Category: media

“The foreign language nomination committee for the Oscars isn’t the U.N. Security Council, but each year at this time it must wade through global politicking, diplomatic challenges and sometimes hard-to-fathom national preferences as it selects five nominees from the offerings presented by countries around the world.” Some of the choices are unusual – excellent films get passed up while dogs are allowed to bark. So, predictably, there are controversies. “Many of this year’s 54 entries have been bizarre or even difficult to watch.”

In an effort to bring film production to Scotland, a group has proposed a £250 million plan to build a studio complex “comprising up to 14 soundstages, an extensive back lot and the largest external water tank in the world.” But the plan has been denounced by residents nearby as “a smokescreen to allow an exclusive housing and leisure development to be built on prime, green-belt land.”

“Everywhere you look on prime-time television, there is language and behavior that would have been unthinkable just a few short seasons ago. But the truth is, while the avalanche of sleaze alone may seem major to the casual observer, it’s actually just a small part of what TV insiders regard as a wholesale reevaluation of the way TV does business. The only guarantee at the moment is that more changes are on the way.”

The budget that President Bush sent to Congress this week tops $2 trillion, and is already being criticized for being overly generous to to many constituencies, given the current state of the national economy. But public television stations nationwide are wondering where they can sign up for some of the president’s fiscal generosity, after discovering that the budget calls for the elimination of funds designed to ease the transition of such stations to digital broadcasting, as mandated by the FCC. Without the funding, many public stations in rural areas have claimed that they will be forced off the air.

During Oscar season, movie theatres in Los Angeles have traditionally given free admission to actors with SAG union cards. Not this year. “This year, though, actors are getting another tough break in a tough town, as theater owners apparently have cut off the freebies many of them have traditionally offered to card-carrying members of the Screen Actors Guild. The reasons for the cut-off are a bit murky.”

A question from the frontlines at the Sundance Film Festival: “Is independent cinema dead in the United States – or, is it just playing possum?”

Clear Channel – the company that owns hundreds of radio stations in the US, is making use of sophisticated editing and mixing to splice together shows for local markets that sound local, but in actuality are recorded in studios often thousands of miles away. “With a lot of cutting and pasting, the engineers create 11 customized hourlong countdown shows for cities like New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and two national pop and rhythm-and-blues countdowns for other markets…” Carson Daly, the host, doesn’t even know which songs he’s introducing on his shows.

Are Americans ready to pay $10 a month to listen to radio? Two satellite radio companies hope so. So what’s wrong with conventional radio? Just about everything, the companies say – annoyances like “advertising, the limited reach of AM and FM signals, and, most of all, playlists confined to a small number of heavily promoted singers and groups.” So what’s better about satellite radio? The “chance to hear unsigned bands, live music, seldom-heard cuts from well-known artists and genres of music that have no home today on the AM and FM radio dials, like the electronica that shows up only in clubs and car commercials.”

Many American TV and movie projects shoot in Canada to save money. But the stories usually are set in American locations. That means that a city like Toronto often gets called to stand in for cities like New York. And how to pull off the illusion? Coaches who train the Canadian actors in how to sound New Yawk. “When casting agents in town get the character breakdowns for a movie, it’s stipulated in big bold type across each page that actors must sound American.”

How do movie theatres get the movies they want to show? A Montreal theatre entrepreneur charges that “Famous Players and Cineplex Odeon, the largest theatre chains in the country, use their size to pressure distributors to decide who gets the films.” He also says the two companies have split up the Canadian market so as not to seriously compete with one another, and that if competition was opened up to smaller players, ticket prices would fall and the range of movies shown would increase.