Left to my own devices

There may come a time when some of us realize we may not live as long as we'd wanted, or expected to. It may not come as a "Eureka!" moment, perhaps more as a slow, steady registering of potential reality. I use the word "potential" deliberately, as none of us knows precisely what the future holds. Still, we can have a fairly good idea after a certain point.

Every year, the late, great film critic Roger Ebert used to hold a contest called Outgess Ebert . In it, he would guess who would win the various categories of the year's Academy Award nominees, and would challenge his readership to submit their predictions, to see if they could "outguess" him. While I don't have the desire to hold a contest, nor am I the movie guru that Ebert was, I thought it would be fun to put my picks out there, and see how it goes. The 86th Annual Academy Awards air tonight on ABC, hosted by Ellen DeGeneres. Following are my predictions on who will win what and, in a few cases, why. Here goes!

My uncle Buster died on December 6th. While mom tried to jog my memory about meeting him at least once, I have no memory of the man. Marion "Buster" Snyder was someone I just heard her talk about sometimes. It's the same for her dad's side of the family. I remember meeting them once, after grandfather Dean Snyder had passed away, but the memory -- now some 20+ year ago -- is a foggy one. When mom and I went to Buster's visitation on the cold night of December 11th, driving from Champaign to her hometown of Clinton, we weren't quite sure what to expect. After mom was born, Dean and my grandmother (Gummy) broke up and Dean started over with a new family with the lovely Hazel, comprised of several children who are my mother's half-siblings, Buster among them. Mom hadn't been extremely close with the family, so we approached the visitation with some trepidation.