Losses at Oscars

Bradley Cooper did not win an Oscar.

Even, this year. Though he’s had four Academy Award nominations so far.

But let us forget Bradley Cooper’s bad luck. What about Kevin O’Connell’s?

What? You don’t know him?

Well, this poor bloke is the "unluckiest nominee in the history of Academy Awards".

Despite 20 Oscar nominations, for sound-mixing, Kevin O’Connell never won a single Oscar.

Just imagine his expectations as he goes on to that red carpet, year after year. Imagine his heartbeats increasing when they announce the nominees for best sound mixing. And then imagine how he feels when they say, “And the Oscar goes to….” and announce one of his contenders’ names.

Yes. Imagine your work getting snubbed by the jury, twenty times, even though you worked on some of the best films ever, including those that went on to win ‘Best Picture’ Oscars.

Just look at his nominations. Terms of Endearment (1983), Top Gun (1986) A Few Good Men (1992),  Twister (1996), The Rock (1996), Con Air (1997), The Mask of Zorro (1998), Armageddon (1998), Pearl Harbor (2001),  Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Apocalypto (2006), and Transformers (2007). Phew!

The Academy Awards jury had always attracted criticism. It always had a reputation for leaving out not only some great technical people, but also some great actors and films.

Richard Burton, for instance, went to his grave without ever getting to hold that little statuette on stage.

In fact, his much-acclaimed, career-best performance  in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" was completely overlooked by the jury. But two of his co-stars in the same film, Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis won the Best Actress and the Best Supporting Actress awards respectively.

Burton actually received seven nominations for the Best Actor award. And never won.

Nor did Leonardo DiCaprio. Or Liam Neeson, Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis or Ian McKellen.

Now, take movies. When we put great ones against one another for the ‘Best Picture’ award, heartaches are imminent. Some win. Some lose.

'Citizen Kane' lost to 'How Green Was My Valley'. 'A Streetcar Named Desire' lost to 'An American in Paris'. ‘E.T.’ lost to ‘Gandhi’. "Midnight in Paris" lost to “The Artist”. An "Avatar" lost to "The Hurt Locker."  

Obviously, what people see and what the jury sees in the movies seem to be completely different.

James Cameron's "Avatar," is the highest-grossing film of all time, grossing over 2.8 billion dollars. But it had lost to "The Hurt Locker," which grossed only $49 million worldwide. Is that good judgement?

Even this year’s winner, “Birdman”, made only about $37 million in US ticket sales, but its competitor ‘American Sniper’ grossed a whopping $300 million in US ticket sales. Is that good judgement?

We don't know. The jury, we assume, considers a host of complex film production activities, in a much broader way that how you and I do.

The fact remains, therefore, that the Oscar awards will always make some people happy and some people very unhappy. But getting nominated will make everyone happy, according to Kevin O'Connell. 

Here is what he said when he received his twentieth Academy Award nomination - in 2007 for his work on “Transformers”: "If you could bottle up the way that I felt this morning when I found out I was nominated, people wouldn't buy drugs anymore because this is just the best thing on the planet."

Migrant Misery on the Mediterranean

Just last year, in 2014, about 3,500 people died attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea, from North Africa to Europe. Shipwrecked.

When you cram small boats that are barely sea-worthy, with hundreds of migrants who have sold their everything for an illegal one-way ticket to Europe, what else can you get?

If the number of deaths is not shocking, listen to this other big number.

A staggering 200,000 people were rescued from here in 2014 alone, by various coastguard agencies, according to UN refugee agency UNHCR.

These huge fleeing masses are from North African countries, leaving their homes and families, and risking their belongings and lives, for a faint glimmer of hope; that Europe will give them a better life.

Driven by abject poverty and political turbulence, most of these hapless hopefuls are converging onto the coast of Libya.

It is easier to go to Italy and the rest of Europe from here, they say. After all, they know, there is virtually no real, united, government control in Libya since Gaddafi’s death.

The mafia of people traffickers with a few boats and dinghies are profiting from the desperation of the migrants who firmly believe jobs and money are aplenty on the European side.

On Sunday, 15 February,  Italian coast guard rescued about 2,000 migrants between the Libyan coast and the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The gravity of the mafia menace can be understood from the fact that the Italian coastguard was actually threatened by Kalashnikov-wielding men - when the coastguard attempted to rescue people from those dilapidated dinghies in rough sea.

Two days earlier too, on Friday 13 February too, 600 migrants, on board just six small dinghies, were rescued by the Italian coastguard. And kept in detention centres.

Right now, as you read this, the migrant reception centre on the  tiny island of Lampedusa - where many migrants were taken - is reaching desperate limits.

Over 1,000 men, women and children are said to be housed at the place made for barely 200 people!

What should Italy and Europe do now?

Should these thousands of rescued Africans, now in fenced migrant detention centres in different places, be taken back to their home countries?

Or like some European countries are helping EU asylum seekers, should they be given asylum?

So, even as EU confronts its own political and financial turbulences, it now has this added issue of rescued illegal migrants and asylum seekers. 

EU had set-up long ago, a border agency Frontex that now coordinates a small multinational fleet that patrols the Mediterranean, regularly intercepting and rescuing thousands of refugees who try to smuggle themselves by hiding in ship’s holds.

I found a report by BBC’s Emma Jane Kirby, who was on an Icelandic coastguard vessel in the Mediterranean, as a part of a Frontex mission, very interesting.

She quotes what the coastguard vessel crew member Andri Johnson, said to her after one of his rescue missions.

 "When I boarded the ship and saw the dirt, the lack of hygiene and the women and children so dehydrated who'd had no food and water for days... it was just so terrible and so moving. You know I have such a good life and to see those people struggling..."

"These people need our help," is what he said to her.

