Learning the magic of movies

With Oscar season coming up and hot debate over the relative cinematic merits of films like "Juno" and "There Will Be Blood," I wonder what the members of the Academy, the voters who determine the names called on Oscar night, experience watching all of these movies and evaluating them. Do they still feel that sense of wonder that they had when they first stepped inside of a movie theater and saw someone else's imagination come alive on the screen? Do they even remember what that was like?

I do. Of course, I haven't seen nearly as many movies as Academy members have, but I remember every part of my first day as a moviegoer.

It was the end of the sweltering Miami summer of 1995. That summer, there had been a program in the city encouraging elementary school students to read by offering them prizes. Depending on how many books you read that summer, you could win free ice cream, ice skates or movie tickets. The grand prize for the student who read the most that summer was tickets to a Miami Dolphins game.

My family had only been in America for a few years then. We came to Florida from Trinidad, a little island off the coast of Venezuela shaped like a boot. During our first few years in the United States, we had been hit by the second-worst hurricane to ever land in America, and shortly before that, my little brother had been born. There was no time to do things like go to the movies. That's what television was for.

So, I seized this opportunity to pay for myself. I spent three months that summer reading over a hundred books instead of playing outside or going to the beach. I did all of this to win four movie tickets: two for me and two for my dad.

The first movie I wanted to see was "Casper." Unlike most children, my bedtime stories came from my father's comic book collection. So of course, when I learned to read, I never left the comics behind, though I found more age-appropriate ones. "Casper" was one of the comics that I bought each week with my two-dollar allowance, so when I heard it was coming out on film, I was ecstatic.

The second movie that I wanted to see was "Pocahontas." I had seen "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast" on VHS by then, and like most little girls, I fell in love with Disney Princesses' magical worlds and happy endings. This particular Disney princess, however, was a bit more exciting than the rest because she, like me, was a minority. While I could never quite imagine being a princess like Belle or Ariel, picturing myself in Pocahontas' place was much easier.

The day that I went with my father to watch "Casper," I called the shots. I exchanged the prize tickets I had received for movie tickets and paid for my own popcorn and soda with the allowance I had saved up for weeks. Then, holding my father's hand, I walked into the dark theater and chose our seats while the music still played before trailers began.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't see "Casper" that day. Instead, what was playing in that dark theater, what I ended up seeing, was "Babe," which I found out was not about a friendly ghost, but about a pig that could talk.

I remember being angry at first that all the hard work I had done that summer was ruined by a stupid mistake. Yet as the film went on, I was drawn to the little pig, and I didn't mind that the story wasn't exciting or scary or anything I had wanted. I was happy in the end to be watching a movie, surrounded by others, who, like me, were reacting with gasps and whispers to the goings-on on the big screen.

Besides, I thought, I still had two tickets left.

Folasade John is a junior majoring in comparative literature from Pembroke Pine, Fla. She can be reached at fjohn@princeton.edu.