"And the Oscar goes to..."

Yesterday's trip to the Kodak Theater was really awesome. It's definitely a worthwhile tour while you're in LA, in my opinion. Believe it or not, that theater they hold the Academy Awards in is located in a big mall with coffee shops, clothing stores, and restaurants. They dress it up come award night, but any other time you might look right past the theater. Outside their are columns marked from 1927 to 2071, each one marking the best picture for its respective year. Inside, it is very atmospheric. There are photo cells along the wall featuring pictures of past winners hanging in front of the shiny material they used to make the "silver screen" out of. When they brought us out on stage, my breath caught. It was so big! Plus, it felt really cool to be on the stage where many of my favorite filmmakers and actors have accepted their awards. Looking out into the audience was a different story. It was beautiful, to be sure, but much smaller than one might think. It's amazing what can be done with the right camera angles. There was certainly a neat feeling about the whole tour.

After the tour, we went to In-n-Out Burger again. That place is great! We then went to the pool for a couple hours and watched some twenty something guy try to hit on the girls from our program. His name was Ephraim, so I'm assuming he was Jewish, and apparently he liked to talk about his family and how successful they were. I'd never actually heard a guy use this tactic before, which further highlighted how different this place is to home.

In the evening we all went to Rebecca's for a barbecue. She has a really cute house that I recognized from Brad Eastridge's video from last fall when he was here. Dinner itself was superb: barbecue chicken, sesame green beans, mashed potatoes, cornbread, and Italian salad. Jess, her roommates, and I checked out after dinner and went back to watch Lucky Number Slevin. I was really pulling for Requiem for a Dream, but I got voted down again. Dave joined us for the movie as well. Steve and Gabe showed up later and caught a little SNL with us, but it was the John McCain episode, which wasn't really one of my favorites.

This morning, several of my friends and I are going to Ecclesia Hollywood, a church where a lot of people from our school attend. Jess has been before, and she says it's great. It takes place in an old theater and apparently has a really good worship service. She also told me that the pastor there is the voice double for Jack Black. That could be interesting!