Category: media

“Local television stations … dominated the TV business for more than half a century.” No longer. “Now, with their viewership in decline and ad revenue on a downward spiral, many local TV stations face the prospect of being cut out of the picture. Executives at some major networks are beginning to talk about an option that once would have been unthinkable: eventually taking shows straight to cable, where networks can take in a steady stream of subscriber fees even in an advertising slump.”

Slumdog Millionaire was the big winner at the British Academy Film Awards in London, winning seven prizes including best film. Kate Winslet won best actress for The Reader. The late Heath Ledger was named best supporting actor for playing The Joker in The Dark Knight.

The nominees for this year’s Academy Awards Best Picture have collectively had the worst box office of any year’s nominees. Does this mean no one will watch the telecast? And is Oscar’s future dimming?

“A television arm sprouted in recent months, with series built around Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda coming to Nickelodeon. Shrek the Musical opened on Broadway late last year. Theme parks are moving forward in Dubai and Singapore. And the company is making an all-or-nothing charge into 3-D movies.”

“Long out of circulation, The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Simon of the Desert (1965) will be released on Tuesday by the Criterion Collection. They remain among the most free-spirited of Buñnuel’s films, fully recovering the nonnarrative liberty of his earliest work.”

Where did Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog) get the idea for his new series, Dollhouse? “At lunch… we were sort of talking about the kind of show [star Eliza Dushku] ought to do… and then lo and behold the show just sort of popped up and started barking at me.'”

Television advertising’s altered mood is a little like the changes in fall foliage; just as autumn leaves turn earlier and more intensely in Vermont, the most direct and bleakest ads cluster around morning cable news shows, echoing the latest stock market dips and unemployment figures. They grow gentler and more sparse around daytime soap operas and talk shows. By prime time, the messages are oblique.

Because of widely available broadband access and a new wave of streaming sites, it has become surprisingly easy to watch pirated video online — a troubling development for entertainment executives and copyright lawyers.

“Simone de Beauvoir famously announced that ‘One is not born a woman, but becomes one,’ in her 1949 treatise The Second Sex. She might have added: ‘But it takes Hollywood to turn one into an hysterical fashion-mongering man-craving anorexic caricature.’ … The good news, for right-thinking women everywhere, is that the contemporary cardboard chick flick may yet eat itself without any help from feminist producers or activist audiences.”

Michael Radford, who directed Pacino in the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, will helm this project, which begins shooting later this year. (Pacino, who has taken many Shakespeare roles on stage and screen, has never played Lear.)