Category: media

Atom Egoyan’s controversial film about Turkish genocide in the early 20th century scored big at the Genie Awards, Canada’s answer to the Oscars. Ararat, which was praised by critics and well-received by the public, took home five Genies, including best picture. Best director went to David Cronenberg for his latest creepy drama, Spider.

The venerable Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is coming under heavy fire these days for a slew of programming changes at Radio One that critics say represent nothing more than a naked attempt to ‘dumb down’ the network’s content and grab more listeners from desirable demographics. The newly created Sounds Like Canada has been a profound disappointment, to the extent that its popular host has left the show, at least temporarily. The motivation for the changes at CBC may be a basic desire for the network to better reflect Canada’s diversity of cultures, but what does it benefit the company to gain a few new listeners, and lose all the old ones, not to mention a few broadcast standards in the process?

Iranian films have found an appreciative audience internationally. But at home, the difficulties of making these distinctive movies is enormous. “In Iran, the subversive subtexts of these provocative films are rattling religious conservatives in government. Iran is poised on the cusp between religious extremism and political reform. Conservatives believe the imbedded politics of new-wave films directly challenge their power by giving voice to the swelling discontent within the country. Enraged by the negative international attention the films bring to Iran’s drastic social and political policies, they are attempting to subvert the filmmakers.”

A recent study estimates that movie and TV productions that have left the US to be shot in Canada have cost the US $10 billion in lost spending, as “studios seek to save cash by taking advantage of more generous tax regimes elsewhere.” Now two California politicians have proposed tax breaks to help keep productions in the US. “If passed, the new law would offer a 25% wage tax credit to each employee on wages of up to $25,000.”

Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are a sombre lot. “So what’s new? Hasn’t drama always relied on at least one killing, just to keep the action ticking along? Surely murder has been a staple of storytelling ever since Cain and Abel. But there is a difference with the movie crop of 2003. In film after film favoured by the academy this week, death is not just a useful plot pivot or even a narrative climax. It is a theme, a puzzle probed and examined from the movie’s beginning to its end.”

Last year Greece passed a law banning online games. The idea was to fight internet gambling. But the ban is problematic – some prominent Greeks have been caught playing, and the European Union says the ban “casts its net too wide, the EU says, ensnaring innocent Internet café owners and computer game companies.” Why the ban? “Parliament took this decision spontaneously, and under unbearable pressure to wipe out the ‘cancer’ of gambling. As a result they voted one of the most excessive, unprepared and extreme laws ever enacted in Europe.”

Radio industry execs are challenging Arbitron, the ratings company to improve its sampling rates. It seems fewer listeners are cooperating by filling out listening diaries. “As radio researchers, we have all been troubled for a long while over the impact that sagging response rates have had on Arbitron’s nationwide and local market products. These surveys are our currency for pricing our commercials and inventories industrywide.”

“These are anxious times for film animators, whose business is being roiled by layoffs, new technology and tension between the industry’s longtime leader, the Walt Disney Company, and its upstart partner, Pixar Animation Studios. Computer technology is the essence of both the creative and production process of every movie. Those are not soothing words to traditional animators, who have watched jobs dwindle in the wake of computer techniques.”

After grabbing three of the five Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Miramax Studio has dominated the Academy Awards like no studio has in 50 years. “That achievement is all the more significant because Miramax is not one of the major studios, like Warner Brothers or Columbia Pictures, but an indie start-up begun in 1979 by a pair of hustling, film-loving brothers from Queens, Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Their company grew steadily through the 80’s, became an independent division of Disney in 1993 and after today has to be considered the equal of any of the major studios in Hollywood.”

The last time Roman Polanski was nominated for an Oscar, Jimmy Carter was in the White House and disco wasn’t quite dead yet. But just because Polanski’s film, The Pianist was given a Best Director nod, don’t expect to see the reclusive filmmaker on the red carpet. Polanski is officially still a fugitive from American justice, having fled the country in 1978 after having pled guilty to having sex with a minor, and the Los Angeles D.A. says that he would not hesitate to make an arrest, should Polanski choose to attend the Oscar ceremony.