“Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.” – Steve Martin

Okay, it’s here. You’ve waited and waited and waited – or should I say, TV networks have advertised and advertised and advertised – for this moment. And it’s D-Day now. In 9 hours, we will unleash the Academy Awards 2016.

But before we get to the good stuff, let’s really understand what’s going on here. Why is there so much hype only for the Oscars? How come very few people care about the Golden Globes? How come the BAFTAs and SAG Awards happen every year and yet, nobody even knows… or cares?

Well, if you were hoping for a huge, logical explanation, it’s a far cry from the truth. The Oscars are more prestigious and famous than other film awards because…. well, because. There are a variety of reasons that don’t completely give us the answer, but they are significant.

Firstly, the Oscars are older than the others. So it’s sort of an ‘old is gold’ theory here. The other awards came later, and hence were diminished in fame due to the existence of the Oscars, which were already famous.

Secondly, the Oscars are more… interesting. For starters, why the term ‘Oscar’? Why is it called that? The popularly acknowledged explanation is that when Academy Award librarian and future Director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick first saw the statue in 1931, she said that it looked like her Uncle Oscar. And let’s just say the name caught on.

I mean, I don’t see the Golden Globes having an affectionate nickname. So the score’s 2-0.

Finally, and this is quite a touchy point, the Oscars are of a better quality. Maybe it’s just me, but the Oscars always captures the spirit of the viewer. Many a time, it gets you invested in a film you’ve neither seen nor heard of. Other award shows don’t really have that charisma. Then there is the overall show itself. The Oscar hosts are more memorable, more celebrities turn up at the Oscars [well, not this year and you know why], and on a more intricate note, the speeches are better. Seriously, they are. And there is also the whole timing of the event. The Golden Globes of 2016 was greatly rushed and I didn’t quite feel it. But with the almost 4-hour long Oscars, I’m pretty sure I will.

But of course, this may be just because of the fame of the Oscars itself, which leads to it holding an image in our minds of a greater quality than other awards shows. But hey – who cares.

Now, the good stuff. The movies. The epitome of the Oscars. Come hell or high water, when all is said and done, it’s the movies that really matter. And 2015-16 was a great year for film. I urgently request you to binge-watch any Oscar-nominated movies you haven’t seen. Probably start with Spotlight or The Revenant. You won’t get any sleep, but it’ll be worth it.

So, without further ado, here are my predictions, or rather my opinions, for which movies will go big at the 2016 Academy Awards :-

1. Best Production Design – Mad Max: Fury Road
2. Best Documentary, Short Subject – Body Team 12
3. Best Short Film, Animated – World of Tomorrow
4. Best Short Film, Live Action – Ave Maria
5. Best Sound Mixing – The Revenant
6. Best Sound Editing – The Revenant
7. Best Makeup and Hair-styling – Mad Max: Fury Road
8. Best Costume Design – Mad Max: Fury Road
9. Best Cinematography – The Revenant
10. Best Visual Effects – Star Wars: The Force Awakens [Better believe it, Academy!]
11. Best Original Score – The Hateful Eight
12. Best Original Song – “Til It Happens To You” from The Hunting Ground
13. Best Film Editing – Mad Max: Fury Road
14. Best Documentary Feature – Amy
15. Best Foreign Language Film – Son of Saul
16. Best Animated Feature – Inside Out [Without a doubt]
17. Best Original Screenplay – Spotlight
18. Best Adapted Screenplay – The Big Short
19. Best Supporting Actress – Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl. With her two breakthroughs in Ex Machina and The Danish Girl, Alicia Vikander is likely to win, although she faces stiff competition from Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.
20. Best Supporting Actor – Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies. Bridge of Spies was a great but underrated movie, and it deserves at least one Oscar, and this is the most likely category. Spielberg wasn’t even nominated for Best Director! Mark Rylance does have a rival in Sylvester Stallone for Creed.
21. Best Actress – Brie Larson, Room. Brie Larson really deserves it for her emotional performance in Room. It would be a pity if JLaw snagged the Oscar again.
22. Best Actor – Leonardo diCaprio, The Revenant. LEO! LEO! LEO! Leo all the way, baby. The Oscars would probably be hated worldwide if Leo didn’t get this much deserved award for his scintillating performance in The Revenant. And the guy has been waiting a looooong time.
23. Best Director – Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant. Alejandro Gonza- let’s just stick with Alex – won the Oscar last year for Birdman, and he can do it this time too for The Revenant. George Miller is another likely candidate for Mad Max: Fury Road.
24. Best Picture – SPOTLIGHT. Yup. The Academy does love upsets, as it has proven last time with Birdman edging out over Boyhood. Only this time, the award is going to go against Iñárritu’s liking, with The Revenant finishing a close second. In my opinion, last year, Boyhood was better than Birdman. And this time, Spotlight is better than The Revenant. It will be a close battle, though. But of course, The Revenant has a whole lot of hype and more people think it deserves Best Picture, so…Well, we shall see.

