After dwelling on the pages of Facebook for a while now I’m mostly convinced it’s a life-ruiner in all respects.  You have to see, on a daily basis, all of the things you were never meant to see.  It’s sort of like finding the secrets to life after death, or discovering the awful truth about Santa Claus.  There are just some truths you really don’t need to know.

It’s strange that, for instance, you have to know the whereabouts of all of the people you’ve ever known in your life.

It’s strange that, when people die, their Facebook pages stay up.  People write on them as a kind of floating memorial.  And Facebook helpfully suggests you friend a friend of a friend who is dead. The online person, the Facebook person, lives on.  The real body goes. So now we have the body, the soul and the Facebook identity.  It’s weird, isn’t it?  It’s different elsewhere online because Facebook is the only place where you are confronted with everyone you’ve ever known, all of your family, and the people you’re networked with, as well as just random strangers.  Who you are on Facebook is now part of who you are period.  And it’s freaky.

The first weird thing that happened to me recently was that a fried of mine from my childhood friended me then got frustrated when that magical relationship we were supposed to have wasn’t rekindled.  I’m busy, yo.  And so she wrote on my page, “too stuck up.” So I unfriended her, just like that.  And harmony was restored in my life. She was one less ghost from my past I had to worry about.

But the thing I hate most about Facebook is the way people torment each other.  They use status updates to taunt their successes — my daughter’s friends in middle school all flaunted and taunted with the various high schools they were accepted into.  Like just being able to do that on Facebook was the key. It’s a little puddle of ego and narcissism where that shit can fly around virtually unchecked.

When you have a relationship you change your status update and then break up via status update and everyone has to know about it. Well, that’s one thing. What’s worse is if you happen to hook up with an asshole who then pretends you don’t exist and never changes that relationship status.  So then you have to see how little you matter on a daily basis.  Worse, you have to watch that person actively flirt on their own profile page.   Or if you get dumped you have to watch that person flaunt their latest exploits with dumb, show-offy pictures.  One guy I know only reflects himself as someone who would attract only pretty girls and thus, every picture that is associates with his online persona is some kind of idealized beauty; none of the women he actually dates ever appear because that would then lower his status online.

So what is the good Facebook has to offer? I don’t really know.  To me I use it mostly for work but I hate this notion of everyone knowing every little piece of my business.  It’s weirds me out on every level.  I worry for the generations that are growing up with this idea that you have your regular life and then you have a Facebook identity to cultivate.  Everything you do has a societal echo that passes praise, likes, judgements…everyone puts on  a fake happy face, like here are all of the good times I’m having that you aren’t having. Here is my great marriage that you don’t have. I don’t know how I would have survived with the added dimension of Facebook.

I just don’t think we ever really stopped to think about what the longterm effects of something like this might be.  Oh well.  There are surely worse thing in life.  For now, though, I’m practicing disassociation.

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

In the days of the internet you have shadow versions of yourself floating around out there.  You aren’t just the one person. You are who you always wanted to be. You say everything you always wanted to say. You never have to be imprisoned by the confined misery of the hand you were dealt.

When two personas try to meet in real life, though, they have to reconfigure themselves into who they really are.  And it’s a roll of the dice whether or not those two people can get along or not. Sometimes they can live in deluded ecstasy together. As in, their individuals pretend selves become the collective pretend couple.

This kind of living has pretty much finished me.  I just want you, the internet, to know this.  After fifteen years online I’ve finally come to the conclusion that “warts and all” is the way to go in life.  Just get all messy and sloppy in it.  There is no benefit that lasts just being in it for the ego boost. We must be bigger and better than our egos.  Think about what an ego must look like, what it would like if it was actually manifested in human form. You know it would not be nearly as big, as hot, as cool, as all-powerful as it thinks it is.  No, it is cowering in the dark, afraid to do anything that might risk it losing at life.  The ego: it’s the little man behind the curtain and it offers you nothing back except a lifetime of unrealized expectations.

Except that ego drives us to do all sorts of things. I think that evil little sack of shit drives my own creativity sometimes, the doing of this bloggggggg, wanting to have a voice “out there.” I know it drives rock stars and movie stars.  But trust me, when it gets down to happiness – look elsewhere.

