Sasha Stone – Oscarwatch is a great site to have around when I cannot make it to the show…brilliant!
That piece of gratifying text is pulled directly, font, color and all, from one of my very first websites from around 2000. Though I can’t really call it a website, more a self-build pile of dogshit hosted by Geocities. Remember that? Having found the site buried in the deepest, muddiest bowels of the interweb, I’m not about to share the URL with a soul now, but certainly want to raise a glass to the nostalgia of the very early days of Oscar predicting and coverage.
My site at Geocities was the real deal, though, back in the day before the prestigious WordPress, before social media was anything to shout about, I mean the internet was still pretty much an infant back then. On the site I wrote reviews, bigged up my screenwriting ambition, published awards announcements, still fresh in the wave of movies that had just blown me away, like Almost Famous and Amelie.
My “with special thanks to” section of the site tipped an amateur hat to those who had somehow helped me – including my uni friend for the use of her computer, her sister for writing a review of the first Harry Potter film, and a certain Oscar geek called Sasha whose site was far greater than mine. I’d been addictively following Miss Stone’s awards season musings for some time already at Oscarwatch.com. Tom O’Neil and Kris Tapley were doing the rounds too. I admired all three of them. Having interacted with Sasha in some form, I was delighted when she linked to my site on her page alongside a bunch of other Oscar prediction websites – my main resources for golden nuggets I might add.
This minor moment of nostalgia owes itself to a podcast Sasha and Ryan Adams recently put out (posted at AwardsDaily.com over a month ago now) on their own journey and perspective through the Oscar game over two decades. Listening to it certainly too me back, and so had to insist you all have a listen if you haven’t already, whether you were running the race all along or not. And I hope as Sasha spoke warmly of those readers that had been with her from the start, somewhere in there she thought of me.
Listen here: