Popularity is Sweet!

I'm not sure I've talking much here on the blog about how much fun me and my colleagues here at the Really Big Childrens' Publishing House been having watching Hollywood have fun with our books. I think my giddy fangirl moments (where I squeal things like, OMG! WE GOT TO SEE THE TRAILER!!!!) have mostly been contained over on Facebook - but there've been plenty over there. We have actually had a great run of movies over the last few months. First, of course, was the last Harry Potter movie, and it was a good one; then we had HUGO (yeah! woohoo!) and next we have (yowza!) the Hunger Games.

This morning we had a mimosa toast for Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and his editor presented him with his own Oscar (only us being in children's publishing, it was an Oscar the Grouch), and he told us hysterical stories about he and his boyfriend's first visit to the red carpet, and meeting (and getting hugged by!) Meryl Streep, and Renee Zellweiger passing on the red-carpet behavior advice originally given to her by Ellen Barkin ("Head up, shoulders back, chest out, stomach in...and walk slooooowly"), and then he signed all of the books we'd brought (which took forever because he actually wants to talk to everybody while he's signing, which is so cool that you don't care how long it takes) and we all got Oscar cookies (Oscar the little gold guy, not Oscar the furry green puppet).

I posted Facebook status updates about this earlier today. I'd found the exact Oscar the Grouch that was presented to him and I posted that, and then I wanted to post a picture of the Oscar cookie (it's not shiny but the baker did at least manage sparkle!) so I googled Eleni's Bakery (source of the cookies) and...

And that's where this turns into a blog post. I don't know...I knew that The Hunger Games is all the rage right now. I know the books have been on the NY Times bestsellers lists for ages. I know Tina Fay has referenced it on 30 Rock. We've gotten sneak previews of the trailers, which was tons of fun, and we get a sneak preview of the movie (I'm sooooo excited - for the longest time we didn't think that was going to happen so when the announcement came out that it was, it was extra-awesome!), and, well, it's just been tons of fun watching the build-up, and I knew there was a lot of excitement and all, but somehow, this amused me more than the rest of the buzz put together.