The game-changers were the pandemic, and also awards-nominated movies One Night in Miami and Sound of Metal, not to mention Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. Those films, "coupled with the cultural impact Borat has enjoyed across the globe, have significantly altered the perception of Amazon Studios’ film division in Hollywood and among Amazon’s more than 150 million Prime subscribers. (The studio,...
For one thing, it's OK to fight. Writers are also seeing back pay come in - and letting the union win it for them instead of fighting alone. And then there's at least one intangible: "I have seen ... an improvement in terms of how a writer looks at themselves and their value next to their representatives, that the...
The Mouse - Disney Plus, in this case - has a huge back catalog, and it's also doing this little thing called dropping a new episode once a week. What even? Well: "They’re treating The Mandalorian like it’s Seinfeld—people tune in one week and they get a great publicity bump as people talk about it over the weekend and there are roundup...
You probably know the French actor Julie Delpy from the Richard Linklater movie trilogy that begins with Before Sunrise, but she's been writing and directing movies for a while. She wanted to keep her new film real, but also deal with the near-future. "I am not saying that cloning is a good thing, but I’m saying, let’s not blind...
McQueen, whose series of (what some of us would call) films hasn't been entered for BAFTAs or Oscars, says, "I just make stuff. You are the guys who want to put labels on things. That limits your thoughts and your imagination. If you want to be limited by form then fine. But kids aren’t. It feels dusty. It feels...
As her movie Never Rarely Sometimes Always - a quiet but hair-raising quest movie about two 17-year-olds from Pennsylvania going to New York to obtain an abortion - teeters on the verge of awards nominations, director Eliza Hittman called out at least one Academy voter who refused to watch the movie. She wrote in a (now-deleted) Instagram caption, "This...
The year of no movie theatres meant the year of no blockbusters; most have been pushed off for a year or more, and that's ... just fine? Justin Chang: "If the Oscars should go forward this year — and I think they should — then surely they should reflect that precarious new reality. They should also call for a...
Alexis Soloski: "It’s recognizable enough that Portlandia and Saturday Night Live can parody it. It suggests intimacy, a rumpled authenticity. Because if someone were faking it, they would, like, definitely cut out the filler words and upspeak. I mean, right? But the most seemingly unstudied performances are often the result of relentless rehearsal and calculation. So I wanted to...
Even as media companies pour billions into the industry, "its formats and business practices are still developing, leading producers, executives and talent to view the medium as akin to television circa 1949: lucrative and uncharted territory with plenty of room for experimentation and flag-planting. … But along with the optimism come worries that big money may stifle the D.I.Y....
Cerise Castle said in a podcast interview and on social media on Monday that her time at KCRW was “marked by microaggressions, gaslighting, and blatant racism starting when I was physically prevented from entering the building multiple times within my first month of employment.” - Los Angeles Times
"When the faithful listeners to Klubrádió, a talk radio station that has been a beacon of free speech in Hungary, tuned in last Monday, February 15, they found only silence. … As an open forum for public discourse, Klubrádió has challenged a range of government policies, including those bearing on public memory and press freedom." - The Nation
Pesca, a public radio veteran who has been hosting Slate's daily news podcast, The Gist, since 2012, was suspended indefinitely without pay this week in the wake of a debate among staffers on the company's Slack channel about whether it is ever acceptable for a white journalist to use the n-word itself in a discussion of the slur's use...
"The process helps winnow the field of competing films for upcoming awards shows, a kind of hive mind forming around the season's leading contenders. This year, that mind is looking blank." As the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter recently tweeted, "The usual consensus-building is gone, and voters are left to what they actually think." - The Washington...