I finally went back to yoga after a long break.  What a relief that was.  In yoga you have to fight your ego at every turn.  You’re in the front row showing off or in the back hiding. You’re doing the advanced pose or the modified one.  But my ego drove me to the point where I injured my shoulder and couldn’t do it anymore. So not only am I in the 1/2 class and no longer in the 2/3 class but I slapped myself down and put myself in the back row.

I am trying to get life right.  I  make mistakes every day.  I wake up hating myself.  Then I wake up okay with it all.  What I do know is that there probably isn’t ever going to be a happy ending for anyone until they practice what the Buddha teaches.  Ahem.

• What is the First Noble Truth?

The first truth is that life is suffering i.e., life includes pain, getting old, disease, and ultimately death. We also endure psychological suffering like loneliness frustration, fear, embarrassment, disappointment and anger. This is an irrefutable fact that cannot be denied. It is realistic rather than pessimistic because pessimism is expecting things to be bad. lnstead, Buddhism explains how suffering can be avoided and how we can be truly happy.

• What is the Second Noble Truth?

The second truth is that suffering is caused by craving and aversion. We will suffer if we expect other people to conform to our expectation, if we want others to like us, if we do not get something we want, etc. In other words, getting what you want does not guarantee happiness. Rather than constantly struggling to get what you want, try to modify your wanting. Wanting deprives us of contentment and happiness. A lifetime of wanting and craving and especially the craving to continue to exist, creates a powerful energy which causes the individual to be born. So craving leads to physical suffering because it causes us to be reborn.

• What is the Third Noble Truth?

The third truth is that suffering can be overcome and happiness can be attained; that true happiness and contentment are possible. lf we give up useless craving and learn to live each day at a time (not dwelling in the past or the imagined future) then we can become happy and free. We then have more time and energy to help others. This is Nirvana.

Oh hi, Nirvana.  I’m looking for you.  Help me find you, will you?  I love this notion of the “imagined future.” This is a trap.  The old “when this happens, this other thing will happen.”

The fact is that life washes over us every day and we barely notice it.  The sun comes up and it goes back down. Light washes the landscape and then it goes dark. And every day our body keeps track of the time passing.  We feel things start to fade.  We age.  And that is all.  But if we can be right here, right now, well then maybe – just maybe – we will kiss the tip the nirvana occasionally.

I feel better now, internet.  Thanks for being here, my imagined self, my projected self, my real self and mean crumpled old ego thank you too.  Oh, memories.  Oh, sweetness.

I had to take a break from this site for a while because of personal reasons.  Well, I had a stalker of sorts who would not leave me alone.  I get a lot of stalkers or mean people coming here – I’m not really sure why but it happens. Shit happens.  So I’m almost done with Oscars 2012, which has turned into a mostly predictable wash out, except for the possibility that Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer might win Oscars, which would shock the hell out of Hollywood.  The status quo would have Meryl Streep win and Spencer in Supporting.  But hey, maybe the status quo will get broken up.

I’m still working on a redesign but haven’t gotten a good one yet.

Getting ready to start writing up the latest in vegetarian cooking and maybe talk about the upcoming election. In the meantime, this happened:

Around 300,000 organic farmers think that Monsanto, the biotech giant known for genetically modifying Mother Nature’s handwork for profit and pushing over the little guys all the while, is pretty seedy.

“Monsanto’s threats and abuse of family farmers stops here,” says Jim Gerritsen, president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association. “Monsanto’s genetic contamination of organic seed and organic crops ends now. Americans have the right to choice in the marketplace — to decide what kind of food they will feed their families — and we are taking this action on their behalf to protect that right to choose.”

Waiting to exhale and hope that Montsanto’s evil mitts are messed with in some fashion.

I was invited to join Google+ by a friend. This was how we all got gmail, remember? Painfully earned invite by painfully earned invite? It generated that lemming-like reaction of MUST HAVE IT NOW OR BE LEFT BEHIND. Cut to: Google has infiltrated every aspect of my online life. Facebook and Twitter are the two places it does not. Twitter is a great business tool for now. It is not so much a joining together with friends/communication tool that Facebook is. But Facebook is too personal. It’s just too much up in your business. You can’t really be unseen there, move anonymously through it gathering information and spreading it, like you can on Twitter. Google+ will probably land somewhere in between the two: it will offer more than Twitter but less than Facebook. You can exclude people from your status updates if you don’t want them to see it – say, leave off all of your family members and show it only to your work friends. This is, so far, the coolest thing about Google+.

