Robert Altman was one of the first filmmakers whose work I sought out when I was first getting into film. I think I saw Short Cuts at the old Capri in Anchorage and it seemed accessible, yet a whole lot more interesting than the stuff I’d been watching at the Fireweed with friends or renting from Briley’s on the weekends. I probably didn’t think of it as “accessible” and “interesting,” but his big casts and interlaced stories just seemed different, weird, and funny, and I wanted more. When we studied Nashville in my freshman film class, I began to see how much more to Altman there was, and when we studied McCabe & Mrs. Miller, I saw for the first time one of my favorite movies. For better or worse, he’s been rewarding my moviegoing experiences ever since. The closest I came to the man himself was an evening with Roger Ebert at the Eastman House last year, when Ebert told stories about Altman as he introduced a screening of Altman’s Three Women. I’ll bet the Academy is breathing a sigh of relief, having given him their lifetime award last year; I somehow thought that when we heard how he’d been living with someone else’s heart all of these years, that he might somehow live forever.