Posted on February 22, 2012 - by Ashley Jackson

Look at My War Horse

Today my fiance and I accomplished a mighty feat! We’ve now seen all nine movies nominated for best picture at this year’s Oscars! This is very exciting, even if most people don’t think so. For reals. More on the movies in a minute.

Today was a work at home day. It’s also Ash Wednesday, which is why there’s not much on here today.

I had part of a Diet Sunkist shortly after I got up so that I wouldn’t get a caffeine headache, then had a black cherry Chobani Greek yogurt around 9am.

Black cherry is the best flavor of Chobani, hands down.

I took a long lunch and went to the noon Ash Wednesday mass, then came back and had a slice of this weird prune walnut log thing I found at Trader Joe’s.

And also some pistachios, because I’m running low on snackage.

My fiance came over after work and we headed to Raleighwood to finish off our quest to see all the Oscar best picture nominees.

Raleighwood is pretty unique, at least around these parts–you sit in swivelly chairs pushed up to tables or bars and they serve you food while you watch a second-run movie.

My options were pretty limited, but I love fish and chips and probably would’ve gotten it anyway.

We got some onion rings to start with and I had a handful (ew) of them. They came with ketchup, which I’ve never seen before, but I tried dipping them in it and thought the results were yummy.

In fact, the onion rings were the best part of the meal for me. The rest of our food came out after they’d dimmed the lights, so I didn’t take a picture, but it was pretty standard breaded fish fillets and french fries. I skipped half of my fish and ate all of the fries and part of the coleslaw. But the food, I think, isn’t the reason most people go to Raleighwood, and I was pretty happy with the experience, especially since we were home by 8:30pm! The movie was way better than I thought it would be, too–it even made me cry once or twice, because I can’t sit through movies about animals without crying.

It did make me think of this, though: the Amazing Horse!

So, now we’ve seen all nine of this year’s Oscar nominees for best picture, an adventure we started on our first date back in June with Tree of Life and then started on in earnest in late January. We even saw four of them at four different theaters in one afternoon for my fiance’s birthday! And we managed to see all but two of them in theaters (Midnight in Paris and The Help). We independently rated them on the whiteboard in my den for purposes of comparison because we’re both big geeks.

What’s pretty cool is that if you take out Tree of Life, which my fiance liked best but which I thought was pretty bad (I’ve nicknamed it Brad Pitt and the Dinosaurs), and Hugo, which he liked better than I did, we rated the remaining seven in the same order. And we both put Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at the bottom. Because it was awful.

I’ll post individual thoughts on the movies and which one I think is going to win closer to the Oscars–don’t want to give it all away before our big Oscar party…!