Tripp Burton
Tripp Burton began his lifelong obsession with the Academy Awards when his parents let him stay up to watch enough of the 1990 ceremony to see Madonna sing “Sooner or Later” from Dick Tracy (at the time, the favorite film of his 8 year old self). The next year he forced his family to participate in an Oscar pool and dress up as characters from nominated films; that year, he dressed up as a gangster from Bugsy.
Throughout his junior high and high school career, he continued to pursue his love of film, while also getting involved in school and community theatre. In 1998, with the release of the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Films list, Tripp took on the three year challenge of watching all 100 of the “greatest American films.” While he quickly learned that many films on this list were not worthy of the classification, he also embarked on a journey through classic Hollywood and world cinema that helped him understand the power and possibilities of the film medium.
Tripp’s love of the Oscars led to a love of theatre and film, which led him to get a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts. During college, he also spent a summer studying film direction at the New York Film Academy. After graduation, Tripp worked as an actor, director and one time playwright in Chicago while discovering his love of teaching. He recently received his master’s degree in Secondary Education and works in the Chicagoland area as an English and Drama teacher. He lives in Chicago with is wife, also a teacher.
Wesley Lovell
I was born, raised and still live in Springfield, MO. Movies were seldom more than a passing interest to me until 1989. I hadn’t ever heard of the Academy Awards and when my favorite movie of the year, Driving Miss Daisy, was selected Best Picture of the year, I was delighted and entranced. I was 14.
When I graduated high school in 1994, I went to college hoping to find a career that would make me some money. My first thought was computer science. A high school chum was taking up the subject and it seemed like a good prospect. My grades started slipping as I got farther into the field. Physics was my downfall. It wasn’t exactly that it was hard, I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I’m sure had I had a teacher whom I could understand and who had more than a passing interst in the subject I might have had more passion, but I didn’t.
That’s when I decided I would pursue something in which I had more of an interest. That’s when I took up Film Studies. I had known for years that I loved movies, and usually the ones more mainstream friends hated, and this seemed the next logical course. So, I pursued the degree and graduated in fall of 1999 with a Bachelors degree in Communications/Mass Media with an emphasis in Film Studies.
During this time, I decided I wanted to launch my own website. Thus, using the free site GeoCities, I found a place in their Hollywood district and founded The Oscar Guy in 1996. In its early incarnations, it was a simple affair with very minimal content. Most of that content surrounded my Oscar predictions and other aspects of the Academy Awards. Over the years, my site grew and after I registered the cinemasight.com domain, a name I had taken early on to describe my interest, my ode to the Oscars was sufficiently in place.
In 1997 or 1998, I formed a message board. The Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board, which was originally housed on the now-defunct Inside the Web, became a hot bed of Oscar discussions and I met many people, including Peter, whom I would be a lesser person had I not met.
Also in 1996, a banner year for me, I formed two organizations. The Online Academies (Online Motion Picture Academy, Online Television Academy and Online Music Academy) and the Internet Film Critics Association. The IFCA faltered within the year, thanks mostly to my admittance into the Online Film Critics Society. The Online Academies, however, have been giving out awards for over a decade now. The group’s name was changed to The Online Film & Television Association and continues to thrive to this day.
I joined the OFCS in its inaugral year and last year served one term on the Governing Committee. To this day, I’m as proud of that organization as I am of any other accomplishment. I feel as if I’ve grown and matured as a critics thanks to and along with the group.
However, as a meager internet-based film critic, I don’t make money off the site or films I see. I still watch and still review because that’s my passion. I would never trade it for all the world. To keep money flowing in, I have worked several temp jobs, spent 5 years at McLeodUSA telecom as a customer service representative and now find myself working for a small Insurance Brokerage in Springfield.
The Oscar Guy site has been my baby for many years and though I’ve gone through many adjustments, changes and redesigns over the years, I will never forget why I started it. I love the Academy Awards (even when the make the stupidest mistakes anyone could ever imagine…and who knows how many they’ve made since I started the site). I love movies. It’s that adoration that has kept me motivated when I could have given up on everything. I also thank all those message board posters for keeping me grounded in reality (even if I want to kill many of them at least 20% of the time). These have been an excellent 12 years of my life and I hope to make it last for many more years to come.
