Category: media

“A bitter six-week labour dispute between Canadian actors and producers was nearly the ‘final nail in the coffin’ for the country’s already battered film and television industry, which experts say now faces a long, hard, uphill climb along the road to recovery.”

Journalist David Carr has spent the last several months covering Hollywood the way a journalist from Japan might cover the U.S. – as a consummate outsider attempting to make sense of a foreign culture. “I’ve been a serious journalist most of my life, and the red carpet reminded me of a national political campaign without the stakes. Juggling an endless array of badges, people wearing headsets and the overall star apparatus, I had a great deal of access, but very little insight.”

Have the Oscars become so overhyped and overtly political that they’re no longer worth caring about? Chris Vognar thinks so: “I’m dumbfounded at the exalted place the Oscars hold in the public (and especially the media) imagination… The Oscars now stand at the peak of what you might call an entertainment-industrial complex. They are the ultimate self-generating content machine, a mix of old lore and new fluff, little of it consequential in any except as a cash cow on par with the Super Bowl.”

Advertisers will pay a record $1.7 million for every 30-second spot. “The show is one of the increasingly few events with enough built-in suspense for most viewers to watch in real time, rather than digitally record the show so they can zip past the ads. That’s one reason advertisers are willing to pay an Oscar record price for a 30-second spot, an uptick from last year’s $1.6 million, despite a droop in the show’s ratings in recent years.”

“Federal and some state officials are looking to regulate the escalating level of violence in film, TV, video games, song lyrics, and Web-based entertainment. But many veterans of the struggle are concluding that regulation is not the answer. It’s time, they say, for new ideas and a search for common ground.”

“You might think traditional radio’s golden age had long since passed. But despite the rise of deep, personal libraries of digital music, MP3-ready cars with 10-CD changers, and yes, subscription satellite-radio channels for every listener niche, broadcast radio still sizzles. Although total listening time may have declined a bit, the medium still reaches more than 90 percent of Americans age 12 and older, year after year.”

“As the record industry struggles to change into an increasingly digitally-based business, satellite radio providers are asserting the explosion of portable music players, Internet-delivered music and cell phone-based content services is hurting their efforts to turn profitable. Indeed, XM and Sirius have said they should be allowed to merge as they now compete with every audio device consumers use, from typical car radios to digital music players.”

It’s one of the closest years ever in the Oscar race for Best Picture. But “the field seems to have left a number of academy voters feeling dispirited. One director said he stared at the ballot and considered leaving the best picture category blank. Then he gave Clint a tribute vote. A publicist told us he did not check favorites in a couple of major categories for the first time in his years of voting.”

Producers of the movie “Dreamgirls” have apologized to Motown officials. “A Motown spokesman said the film upset several artists who felt the label was falsely depicted in a negative light. Dreamgirls is widely seen as a loose version of the story of The Supremes.”

The Canadian actors’ strike may finally be over, after both sides agreed to a new deal under which rates are set for new media distribution, which had been at the heart of the dispute. Making matters more complicated was the fact that the major Hollywood studios were putting pressure on Canadian producers not to agree to anything that might allow U.S. actors to demand more money when similar agreements expire in Hollywood next year.