This year, my friends and I decided to try to watch the Oscars, live. It’s not that we were really invested in who won (until the night of, only one of us has seen any of the nominated films), or that any of us are big film buffs, but we thought it would be a nice excuse to get together and eat food which is very bad for you.
What we didn’t do, however, was make sure that we were actually going to be able to watch it. Oops. So, night of — well, morning of, since Ireland is seven hours ahead of California — we’re all of us sitting around in the living room and it’s about 1:30ish, so we figure that the Red Carpet stuff is probably over and we can turn the show on now.
‘Does anyone know which channel it’s on?’
Crickets.
Several googl-ings and confused channel-changes later, we discovered that my friends, who don’t have Sky (an Anglo-Irish cable service) didn’t get the channel the actual awards were being shown on, only about three channels which critiqued the Red Carpet fashion, star-interviews, etc. At this point, verging on quarter past two on a Monday morning, we decided to try streaming. All of the Irish websites which said that they had streaming, didn’t have streaming. ABC doesn’t stream in Ireland. We couldn’t find a single, solitary, working English streaming site. At this point, most of my friends gave up and went to bed. Two of us persevered.
Of the two of us, my friend is German, and she knew from experience that she could get the German channel she watched the Oscars on in Germany to stream in Ireland. So that’s what we did. It was pretty entertaining for me, kind of embarrassing for her. The actual show was in English, no German subtitles, no nothing, but all of the ads were in German. And they were mostly… let’s say, not appropriate for children. Apparently, on this particular German channel, anything past midnight is fair game for ‘adult’ ads, including a ‘dating’ service which was apparently chock-full of dirty puns that made my friend laugh guiltily and reluctantly explain to me after I prodded her repeatedly to tell me why it was funny.
We didn’t end up staying up past half three, since I has class at eleven in the morning, and what we actually saw of the show was kind of lack-luster, aside from Ellen ordering pizza for the audience. The Oscars are probably more enjoyable to watch when they’re happening within two hours of your time zone. I will never forget those German ads, however. I definitely got one kind of lesson out of the Oscars.
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Hannah Vose
<p><span style="color: rgb(29, 29, 29); font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; background-color: rgb(237, 237, 237);">Hannah Vose is a University of Rochester junior, majoring in English with an interest in literary translation studies. When not burying her nose in whichever book has most recently been plucked from atop the dangerously tall pile on her desk, she can be found obsessively learning new languages, squinting through her (very stylish, thank you!) bifocals at someone else's writing in her job as a Writing Fellow, drinking stupid amounts of tea, squinting through her bifocals at her own writing in her job as a scathing self-critic, or dreaming of living somewhere which gets even less sun than Rochester. Born in England but having lived most of her life in Endicott, New York, she has traveled back to the Land of Her People twice and visited Dublin once on the way over. She considered applying to Trinity College as an international student, but was deterred by tuition costs (yikes!) so she's absolutely 100% thrilled to be living in Dublin and taking classes at Trinity for an entire year (and only about 34% of that is because she might get to take a class on Patrick McCabe -- will it happen? Stay tuned!)</span></p>