Listen, I’m not saying it isn’t cool. I’m just wondering where in god’s name am I going to put everything? As it is, I barely check Facebook. Twitter is something I do constantly, in real time. I read and engage with people there moment by moment throughout the day. I have other networks of communication too – it’s just that when I click on my Google+ homepage I’m confused. The reason Facebook works across such a broad spectrum, I figure, is that they give you less choices, not more. We pretend to want to have more freedom but the fact is, advertisers and corporations know this, we don’t. We will choose a Starbucks over a local joint, or a Home Style Buffet over a small town diner because we are assured that we will get basically the same experience every time. We don’t want to gamble our money on something that might not be what we want or what we ordered. Some of us are more willing than others to take risks. Facebook operates on that same notion that we don’t want a lot of choices – we all want to exist on relatively the same playing field. Facebook takes our limited choices and enhances them. So we can have friends but we can choose what we show certain friends. We can have photos but we can choose who gets to see them.

Conversely, Google+ gives us way too much freedom. We simply don’t have the time to sift through it all and figure out what’s what. The best thing they could do here, in its early stages, is to limit our options. Either way – here is how I think it works so far.

You have circles — so when someone clicks on your page they see all of the people who have you in their circles and all of the people you have in your circles. But they don’t get to see how you’ve categorized them. So, let’s say I have Mark Zuckerberg listed in my circle as a friend (hahaha) and an acquaintance. If you click on my page you will see that I have him in my circle. But he won’t have me in his circle. This is how you get to the exclusivity thing. If Twitter is about having more followers than you are following (wrong way to use Twitter but try changing human nature — we need to feel superior to our fellow man/woman), and Facebook is about having a lot of friends or a lot of “likes” – Google+ is about having yourself appear in a lot of circles. That shows and measures your reach.

Right now, I’m only in 17 circles as far as I can tell. I expect this number will grow but I’m not so sure. For instance, I have more than 4,000 followers on Twitter but the reason for this is that people follow me based on my site, awardsdaily.com, a lot of the content there is generated by Ryan Adams.

So when they follow @awardsdaily they think they are following the site — when in actuality, they are following me. I need to fix this. But on Google+ they won’t be following Awards Daily, they will be following me. That’s why I only have 17 so far. My own circles will be a much higher number as I’m more interested in putting other people in my circles than they will be of putting me in theirs.

Output is everything on Twitter – not everything on Facebook (in fact, the opposite: no one likes people who Facebook too much) — and will be a balance on Google+. Useful updates will work on Google+ as they do on Twitter. Junk will work as it doesn’t on Twitter. People don’t necessarily want to know that you are getting a pedicure unless you A) are someone interesting, or B) tell a funny story along with it. Usually just the old “I’m getting a pedi at my local salon” will make you lose followers instantly, unless you’re Kim Kardashian or Katy Perry. I suspect that Google+ will be something in the middle of the personal Facebook and the work-oriented Twitter.

The question remains, though: who has time for all of this? Having everything in one place is the advantage of having a presence on Google+ for me. I use Google all of the time anyway because I have sold my soul to the devil. So it’s nice to click on the + symbol and be in a social networking environment. But I look at Facebook and I look at Twitter so now I also have to look at Google+? I suppose it’s handy that one clicks on Google to search at least once a day if not twenty or a hundred times a day – so how hard is it to just click on the + symbol?

I can’t wait to see how this all turns out.

A funny modern times/olden times phenom: this idea that celebrities are somehow more interesting than regular people. Most of the time, they are not. The only really interesting people on Twitter are really interesting people. Celebrities, most of them, fall way short of that. But try telling that to the minions of tweeters who like to @ the celebs. And if they ever get any notice by the celebs, suddenly the @ tweets start flying.

Maybe the celeb notices the one worshipful, thoughtfully composed, publicly displayed rubber-necking. Maybe they see it land amid their millions of followers who all, no doubt, retweet the tweets that tumble out of the celebs Twitter.

