Favorite Thanksgiving Scene

[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t seen Pieces of April, but plan to someday, you might want to skip the clip above — since it’s the final scene in the movie.]

Thanksgiving movies aren’t as common as Christmas movies so it’s easy for me to name my favorite. Katie Holmes, Derek Luke, Oliver Platt and terrific Patricia Clarkson in Pieces of April. The family shows up late after Thanksgiving plans flame out in disastrous meltdown. Those who know the movie will appreciate the emotions leading up to these freeze-frame moments, and there’s no easy way to summarize for those who haven’t yet seen it. Highly recommended.

Like the movie’s late arrivals, I drag myself in lagging a day after Sasha’s sweet Thanksgiving wishes, but I bring my own armload of gratitude. On a purely movie-lover level I’m thankful for the visionary filmmakers who’ve given us such a cornucopia of amazing movies for three years in a row. Thankful that this latest surge of brilliant films caused me to seek out a site where I could share my excitement, and led me to “Oscarwatch” in November ’06 — just in time to see it evolve into AwardsDaily.

(more mushiness, after the cut)

I’m thankful for our incredible gang of regulars, guest contributors, and itinerant vagabond visitors from all over the world. Thankful that all of you make AD one of the brightest and most lively movie awards communities on the web.

Sasha and I had an email convo just a couple of days ago, talking about how you guys have such an incredibly good record of nailing frontrunners and Oscar-winners in our polls, months in advance of the professional pundits. We agreed that our reader’s luck with polls and predictions is a reflection of your sophistication and sharp intelligence. Braininess that’s mostly ingrained but partly retrained. My theory is that readers with great taste come to AD for two reasons. Those who already have great taste are drawn to AwardsDaily like the best students are drawn to Princeton. And those of us whose tastes are still developing and evolving have fine-tuned our refinement with Sasha as our expert instructor.

So most of all, I’m thankful for Sasha Stone. She singlehandedly created AwardsDaily from scratch more than a decade ago, nurturing it from the brand new concept of Oscar watching, and saw her idea launch a hundred imitators, expanding into a virtual mini-industry. At the birth of OscarWatch, there were barely even crude message boards online, much less the vast interwoven network of friendly (and rival) sites we have now, with as many angles on the movies and awards as the personalities behind those sites. (I’ll feature some recent articles and links to some of our friend’s sites, later tonight and throughout the long holiday weekend.)

And finally I’m thankful to have discovered this place two years ago. Wandering around link-to-link in November 2006, trying to find a group of like-minded cinemaniacs as excited about The Departed as I was that Fall, I stumbled across this amazing haven with its ready-made family of global moviegoers. I slipped in like a Wedding Crasher. Immensely thankful that something I wrote caught Sasha’s attention and prompted her to pluck me out of the comments like a stray weed out of her garden. Thankful that instead of mulching my weediness she took a chance and replanted me as her loyal and sometimes troublesome sidekick. (And is probably still wondering if I’ll ever bloom into anything worth all the hassle.)

Have a great Thanksgiving everybody. Who’s already checked the showtimes at the multiplex to see what’s playing after dinner?