Huge thanks to filmgeek of Final Cut, for nominating me for something called the Kreativ Blogger award. I must admit to my shame that I’ve never read her work before, but having taken a spin ’round in the last day, I am damned impressed, and quite grateful that she singled me out for this honor.

[Added: Thanks as well to Jake of Not Just Movies, another pretty swell blog I’m just now discovering (awesome Sunrise review), who has flattered and embarrassed the hell out of me with his effusive praise; two nominations! I shall get a big head].

But I must decline.

See, one of the rules is that you have to pick seven other bloggers to pass on the award to, and after spending more than a day trying to do just that, I have to confess myself stumped: how does one pick just seven blogs out of the dozens I read, and not feel like I’m doing a horrid disservice to the rest of them? I’ve never been good at getting over that feeling. It’s why I don’t tend to do memes.

Instead, let me just turn your head over to that thar blogroll on the righthand side: newly polished up, with a few additions, a couple dead sites taken off, and say with some urgency that all of those writers are very good at what they do. So if you’re one of those folks who comes to read my shit and skip out (and I know that’s most of you – I have the exit click stats), can I just please ask that you might spend some time perusing those sites? At the risk of sounding cloying and family sitcom-esque, they are all Kreativ bloggers in my book, and some of them are much, much more famous than I am, and do not need my boosting; some of them are quite unaccountably obscure. But not one of them is going to be a waste of your time. So hop to it.

There is one element of the awards acceptance that I hope you’ll indulge me in even if I’m pussying out on the much, much harder part. Name seven facts about myself that I think people will find interesting:

1. I desperately wish that we all still had to wear formal eveningwear every time we went out.
2. I still think of filmblogging as the thing I’m doing until I get to be a proper filmmaker.
3. Movies aren’t my favorite art form, or even my favorite dramatic medium. Opera is.
4. I have studied German, Norwegian, Latin, French and Spanish. I speak none of them fluently.
5. My cat is named after a Welsh goddess.
6. The DVD I most regret buying is Ransom.
7. Though I cannot stand them, the mixed drink I make the best is a Cosmopolitan.

Dead serious, though: read your way through that blogroll. You’ll be happy with what you find there.