“you r amazing! Thank U all who came to see us!” Translation: thanks for helping my career and my success. Thanks for turning out and buying something. Thanks for loving me.

“B kind to yr friends in Haiti!” Translation: the obligatory socially conscious tweet that celebs insert in between self-promotion tweets.
“The moon glows in the sky. The world is alone.” Translation: the supposedly intelligent celeb who is too deep to self-promote, too self-conscious to forward a cause but is forced to have a Twitter presence and connect with the great opportunity FOR self-promotion. Either they’re forced to or they like to — some of them like to talk to us nobodies. And then get flooded with the @s back.

“Does everyone wear mashed potatoes on their tie for character?” Translation: I’m a funny twitterer because I’m a funny person in real life. I might have a book to sell soon or a show to promote so I keep my audience hooked with the occasional joke, mostly obscure.

“Boing.” Translation: The Jim Carrey meme when he kind of lost his marbles online and started boinging right and left. But it just turned out to be harmless fun in the end; Carrey doesn’t need Twitter — it appears to be something he just likes to do. He mostly sends spiritual messages to his millions of followers and occasionally showcases his paintings.

“#charliesheen Translation: trying to keep a dead joke alive. If it’s Charlie himself, well, he’s trying to tap into the millions who followed him within minutes.

Truth be told, there are so many great tweeters out there – some who truly master the form. They can be informative, funny, personal, insightful. They never waste your time. Never. Recently, the Times of the London released a list of their top 100 twitterers – TIME mag did the same.

And wouldn’t you know, amid the handful of truly great and well known tweeters, like @ebertchicago and @susanorlean, all of the celebrities who give Twitter a bad name and render it pointless, not to mention what it does to our society as a whole: you never really want to look into that full length mirror for very long. You won’t like what you see. Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, Britney Spears – they are all the celebs with the most followers. Yes, really. And their tweets are, well, ordinary. What do they give us?

They give us contact with the famous. Impersonal contact but contact nonetheless.

Yes, Twitter is a great tool for self-promotion. I use it for that myself. It is a great way to stay in touch with those who know about you. I’m not complaining about that part of it. I am complaining about mainstream media making up lists of great tweeters and including celebrities simply because they’re celebrities.

Here is a list of the top people (celebs, of course) on Twitter and their latest tweet. Of course, it goes without saying that there are some good tweeters with a high follower count – Barack Obama, Ellen…

1. @ladygaga (9,154,448)
I begin next month as a Fashion+Art Columnist for @VMagazine. + I’ll be resurrecting “TRANSMISSION GAGAVISION” episodes starting next week!

2. @justinbieber (8,520,052)
http://twitvid.com/GTVQD – Damn @kennyhamilton you can sang. lol APRIL FOOLS

3. @britneyspears (7,306,316)
If you guys dont know @SabiBangz yet, you should def get to know her better. She’s amazing. http://on.mtv.com/gVsZvW -Britney

4. @barackobama (7,235,326)
We cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity and security on a resource that will eventually run out. Not anymore. http://OFA.BO/QzdrP3 6:43 AM Mar 31st via HootSuite

5.@kimkardashian (6,971,311)
I love this site http://kimkardashianweb.com Thank you doll for making this & upkeeping it. It means everything to me!

6. @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher)(6,514,870)
If you would like to help with our #ideajam search #ideajam all our participants will be posting ideas there for the next 48hrs

7. @katyperry (6,481,056)
♥ THANK YOU WALES! ♥
Note: it is Perry’s “dirty, sexy” tweets with hubby @rustyrockets that keep her fans intrigued.

8. @theellenshow (Ellen Degeneres) (6,310,099)
Y’all know I’m multi-talented. It turns out I’m also fluent in baby. http://ellen.tv/exlnAg
Note: I think she is the one exception to the celeb rule – her tweets are always pretty great.

9.@taylorswift13 (5,804,401)
Wow. I’m still the same as I was in elementary school- the last to realize it’s April Fools day. WAY confused until someone reminds me.

10. @oprah (5,473,430)
#OprahLiveTweet: We’re live tweeting at 8/7c on Sunday. All the way through Master Class. Will answer ur questions live

You can check out the power lists here – but it is all basically the same. You have to drill down pretty deep to find the tweeters who are popular because they are good rather than famous.

Observations:

People like to follow celebrity tweeters because they having direct contact with them, even if they are only one of five or six or nine million others.

Celebrities are not more interesting than regular people. Twitter is proof of this.

And the weirdest thing in all of this? Just because I put the name Kim Kardashian in this post, maybe paired up with fucker, I will get hits. This is one thing I know for sure.

I think that the two key differences between Facebook and Twitter is that Facebook seems to exists only to make one feel shitty abut one’s life. Twitter is what social networking is all about. The only things I see on Facebook are things and relationships I will never have. Sure, I have a happy daughter and hundreds of photos of her there. But the other stuff, the scourge of existence is there too: the relationship status. For lonely people, broken-hearted people, or the dateless out there – how can they stand Facebook? To make matters worse, Facebook is always about the good news, the celebrating, the bragging. It is never about the bad news, the struggles, the pain.

Twitter, on the other hand, flies by so quickly you never realize what’s happening. So if someone tweets about their wedding anniversary or the birth of their new baby it is immediately swallowed up by the next few hundred tweets which are, mercifully, about things that all people, even we non-normal misfitted assholes, are interested in – tragedies throughout the world, political activism, violence, mayhem. I choose you, Twitter, because I can stand you.

The day I get married, if I ever do, I promise I will never make it a public Facebook thing. I will never do it because I know what it feels like to be on the other side. For all of my friends out there who do feel like misfits in the “relationship status” department, I will spare them the horror, the horror of all of the good news there is to be had. But, to all of those who do have those kind of lives they can share with the world, how great to HAVE Facebook as a way to showcase that for all to see. Thank goodness, right? Because otherwise we would all be living our lives in mostly quiet obscurity, waking up one morning and saying, “I wonder whatever happened to so and so.” Now, unfortunately, we know exactly what happened to so and so. They remind us every goddamned day.

Then again, I shouldn’t be so bitter about it. One does find some stuff on Facebook that isn’t rose-colored. But you never hear those lonely cries out to the world the way you do on Twitter. And if the world was really one big Facebook? I just don’t know what I would do with myself. I don’t think it’s really a life worth living that is only about putting on a happy face.

What’s the value of a song? Jammie Thomas-Rasset has spent the last few years in court debating that question. The Minnesota mother of four is being penalized for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs on the peer-to-peer file-sharing network Kazaa in 2006, but how much she owes the record labels has been in question. The jury in her third trial has just ruled that Thomas-Rasset should pay Capitol Records $1.5 million, CNET reports, which breaks down to $62,500 per song. It’s a heavy penalty considering the 24 tunes would only cost approximately $24 on iTunes, which was Thomas-Rasset’s argument, too.

They want to make an example of Thomas-Rasset but in so doing make a mockery of the proceedings. Or, as Woody Allen would say, “this is a sham of a mockery of a sham of a mockery.” Really, though, I hate to be the one to say it but you know, this kind of thing? It sort of goes on all over the internets? It’s wrong, sure, but there has to be a better way to punish Thomas-Rasset than embarrassing your court decision with such an overbearing fine.

I am not sure how long this internet free-for-all will last – but for now there is no stopping it.

I had a good laugh at the comments on this post, Rechelle Unplugged lampooning The Pioneer Woman — buried in the comments was a link to this post. Apparently the old homeschooling blogger there (paid to post on PW) got into trouble with Ree for generalizing Ree’s readers as right wing Christians.

BUT THEY ARE, BLANCHE. THEY ARE. There is no crime in that. Heck, there has to be some place for them to go that is in the mainstream. But this is how it is – when your whole readership picks the Bible as their number one favorite book? Um, er, um…them facts is them facts.

You pay a big price for not being that person. Well, I suppose you could be Dooce, who sits mostly on the opposite world of Ree — Dooce talks politics and religion, Ree does not. Both are very popular and successful. They both have their charms and their singularly irritating qualities. But make no mistake – one is Sarah Palin’s world, and the other is Rachel Maddow’s.

The poor, nice, homeschooling blogger lady, who didn’t even put up the lines about Ree’s readers being right wing Christians, still had this happen to her:

Ree put the post up on Thursday night and when I opened my laptop on Friday morning, my inbox was filled with hate mail assuring me that I was going to hell, was a horrible parent, a scourge to the Pioneer Woman’s blog and just about everything but a child of God. The Women’s Colony, this blog, had been hijacked by internet trolls who left an enormous amount of cruel comments and scripture quotes from what seemed close to 77% of the Bible.

