Media

This doesn’t seem like a great idea, but then again, who asked the audience? “Items can be digitally added to almost any movie or TV show. For example, advertisers could put new labels on the champagne bottles in Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca, add different background neon advertising signs to Ocean’s 11, or get Charlie Chaplin to promote a fizzy drink.” – BBC

Just as Chloé Zhao seems a near-lock for Best Director, the predictions are … that no one watches this year’s Oscars ceremony. “At a time when the traditional film industry is fighting for its primacy at the center of American culture — with at-home entertainment soaring in popularity and pandemic-battered theater chains closing — a collective shrug for the Oscars would send Hollywood deeper into an identity crisis. And a shrug certainly could happen.” – The New York Times

The flagship theatre was special for multiple reasons, but one is that Hollywood often doesn’t seem very, well, Hollywood. “The ArcLight Hollywood, by contrast, represented the living, breathing movie industry. It accomplished the rare feat of melding Hollywood the real with Hollywood the ideal. With its costume and prop exhibits in the lobby and its Q&As with actors and directors, it showcased one of our city’s top industries in ways that made it shine so brightly that people from all over our area who have no interest in my neighborhood’s tourist traps traveled long distances just to go there.” – Los Angeles Times

Not just irrelevant, but worse. HBO is celebrating, of course, but “whatever about HBO, how do the rest of us feel about Game of Thrones turning 10? Is our nostalgia tempered, for instance, by the fact the final seasons are now agreed to have been pretty dreadful? What, moreover, of the casual use of sexual violence as a plot device? Here we arrive at the awkward truth that much of what made Thrones Thrones is now regarded as problematic.” – Irish Times

Well: “Changing the Academy Awards, a 93-year-old American institution, has typically proven an exercise in futility. Tweaks have been tried along the way, yet the basic format has been stubbornly immutable.” Maybe this year will be different? Hope dies hard in Hollywood. – Boston Globe (AP)

Right now, though not only right now, there’s an issue with Black horror. “Black horror faces a distinct paradox: The genre has long been a valuable tool for creators of different backgrounds to process their traumas, and for audiences to reckon with their own. Some Black writers and producers in America use horror and science fiction as a lens through which to examine the grotesquerie of the country’s racist systems and history (Jordan Peele, for example, made Get Out after the killing of Trayvon Martin). But productions that engage with that real-life terror can, at times, feel more like brutal reenactments of senselessness than purposeful works of art, unintentionally compounding some Black viewers’ traumas.” – The Atlantic

Yes, it’s Philly. Despite how much those of us outside the area might think we know it, “the characters in Rocky don’t talk like they’re from Philadelphia. Neither do the ones in Silver Linings Playbook or The Irishman. For all the stories that have been set in and around the city, there’s a pronounced lack of authenticity when it comes to speaking the way the locals do—not a matter of failed attempts, but a failure to attempt it at all.” – Slate

TV networks spend about $100 million a year in developing pilots for series. Only a small number get to the schedule. Even fewer become ratings successes. So there’s an awful lot of very weird failed pilots out there… – Tedium

Last week the video-rental-service-turned-streaming-giant paid an estimated $1 billion for five-year exclusive U.S. rights to Sony’s theatrical releases and right of first refusal for the studio’s direct-to-streaming productions. If Netflix is going to spend that kind of money, shouldn’t it have just bought Sony outright? It’s what many people expected, and all the other major Hollywood studios have been gobbled up by other corporate giants. Josef Adalian explains why a purchase might have made sense for Netflix five or six years ago but not now. – Vulture

Censorship ain’t what it used to be, including in Ireland. Here, as elsewhere, it’s been replaced by a different C-word. The last Irish film censor, John Kelleher, was instrumental in seeing through legislative reform which in 2008 renamed and redefined his office: he was now a Classifier of films. As a result, the curtain was finally lowered on a long, shameful history of repression, philistinism and bowdlerisation that dated back to the very beginnings of the independent Irish state. – Irish Times

