Special Oscar Edition!

What on earth does a science/skeptical blog have to write about around Oscar time? With all the hype that surrounds the Academy Awards, which air tonight at 8:30 EST, it’s not surprising that coverage spills into areas of science, pseudoscience, technology and awesome. For example:

• Filling the gap left by the death of Paul the psychic octopus, Heidi the cross-eyed opossum, who lives at a zoo in Leipzig, Germany, made her prediction for Best Actress on the Jimmy Kimmel show. She chose Natalie Portman for her role in ‘Black Swan’. This gave me great pleasure since I’ve had a crush on Natalie Portman ever since she was the only good thing about the Star Wars prequels.




• The Economist wrote a short article on the science behind some speech impediments in honour of the success of ‘The King’s Speech’




• 2 of the 5 nominated movies for Best Documentary deal with the environment. One of those films, called ‘Gasland‘, deals with hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” and prompted Scientific American to write a feature article about it.




• By monitoring social media chatter from sites like Twitter and Facebook, the Meltwater Group has made their prediction of Oscar winners based on the number of mentions of a certain movie or actor/actress. Based on this data, the favourites are ‘The King’s Speech’ for Best Picture, James Franco for Best Actor, and Natalie Portman for Best Actress. 




• And finally, the Best Picture nominees in LEGO form. You can see them all on Gawker, but here are my favourites:

127 Hours

Inception

The Fighter