“Satan, that deceived the whole world. He was thrown down to earth, and all his angels with him.” (Rev. 12: 9)

“Put on all the armor that God gives you, so that you will be able to stand up against the Devil’s evil tricks. For we are not fighting against human beings but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities and cosmic powers of this dark age.” (Eph. 6: 11-12)

“Your enemy, the Devil, roams around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. Be firm in your faith and resist him.” (1 Peter 5: 8-9)

And seriously, more:

And in the interest of full disclosure, I had some atheists come after me, too. They resented that I was shoving religion down my kids’ throats.

Honestly, it was like a harmonic convergence of halfwits.

I’d like to take a moment to thank the Jews for leaving me alone.

One commenter said she had watched some of my videos and that I was obviously a foul mouthed alcoholic who, get this, had to drink to get through the Christmas holidays, and that I had some serious mental problems.

All true…and somehow it helped to know at least one reader really “got” me.

By Saturday, I was losing it, so I put up a post requesting that anyone who had issues they wanted to discuss that had nothing to do with content on the Women’s Colony please quit leaving comments on the blog and just email me directly. I gave out both my email addresses and I promised to respond politely to each and every one. Plenty of people emailed (and I did write them all back—except for a moronathon named Jan Westemeier who told me she was shocked to read I was only 42 because I looked 60 and that I need to dye my hair and get new glasses and aspire to look like Courtney Cox because she’s 42 and LOOK AT HER!) but the comments on the blog continued.

Late Saturday night, we received two phone calls. One from a woman damning me to hell and the other from a guy quoting some gibberish from Saint Anthony…I didn’t really get the gist of his point, because I hung up on his Jesus, Mary and Joseph loving ass. I don’t use my last name on this blog (though most readers know it), but apparently some sleuthy readers looked into my children’s Facebook information and took more opportunities to introduce them to the path of righteousness and, bless their hearts, pray for my kids’ souls. It was at this point that I started to feel fear. I took the phone off the hook.

Yeah, um, wow? Seriously? Wow. If I were Ree, no matter how much money I was making, I wouldn’t want this to be my readership. Moreover, now I can see why Ree has to be so bland and down the middle on everything. Who wants this kind of treatment? I am suddenly grateful for being completely obscure.

Holy hysterical zealots, Batman. Meanwhile, if you’d like to read a blog that is a little more real and a little less delusional, check out Rechelle Unplugged.

My friend Marshall found this old article from 2001, believe it or not. 2001 seems like an eternity ago for so many reasons. 1) Because the world changed full stop. And 2) My world changed. Full stop. I never did appear on the Oscar Pre-Show, but I was featured on Ebert and Roeper thanks to Michaela Perreira who was doing a tech segment for them. It was one of the coolest things anyone has ever done for me. My site was then later listed as a source in one of Roeper’s books. And that’s as far as my six degrees of separation to Roger Ebert go.

Sasha Stone To Appear On Oscar Pre-Show

Mirror film critic Sasha Stone will be featured as part of the “Internet and the Oscars” segment on KABC’s Academy Awards pre-show telecast, Sunday, March 25. Hosted by Roger Ebert, the broadcast is syndicated nationally and internationally as the official Oscar pre-show.

Stone will speak as Editor-in-Chief of OscarWatch.com, an online Academy Awards analysis and prediction magazine that she created in 1999. The site, which was recently redesigned by Venice internet consultant Joshua Avedon, features Oscar buzz, “insider” information, analysis of behind-the-scenes campaigning, and discussions of other factors that contribute to who takes home the coveted golden boy each year. The OscarWatch Forums, in which movie fans from Chile to Slovakia to Zimbabwe argue the merits of their favorite films, prove once again the worldwide fascination with the Hollywood Movie.

Stone updates the site daily, and shares her own insights in the “Ed Sez” column. OscarWatch was featured as one of the top three Academy Awards-related websites on “Ebert and Roeper at the Movies” earlier this year. To read Stone on the Oscar race, see this page, and visit www.oscarwatch.com.