Oscar Predictions

Everyone does them, so why not lil' ol' me? It'll be interesting to see how many of the big categories I get right.

Best Picture- The Hurt Locker

Best Director- James Cameron (Avatar)

Best Actor- Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)

Best Actress- Carey Mulligan (An Education)

Best Supporting Actor- Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds)

Best Supporting Actress- Mo'Nique (Precious)

Best Original Screenplay- The Hurt Locker (Mark Boal)

Best Adapted Screenplay- Up in the Air (Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner)

Best Animated Feature- Up

I think The Hurt Locker will come away with the most awards, but for what Cameron has achieved with Avatar, I think he deserves to get the Best Director award and the Academy might recognise that. I'd love for Inglorious Basterds to win big, and if I were deciding with my heart I'd have said Tarantino should get the Director and Original Screenplay award. Unfortunately, I'm going with my head so we shall see...

How Do You Review A Film That's Not A Film?

Warning: If you haven't seen Funny Games yet, this review contains spoilers.

Put a CD in a CD player and you expect sound. Put an orange in a blender and you expect juice. Put an Israeli in Palestine and you expect death. Put a movie on, and you expect to feel something.

Or so that's what I thought. Little things that you just expect to happen often leave you wide open to get a big smack of surprise in the face. So when I finished watching the remake of Michael Haneke's Funny Games, you can imagine the emptiness inside when I genuinely didn't know how to react.

At it's most basic, Funny Games is a thriller. A family made up of Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and their young son go to their vacation home on a quiet lake, only to find themselves hostage in their own home to Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet. The two men initiate a series of sadistic games including making the family members choose who dies first. Throughout the film Pitt's character Paul constantly breaks the 'fourth wall', communicating with the audience and teasing them how their expectations of the film will not match up to the events that occur.

Roth and Watts struggle somewhat with very little material. When trying to portray the same emotions for 110 minutes, their performances become very stale. Pitt and Corbet's performances are very difficult to comment upon. Draped in white like their saintly names suggest, these two drive the film. Whilst they are by far the most entertaining assets in the movie, everytime they are on screen the film becomes excruciating and agonising to watch. Thanks to their on screen actions of torture and sadism, the virtually soulless and emotionless portrayals of these characters induces the audience to hate everything about them, including their performances.

Funny Games is also a lesson as much it is entertainment. Haneke proves a point with the material, commenting on the Western world's love of violence as Peter (Corbet) and Paul nonchalantly dispatch of the family. Indeed, the films most entertaining moments are when Peter and Paul are on screen, toying with the family and making bets with them that they'll all be dead by a specific time. In the last act when Peter and Paul leave (in Paul's words to make the film more dramatic to give George (Roth) and Ann (Watts) a chance to escape), Haneke slows everything down dramatically, with hugely extended camera shots and long periods of little dialogue. During this time, I craved the return of the two antagonists just to inject a bit of entertainment back into the film.

And here lies my point. Haneke has made Funny Games in such a way to manipulate the viewer that you can't really pass judgement on it. It's difficult to have any kind of opinion of a film which channels your judgement into a narrow corridor. In Haneke's own words, 'if you don't walk out halfway through the film, then there's something wrong with you'. The thing is, if you don't walk out, your left with a very strange feeling inside of emptiness. Not whether it's good or bad. Not whether you feel utterly shocked at the splattering of a young child's insides over the walls of the house. Not whether you feel confused when Peter grabs the TV remote and rewinds the film to alter his actions. Just a hollow sensation as though you just missed out 2 hours of your life.

Watch Funny Games. Experience a completely different way of watching a film. But just don't to expect to be able to answer the question 'was it any good'? Because I've been sitting here for over an hour trying to answer the same question, and as you can tell by the complete lack of direction in this review, I'm still stumped.

Talk To My Agent

Me and Mark Thomspon

As far as mad weeks go, this has been up there quite high. If I was in a relationship with Jordan it would have been less eventful and hectic. Writing speeches, cancelling speeches, new shirt, new tie, press releases left right and centre...I don't like being the centre of this almighty spotlight.

Last night was the Bob Friend Memorial Lecture, where I was formally presented with the Scholarship that I won a few weeks back. It was an incredibly glitzy and overwhelming event, not least because the guest lecturer was Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC, who gave his first public speech since the decision was made to cut both 6Music and the Asian Network as the BBC attempts to cut it's 'bloated' service.

Firstly, Thompson. I think he provided a really interesting lecture, constantly defending the Fourth Estate theory to the hills and how the journalist should always serve the people. He seemed much more chilled and relaxed than anytime before this week, presumably because he didn't have Jeremy Paxman snarling in front of him. It was also nice for him to congratulate me several times, so hopefully if I want a job at the BBC I can just prompt his memory by saying 'the baby-faced guy who won that award that you gave me'. And as far as slip ups go, Thompson saying, AND I QUOTE '...the BBC has links with al-Qaed- I mean al-Jazeera' was pretty damn special.

