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The Academy Awards are coming this month and if you're still trying to see all the Oscar-nominated films, it may be easier to find them in China than the U.S.

A few weeks ago, the films flooded into the pirated DVD store down the street from my apartment in Shanghai. It happens like clockwork every year.

I asked T.J. Greene, an American executive who runs a small movie theater company here in China, to visit the store and explain what was happening.

There is nothing subtle about the store, which has a huge "DVD" sign on top and pipes music out onto the sidewalk. We strolled inside to find a dozen shelves worth of pirated DVDs. The front rack, visible from the street, was filled with all the Oscar hopefuls, including American Sniper, Selma and Birdman.

"Every single one of them is in perfect and nicely wrapped plastic and in great, great condition," Greene said, admiring the packaging. "You can even read the synopsis on the back."

"Before, if it was just a Hollywood cinema or a Warner Brothers cinema, there wasn't as much pressure to crack down, because it's foreign. But now it's having an effect on their own pocketbooks.

- T.J. Greene, executive of a movie theater company in China

A female clerk, who wore the store uniform, a bright yellow wind-breaker, assured Greene all the DVDs had high-quality pictures and audio.

"What happens if [there's] bad quality, can we bring it back?" Greene said to the clerk.

"OK, no problem," the clerk answered cheerily.

Greene is the CEO of Apex Entertainment, which has a cinema in the eastern city of Suzhou and is building nine more around China. He often checks out pirated DVD stores to gauge the competition.

After scanning the Oscar nominees, Greene asked about the latest Hunger Games film, which opened around the world in late November, but will only come to China this month.

"The copy not very well ... so you can wait," said the clerk. "Maybe after Chinese New Year, I have very good one."

As Greene chatted with the clerk, the store's enforcer, a Chinese man about six feet tall, continued to eye us from just a few feet away and frown. We decided to leave and head to my apartment to talk about what we'd seen.

All the Oscar-nominated movies in the store were copies of screeners, the DVDs sent to the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as part of the nomination process. Greene says the copies could have come from factories that made the screeners or from the homes of members themselves.

Members are not supposed to show a screener to other people. "But, hey, this is the real world," Greene says. "It can easily get into the hands of others."

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Online piracy in China remains a big problem, but DVDs on the streets have actually improved. When Greene arrived here in 2004, vendors across the city were still operating carts containing hundreds of DVDs each. Since then, authorities have run most street vendors out of business.

Greene says a big reason is the explosion of movie theaters in China.

When he came here, there were about 2,000 screens. Most of the theaters were rundown and had lousy sound systems. Today, there are about 25,000 screens, most state-of-the-art. Nearly all are locally or state-owned, which means China's government has a big incentive to protect them.

"Before, if it was just a Hollywood cinema or a Warner Brothers cinema, there wasn't as much pressure to crack down, because it's foreign," Greene says. "But now it's having an effect on their own pocketbooks."

That's probably one reason why the DVD store in my neighborhood didn't have a clean copy of the new Hunger Games movie. A pirated DVD of the movie would have eaten into potential ticket sales here over the last two months.

To protect domestic filmmakers, China only allows 34 foreign movies into the country each year. Greene says that's an even bigger problem than piracy, because it severely limits what Hollywood can show here and what audiences can legally see.

"This weekend, I went to Hong Kong and I was able to watch American Sniper," Greene says. "That film will never see the light of day here because of the quota system."

China says it will increase the foreign quota in two to three years. Until then, Greene says film fans here will have to keep going to pirated websites, or stores like the one in my neighborhood, to see some of Hollywood's best movies.

China

This story is part of the New Boom series on millennials in America.

As the economy continues to recover, economists are seeing stark differences between people with high school and college degrees. Four-year college graduates are nearly twice as likely to have a job compared to Americans who just graduated high school and stopped there.

But economists say that doesn't mean everybody needs a 4-year degree. In fact, millions of good-paying jobs are opening up in the trades. And some pay better than what the average college graduate makes.

Learning A Trade

When 18-year-old Haley Hughes graduated from high school this past summer, she had good grades; she was on the honor roll every year. So she applied to a bunch of 4-year colleges and got accepted to every one of them. But she says, "I wasn't excited about it really, I guess."

"The baby boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials."

- Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce

So instead of going that route, Hughes is taking a different path: an apprenticeship through the big New England power utility company NSTAR. In one of her recent classes at an NSTAR facility outside Boston, the classroom work was actually quite exciting.

