A quick Google might tell you that Thursday, August 8 is International Cat Day, National Sneak SOme Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day, or National Melvin Day (FOR REAL!), but here in Ann Arbor, we know it’s NERD NITE DAY! Celebrate this very important local holiday by gathering at LIVE (102 S. First Street) for another wonderful edition of NNA2! Doors open at 6:30 pm, talks start at 7 pm and as always, there’s no cover charge!
We’ll start things off by heading up to Isle Royale for Moosewatch: an unexpected, off-trail Isle Royale adventure. Isle Royale National Park, the least-visited and most-revisited of the national parks, is home to the longest-running predator-prey study in the world. Explore Isle Royale’s unique ecology, the current status of moose and wolves on the island, and what exactly happens when teams of volunteers are turned loose into the backcountry to collect moose bones with Erin Parker, former backcountry ranger and 6-time Moosewatch trip leader.
Erin gets to play outside and call it work with her role as an interpretive services supervisor for the Huron-Clinton Metroparks.
We’ll turn from searching for moose to searching for music in The Most Famous “Lost” Album Ever. Bill Bulger will tell the story of The Beach Boys’ “Smile” album. After the band was on top of the world following the smash timeless single “Good Vibrations” in 1966, the follow-up album was sure to be even better (or at least be released), right???
Bill is a Senior Director of Operations at MDpanel who frequently goes down nerdy rabbit holes and has learned a lot about PowerPoint in the last few weeks. He has a family reputation for making killer mixtapes, including for his niece Emily and her mom Linda, who got him into this Nerd Nite situation in the first place (with help from his wife, Jenny).
The night will close out with Daniel Joyaux and The Oscar for Best International Film: Why the nominating process is filled with bad ideas, and why they’re the best bad ideas we have. Every year, the five nominees for Best International Film leave even the most dedicated Oscar-ologists confused and despondent over a great category that refuses to make sense. Like last year, when Cannes Palme d’Or winner (and eventual Best Original Screenplay winner) Anatomy of a Fall was nominated for Best Picture, but not Best International FIlm. Or two years ago, when RRR, the Indian film that became a huge Zeitgeist hit on Netflix, was nowhere to be found in the category. What are the labyrinthine rules and processes that create these egregious snubs year after year, and why are they so seemingly unfixable?
Daniel is a film critic and journalist whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Ringer, IndieWire, Cosmopolitan, Roger Ebert, and others. He also wrote for A.frame, the now-defunct Oscars newsletter put out by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Before becoming a full-time writer, Daniel worked at film festivals, including three winters spent in Utah working as a publications editor for the Sundance Film Festival, and two summers up north working for the (also) now-defunct Traverse City Film Festival.