i was hoping the snow that fell this morning would be a dusting, but the few inches of accumulation was more than anticipated, forcing me to abandon the idea of a bike ride to belmont for dinner. i was excited about the possibility of taking the bus instead, but my father was at the cafe snow plowing the sidewalk and informed me he could swing by after he was done. my ride came after i ate the 2nd of my vietnamese banh mi sandwich for breakfast (this one didn't cut the roof of my mouth as much).

by then the snow had stopped. it was pretty, but this late in the season i was already jaded to such snowy spectacles. arriving in belmont, hailey was going crazy, waiting for me to let her out into the backyard. for a short-haired dog so ill-equipped for snow, she seems to have a real passion for the white stuff, barking for attention in an attempt to get anyone to throw snow for her to catch. afterwards she wouldn't come back inside the house until finally realizing in her dog brain that nobody wanted to play anymore.

in preparation for the oscars that was happening later tonight, i caught up on 2 more best film nominees: winter's bone and the social network. winter's bone was an okay movie, but not one i knew too much about. i think it received as much prestige as it did partly because it was adapted from a well-received novel (since i'm not much of a fiction reader, i wouldn't know anything about that). jennifer lawrence was pretty believable in her role as a teenage dropout taking care of her mother and siblings and in search of her meth-dealing father. i put off seeing the social network for the longest time because i'm not a facebook fan and wasn't interested in learning about the company's inception, no matter how machiavellian it was. i left the movie thinking the founders of facebook even bigger assholes than before (except for eduardo). more the reason to avoid facebook!

i got a ride back to cambridge after dinner.

victor and i ended up watching the academy awards together. back home in spain, he'd wake up in the early morning to watch the ceremony live, but now that he was in the US, he could see it at a normal hour and still manage to get a good night's sleep. i thought about making some popcorn but once the oscars started i couldn't turn away (not that it was that riveting); besides, i wasn't in the mood to stink up the house the rest of the night with the smell of popped kernels.

i thought james franco and anne hathaway did an okay job hosting. i especially liked the pre-taped stuff, like the movie-embedded intro. the fact that melissa leo still won the oscar despite her recent self-publicizing flub was the night's biggest surprise for me (i was rooting for hailey stenfield). 94-year old kirk douglas' presentation of said award was cool in the beginning, but slowly wandered into awkward territory. isn't it cute how old man can still be horn bags? ha ha! it's weird to see billy crystal; what has he been up to lately and why isn't he aging? his introduction of ghoulish CGI resurrected bob hope was creepy. i'm glad the king's speech won best picture; i finally saw social network today and that is not really a feel good movie. and the director of the king's speech? a splitting image of james cameron, don't you think? there was an overall lack of surprises in the acting awards; the supposed frontrunners won in each respective categories. i cheered for christian bale and colin firth, but i was hoping annette bening could upset natalie portman.