ONE thing that fascinates me is filmmaking. And one of my idols is Antonio Banderas. He surely rocks. I want to follow in his footsteps. After being successful here in Spain, he went to Hollywood and earned a lot of money. He even had the guts to court Melanie Griffith and even married her. So here I am in the University of Salamanca taking up filmmaking. The mood here is very Americanized as undoubtedly, the city is the most Americanized city in Spain.

And so it came to pass that I am already in my junior year in college and I was recently granted to study for one whole semester at Sundance Institute in Salt Lake City. Isn’t that amazing? I will be spending time not just studying Hollywood films but also walk in the very same halls where great directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh were molded.

This semester, we will be studying on the best films of the year, how they were directed and whether their actors were deserving of the accolades that they receive. I have a particular fascination with the Oscar-nominated movies, actors and actresses.

I begin with the movies that were nominated for best films. It is sad to note that of all the films that were released last year and are eligible for the Academy Awards, my choice was never nominated. My choice was The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is actually the title of a book written by a paraplegic with Locked-In Syndrome, meaning only his eyes can move. Now isn’t that fascinating? Sadly, it was never nominated.

Another movie which was never nominated because it was released already in 2008 (just today actually, January 25) is one foreign language film coming in from Romania. The title is 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days and it talks about the dilemma of a girl who is four months three weeks and two days pregnant on whether to abort her baby or not.

Barring those, the next movie that I want to win for the Oscar is Juno because Ellen Page is starring in it. Ellen Page was the one who played Shadowcat in X Men 3, remember? But it is not Ellen’s beauty which fascinated me in this film. The poor girl gets knocked up and because she cannot afford to raise her baby, she has to give it up for adoption with the condition that she will never see the baby ever even after birth. Now there goes the dilemma.

Now let’s take a look at the movie Atonement. Like Sleepers, Atonement takes a look at what happened in the past and how it has molded the lives of the characters at a later period. Just like Crash and Vantage Point, Atonement is told from different points of view. There are so many nice movies today but I will study only two of them – The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and 4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days.