Gullane and the Academy Awards.

Well it's been over a week since I made a contribution to the blog with a post but here I am back and ready.

There are a lot of other things I have to do; I have to write my novel, organise my one man show for the Edinburgh Festival and do my taxes.

What appears to be taking a lot of time is the one man show; I did the classic thing of registering my show on the Edinburgh Fringe web site and then forgetting what user name and password I had chosen.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem as all you do in that case is click on 'reminder of password' and it gets e-mailed to you automatically but there is one snag.

AT&T in the form of SBCGlobal are my servers and they put a block on foreign domain names they do not recognise. So when the reminder came to me from the web site in question it was blocked and sent back. The name of the domain where the e-mails were coming from was edfringe and edfringe might look a bit shifty to a computer.

So I have made many a phone call to Scotland over the past week and it still isn't sorted out. The big problem with calling them is that they finish work at 6:00 pm so all the calls have to be made before 10:00 am Los Angeles time. If the person I want is in a meeting they never get out of it before the end of their day.

So it's a bit of a bind.

There is a place called Gullane which is a small town – or more like a village -on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland. It's about twenty to thirty miles from Edinburgh and in it there is a village hall which I want to use for a few rehearsals before the show; there it is above.

I know of the hall, and Gullane, because my uncle used to live there. He had half a Dublin accent and half a Scottish one and my dad couldn't understand a word he said.

When I was staying there with my brother, many years ago, we took a job in Gullane at the fair ground collecting the fares on the Dodgem Cars.

The first thing we were taught to do was to give incorrect change to the punters. It's something I never did but our boss, who was a little fella who wore a hat with a feather in it, would show us how to let the customer see the change in our hand and then as we put it into their hand we would somehow keep a coin in the folds of our fingers; I don't think I could have done it even if I'd wanted to.

We collected the fare when the cars started to move and we had to jump between them and kind of flatter and chat up the girls to try to keep them in for another ride; I liked doing that.

The thing you couldn't do was to touch two cars at the same time as the electricity would go through you and give you a nasty shock. I can still feel the pain from trying it once – it wasn't touching cars exactly, but the bar that was on the back which would reach the ceiling of the rink to give power to each car.

There was that, of course, and trying to avoid being hit by the cars.

I remember it took us some time to get paid too as the people running the dodgems tried to get away with it.

My cousin, who still lives in Gullane, always reminds me of the time my brother Pat and me worked at the fair ground.

So I think a nice little drive out to Gullane each time I rehearse would be nice and pleasant when I am there and I can get some fish and chips with my wife and wander along the beach.

When I go there I have another blog which I will be posting so I hope you will be able to follow me there.

It's been over a week since the Academy Awards and I wasn't too disappointed with the outcome. I'm glad Hurt Locker won but I would have liked to have seen Up in the Air win. It was a brilliant script and well performed and was about a man who thought he had everything but he didn't and it was a really good satire on America. Try and see it if you can; it's not a rip roaring comedy or a thriller but well worth a watch.

I asked a friend of mine if he enjoyed the Academy Awards and he said that they were a load of shit; a blatant publicity stunt.

Well you know who am I to argue with that; but people enjoy them. I always do and loved last year with Hugh Jackman; I didn't expect Stave Martin and Alec Baldwin to be like that but they were good in their own way.

I know it's a publicity thing but at least members of the academy get to vote – so it's real as far as that's concerned but it's only their opinion. There is never a degree of difficulty point like in the diving at the Olympic games so it really is very hard to say whose performance is better than anyone else's?

Is it harder to play a country 'n' western singer than a company executive? It depends doesn't it – I mean it would be harder for me to play a country n' western singer than Jeff bridges as he is almost there.

And what about directing? What about it I hear you say.

There was one scene in The Hurt Locker when the chap – the protagonist – was trying to defuse a bomb in a car; that scene was almost perfect and it was made up of good acting, good placement of the camera shots and – most importantly – good editing.

What kind of direction went into that scene? We will never know, of course, but the director's job is to get the performance from the actor; a discussion with the Director of Photography about the camera angles too but the main job is to make it believable and if the actor is not believable – over the top, playing it too small or just plain unbelievable – the whole thing is ruined.

The director has to tell the actor, if he doesn't know, what the character wants, what he has just been through and then has to tell him, using the correct words, how he is doing.

If the director tells the actor he is a load of shit where is that going to get him? If the director tells the actor how good he is that could be counterproductive too – the correct words need to be used I repeat.

That is why I am glad Avatar didn't win; I haven't seen the film but every time someone tells me about it they tell me of the 3D effects and the magic but I have yet to hear anyone tell me about the acting.

With regards to how important and correct the awards are I will say one of the greatest actors never recaived an Academy Award for any of his performances; I'm talking of Charlie Chaplin.