2009

Best Picture: slumdog millionaire

The plan for this year's party was to update the website that had been set up for the 2007 party, including the online ballot, but the Oscar curse that we seemed to be under during this era continued to dog us. I had some difficulty accessing the site in order to update it, and owing to some miscommunication with the company that hosted our site (i.e. they neglected to respond to my emails inquiring how to get in) I was forced to invite everyone by email and to circulate an electronic copy of the ballot as I had done in the years before the ballot was available online.

The party itself comes off as planned, though, and despite many of our guests not having been to our house for three years everyone seems to be able to find the place okay. It's a relatively sedate affair this year, as it's the first dog-free party we'd hosted in some time. (Fly's last appearance was at the snowy, sparsely-attended '07 party.) Meanwhile, behind the scenes, we hire a housecleaning service that we'd used in prior years to come clean the place up on the Friday before the party. We come home from work on Friday to find the place untouched, and are forced to do a frantic last-minute cleaning on our own, while the company we'd ostensibly hired fails to return our phone calls. We finally get a return phone call from the housecleaing service during the party, asking us when we'd like to reschedule. What a bunch of cut-ups!