Parasite got six Oscar nominations and four awards, none of them for any of its actors. That case continued a pattern that has held even with Asian-led films in English: Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi, The Last Emperor, and so on right back to Flower Drum Song in 1961. And the pattern may be about to repeat itself with...
Torstar's new owners say they are branching into online gambling to help pay for those continuing efforts. "Doing this as part of Torstar will help support the growth and expansion of quality community-based journalism," co-owner Paul Rivett said. - CBC
That would be transcription, which is prohibitively expensive to do for every segment but which makes it far easier for potential users to find any given audio piece with a search engine. KQED's senior vice president for digital partnerships writes about how his station and the Google News Initiative are working to improve automated transcription — and avoid pitfalls...
“Our entire industry is in the worst crisis since World War II,” says Thomas Lengfelder, chief executive of the Berlin Hotel and Restaurant Assn. (DEHOGA Berlin). “Even today, there is still no telling where the pandemic will lead us. Unfortunately, political leaders are still not giving us any prospects.” - Variety
Who votes for these things? The members, currently totaling a scant 87 compared to the nearly 10,000 eligible Oscar voters, of the LA-based group of entertainment writers and photographers, working for media outlets overseas, known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. THe HFPA currently has no Black members, and hasn’t for 20 years. - Chicago Tribune
"The cultures of public media (nonprofit, built around broadcast, sometimes a little sleepy) and digital news startups (often for-profit, built around text, real-time and a little frenetic) are not the most natural media match. Public media outlets — typically the larger and better-financed partner — often enter these deals specifically in hopes of injecting that digital DNA. But the...
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...
