1997

Best Picture: the english patient

Two big changes in our day-to-day lives occurred since the '96 party: our first personal computer + access to the internet = Welcome to the (Late) Twentieth Century! It also opens a floodgate for me to start designing and printing my own ballots and invitations, which will become more and more elaborate and involved as the years proceed, ultimately to a fairly insane degree.

Microsoft Word was the software I had available to work with for those first several years of creating these, which is nobody's idea of an ideal design layout program. I got fairly used to working with it for this purpose by the time I moved on to something else, but the first couple of years in particular had some pretty rough results. I used to take the day off from work the day the Oscar nominations were announced to knock out the ballot and invites, and, yeah, sometimes the speed I worked with showed, along with my inexperience. But I had fun doing it, and it was always satisfying to assemble the packet once everything was finished and printed out and cart the envelopes down to the post office for mailing. And if anyone ever found any of these early efforts particularly unattractive, they were at least kind enough not to say anything about it.

This was the last Oscar party that we hosted out of our apartment in Media. We closed on our house in Glen Mills a month and a day after the party, and, boy, were we ready to get a place of our own by then. The couple with the beagle that bayed all day long had recently moved out of the apartment directly above us, and a family of potheads (yes, an entire family) who enjoyed rifling through our personal effects in the building's storage area had taken their place. Quoth Homer Simpson: "So long, Stinktown!"