It is impossible to make a film that accurately portrays the Holocaust as a whole. Its horror is too vast, and its characters too numerous. Cinema’s only available shortcut is to illuminate individual traumas that compose the darkness of the times. Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece “Schindler’s List,” perhaps the most familiar American Holocaust film, fixed its gaze on the struggle of the names written on the infamous List. To a lesser extent, it focused on Oskar Schindler, the brave soul who risked his stature and position to rescue the names.
Conor Brown ’16, Louie Reed ’16 and Patrick DeVivo ’16 have created “Meetum,” an app that more than a third of Amhert’s student population has downloaded, and one that hopes to shift Amherst’s social paradigm.
Meetum is intended as an app where students can share events and activities (“meetums”) with each other. Unlike Facebook events, “meetums” are intended to be more casual. DeVivo puts it as, “Impromptu social events or things like studying for a particular midterm or comps,” or “playing basketball, looking for two more guys, etc.”
We all know that the beautiful Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar this past Sunday, an achievement long-sought after by both himself and by his fans. And while his animalistic acting skills in “The Revenant” should certainly be acknowledged, there are many categories in the Academy Awards outside of “Best Actor” and “Best Picture” that do not receive the attention they deserve, and among these are the animated shorts.
The red planet has been a source of inspiration for years, especially for science fiction visionaries such as H.G. Welles and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It has hosted alien civilizations, portals to other dimensions and Bugs Bunny. This time, Matt Damon takes on the second step of the final frontier. It’s his Oscar-nominated performance that anchors this movie, “The Martian,” and allows legendary science fiction director Ridley Scott to produce a quality adaption of the Andy Weir novel of same title.
It’s unfortunately clear that a vibrant music scene doesn’t exist in the mainstream social fabric of Amherst College. In my experience, when concerts happen on campus, very few people know about them and attend them. And on Saturday nights, the social dorms tend to radiate the same ten pop songs. Certainly, people have schoolwork to do, jobs to work and higher priorities than participating in the creation of a more sophisticated musical culture.
The impossible happened: Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar and the Academy owned up to its lack of diversity. The #OscarsSoWhite controversy emerged in the last couple of years, but the issue became even more pertinent this year when there were no actors of color nominated. After Neil Patrick Harris danced around the subject last year, the Academy chose straight-shooter Chris Rock to be this year’s host. When it was first announced that he would be hosting the Oscars for the second time, everyone knew Rock wouldn’t keep quiet about the Academy’s lack of diversity.
There is a certain aesthetic that defines the seasonal outpour of movies that more cynical moviegoers scorn as “Oscar-bait”. The camerawork in such films travels the middle road between subtlety and officiousness, and it is just subdued enough to be impressive. The script is usually open to a range of interpretation and emotion on the part of the main actors, often tinged with sentimentality easily understood by an equally accommodating range of audience members.