In 2010, at the request of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Oscar Guy domain was turned into my own personal website while all of my professional activities, writing reviews, prognosticating the Oscars, etc (everything you’ve come to know and love about oscarguy.com since I registered the domain back in 2002), has been transitioned to my new website: Cinema Sight.
Peter J. Patrick
Peter J. Patrick was born September 16, 1943, the first of nine children of Peter and Margaret Patrick. He always hated his name, which sounded like a nursery rhyme to him, hence the use of his middle initial, which stands for Joseph. He always felt breaking his name up that way made it sound less like Peter Pan or Peter Piper.
A film lover since seeing his first film, the appropriately titled Welcome Stranger, at the age of 4, Mr. Patrick has been viewing films at the rate of five or more per week for most of his life. By the age of 16 he already had his own film awards, called the Patrician Awards, after both his own last name and the indication of refinement that the word implied.
Mr. Patrick’s first job was as a newspaper carrier for the Long Island newspaper, Newsday, at the age of 13. By the age of 16, he had his first affiliation with the film industry, albeit a cursory one, when he landed a job as an usher, then a candy attendant at a local theatre. He later took a job as a film editor for an education film company while attending college at night.
Drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War, Mr. Patrick’s astigmatism almost got him discharged from boot camp when he failed to hit the target at the rifle range. Re-cycled back four weeks, meaning he was no longer in a training program with his childhood friends, but with a group of younger volunteers, it again looked like he would fail target practice and be shamefully discharged when out of frustration he leaned to the side and hit a bulls-eye. He followed up with two more bulls-eyes, thus securing his position in the Army for a full two years.
Because of his poor vision, Mr. Patrick’s orders sending him to Vietnam were revoked and he was instead sent to Germany where he became a company Training Officer during his 16-month stay. By now he had become an adept public speaker, but found that his audience tended to fall asleep during their weekly training programs. If they were going to sleep anyway, he decided it would be more advantageous to just show Army training films during his four-hour classes. To do so, meant a weekly trek up and down Germany’s fabled autobahn. These excursions became one of the highlights of his time in Germany as he and his driver would explore new towns and restaurants each week.
After his stint in the Army, Mr. Patrick settled down to a long career as a banker. Having been sent by an employment agency to a prestigious Wall Street brokerage, he was unable to find his way around lower Manhattan and missed his appointment. The agency then sent him to one of the country’s largest banks, which was in their view a less optimal choice, but since the bank was at the first stop in Manhattan on the E and F trains, it was a building he would have no trouble finding.
He took the job as a collector of FHA second mortgages to get a foothold in Manhattan, planning to stay just six months until he found something more “suitable”, but one promotion led to another and before long Mr. Patrick found himself a manager in charge of recoveries of all charged-off loans for the Lower Manhattan region of the bank. Establishing a program of working with customers rather than treating them like deadbeats, his staff consistently outperformed all other regions of the bank. By the mid-1970s, computers had revolutionized the collection industry as it had other industries, and Mr. Patrick, along with a single programmer, created the first computerized recovery system. This led to his being recruited by a California bank in 1980, where he continued to take on more and more responsibilities until taking early retirement at the end of 2005.
Mr. Patrick’s banking career was distinguished by his legendary movements of people. Others would become rich and famous by writing books about managing by change in the 1990s, but Mr. Patrick had been doing exactly that for more than two decades by then. More than one manager over the years was afraid to go on vacation for fear of finding someone else in his place when he returned.
The bank first provided internet access in 1998. With his career now entailing almost-daily lengthy and boring conference calls, Mr. Patrick found he could ease the boredom by surfing the web while listening in and occasionally contributing to the business discussions at hand. Naturally, the first thing he searched for was movie sites, and more importantly, movie awards sites, where he came upon Oscar Guy and his Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board.
At first he would make comments using his own name, but when no one paid attention he decided he needed a moniker that would make them sit up and take notice. He thought of Big Kahuna, a name one of his employees had affectionately given him, but decided that was too pretentious. Instead he came up with Big Magilla, which meant absolutely nothing, but he thought the word “big” might command attention. Sure enough, he received immediate response to his first posting under his new nickname.
A member of the Online Film and Television Academy almost since its inception, and a member of the Executive Committee for almost as long, Mr. Patrick is at long last a member of an official awards association as well as the sole generator of the Patrician Awards also known as Oscar Shouldabeens.
Mr. Patrick is delighted to share his knowledge of films and film history in the weekly DVD Report.
