We received a lot of great entry essays to our Climate Ride contest and from among them have chosen one first place winner, two second place winners and two third prize winners who will ride with Greg Laemmle from San Francisco through wine country to Sacramento this May to raise awareness about climate change and money to help combat it. In conjunction with the tree planting movement, this has helped raise so much awareness for the problems regarding climate change and helped convinced many more people that we need to act now to save our planet! I’m thrilled with the turn out for the Climate Ride and feel honoured to inform you of the winners. Here’s who won and their fabulous prizes!

Grand Prize, an Unlimited Laemmle Movie Pass for the rest of 2014, Free Registration for
Climate Ride, and a $2500 contribution toward their Climate Ride
fundraising goal, goes to David Rindlaub.

Second Prize, an Unlimited Laemmle Movie Pass for the rest of 2014, Free Registration for
Climate Ride, and a $1250 contribution toward their Climate Ride
fundraising goal, goes to Eddie Beres and Dalila Mendez.

Third Prize, an Unlimited Laemmle Movie Pass for the rest of 2014 plus Free Registration for Climate Ride, goes to Aaron Ratliff and Alan Bair.

Congratulations to all five of them! Please consider supporting their efforts because they have a long way to go before reaching their fund-raising goals. Click on the above links to learn how and why they have made such a big commitment to raise money for climate change-related causes.

Well, the 2014 Oscars are in the books and though the results were predictable the show was entertaining — I, personally, think it was a good idea to include full performances of all the nominated songs — and the winners deserving.

And the passes go to:

First place: Alex A. of Hollywood, who gets 20 passes;

Second place: Andre C. of Los Angeles, who gets 16 passes;

Third place: Kenneth O. of West Hollywood, who gets 12 passes.

Congratulations, guys, and happy moviegoing!

This year we had double the usual number  of entries. No one guessed all 24 categories correctly but four missed only one category: one missed the Best Documentary Feature category and picked “The Act of Killing” instead of “20 Feet to Stardom.” The other three missed Best Animated Short and chose “Get a Horse!” instead of winner “Mr. Hublot.” The shorts categories are tricky!

Since there were four first place ties, the tie-breaking question decided the ultimate winner. The winner guessed 210 minutes — only four minutes off the actual Oscar Telecast running time!

There were only two major troublesome categories for patrons this year. Best Original Score winner Steven Price (“Gravity”) only received 30% of the vote while the other nominees equally split the rest. Best Animated Short was the other. Winner “Mr. Hublot” received only 20% of the vote. “Get a Horse!” was the favorite chosen by our patrons. The average number of correct answers was 13.  Thanks to all who played.

Laemmle Theatres will bestow fabulous prizes (movie passes) upon the people who most accurately predict the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s choices in all 24 categories, from the shorts to the Big Kahuna, Best Motion Picture. (Why INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is not the tenth nominee in the latter category, we do not know.) We’ve got some smart cookies for customers so we have a tie-breaker question: you also have to guess the show’s running time. Take a crack at it! FABULOUS PRIZES (movie passes) to the those who can best predict the winners. First place wins ten pairs of passes, second place wins eight pairs and third place wins six pairs. Good luck!