2010

Best Picture: The Hurt Locker

It's back! The first Barker Oscar party invitation to go out in three years sees our Oscar website up and running again. No more funny little designs for each of the Best Picture nominees in the invitations, though; the Academy changes the rules and now there are 10 films nominated each year, throwing a big fat monkey wrench into all sorts of things. On the upside we now have the ability to embed YouTube videos into the web pages, enabling our guests who visit the site the opportunity of enjoying the upbeat trailer for "Precious" over and over again to their heart's content.

This was the year we introduced our fresh-out-of-the-box, monstrously huge high-definition TV to the proceedings. Even our guests seated all the way at the back of the room can now clearly see what's happening on the screen; later on, our next-door neighbors let us know that they, too, had an excellent view of the screen from their house, prompting us to consider putting curtains on our windows.

"Up", the story of a man who attaches thousands of balloons to his house and flies it away to South America, was up for (and won) Best Animated Feature, and we do a scaled-down replica of his feat by attaching several dozen balloons to the railings on our deck. (Our house fails to sail away to South America, though, or anywhere else for that matter.) The following year Chase insists that we do the same thing again at the party, despite my protestations that this is no longer apropos. He's talking about making the same demand for the 2012 party. I predict a porchful of balloons during the party for several years to come....