It’s Saturday morning. I wake up, feeling heavier than ever. I’ve been feeling like this for a while now. That heaviness has been stuck with me ever since I came back to the US. San Antonio is not my city, and America is not my land, either. But, today I’m forcing myself to do something a little bit different. I’m going on an Artist Date.

I arrive at the Pearl around 1 PM. It used to be a brewery here at San Antonio but closed years ago, then people decided to turn it into a culinary and cultural destination, with retail, dining, green spaces, and Farmer’s Market on the weekend. I’ve been here a billion times now, so honestly, I don’t even know what I’m expecting today. I go to Lick Honest Ice Cream, my all-time-favorite ice cream place in San Antonio, and get myself two scoops of Coffee and Cream ice cream, and take a walk to Pearl’s park, which is a greensward in the middle of the Pearl.
The weather is excellent today. It’s a little bit chilly, but still incredibly sunny outside, makes you want to lay down and close your eyes in the sun for hours. I get to the park, sit down on the grass, put on my headphones and begin eating my icecream. The Farmer’s Market closes at 1 PM, so everybody is packing up to go home. They all look very happy and satisfied, both the sellers and the buyers. Everybody seems to be having a great weekend. Everybody but me, who’s sitting here, in the least stressful place on earth, looking at the little kid holding a giant watermelon, eating ice cream in such perfect weather, yet I’m still so…sad. I’m still missing something that I can’t put a name on it. I put the ice cream down, lay down to look at the sky. It’s so sunny, yet the sky is still so blue. I look at the clouds, try to imagine what shape they are, but give up after just a few minutes. I feel stupid. This isn’t me. I’m not the type of girl who lays on the grass, looks up at the sky and dreams. I’m the realistic type, is all I can say.
So, there I am, laying on the grass, looking at the sky, and not knowing what to do next. Suddenly, my phone shuffles to one of my favorite songs of all time, “Dream” by Priscilla Ahn. I close my eyes to listen to the song, let the sun warms me up. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I find tear-drops slowly rolling down my cheeks. I’m crying.
I’m terrified. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. All I can feel are waves of sadness that keep hitting me, making it impossible to stop crying. So I let it be. I lay there, with my eyes closed, cry for almost an hour. I don’t care about who’s looking at me and probably think that I’m crazy. I’m tired of pretending like I’m fine when I’m not. I just let it all out. When I’m too tired to cry anymore, or my tears are all dried out, I sit up, take out my journal and write this all down.
I basically didn’t do anything on this Artist Date. I just lay there, look at the sky and then cry for an hour. Yet, after that, I feel so relieved and the first time in forever, I start feeling like myself again.

In the Filmmaker Magazine, 3 out of 8 featured posts are analyzing the movie “Parasite” and Director Bong Joon-ho spectacular wins at the Oscar last night when he brought home 4 Oscars for his movie. There’s no doubt that Parasite is one of the biggest topics in the film community right now.

The first featured post is about the 8 minutes meal that appears in the mid-point of the movie. The dish is prepared in just under 8 minutes before the wealthy Parks decide to cancel their camping trip and go home, and call in order to the housekeeper to prepare the meal. The dish – ram-don – itself is liked by both the rich and the poor, so it can be seen as something intertwine the two worlds. But the rich wife couldn’t stand the fact that her son is eating cheap noodles, so she decided to add stir-loins as toppings. Since its inception, the recipe for ram-don has been everywhere.

Another article, also from the Filmmaker Magazine, They Came From Within: Bong Joon-ho on Parasite features an interview with Parasite’s director Bong Joon-ho himself. In the interview, Bong Joon-ho talks about his obsession with food and how important lunch and snack times with him on set, as well as how comfortable he is working on a medium-budget movie again after working on 2 heavy CGI, high-budget movies. He also talks about his excitement when working with natural light instead of an artificial one, and also mentions some of his projects in the future.

Variety also covers a lot that happened at the Oscar 2020, especially, once again, the movie Parasite. The article Bong Joon Ho’s Post-Oscar Win Plans: ‘I Will Drink Until Tomorrow at Noon’ talks about how Bong Joon-ho should have every reason to celebrate for making history, when his movie Parasite becomes the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for best picture. Besides that, Bong Joon-ho also brought home the Oscars for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. He told Variety’s Marc Malkin that “I will drink until tomorrow at noon” and thought he was done after winning international feature, and also talked about a Parasite spin-off with HBO.

A lot of the recent articles are covering the Academy Awards. The Hollywood Reporter wrote an article about TV Ratings: Oscars Fall to All-Time Lows, talking about how the ABC’s broadcast’s viewers drop about 3 million compared to the previous low in 2018. The article mentions the decline in ratings of the Academy Awards. This year, the kudocast averaged about 23.6 million viewers, way lower than the 29.56 million viewers of the 2019’s award ceremony. However, the good news is, the Oscar did maintain to be the most-watched awards after all.

Another article from Variety discusses the reason Why ‘Birds of Prey’ Whiffed at the Box Office. After the continuous successes coming from “Wonder Woman”, “Aquaman” and “Joker, Warner Bros. has been on a hot streak and are wishing to continue with Birds of Prey. But despite all the expectations, the movie debuted to $33 million in North America. It was still enough to place first on domestic box offices chart, but rather a disappointment for Warner Bros. The article points out some of the mistakes Warner Bros. made in Birds of Prey, including not focusing on Harley Quinn, being a “niche comic-book movie”, and its R-rating meant the film wasn’t going to open in China in the first place.

So as we can see, the clear 3 hot topics in the industry right now are Bong Joon-ho and his movie Parasite, The Academy Award, and the failure of Warner Bro., Birds of Prey.