“Pacific Theatres announced on Monday that it would close all of its locations, which include the ArcLight Hollywood and the historic Cinerama Dome. Not as well known is that the theater chain also owns the Cinerama technology. The three-camera filming technique was introduced in 1952 in response to the rise of television, and was virtually obsolete by the time the Cinerama Dome opened on Sunset Boulevard in November 1963.” But there are still some movies made with the technique extant — what will become of them? Perhaps the leading current expert on Cinerama explains. – Variety

Novelist Mohammed Hanif (A Case of Exploding Mangoes) writes about the strange case of Sarmad Khoosat’s film Zindagi Tamasha (“Circus of Life”), which has won multiple prizes at international festivals, was cleared by three Pakistani boards of censors, made the country’s official entry for the Best International Film Oscar, glommed onto as a political football by people who hadn’t seen it, protested by enormous mobs who knew nothing about it, uncleared by those same boards of censors, and then re-cleared. The movie still hasn’t been shown there. – The New York Times

“The celebrity endorsement is a three-way relationship connecting the star, the product and us, and the internet has worked to draw all of its participants closer and closer together. We’re all mingling on the same platforms, our photos pinned to the same timelines. Social media influencers have narrowed the distinction between celebrities’ claims to fame and their ability to exploit that through sales: Influencers’ notoriety is itself derived from their facility at moving product.” – The New York Times

Univision, the largest producer of Spanish-language in the United States, and Televisa, Mexico’s largest media conglomerate (and one of the world’s biggest single producers of broadcast material in any language) will combine their content operations to form Televisa-Univision, which could become the dominant media force in the entire Hispanophone world. – Variety

Neighbours, which has been running in Australia since 1985 and is one of the country’s most successful TV shows internationally, has had two indigenous cast members and one of Indian descent publicly describe some brazen behavior from fellow cast and crew members, including one incident where an actor compared the Indian-Australian colleague to a bobblehead doll. – The Guardian

The Emmy Awards — already in a ratings tailspin in recent years as it no longer celebrates mass-appeal hits — showed how far audience levels can drop, sinking 9% to 6.1 million viewers Sept. 20. Other shows, such as the American Music Awards, the Country Music Assn. Awards and the Billboard Music Awards, hit all-time lows as well. – Los Angeles Times

It’s not just that they’re wildly popular and can be addictive. It’s because nature documentaries have at least as much artifice as any studio-produced adult video and maybe more. (“Are these seabirds supposed to be majestic or comical as they enact their mating dance? The music tells us. Whom are we to root for in this interaction of predator and prey? Listen for the menacing strings.”) Emma Maris argues that “the solution to the way [nature docs] might warp our expectations is the same as it is for porn — not to ban them, but to diversify them.” – The Atlantic

In fact, reporter Angela Watercutter compares the 15-second-video service old Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse: “The platform, thanks to its duetting and stitching functions, automates a lot of what the Surrealists were doing. It’ not exactly an exquisite corpse, since TikTok records the entire genealogy of any given work, and there is a want for continuity with what others have contributed before. But there is a similar spirit of spontaneous collaboration, and a kindred quest for the absurd.” – Wired

“Virtual entertainment is the new cultural center of gravity,” Authentic Artists founder and CEO Chris McGarry told Protocol. Authentic Artists has developed a dozen such virtual DJs thus far, and is powering their performances with a custom-built AI music engine that uses a catalog of 130,000 MIDI files to generate performances in real time. The resulting music is being fed into the company’s animation pipeline, and there’s a feedback mechanism for Twitch audiences to change the course of a set. – Protocol

As a matter of fact, there were so many complaints about the bump in programming for special coverage of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death that the BBC had to set up an whole new temporary complaint page. And it wasn’t just the main channel. “BBC Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live also aired special programming charting Prince Philip’s life, while BBC Four was paused and displayed a message directing viewers to switch over for a “major news report”. – BBC

In 1992, television wasn’t all about the latest competition or race or humiliation reported to the camera. So when The Real World started, it was a shock. Perhaps not as much of a shock – but a choice that has echoed for nearly three decades – is the way the show framed Black cast members. “The show often sacrificed nuance in favor of drama when framing the Black castmates for the network’s predominantly white audience.” – BuzzFeed