Lara Allison is one of the instructors teaching Hughes and the other utility worker apprentices how to protect themselves if they're down under a manhole cover, in an underground electrical substation and something bad happens.

"An arc flash, that's the thing we worry the most about," Allison says.

An arc flash is a highly energized bolt of electricity, an explosion of electricity in a sense, that jumps from an energy source to another spot that's grounded or that the energy can flow into. Allison tells the students that if they wear the wrong clothing and they get hit by an arc flash, their clothes can catch on fire and get seared into their skin. "It's really, really hot," she says.

On her apprenticeship Hughes already has been down working in those underground substations.

"I loved it, it was great," she says.

Hughes says another thing that's great is that taking this path into the high-skilled trades is a lot cheaper than a 4-year college would have been.

$40,000 Vs. $2,400 Per Year

"The student loans would be ridiculous," Hughes says during a break from class. "The schools I was looking at ... were like $40,000 a year." In the long run she thought that was just too much.

By comparison, NSTAR is partnering with nearby Bunker Hill Community College. The students end up with a 2-year associate degree. Hughes has some scholarships and NSTAR pays some of the cost. It works out to about $1,200 a semester. Hughes says she's been paying that herself and so she expects to graduate with no debt.

Hughes is also getting a lot of on-the-job training and taking a wide range of courses at the community college: English, math, a computer science course and even a psychology group dynamics class. Then there are the classes directly related to power utility work: DC theory, AC theory, physics, engineering and business etiquette. Not bad for $1,200 a semester.

'Averages Lie'

At the NSTAR apprenticeship program, 90 percent of the students get jobs with the power utility at graduation. Starting base pay is about $58,000 a year.

On average, it is certainly true that people with a 4-year college degree make more money than those with a 2-year degree or less. But there is plenty of nuance behind that truth.

"Averages lie," says Anthony Carnevale, the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

He says the problem with those averages is that people who work at Radio Shack or Target get lumped in with master carpenters and electricians.

"You can get a particular skill in a particular field and make more than a college graduate," he says. For example, he says the average electrician makes $5,000 a year more than the average 4-year college graduate. And the country is going to need a lot more skilled tradespeople.

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"The baby boom workers are retiring and leaving lots of openings for millennials," Carnevale says. He says there are 600,000 jobs for electricians in the country today, and about half of those will open up over the next decade. Carnevale says it is a big opportunity for that millennial generation born between 1980 and 2000.

With so many boomers retiring from the trades, the U.S. is going to need a lot more pipe-fitters, nuclear power plant operators, carpenters, welders, utility workers — the list is long. But the problem is not enough young people are getting that kind of training.

Not Enough Training

Utility apprentice Haley Hughes says she chose to work in the trades, in large part, because she went to a vocational high school. A lot of her friends are going into the trades. She got comfortable there with wiring light switches and doing basic electrical work and learning about the industry. But, there aren't nearly as many of these types of programs in high schools as there used to be.

"We made a mistake," Carnevale says. "Back in 1983, there was the 'Nation at Risk' report in which, quite rightly, we all were appalled at the quality of education in America."

After that, he says, most high schools focused on academics and getting students ready for college. For a lot of parents, they wanted their kids to have a 4-year degree. But Carnevale says, in the process "we basically obliterated the modernization of the old vocational education programs and they've been set aside."

Carnevale says we should bring those programs back and we need to be preparing a lot more young people for good, well-paying jobs in the trades. And he says that means we need better training programs at high schools and community colleges in partnership with businesses in scores of different industries around the country.

apprenticeships

Parents on the hunt for great kids' books get some help each year when the American Library Association gives out its youth media awards. On Monday, the association announced a long list of winners in a variety of categories. The two that get the most attention are the John Newbery Medal for most outstanding contribution to children's literature and the Randolph Caldecott Medal for picture book artistry. This year's Newbery went to Kwame Alexander's The Crossover, and the Caldecott went to Dan Santat's The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend.

The Crossover

by Kwame Alexander

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Alexander says he couldn't sleep Sunday night knowing that he had a chance of winning the Newbery. "I know we hear that it is all about the journey, and it was," he says. "But I so wanted the journey to end in a really cool place."

His winning novel is a story about twin brothers who love each other and basketball in equal measure. Alexander knew a story about sports would attract reluctant readers, especially boys. And he wrote the novel in verse because he started out as a poet.

He says, "When I set about the task of trying to write a novel, of course I went with what I knew. And I said, 'Oh, well I know how to write poetry so I'm going to be able write a novel in poems pretty easily.'"