But enough about Mr. MT. This is my blog so I'm going to talk about yours truly. I can see know why celebrities are all so bitter and lonely. I'm not for a moment suggesting I'm up there with Brad & Ange or Tom Cruise and the like, but being dragged around by a press officer and being told who to talk to and pose for certain photos was certainly an eye-opening experience. Obviously it was 'my night' (not being a twat for a second here) so it was nice to be the centre of attention. But it's difficult. You just want to go and celebrate with your friends, and posing for photos does get a bit annoying, especially when you're not used to smiling that much...

Of course I had a fantastic evening. I'm not going to lie, but having my picture plastered everywhere gives you this warm little feeling inside (no I did not piss myself or anything else...) To be that recognised is pretty amazing and the fact you can 'Google' yourself feels awesome. But this fame-lark, I'm gonna have a Susan Boyle-style breakdown if I'm not careful.

Swedish Scandal

If Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA walked onto Dragon's Den today, Peter Jones would shoot him. His idea shouldn't work, not in the logical real world. "So we're going to have stores the size of small continents on the outskirts of major cities across the world. There is a one way system in place and anyone not following the stream will receive the evils from our employees. And we will fill our stores with so many items, people will spend all day travelling through the store just to find the plastic cups they wanted". Evan Davies would die.

Well, somehow this Swedish concoction, which is even more barmy than Sweden's only other decent export, the Koenigsegg (a mad hypercar which nearly killed The Stig on Top Gear) is one of the world's leading furniture brands. As I was getting lost in the stupid one way system, I wondered 'how'?

Last year they had a turnover of €22.7billion and employ around 120,000 people across the globe. It's a business on a massive scale.

But why and how does it work? I honestly have no idea. My auntie and uncle from Yorkshire swear by it. But they are from the North, and apart from Morrisons and Gregs it is the only other shop they trust.

So I thought ok, Northerners love it. But what about the goods it sells? Surely they must have something to with IKEA's success? Well I suppose they did virtually invent the entire idea of flatpack furniture. The fact you virtually buy an entire bedroom and have it so well packed you can carry it home on the back of your pushbike is quite a feat. But then it's too well packed. Honestly assembling some of the stuff would be like trying to assemble the International Space Station. In boxing gloves. In an asteroid field. It's such a perilous operation because it has to be so unbelievably perfect. And they always leave a damn nail or screw missing. The most important one too. And when that happens, you have to disassemble your beautiful new coffee table and try and get it back into the packaging so you can go back to IKEA, walk round the damn one-way system to get to customer services to exchange it. How your average Tobias or Benni back in Stockholm manages to get it into the cardboard box in the first place amazes me beyond belief.

And then everything's named! I couldn't believe it. No wonder they hire so many damn people, it's because they just all sit in a room coming up with Swedish-sounding gibberish. It's unbelievable how they've got the cheek to name everything from tape measures to plastic cups. And by the time I'd reached the end, it was obvious they'd exhausted the Swedish dictionary, because they'd given items people's names! I'm not kidding, there was a DVD cabinet called 'Billy'. And if you wanted the same DVD cabinet but with glass? Well of course, it's called 'Billy Myhom' or something like that (my Swedish is a bit rusty I apologise). Then there was a chair called 'Herman' and a desk called 'Markus'. I was at the point of breaking down in hysterics in the middle of the 'MarketPlace'.

So I left. Armed with a shit load of free pencils and tape measures that people can steal from the pencil and tape measure dispenser, I escaped. Not before being offered Swedish meatballs as the last insult to my intelligence. The words 'no deal' came to mind before Noel Edmunds put the phone down to the Swedish meatball-shaped Banker.

But I was still none the wiser. How can a store which virtually keeps you prisoner for several hours succeed? How can a store which hides the one item you're looking for in an obscure corner succeed? How can a store which has SHORTCUTS like fecking Mario Kart possibly be taken seriously. Well it clearly does, because after getting lost in 'bedrooms' and 'kitchen', I finally found the photo frames my parents needed, only to find that the tills were gridlocked. Honestly they couldn't have been more tightly packed if our friend Tobias from Stockholm had put them in an IKEA branded box himself...

Therapist Required

Paparazzi. 3. Fight For This Love. Fireflies. She Wolf. If We Ever Meet Again.

No this is not a code. The more bright-eyed readers may have gathered that these are song titles. But they're a bit too 'pop' to appear on MY blog surely?

That's exactly what I thought. For a self-proclaimed 'rock dude', I was mortified to find myself, out of choice, hunting down these songs on Spotify and playing them instead of my usual audible treats. I'm starting to think I might have hit my head over the last week. There's no other explanation for this sudden turn towards homosexuality.

