The Boys Consider the Academy Awards / Plus, Richard and Harry Lupus Meet The Competition!

Like several other straight men across the nation, the boys love the glitz and glamour of Oscar night. But they are a little concerned about this year's competition. Last year the telecast received its lowest ratings ever. Can this year's recapture the magic? Rumors are that major changes are in store. Besides hiring this year's "sexiest man alive" Hugh Jackman to host, producers have supposedly revamped the previously mundane way the awards are presented: "this year's Oscars will have a story line related to making movies and will lean heavily toward live theater instead of endless film clips, with the award presentations almost Shakespearean plays within a play" (NYTimes).

Chip: "Supposedly the producers want the telecast to reconnect with the 'average' viewer, but I suspect this 'meta' approach is not the way to do it. If they want people in Forttt Scottt to watch the Oscars, they need to nominate Paul Blart: Mall Cop for Best Picture and hire Larry the Cable Guy to host. He could 'get 'er done' in less than four hours, I assure you."

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Just last week Richard believed that he had cornered the market on young-adult werewolf fiction. But somehow he had completely overlooked Carrie Vaugn's 'Kitty Norville' series, feauturing a female werewolf who hosts a radio advice show (the newest installment, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand, checks in at #13 on the NYTime's Mass Market Fiction list this week).

Is there room for both Kitty and Harry?

Richard: "I believe so. Kitty seems to be going for a female audience that's slightly older than the readers of Twilight and Harry Potter, and supposedly there's a 'feminist' element to her work. I'm going for the untapped young male audience who doesn't want a 'political' edge to their work but just wants to read about a young werewolf killing and fucking. Plus, our styles are quite different. Let's take a look at this excerpt from the Kitty series:

"The forest was silver, the trees shadows. Fallen leaves rustled as nighttime animals foraged. I ignored the noises, the awareness of the life surrounding me. I pulled off my T-shirt, felt the moonlight touch my skin. I put my clothes in the hollow formed by a fallen tree and a boulder. The space was big enough to sleep in when I was finished. I backed away, naked, every pore tingling. I could do this alone. I’d be safe. I counted down from five—One came out as a wolf’s howl."

This is excellent, of course, and fully deserving of Times bestseller status, but there's a sensual, feminine element to it that I seek to avoid in my work with Harry. It gives me a boner, sure, but I suspect the love scenes in this series verge on the Harlequin-romance kind, whereas I'm going to make sure that Harry and Muffy, in my work, screw like animals. Wolves, to be precise."

Chip: "If your werewolf series doesn't pan out, you might consider writing a series of novels about a young Abe Lincoln and his sexual misadventures. Lincoln is so hot right now. And I feel there are a lot of horny young history buffs out there who would love to hear about Honest Abe sporting wood in his log cabin."