Help from the international community either by enabling local African governments to become economically self-reliant or by making European countries' public policies to accept migrants in a phased manner, is possible.

But it is easier said than done.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to Sustainability

The Dreamliner, or Boeing 787, uses 20 percent less fuel per mile than Boeing 767.

Airbus A350 produces 90 percent less noise than what a similar plane would have done 50 years ago; it is even below the noise standards prescribed by International Civil Aviation Organization.

Thanks to improved aerodynamics and the use of lightweight composite materials, planes are becoming more fuel efficient. And thanks to newer noise-reduction technologies in engines, noise-pollution is declining.

However, on the flip side, air traffic worldwide is increasing so rapidly that global carbon dioxide emissions from aviation, which now represent just 2 to 3 percent of all CO2 pollution, could jump as high as 500 percent by 2050, according to some forecasts. And that is alarming.

From a global population of just 3 billion in 1960, to a projected 9 billion by 2050, it will be a three-fold rise in the number of human beings.In only one generation! And that is alarming.

What are the nations doing about it? Are the world’s resources enough? What about Food Security? Waste Management? Environmental Equilibrium? And, are these the only challenges ahead?

These were among the many topics I got to hear about at the 2nd Bahrain International Corporate Social Responsibility Conference held this week.

Not just in the aviation industry I mentioned earlier, but in a whole range of industries including oil, construction, petrochemicals, automobile and electronics,  the key focus of governments, businesses and individuals must now be on ‘sustainable development.’ That was the key-message from all speakers.

The famous Brundtland Report defines "Sustainable Development” as the “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

In the past, organizations took pride in their contributions to society through some financial donations, and some passive involvement in medical, educational, entertainment and sporting activities. They called it their corporate social responsibility. But now, they must focus on wider environment concerns, by strategizing all their operations with the aim of long-term sustainability.

One of the serious concerns affecting sustainability is the rapid growth of Electronic Waste.

My colleague and I presented a paper at this conference titled ‘Consumer Behaviour in E-Waste Disposal - A Case for Setting up an E-Waste Collection and Recycling Facility in Bahrain.

We presented our findings from a survey of 200 households in Bahrain, and showed how Electronic waste is accumulating in our homes, with no proper disposal systems available. 

And we recommended the setting up of an e-waste collection center that can collect and recycle part of the waste; and send a part of it outside Bahrain to e-waste treatment facilities.

Of course, it must be shipped in accordance with the UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) Basel Convention guidelines given for transboundary movements of e-waste.

I found it interesting to note that annual reports of organizations must now, not only include CSR or sustainability work, but they must follow ‘sustainability reporting’ guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

Also, GRI’s G4 guidelines – the latest – require most organizations to make up-to-date disclosures on governance, ethics and integrity, supply chain, anti-corruption and green house gas emissions.

In keeping with the global shift in perspectives, I felt that the organizers should have called it a conference on ‘Sustainability’ instead of on ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’. Somehow, CSR sounds very old now.

Air Travel - How Safe is it?

You are nineteen times less likely to die in a plane crash, than in a car accident.

That is what I read.

However, with the spate of air crashes we have seen in the recent past – including the TransAsia flight that crashed in Taipei, Taiwan on Wednesday – I found it hard to believe.

The number of commercial air-crashes, you will agree, have clearly increased.

And common sense, if not statistical probability, tells us that chances of air-crashes are directly proportional to the increase in the number of flights. Right?

Wrong. In 2013, the number of people killed in flight accidents worldwide was 265 - the safest year in aviation since 1945.

That figure is from a CNN article very aptly titled, “Is 2014 the deadliest year for flights? Not even close.” (You can see interesting graphs at this link)

It is just over 100 years since the Wright brothers invented the aircraft, but already crisscrossing the globe, at any given moment, are a few thousands of commercial aircraft.

Yes. You can check out the global air traffic – live – at flightradar24.com.

Commercial air travel has increased in ways unthought-of, by aviation pioneers. The numbers of airlines and airplanes, airports and passengers have had such an astounding growth that it would put the word ‘exponential’ to embarrassment.

But maybe it is an advantage. An article in Travel and Leisure (March 2014), titled “Why Airplanes Are Safe” says this: “In the past 50 years, the world’s commercial airliners have racked up nearly one billion flight hours, providing an industry meticulous about recordkeeping with a steady stream of information that is used to constantly improve the design of airplanes and engines”.

“We’re getting better,” says Bill Bozin, vice president of safety at Airbus Americas in the article, explaining that all this information gives engineers a truer understanding of the machine’s limits.

Also agreeing with them is a website called anxieties.com. It says, "No other form of transportation is as scrutinized, investigated and monitored as commercial aviation".

One Dr. Arnold Barnett, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done extensive research in the field of commercial flight safety. He found that over the fifteen years between 1975 and 1994, the death risk per flight was 'one in seven million'.

This statistic is the probability that someone who randomly selected one of the airline's flights over the 19-year study period would be killed in route. He says, "That means that any time you board a flight on a major carrier in this country (USA), your chance of being in a fatal accident is one in seven million. It doesn't matter whether you fly once every three years or every day of the year".

"In fact, based on this incredible safety record, if you did fly every day of your life, probability indicates that it would take you nineteen thousand years before you would succumb to a fatal accident”. Nineteen thousand years!

Dr. Barnett of MIT also compared the chance of dying from an airline accident versus a driving accident, after accounting for the greater number of people who drive each day. He found that you are nineteen times safer in a plane than in a car.

In USA which has the world’s highest number of flights at any given time, the chance of a person dying from a cardiovascular disease is 50%. But the chance of dying from an air crash is a one-hundred-thousandth of one percent (.000014%)!

So, ladies and gentleman, Next time we fly, even if we are afraid, let us thank God for statistics, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight.


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