Category: media

That is, the Scientific and Technical Awards, handed out by host Patrick Stewart, but without a red carpet or other celebrities. “This is an awards ceremony where the mere mention of a “rig” — the basic skeleton of a 3-D model used in digital animation — can inspire a hearty round of applause and where a wry joke about the programming language C++ can bring the house down.”

One big difference is that this French president is a woman. “‘Like everybody else, we didn’t see Macron coming,’ said Eric Benzekri, one of the show’s two screenwriters. ‘What we saw is the political space which Macron had, and we gave our president, Amélie Dorendeu, the same space in the series.'”

The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies takes its name from Lovecraft and was founded in Canada. It has homes in Brooklyn and London, and it’s heading to L.A. as well. At the Institute, those curious about the intellectual side of horror film can take courses “led by writers, scholars, directors and others with a passion for the genre.”

Basically, this is in response to a popular creator named Logan Paul, who violated the company’s policies several times (and posted videos about the abuse of dead animals). “The changes are straightforward: YouTube says it reserves the right to strip a channel of its ability to serve ads and its access to premium monetization programs like Google Preferred and its YouTube Partner Program, as well as the right to cease recommending a channel’s videos across its network, if that channel proves harmful to the broader YouTube community.”

Hint: We’re talking about The Shape of Water, which won best movie at the Producers Guild this weekend, while its director, Guillermo del Toro, snagged the feature film award at the Directors Guild. (Note: La La Land won both of those awards last year, and as everyone knows, did not win the Oscar.)

HBO, which has had massive success with its scripted programs, has been searching for nonscripted hits for a few years. Last week, the network released the first of a series of four specials with the hosts of the podcast “2 Dope Queens,” and now they’ve made a deal with the hosts of “Pod Save America” for content that will run through the midterm elections.

Mary J. Blige, who plays Florence, says: “My mom used to send us down to Georgia every summer. So I knew what it felt like to have my hands in the dirt and to pick beans, and to pick whatever was in the field and to watch my grandmother, who was a sharecropper — and a sharecropper’s wife. They had a farm; they had chickens. And whatever they killed, we had to eat, and whatever they pulled out of the field, we had to shell beans, we had to pick peas, we had to cut greens. We had to do all that stuff. So I guess it was already in my DNA and embedded in me.”

The stats are deeply ugly: “In 2016, only 7 percent of the directors behind 250 of the year’s highest-grossing domestic releases were women. (In television, things are a bit better: Thirty-two percent of first-time episodic directors during the 2016-17 television season were women.) From there, women directors get lower budgets on average, and their projects are played on only one-third as many movie screens as male-directed films, according to a study cited in 2016 in The Hollywood Reporter.”

Will this happen? “To get well beyond the 2 million [subscribers] it already has, MoviePass needs to convince people that they really want to go to movies more often. In most cities, a subscriber needs to watch 13 movies a year to break even. In big cities, it’s eight.”