I hate pop music. It feels like a toy that was made in China. Cheap. Manufactured. Lots of different variations that all sound the same. Take this years BRIT Awards. Best male went to Dizzee Rascal, a man who can only make a hit when he performs with someone else. But to be honest, when he was up against has-beens like Robbie Williams and chipmunks like MIKA, it's no surprise the BRIT judges chose the lesser of all evils. And why was the audience of GMTV allowed to make the decision on the best BRIT performance of the last 30 years? These are the people who are offered prizes like holidays in exchange for identifying David Beckham's first name. It would have been more sensible to let the KKK host the MOBO Awards...

So yeah, if you're a therapist and you're reading this, can you please prescribe something to stop me listening to this nonsense before, god forbid, this stuff makes it's way onto my iTunes. It'd be a dark day in my music history if I were to have my music on Shuffle only to hear the whinings of Lady Gaga after a Metallica song. Lord have mercy.

Oh and a quick note on the BAFTAs tonight. I'm fully expecting 'An Education' to do rather well. We don't like to admit it, but we are generally quite biased towards our own films at these things.

How DARE You Try And Fight Crime.

I'll be honest, when I was 6 I wanted to be a policeman (or police officer according to the rules and regulations - thank you Hot Fuzz). I don't know why, maybe it was the fact my granddad was in the Fuzz for countless years before he died. Or maybe it was the fact I could carry around various weapons like bats and pepper spray (American kids who want to be cops have so much more to look forward to) or maybe it was the fact you got to run around town fighting crime with an Alsatian. Who knows?

But if I'd have known you could have piloted an unmanned drone with a remote control to fight the crims of England, I would have bailed on primary school painting lessons and headed straight down to the police station to start work there and then.

Well now the kids of today who dream of being a police officer have this to look forward to. Because the Merseyside Police now have the opportunity to fly around small drones with thermal imaging and cameras and all sorts of other things which would make Q go all cross eyed and cross legged. And to be honest, all it needs is some machine guns and the invisibility trick from Bond's Aston Martin Vanquish from Die Another Day and it's my own little crime-fighting wet dream. Admittedly, you do have to be a police officer in Liverpool to operate the thing, which lets be honest, doesn't have quite the same 'pazzazz' as Crockett & Tubbs or Starsky & Hutch. But still, this little drone thing sounds awesome. It can fly up to 400ft and reach speeds of 30mph, perfect for keeping up with a Ford Escort full of Scousers. Officers say they used the thermal imaging to find a criminal hiding in some undergrowth without wasting valuable man hours or sniffer dogs. How amazing is that? Although if a man from Liverpool is in some undergrowth it usually means he's doing his grocery shopping...

Ok. All well and good. So why is the title of this post what it is? Well, the evil minions who run this country have put a stop to all this good work. Yes that's right, another blog post that talks about how this country's gone to dogs, surprise surprise.

I just want to move. Honest.

The Civil Aviation Authority has decided that this £40,000 bit of tech needs a license. They also need the CAA's permission to fly within a certain distance of buildings and people. And finally, Merseyside Police have invited the CAA to see how they use the drone. It all sounds as though the CAA are surprised that this drone actually fights crime. Surely these wazzocks have seen James Bond to realise that the man in the tux is totally useless and it's the fancy tech stuff that ALWAYS beats the bad guys. And what with the crims of today getting quite tech savvy and everything (maybe not from Liverpool), the Fuzz are gonna need more than a truncheon and the nose of a Spaniel to fight them. And denying them the use of a £40,000 because it needs some bureaucratic piece of paper to say it works (when the damn things been in service since November) is a waste of time.

As long as the remote doesn't end up in the hands of some Scouse kid, then life is good. Mind you, he'd probably have more of an idea than the brain-dead oafs at the CAA.

If this Blog wanted to sue me....

....for gross negligence then it would have a right to. Especially seeing how it's been criminally underfed for about a month. But no matter! Because Daddy's home and I'm going to striaghten things out.

It's been a pretty busy month I'll be honest. Back in my little shoebox at Uni, the workload has been steady but not brutal, we found ourselves a house for next year (albeit above a kebab shop), and I won a scholarship. Yes, young Daniel went and won himself 4 weeks paid work experience at Sky News in the summer. Plus first year tuition fees paid for. Plus travel and hotel expenses. As far as prizes go, it's obviously not as good as the Daewoo estate you can win on Wheel of Fortune, but I'm not exactly moaning about winning it. I was in a state of trance for about 10 minutes after they'd told me I'd won, and then after an afternoon of drinking it still hadn't settled in that I'd won. It was a mad day. And now I get my own little award ceremony where Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC will be in attendance. I'm making sure I stay well clear of the alcohol beverages that evening before I tell him 'I fookin laave youuu'...

So yeah I think I'm going to leave it at that to be honest. This post is going to act as a little stopgap just to assure you all I am actually alive, but after a weekend vegetating, my mind is a big green mush and it's unlikely anything decent is going to come from it. That's all folks!