Tag Archives: TV Shows

The Anti-Oscars

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Welp, it’s that season again. No, I don’t mean the lingering frigid temperatures and precipitation of February. I mean award season. Is it just me or do The Oscars nominees seem particularly far removed and uninteresting in comparison to what us plebs are actually watching? I’m intrigued by The Brutalist, now being heralded as Adrien Brody’s greatest work since The Pianist, but I have a feeling my interest in architecture won’t be enough to keep me in my seat for over three and a half hours. Do you ever get the feeling that the teams behind these often bloated, slow-moving marathon pieces are in some kind of secret competition to make the longest movie possible? Whenever a film exceeds two and a half hours, I generally wish the editor had stepped in with their metaphorical (and anachronistic) scissors to cut large swaths of unnecessary film from the picture. If you’re like me, and you look for award competitions that honour plucky, underdog ventures, look no further. I found some awards that have applauded what I’ve actually been watching and what I hope you’ve been watching too! In the tradition of anti-proms, I hereby dub this the Anti-Oscars. Last year around this time, I introduced you dear readers to the Dorian Awards — a competition run by GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. Read more about the Dorians here, but suffice it to say, there are traditional award categories like Film of the Year, and there are also ones you don’t see everyday, like LGBTQ Film of the Year and Visually Striking Film of the Year. This time around, more than one of the nominations for Unsung Film of the Year are movies I’ve seen and very much enjoyed. Let me tell you a bit about them.

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‘Tis the Season for Gift Giving – A Secret Santa Shelf Pick

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Photo by Erica Marsland Huynh on Unsplash

Happy December, happy holidays, and happy last month of 2024! (As delightfully kooky youtuber Jenna Marbles once said, this year felt both short and terribly and insufferably long at the same time.)

My fellow HOTS writers and I thought we’d switch things up a little this month. In the spirit of gift giving and shelf picks—which is a personalized reading recommendation service where library staff introduce you to titles based on your preferences—we thought we’d do a sort of Secret Santa exchange of recommendations.

And thus, this post is dedicated to Claire and what I think (and hope!) she might like to read and watch, in the event she hasn’t yet. I gotta confess, this was a nerve-wracking test of how familiar I am with Claire’s taste and preferences.

Aiming to not give a gift that sucks, I revisited some of Claire’s posts and took literal and actual notes, by hand, in a notebook, to then do research with. I’m hoping that paid off! I’m also hoping you—dear reader—will find this list of recommendations to be a gift as well (pun fully intended).

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An Archive of Librarian Lore

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Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

A little while ago, my coworker Alison shared this list of top librarians in pop culture with the team and asked us who else we might add to it. Inspired by the resulting conversation, I thought I would compile everyone’s suggestions, along with my own, into a handy-dandy blog post on famous and infamous librarians, by librarians, as a sort of archive of librarian lore (hence the title).

(Shoutout to Adam, who has written about libraries already, actually! Our posts will therefore have some overlap…but can there possibly be too much said about this venerable profession? That’s a rhetorical question, and the answer is a cheerful ‘no’ from yours truly).

Before we dive into the list, let’s learn a bit about librarians and their libraries! So, what makes one a librarian, exactly? Do you need a degree? Technically, the answer is yes. To be a certified librarian you need to have completed a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. But not-so-technically, and to the general public, a librarian is what you might call any library worker.

Who was the first librarian? No one knows for sure, but the Sumerians (our earliest known civilization) may have been the first peoples to “train clerks to keep records of accounts. ‘Masters of the books’ or ‘keepers of the tablets’ were scribes or priests who were trained to handle the vast amount and complexity of these records.” And a king of Assyria named Ashurbanipal may have been the first person to make librarianship an actual profession, when he created a library in his palace in Nineveh and then hired clerks to look after it.

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