Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Josh McNeil to overthink Academy Award Nominations, with detours into what makes an Oscar-worthy performance, the meaning of meaning, and movies Fenzel has always wanted to make.

→ Download Episode 86 (MP3)

We’re still livestreaming the podcast recording on Ustream (on the Overthinking It Podcast Page, where it will return next week on Sunday at 9:15pm ET (6:15pm PT). (In two weeks, we’ll be watching the Oscars.)

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Update Feb 22, 2010 10:49am: Oscars are two weeks from today, not one week. We’ll be livestreaming like normal next week.

Up 2: Next Year in Jerusalem

“He caught him up, and, without wing
Of hippogrif, bore through the air sublime,
Over the wilderness and o’er the plain,
Till underneath them fair Jerusalem,
The Holy City, lifted high her towers . . .

. . . There, on the highest pinnacle, he set
The Son of God.”

– John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV

The kindness of the world toward your existence turns out to be an illusion of youth, and all love dies. Man must keep his faith and promises, even as he ages toward death — find a place to stand firm, even as he falls.

Pixar’s Up and John Milton’s great poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are about more than what they have in common. A laundry list of their similarities would hardly be interesting (especially if you haven’t read the poems). But they meet at a critical and compelling place in what I like to call the Artistic Project.

This balloon is about to get heavy, so if at any point you need a little extra lift, bookmark this.

Now, let us go, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, to find our solitary way —