At this point in our lives, I think we have all given up on the notion of truth in advertising.

We gladly accept beer commercials that promise beautiful women to an overly chummy group of young men who choose a particular brew. We’re OK with seemingly healthy people talking about how a drug helps them cope with a debilitating disease. We can deal with chain restaurants hawking an “authentic” experience.

But a new set of ads has come along which pretty much demands we stand up as a nation and swat the executives in charge on the nose with a rolled up newspaper.

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So a bunch of people I know are going crazy because the Oscar nominations came out today. That only means one thing – horribly overwrought examination of what people wear to an awards show is just around the corner!

OK, it means two things, that first thing and that The Brians will be coming up soon. If you don’t know, The Brians are my yearly awards for movies which I saw in the theater in the previous year. This year, I believe 12 movies will be eligible. I say “I believe” because I only looked at what I posted about online and already notice that I somehow never blogged about seeing The Muppets. That means I need to go check my ticket stubs to make sure I didn’t leave anything out.

Anyways, the qualifying movies for The 2012 Brians are:

• We Bought a Zoo
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
• Happy Feet 2
• Moneyball
• Horrible Bosses
• Kung Fu Panda 2
• Bad Teacher
• Bridesmaids
• The Muppets
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules
• The King’s Speech
• Gulliver’s Travels

The Brians will be announced on Feb. 28 in my weekly column in The Evening Sun. Secondary awards will appear online later that week.

Before I get to my thoughts on this book which took me far too long to add to my reading stack, I want to talk about how awesome it is to get books for Christmas. I walked away with six things to read. That should, unfortunately, hold me through Easter at least. I wish I could read faster because I bought one interesting book after Christmas and have found a couple of more since.

One of the best parts of my Christmas bounty belies my support of local businesses, but is still really cool. My wife got me three books for my Kindle, but took advantage of the program which allows someone to purchase them as a gift and not show on on the device until Christmas Day. She gave me a note telling me about this, I went to my e-mail and clicked a button to download each book. Very cool.

I do wish it were a little more seamless – yeah, this is me complaining about the magic of books appearing on a wireless electronic device – so they just appeared the next time I turned on my wireless, but it’s not a big deal. I still try to support local bookstores and libraries when I can, but this experience was pretty fun.

One of those Kindle books was Moneyball, something I had talked about reading a bunch of times, but never got around to it. I had hoped to read it at the beach last summer, but the library didn’t have any copies available for the week I traveled. My nephew brought his copy, but I was already buried in my stack of books and didn’t pick up Michael Lewis’ book .

When I saw the movie recently, I knew I needed to change this. Luckily, my wife pays attention to me when I talk about things like this. When I tried to choose which book I would tackle first, I knew I had to knock this off my list once and for all. What a great decision.

I really get into the analytic aspect of sports. This comes from hours upon hours of playing Strat-o-Matic sports and trying to figure things out. While I generally loathe sports talk, I do enjoy the bits I can find where the announcers really examine what happens on the field instead of just yelling.

So I can relate to the quest Billy Beane and Paul Depodesta went on to find a better way of evaluating players. As someone who has, during my days as a reporter, suffered the glare of pro athletes because they think you’re not worthy to ask them certain questions, I can understand the motivation “outsiders” have when they want to prove the establishment wrong. As someone who watched the way Earl Weaver managed growing up, I wondered why more people didn’t choose their own path.

The book did a great job getting into the details of how and why the whole “moneyball” approach came about and actually worked. It also showed how dangerous emotion can be in athletic decisions, something we have known forever but don’t heed often enough.  This sounds silly now, but it’s easy to see why this book had such a huge impact. Not only did it cut to the heart of many of baseball’s problems, but Lewis wrote it in such an engaging and readable style that people had to pay attention.

Unless you’re an idiot like Joe Morgan or stubborn fool like Peter Angelos.

The Oakland A’s may have not won a World Series in the early days of Beane’s strategy, but his outlook undeniably changed baseball. His critics point to Oakland’s declining success since the early 2000s, but a lot of that is because other teams have caught on and the market correction made it harder for the A’s to get the bargains they wanted.

Just take a look at the way Beane analyzed the 2002 amateur draft, a topic the book covers in great detail (and was understandably lost in the movie version). Maybe he just got lucky, but his perfect 20 and resulting picks have an amazing success rate. Jeremy Brown, the primary poster child for the strategy, may not have made an impact at the major league level, but he did continue to get on base at a pretty solid rate in the minors. He just didn’t seem to adjust as the pitching got better, but the things Beane and Depodesta saw in the big guy certainly did play out.

Billy Beane never professed to get everything right. He just said that other people who said they got things right may not see the whole picture. Since most people have started to adopt his approach in some way or another, their criticisms of how he did it don’t carry much weight with me. I just hope the next time someone writes a groundbreaking book about how someone has changed an entire sport, I don’t wait eight years to get in on the action.

As parents, we do things for our children that might go against every instinct we have. That’s pretty much the feeling I had last month when I walked into our local movie theatre with my daughter and purchased two tickets to see We Bought a Zoo.

We had a free day, and we always like to go to the movies together. I figured I would survive the Matt Damon effort in my final movie-going experience of 2011. Besides, I would have movie popcorn to cheer me up.

A couple of hours later, I apologized silently to everyone involved with the movie for ever doubting them. I thought I bought a ticket for a goofy kids romp when I really paid to see a pretty emotional story of loss, regret and ambition with a solid cast and surprisingly strong story.

