The 2008-2009 Rhodes Scholars have been announced, and Columbia's very own R. Jisung Park of Shelton Connecticut has made the list!

Per the winners' bios press release: "R. Jisung Park, Shelton, Connecticut, is a senior at Columbia where is a double major in economics and political science. Jisung has done research in tropical rainforest studies in Australia and has developed a cross-disciplinary course of study at Columbia in sustainable development. He serves on the editorial board of a journal on sustainable development, is an a capella bass singer, has taught English in Korea, and spent a year studying at Oxford. He will return to Oxford to do an M.Sc. in nature, society, and environmental policy."

Congratulations R. Jisung Park! We look forward to congratulating you once again when PBK is announced.

Last year two Columbians were awarded the scholarship: Jason Bello and George Olive. In terms of inter-Ivy competition, Princeton was the big winner this year, with three students represented. Harvard was runner-up with two, and Brown, Penn and Yale tied with Columbia. Hear that Yale? Tied.

Today, the MacArthur Foundation announced this year's recipients of its famed Genius Grants, and one winner is the Mailman School's own Wafaa El-Sadr.

El-Sadr is a clinical researcher, specializing in such noble pursuits as studying alternative treatments for patients who can't tolerate certain therapies and developing gels that inhibit HIV transmission. She is also chief of infectious diseases at the Harlem Hospital Center.

El-Sadr receives $500,000, no strings attached, meaning the money is not necessarily designated for any specific project. Oh, and bragging rights, she's won those too.

The Columbia website (and daily editor Pierce Stanley) informs us that History prof Samuel Moyn has won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his works on the Holocaust's impact on postwar France. Moyn then informed us, too, by changing his Facebook status to "Samuel Moyn is gloating." Fortunately, he's since wised up and changed it to "Samuel Moyn is no longer gloating." (He's also got one of the better Facebook professor profiles known to Bwog.)

Also winning Guggies are professors Margo Jefferson (Creative Writing), Sam Lipsyte (Creative Writing), Alexander Stille (Journalism), Jonathan Weiner (Journalism) and Peter Ozsváth (Math), with whom Bwog sat through a dismal Calc IV section Freshman year. Congrats nonetheless.

Hey, remember the Oscars? They happened last year? They might get cancelled? Sometimes women win them by pretending to be ugly, even if they aren't ugly, and sometimes if they are? Well, the nominations came out today (surprise! No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood led the tally) and Bwog awards show correspondent Daniel D'Addario puts on his best Mary Hart to tell you that there will indeed be blood - and Oscars! First up: the acting categories.

Best Actor
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

Will Win: While I'm glad that Oscar voters looked past the general hackiness of Paul Haggis's film to see Jones's great and dignified performance, this is Daniel Day-Lewis's to lose. His delivery of the line "I drink your milkshake!" alone would have earned him a SAG Award.

Should Win: I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!

Robbed: This category seems pretty solid - although I haven't seen, and will not likely see, Sweeney Todd, and think that George Clooney has gone from being an affable, good-looking guy to an awards-season threat that must be contained (fuddy-dud Michael Clayton for seven nominations - really?!). If I had to toss another nominee on the pile, I'd take out Clooney and nominate Emile Hirsch for his nature-obsessed, Thoreau-spouting man-child whose glaring immaturity provides Into the Wild with a welcome dose of moral ambiguity (seemingly against the director's will, making Hirsch's performance a masterful act of subversion). Or perhaps Javier Bardem, who was nominated for supporting but played the lead role as a superhuman killer in No Country for Old Men. Especially on the men's side, 2007 was nothing if not a year of obsessions.

Esteemed School of the Arts professor James Schamus received the Venice Film Festival top award, the Golden Lion, for Lust, Caution. The duo saw previous accolades with Brokeback Mountain, which also won the Golden Lion. Directed by Ang Lee and produced and co-written by Schamus, Lust, Caution piggybacks on Brokeback Mountain's sexual frankness, garnering the film a NC-17 rating.

It sees the U.S. release on September 28th, 2007, just two more weeks to go!

Yeah, we know they're still two weeks away, but Bwog likes to get things rolling early. Because there's not much else exciting about February, we bring you an abridged set of Oscar predictions from daily Bwog editor Dan D'Addario and contributor Ashley Nin--because no one cares who did the best sound mixing anyway (Dan's responses first, then Ashley's).

Best Picture

Will Win - "Babel." "The Departed", while well-executed (no pun intended), received fewer nominations and seems too "genre" to win. "Babel" seems far more "important" in the way that "Crash" was last year. The spoiler in the race is "Little Miss Sunshine," but as a light comedy, it has a tough row to hoe with the Academy.

"The Departed." It's got nine awards exclusively in the Best Picture Category (Letters has 6, Babel 1, Little Miss Sunshine 3, The Queen 3). Do the math.

Should win - "The Departed" shines in every aspect - ensemble acting, writing, directing. It only improves on repeated viewing, and the final ten minutes alone will stand up as one of the best closing scenes of the decade.

"The Departed". It really is very well done in all aspects: the ensemble cast is balanced, everyone bringing unique and impressive efforts; the cinematography is polished, the script is engaging.

A few items from here, there, and everywhere:

-Columbia's duPont Broadcast News Awards were announced January 13 and are being presented on campus today. Perhaps predictably, the most awards went to PBS, with NBC the only major network to win an award. What, no love for Katie?

-Columbia medical researchers, working with doctors from B.U. and the University of Toronto, have discovered a gene that has been connected to Alzheimer's. Congratulate the next med student you see getting a coffee in Strokos.

-And while Maggie Gyllenhall CC '98 was nominated for a Golden Globe (she lost Monday night to Helen Mirren), her brother Jake (a Columbia dropout) has starred in the latest Saturday Night Live video to make the rounds on the Internet. After seeing this, you might understand the rumor that he was rejected from the Varsity Show.