Michel Hazanavicius's movie "The Artist" is viewed as the front-runner by far in this category. Martin Scorsese's film "Hugo" garnered the most Oscar nominations overall; "The Help," directed by Tate Taylor, snagged the SAG Outstanding Performance by a Cast award, which can sometimes point to a Best Picture win at the Academy Awards; and the Alexander Payne film "The Descendants" seemed like an early favorite. But "The Artist" took the Best Comedy or Musical award at the Golden Globes, the Best Film prize at the BAFTAs, and its producer Thomas Langmann won at the Producers Guild Awards. And the PGA's pick for producer has mirrored the Best Picture Oscar for the past four years. The Directors Guild also gave its Best Director award to Hazanavicius, and often the winner in that category has his or her film picked for the Oscar prize.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