But it was a lot harder than he expected. He says he wanted to embrace a variety of forms so that kids would be introduced to different kinds of poetry, though he's surprised when he hears people describe some of the verse as rap.

"That's so funny," he says. "You know, I hear people say ... that there's rap in the book and of course, when I was writing it, there was no rap in my mind."

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The Adventures of Beekle is the story of an imaginary friend who goes in search of a child who needs him. Author and illustrator Dan Santat says, "I found it interesting that no one had ever taken the approach from the imaginary friend's point of view."

He remembers when his own son first went to school and worried about making friends. He says the book is really a gift to his son, and winning the Caldecott just makes the whole experience sweeter.

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"I would have been perfectly fine knowing that my son would have been content growing up and maybe possibly having his own children and sharing the book and saying, you know, 'This book is a love letter from your grandfather to me.' But now it's going to have a sticker on [it] and now it can be shared, you know, with the world," he says. "It's beyond words. I'm thrilled."

Other winners announced on Monday include:

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Coretta Scott King Author Book Award)

Firebird by Misty Copeland and illustrated by Christopher Myers (Coretta Scott King Illustrator Book Award)

Viva Frida by Yuyi Morales (Pura Belpr Illustrator Award)

I Lived on Butterfly Hill by Marjorie Agosn and illustrated by Lee White (Pura Belpr Author Award)

I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson (Michael L. Printz Award)

The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant and illustrated by Melissa Sweet (Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award)

Read an excerpt of The Crossover

Peter Fredell carries an unusual wallet. It feels a bit like leather, but the material is pale and thin. He pulls it out on a street corner in Stockholm, Sweden.

"I actually made it myself," he says. "It's an eel that I fished up. And I used the skin and stitched it together."

This eelskin wallet carries personal significance — but it does not carry cash.

Around the world, cash is fading. Electronic transactions are becoming a bigger part of the economy every year. And one of the leaders in this trend is Sweden, where more than 95 percent of transactions are digital.

Fredell is the CEO of a company called Seamless that designs payment systems for cell phones.

Back in his office, I asked him to recall the last time he needed cash.

He thought for a bit.

"My son plays ice hockey, and I had to give something to the ice hockey team, and so I gave them some cash," Fredell says eventually. "But as a matter of fact, that will disappear too."

He says the ice hockey team has just started taking cell phone payments.

I decided to see just how far this goes.

So, we stuck our heads out of Fredell's office to the open-plan workspace. I ask if anyone has cash on them. Person after person shakes their head no.

Finally we found one employee with cash — an engineer named Wilhelm Svenselius.

He says he needed it for a party the previous weekend. It was held at a bar that doesn't take cards, and Svenselius had to get cash especially for the occasion. He says that happens once a month or so.

i

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically. Camilla Lindskog/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Camilla Lindskog/AP

In this photo from 2011, Vicar Johan Tyrberg of the Carl Gustaf Church in Karlshamn, southern Sweden, stands next to a credit card machine enabling worshippers to donate money to the church collection electronically.

Camilla Lindskog/AP

Of course, these people work for a digital payment company.

But national data show that in Sweden, they are not unusual. There are churches that pass a digital payment system with the collection plate. Some homeless people who sell newspapers on the street take digital payments.

Ruth Goodwin-Groen runs the Better than Cash Alliance, which the U.N. and major global foundations are funding as part of an effort to move the global economy away from cash toward digital transactions.

"This is a means of helping achieve many different goals," Goodwin-Groen says.

Electronic transactions are more transparent and more accountable, she says. They cost less, and they're more secure. It's a global trend, from the developing world to the biggest, most advanced economies.

But there are holdouts.

Ron Shevlin is a senior analyst at the Aite Group, a financial services firm in Boston.

"For some consumers, and especially older consumers, they prefer cash and don't prefer to use cards or mobile payments," he says.

And people making illegal purchases on the black market will always prefer cash.

Plus, he says, digital transactions do raise security concerns.

"In some respects, the economic impact is negative because of the propensity for data breaches and fraudulent transaction," Shevlin says.

Back in Stockholm, Fredell is already imagining ways to make cashless transactions completely secure.

"My favorite payment actually is DNA payment. You spit in a cup next to the cashier," he says.

That spit-system doesn't exist anywhere yet.

"But it's the absolutely safest way, right?" Fredell says. "Someone would have to copy your DNA."

It's a dream — but not one that he sees happening any time soon.

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