Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Oscar-ese - text by Ron Martinéz

Guys, check out this great text about the Oscar vocabulary by book writer Ron Martinez

"It occurred to me late last night, while watching the Academy Awards presentation in English, that Oscar night has its own special lexicon.

For example, Americans say movie, and the British say film… But when it comes to the Oscars, the translation for Melhor Filme is Best Picture. Movies were once called moving pictures, which then got shortened to “movies”. The word picture remained, however, in the now formal-sounding term “motion picture” – hence the now abbreviated “Best Picture”.
The fact that we call the best movie of the year “Best Picture” is even more confusing when we get to the animated and foreign-language movies, called Animated Feature Film and Foreign Language Film (not “picture”), respectively.

Go figure.

And then there’s the music. We all know the word song, but in a movie the songs played are collectively called the soundtrack. But there’s no Oscar for “Original Soundtrack”. The Academy Awards only have categories for best Original Song and best Original Score. Huh? “Score?”, you ask? Yes, “score,” which in Oscar-ese seems to usually mean “music with no words”.
These specialized terms can even confuse native speakers – even people inside the “industry”. When Clint Eastwood stepped up to introduce an honorary achievement award for Italian composer Ennio Morricone for his decades of work writing music for movies, he was unsure about what to actually call him, saying he was the best “scorer” he’d ever worked with, and then questioned himself and the audience: “Um… ‘Scorer?’ Is that right?”

And then there’s the Oscar, um, himself. That little golden award is a kind of trophy, basically, in the shape of a statue, but it has a special name. When costume designer Milena Canonero received the award for her work in the film “Marie Antoinette”, she called the award a little “doll”. Most folks call the award a statuette.

Finally, I learned the origin of an expression last night which now seems so obvious, but which I’d never thought about before. Kate Winslet introduced the award for best editing, and she said, “I don’t know who first said the expression ‘cut to the chase’, whether is was…” and it hit me where this phrase, which I had uttered probably a thousand times in the last 38 years of my life, actually originated from. In case you don’t know, the phrase let’s cut to the chase basically means, “vamos ao que interessa”. The expression in English comes straight from movie-editing jargon, since film editors used to physically cut stretches of film that they didn’t want, and in action movies in particular, often directors and editors would want to cut out any boring parts and get to the “chase scene” (usually good guys chasing bad guys) …in other words, they would cut to the chase.

Have a good week.
By Ron Martinez

Referência: Texto publicado originalmente na comunidade do Ron Martinez no Orkut, a "Como dizer tudo em inglês”

Friday, February 23, 2007

First Homework - enjoy while it's easy =)


Guys, this is your first homework:


  • Step 1: before our next class, which will be on March 3, try to go to the cinema and watch one of the movies nominated to the Acadamy Awards 2007. If you don't know which movies have been nominated, click here to check them out;

  • Step 2: come back here and make a comment about the movie you have watched saying if you liked it or not and if you agree it really deserved to be an Acadamy Awards 2007 nominee.

  • If you have already seen one (or more) of the nominated movies, don't waste your time and leave some comments about it/them. Don't forget to mention your name and the name of the movie, of course.

  • If you haven't seen any of the movies nominated to the Oscar, and don't have time to go to the movies this week, don't worry, there will be easier tasks later.

Have fun!!!

Learning with the Italian guy, learning with radio announcers... pronunciation is a MUST!!!

This is the video of the Italian guy I told you about. Have fun and watch out you pronunciation!!!