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Google Picks the Oscars

In preparation for our Oscar pool, I  punched all the Oscar nominations into Google, to see who the Internet picked as winners. I decided to go with straight search terms, which gave a huge advantage to movies like "Ray" and "Ryan" and punished some movies severely - "Sister Rose's Passion" only got 11 votes.

There are obviously many ways this could have been done better. "Movie Name" or "Actor's Name" AND movie would have made "Ray" much less formidable, for instance, but I think that Academy members subsconsciously vote for the words that there most familiar with. I could have used Google News to measure buzz, or I could conceivably have bought a directory of the Academy voters, found their average longitude and latitude, and used some Google Maps magic to measure their proximity to different search terms (like this.) I also spent about 4 minutes considering using Net::Google to try a few of these different options.

But plane jane search rules in the end, and the big winner was Ray with five awards including best picture and best director, followed byJohnny Depp for best actor, Morgan Freeman for best supporting actor, Kate Winslett for best Actress, and Natalie Portman for best supporting actress. Click on the ballot above to see all the results. 

The Gates in Central Park

Up the Gate 
Originally uploaded by david.

Here are my contributions to Gates Mania: my flickr stream and some over in Hello, The Gates. You've got to see it in person, if you can. It's a total transformation of the most wonderful place in the world.

Highlights:

• Two men entering the park as we were leaving. They asked us "What is this?" We answered "The Gates, there are 7500 of them." Somehow, they didn't know they were going up. They asked us where we were from. "Brooklyn," we answered. "Westchester," they replied. They giggled a little, asked us "Is this art?" and ventured in.


• Seeing a hawk (Pale Male?) devour a squirrel. I was actually taking video at the time, and I'll post it soon. There was a huge crowd, obviously, for The Gates, but everyone stopped and watched the hawk devour the squirrel's guts. I was spellbound, but Adriana tugged at my arm "Let's go, he's eating."


• Seeing the "saffron" flags interact with the sun and the wind. We were thankful for the mild weather, but I'd like to see how a storm would transform the space.

Jason wondered (perhaps in jest) whether or not The Gates would be the "most photographed event ever." It absolutely will be, we saw thousands of people, and almost all of them had cameras and cameraphones both, snapping away.

It's only a matter of months until the majority of the world's photo images are on-line, if they aren't already. (I bet Waxy would be able to figure that out.)

Inspired by Jason, I asked metafilter about the most photographed "thing" ever, and didn't come up with any great answers, but I'm sure it will be The Gates. I liked the possibility that it could be "The Moon," especially if you count all the astronomers who have taken pictures of the heavens.