I think with marriage, children, and age one starts to go to the movies more often. At least, this is what happened for me and my husband. We have a group of friends that we frequent the movies with followed by dinner afterwards to discuss the movie, the actors, and whatever gossip is involved with either. I was quite excited when we moved to Dallas and our neighbors, who are now dear friends, asked if we wanted to be part of a neighborhood Oscar competition.  Unbeknownst to them my love of movies, I happily accepted. Two years and two wins later, the pressure is on! If I win my third year in a row, I get to keep the golden statue on permanent display in my home!

Needless to say, this does deserve a party!  So, here are a few fun ideas that I have come across if you are thinking of throwing an Oscar soirée!

01. Recreate the “Tree of Life” by hanging Oscar ballots from branches.

02. Set up a bar cart with drinks and trinkets that you would find at “Midnight in Paris”.

03. Dress in evening wear reminiscent of “The Artist” in the 1930s.

04. Serve crabcake (“The Descendents”) sliders (“Moneyball”).

And don’t forget the infamous chocolate pie from “The Help” for dessert!

Except for one particular era, I’ve never wanted to live at any time in history other than right now. But the one that does call out to me as an artist is Paris in the first decade or two of the twentieth century. That’s when the tectonic plates of representational art and something altogether different began to grind one against the other, in preparation of snapping apart. You can still feel the aftershocks a century later.

Smack dab in the middle of it all was a Romanian sculptor named Constantin Brâncuşi, born on February 19, 1876 and destined to be included in one of the most significant art events of the twentieth century, the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York. Most commonly remembered for the debut of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the so-called Armory Show embodied this seismic shift in contemporary art, where Brâncuşi’s tribal-looking sculpture was juxtaposed with the work of Cézanne and Gauguin, Goya and Van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso.

But even before, Brâncuşi was on his search for new ways of looking at things: after only months he’d left the tutelage of Auguste Rodin saying, ”Nothing can grow under big trees.” Shown here is his studio as photographed by Edward Steichen around 1920. Some shapes bear a resemblance to our own Architect’s Favorite Side Table.