Wesley Lovell
I was born, raised and still live in Springfield, MO. Movies were seldom more than a passing interest to me until 1989. I hadn’t ever heard of the Academy Awards and when my favorite movie of the year, Driving Miss Daisy, was selected Best Picture, I was delighted and entranced. I was 14.
I graduated college in the autumn of 1999 with a Bachelors degree in Communications/Mass Media with an emphasis in Film Studies. It wasn’t a prestigious university, but it gave me the foundation I needed to further develop the website I started in 1996. I launched my own website discussing my passion: the Academy Awards. Using the free site GeoCities, I found a place in their Hollywood district and founded The Oscar Guy in 1996. In its early incarnations, it was a simple affair with very minimal content. Most of that content surrounded my Oscar predictions and other aspects of the Academy Awards. Over the years, my site grew and after I registered the cinemasight.com domain, a name I had taken early on to describe my interest, my ode to the Oscars was sufficiently in place.
In 1997 or 1998, I formed a message board. The Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board, which was originally housed on the now-defunct Inside the Web, became a hot bed of Oscar discussions and I met many people, including Peter and Tripp, whom I would be a lesser person had I not met.
Also in 1996, a banner year for me, I formed two organizations. The Online Academies (Online Motion Picture Academy, Online Television Academy, and Online Music Academy) and the Internet Film Critics Association. The IFCA faltered within the year, thanks mostly to my admittance into the Online Film Critics Society. The Online Academies, however, have been giving out awards for over a decade now. The group’s name was changed to The Online Film & Television Association and continues to thrive to this day.
I joined the OFCS in its inaugural year and have served on the Governing Committee for twelve of the last 18 years. To this day, I’m as proud of that organization as I am of any other accomplishment. I feel as if I’ve grown and matured as a critic thanks to and along with the group.
However, as a meager internet-based film critic, I don’t make money off the site or films I see. I still watch and review because that’s my passion. I would never trade it for all the world. I worked five years in telecommunications (customer service) and have spent the last 16 years working as an insurance underwriting assistance. That’s how I stay afloat while maintaining my websites.
The Oscar Guy site has been my baby for many years and though I’ve gone through many adjustments, changes, and redesigns over the years, I will never forget why I started it. I love the Academy Awards (even when they make poor decisions). I love movies. It’s that adoration that has kept me motivated when I could have given up on everything. I also thank all those message board posters for keeping me grounded in reality. These have been an excellent 27-plus years of my life and I hope to make it last for many more years to come.
Facebook: OscarGuy
Twitter: OscarGuy
Member of the Online Film Critics Society
Member of GALECA
Peter J. Patrick
Born September 16, 1943 in the Bronx, New York, Pete was the eldest of nine children. Accompanied by his maternal grandmother, he saw his first movie, the aptly titled “Welcome Stranger,” in a theatre in 1947, several years before the family had a TV. He became an instant film buff and has remained one ever since.
Pete’s first job was delivering newspapers for Long Island’s Newsday at the age of 13. One of his customers was the manager of Century’s Bellerose Theatre where he would get to pause and take in a scene or two of a film to gauge whether it would be worth seeing in its entirety. At 16, he went to work at Century’s 3,000-seat Queens Theatre where he worked as an usher after school. He later worked at the concession stand and became the concession stand manager while still in high school.
While attending college at night, Pete worked as a film editor at an educational film company before being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1965. Assigned to a major supply company in Darmstadt, Germany for 16 months, Pete went from a job as security clerk to Operations Manager and Training NCO. He quickly learned that the best way to teach a class was to show training films in the local theatre, a few steps from his second-floor office in what once had been a Nazi barracks.
After his discharge from the service, Pete began a 40-year banking career with Citibank in Manhattan, where for four of his years with the company he had an office in the theatre district where he got to meet numerous film, TV, and theatre stars. After working for Citibank for 14 years where with the help of a programmer he developed the first ever recovery collection system, he was recruited by Wells Fargo and moved to California where he continued his banking career until he retired at the end of 2005.
At the time of his retirement, Pete was a Division Manager with offices in California and Idaho. As a member of the bank’s due diligence team, he travelled extensively throughout the country meeting with the management teams of potential acquisitions for the bank.
Returning to the east coast in 2011, Pete now lives on the Jersey shore where he currently chairs the Publicity and Rules and Regulations committees of his homeowners association. He has been editor of his association’s monthly newsletter since 2015, and the administrator of its website since 2016.
Pete has been a member of and contributor to the UAADB since 1998 and CinemaSight since its inception. He has been writing weekly home video reviews for the site since 2008 and weekly Oscar profiles since 2010. He has had his own film awards called the Patrician Awards, a play on his last name, since 1960. They are called Oscar Shouldabeens on the UAADB. He has been a member of the Online Film and Television Academy almost since its inception, and a member of the Executive Committee for almost as long.
Tripp Burton
TBD
Thomas La Tourrette
TBD
