Category: media

It’s a story about smuggling immigrants into the US. The audience award for best drama, voted for by festival-goers, went to Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness.

“It’s definitely getting harder to land these deals. It’s not that it’s impossible to get companies on board. They all want their products on the screen. Getting them to open their wallets and promote those appearances, especially with mega TV buys, is the hard part.”

The fine is for a scene where a boy surprises a woman as she prepares to take a shower. The scene depicted “multiple, close-up views” of the woman’s “nude buttocks” according to an agency order issued late Friday.

The Hollywood writers’ strike is forcing TV execs to rethink how they do business. Once of the casualties might be the traditional pilot system. Several studios say they will cut back on pilots.

What will television look like when the strike ends, and how is the next season going to be changed? Beyond the conviction that some scripted television series will be replaced by reality shows, network and production studio executives are expressing hope that one outcome of the strike will be a different, and much cheaper, process for getting scripted shows on the air.

“The five most-watched debates in cable TV history have come in the past five months — three of them on CNN and two on Fox News. And in each case, nearly one-third of the audience comprised viewers between ages 18 and 49, the demographic most desired by programmers and advertisers. Traditionally, the audience for news skews much older.”

“The strike by the Writers Guild of America, you’ll recall, was supposed to be a disaster for TV ratings. Once they realized their favorite shows were no longer airing original episodes, angry and bereft viewers would go berserk, smash their TVs and spend all their newfound free time on Facebook.com.” But the strike’s “effect on ratings has, aside from one-off train wrecks like the Globes, been remarkably modest.”

Striking writers have had to get creative to keep their plight in the public eye during the months-long work stoppage. “Yesterday, you had writers from ‘The Daily Show coming to [Capitol Hill] to face off against scribes from ‘The Colbert Report’ in a kind of meta-debate about the two-month-long strike.”

Kenneth Turan says that the Academy made a huge mistake “when it passed over what has been universally considered the best foreign film of the year” in its nominations. “Something identical happened more than a dozen years ago when the documentary committee declined to nominate Hoop Dreams.” That time, the blunder led to changes in the nominating process.

In case anyone was wondering whether the writers’ strike could really shut down an event as big as the Academy Awards, several major Hollywood stars and Oscar nominees confirmed yesterday that they will not cross writers’ picket lines to attend the ceremony.