So there you go – a huge sum-up of the Oscars 2016. One thing I hate about the film industry is that there’s always some looming ‘problem’. Last time it was equal pay for equal work, but this time it’s something way bigger – a White Oscars. Sure, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few black nominees in there [Idris Elba was amazing in Beasts of No Nation] but the outcry over the issue has been in excess.

Anyway folks, enjoy the Oscars. And to the nominees themselves, bonne chance.

Anyway, kudos to all the future winners. And Rock the stage! (Chris Rock reference :P)

Life is good. Adieu.

“Killing Pluto was fun, but this is head and shoulders above everything else.”                                                                                                                   – Michael Brown, Caltech

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union [IAU] nullified Pluto from its status as a proper planet in the Solar System, due to the fact that it could not ‘clear the neighborhood’ around its orbit, it being only 0.07 times that of the mass of the other objects in its orbit. Michael E Brown, a professor at Caltech, was soon hailed as the ‘man who killed Pluto’. Heck, he even wrote a book about it. [He really did – It’s called How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming. On top of that, his Twitter handle is @Pluto_killer.]

And so, for another 10 years, life went on and people came to grips with the reality that Pluto was gone for good. But then, a decade later, [rather convenient, don’t you think?] on the 20th of January, 2016, the same Michael Brown who demoted Pluto announced, along with his Caltech colleague Konstantin Batygin, that they had found near solid evidence of a new ninth planet in the Solar System.

Yup. A ninth planet. Just like that. Out of nowhere. As a matter of fact, we weren’t even searching for another planet in our Solar System. It just appeared. 

In 2014, astronomers Chad Trujillo and Scott Sheppard became the first to hypothesize a planet beyond Neptune, with some minor evidence. Soon, Caltech professors Michael Brown and Konstantin Batygin arrived and made attempts to actually refute the claims to a ninth planet. Figures. The Pluto killer had come back for more.

But instead, they found the evidence to be so strong that the refuters became the proponents of the theory of a ninth planet, Planet X, that lay in the Kuiper Belt, far away from Neptune. How was it found? Here goes.

So, the Kuiper belt is a vast expanse of asteroids, comets and dwarf planets [including Pluto.] But these researchers found that the orbits of many of the huge bodies in the Kuiper Belt were actually similar. They were just different-sized versions of each other, all in the same direction. Similar orbits, that too in such an arbitrary place involving random celestial bodies? That was no coincidence. Scientists don’t believe in coincidence.

The scientists were curious. Similar orbits require some kind of central body with a gravitational pull strong enough to make such similarities. The Kuiper Belt itself did not have enough mass and wasn’t strong enough to pull its surroundings. So, after much experimenting, the scientists came to the conclusion that there was indeed a planet that held the Kuiper Belt bodies in place and revolved around the Sun, and gave an answer to the bodies having similar orbits and lying in the same plane and direction.

You may say, Oh, that’s just a shot in the dark made to sound like something big. The similar orbit phenomenon could be anything. The Pluto-killer’s probably trying to apologise to us for his murder of Pluto. But no. The mathematics checks out. The measurements, the theorized impressions, they all work. And unlike Pluto, Planet X has the requirements to be dubbed a ‘planet’, as per the IAU:

1. It is in orbit around the Sun.
2. It has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium [Basically, it’s almost round in shape.]
3. It has ‘cleared the neighbourhood’ around its orbit unlike Pluto, i.e., it has a strong         dominant gravitational pull and there are no other bodies of comparable size or                 gravitational pull under its influence.

So there you have it. Planet 9. After a detailed scientific analysis of this discovery, scientists have found some properties of Planet 9 with respect to the Solar System –

1. It has about 10 times the mass of Earth and about 4 times the diameter, but it is smaller in size to Neptune. Greater distance doesn’t mean greater size, folks!
2. It is about 60 billion miles from the Sun and has a highly elliptical orbit.
3. It is quite similar in properties and size to the icy duo of Uranus and Neptune.
4. It has an orbital period of 20,000 YEARS, i.e., it takes 20,000 years for Planet 9 to orbit the Sun.

All these properties make Planet 9 highly likely to exist, but however, a planet that is incredibly hard to spot. And unless we spot this planet, unless we receive that hard evidence, only then will it gain official planetary status and become Pluto’s substitute.

At its aphelion [point where it is farthest from the Sun], its distance from the Earth is a hell of a lot. It is shrouded in the unexplored realm of the Kuiper Belt. And as you can guess from the amount of time and effort this discovery has taken, Planet Nine isn’t exactly crying out for attention.

It may take thousands of years for Planet 9 to even approach its perihelion, when we can actually catch a real glimpse of this celestial treasure. And hopefully, when it comes, we’ll be waiting. Waiting out in the open night with our telescopes. Or maybe even with our naked eyes, just hoping to witness this spectacle of space. All that is needed is a bit of curiosity: to look into the sky, and hope for a miracle. A passion to know, to see, to gaze into the unknown and understand its very being. After all, curiosity is what led to the discovery of Planet 9 – it is curiosity which fuels scientific progress.

Life is good. Adieu.