I had no idea of the background of the true story which inspired the film, but found myself pleasantly surprised when I discovered they made the overall story darker than the tale of the English man who bought a zoo with his mother and brother. Damon did an outstanding job in carrying the emotional weight of the movie-version of Benjamin Mee. The presence of his small daughter wasn’t just for laughs. She did a great job in counter-balancing her sullen and angry teenage brother.

Oh, and she brought down the house when she called John Michael Higgins’ character “a dick.” She didn’t actually call him that, but she did use the word in correct context and proved to parents and grandparents in the theatre that they should have read up about the film a little bit more before they brought a 5-year-old to see the animals. Those kids learned a bunch of new words that day.

I commend Cameron Crowe, who has producer, writer and director credits on this one, for not beating us over the head with a forced love story between Damon and Scarlett Johannson. It’s there, but exists around the edge of the film.  They could have left it out altogether since it occupies such little space, but a little is better than a lot.

I don’t think the movie will win any wards, either in real life or at The Brians, but it delivered a much better experience than I expected and should probably vault higher on people’s list of things to see if they missed it.

I finally broke down and bought the (supposed) final album from R.E.M. I say supposed because Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982–2011 may be the last project the band works on together in the studio, but I really doubt the business entity that is R.E.M. will never release anything ever again.

I’ve blogged before about Peter Buck’s fascination with bootlegs and demo tapes – a passion not shared by Michael Stipe – and think nostalgia and money will eventually coax some more live shows or hidden studio offerings out into the marketplace. At least I hope so.

But just in case they never commit anything to vinyl or CD or MP3 again, I bought Part Lies recently. To be honest, I had gone to Amazon to buy something else and really wanted to get free shipping so I added the CD somewhat reluctantly. I will probably reference the liner notes more than I play the discs. Each song has some explanation from the band with each member weighing in on whichever songs they felt like.

Some of the stories shed no new light, but others gave those nuggets of minutiae that I love. This piece from Time checks in on each song and shows why the liner notes rock as the reviewer tracks immodest statements from Stipe within the notes. Not only that, but he does pull the curtain back on a few song inspirations/meanings. I had no idea they really considered not putting “Radio Free Europe” on Murmur. Since the song had helped catapult them to success as a single, they didn’t know if they wanted to release it again. But they did and the differences between the original (fast) version and the one most people have heard from the album indicate, to me at least, the ability the quartet had even in their earliest days.

I also enjoyed the nuggets, mostly from Buck, about who wrote what song. The quick and easy description of how he and Bill Berry put together “Driver 8″ makes me like the great song even more somehow.

On the downside, they threw three new songs on the end of the album. I have heard (and was unimpressed by) “We All Go Back Where We Belong” when it was first released and doubt I will intentionally hear it again. I haven’t heard the other two songs and feel no compulsion to ever do so. I’d rather hear yet another live version of “Rockville” or “Gardening at Night” so I hope Buck is getting antsy about breaking open the vault.

So I haven’t blogged for a while. Three weeks, pretty much. I have no real excuse. I have thought about writing things, but have been busy at work, focused on another writing project and not really motivated at home.

Never fear – or I’m sorry for the people who come here because they don’t like what I write – I plan on getting back in the swing of things this week. I have a couple of columns to post that have run in the paper. I have a book and a movie to review, plus the usual inanity.

So get ready for some fun here.

When you find something that works, stick with that. That philosophy doesn’t always work with entertainment because the same old thing can get old quickly. But in the instance of the second installment of the Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law Sherlock Holmes mysteries, the old adage has rung true.

We went to see Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows the other night and came away thoroughly entertained just like we did after the first movie starring the pair. I love walking out of a theater knowing I just had some good old-fashioned fun.

That’s what this franchise represents to me. There are twists and turns and fancy scenery, but Downey instills a particular brand of fun into Holmes. Law’s Watson reluctantly joins the fray as we all go along for an entertaining ride.

This time, the ride takes us across Europe as Holmes tries to bring down Professor Moriarity (played by Jared Harris who plays Lane Pryce on Mad Men, a fact which drove me nuts until I finally figured it out). The tale of intrigue involves gypsies, arms factories and creepy Swiss castles. I loved every minute of it.

Some might find Guy Ritchie’s direction annoying and roll their eyes at the way he has Holmes break down his physical battles, but I love that stuff against my better judgment. I’m totally hooked on this version of Sherlock Holmes.

Which is a good thing since they have already started writing the next movie in the series.

Parents can often feel pride about the accomplishments of their children. Maybe they bring home a perfect report card or score the winning goal or have an excellent performance on stage.

But sometimes they make us beam for other reasons. Sometimes your child takes great pleasure in pointing out when people use unnecessary quotes.

As my daughter approaches her teenage years (way too fast for my liking, but that’s another story), she has started to develop the kind of observation-based sense of humor I love.

One day she was talking about her day and told us about a sign she saw somewhere. When she told us about it, she used air quotes when she said one word. I had to stop and question her for a second.

Once I received her answers, I realized I had the double whammy of sarcastic Daddy pride. She understood that the quotes were completely unnecessary and showed us via air quotes with a small eye roll thrown in for good measure.

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Even though I embrace change, I sometimes worry about unnecessarily upsetting my routine.

In order to make things run smoothly around the house, I have adopted a fairly regular morning ritual. I need to leave the house by a specific time in order to avoid certain hassles on my commute.

This means I have planned out the proper wakeup time and do as many things as possible the night before. If I have to load my iPod or make my lunch in the morning, I run the risk of throwing everything else off kilter.

But I have one change which could make or break everything. I could significantly improve my morning experience or make my ride to work intolerable.

I think I need a new travel mug.

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