Tonight, I’m anticipating a flood of tweets about the Oscars. I probably won’t be watching the show myself. Honestly, I think the award show — not counting the red carpet show, which is a bit entertaining — is an overrated snooze fest.

This year, the race for the Oscars isn’t even that exciting. Is anyone really doubting that Natalie Portman and Colin Firth will be taking home the acting awards? The showdown between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” is being played out in the media, but anyone who has seen both movies will actually agree that the former is infinitely better than the latter. Also, “The King’s Speech” has already won the Directors Guild Award, a better predictor than the Golden Globes of who’ll take home the Best Picture award.

Anyhoo, this post is about advertising, so let’s go at it. If there’s one person at this year’s Oscars that might make me watch, it’s James Franco. The guy looks good and possesses incredible charm. I’m not sure if those qualities will help him with his hosting gig tonight (I have major doubts about that), but they’ve definitely helped in this ad for Gucci sport:

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This week was reading break, but it wasn’t as productive as I had hoped it was going to be. Someone should really re-name reading break to catching up break; the latter is more accurate because no one wants to read textbooks when they don’t have to!

In between working on extra-curricular projects, I’ve managed to work on an upcoming paper. I’m far from done, but at least I have a thesis and an idea of what media to critique for the paper.

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You’ve probably seen this post coming. As I said in a previous post, the Grammys is the one award show that I actually look forward to.  Simply put, I love music and music stars!

Music and advertising is a marriage made in heaven. An appropriate soundtrack can take a commercial to a new level. At the same time, music stars have so much clout that it makes sense to have them as spokespeople.

First up is the artist with the most nomination for tonight’s show: Eminem. Now, I won’t lie – at one point, I thought Eminem was no longer relevant. And then — boom! — just like that, he’s back on top, thanks to a good album and a monstrous collaboration with Rihanna.

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