Category: media

“Frustration was in the air at the Makers conference, where hundreds of women gathered for three days in Rancho Palos Verdes to network and hear female celebrities and luminaries speak. Just weeks after the Women’s March and the inauguration of a president who has bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women, Hollywood women in particular were openly critical of the way they’d been treated in their professional lives.”

It took one news report that Donald Trump was upset that SNL cast a woman as Sean Spicer for Twitter to erupt with calls for the show to cast Trump’s number one bête noire, Rosie O’Donnell, as Steve Bannon. Megan Garber points out that this is no longer just a joke: “It operated on the premise that jokes can effect significant changes in the daily operations of the White House.” (We want Steve Buscemi as Kellyanne Conway!)

Humiliation. In a Q&A, the filmmaker, up for what could be his second Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar (though he won’t be at the ceremony), talks about the painful dynamic between the couple at the center of the story.

United Talent Agency (UTA) on Wednesday canceled its annual Oscars party and said it will instead hold a rally in Beverly Hills two days before the Feb. 26 Oscar ceremony to protest “anti-immigrant sentiment” in the United States. “If our nation ceases to be the place where artists the world over can come to express themselves freely, then we cease, in my opinion, to be America,” UTA chief executive Jeremy Zimmer said in a statement.

“Five of the 10 feature-length and short documentaries nominated for Oscars are directly or indirectly about refugees. … Several of the documentarians wanted to bring their subjects to the Oscar ceremony, but plans were upended by President Trump’s [travel ban].” So the Times‘s Carpetbagger asked what they’d say if they got the chance.

“So for KPCC, our CPB grant comes to about 5 percent of our overall operating budget. For stations in Alaska, for stations in a number of rural states, it’s as high as 40 percent. So there’s a real disparity in the impact that would have between rural and urban stations, and I think from a public policy perspective, that’s a concern.”

Ian Crouch: “In other times, the [Anheuser-Busch] commercial – a cinematic, and partly fictionalized, depiction of the journey that the company’s co-founder, Adolphus Busch, made from Germany to St. Louis in the mid-nineteenth century – would not have drawn much attention.
But these are not other times.”

“An Indian court has ordered filmmakers to cut four scenes from a forthcoming Bollywood movie after ruling that they show lawyers in a bad light, media reports said on Tuesday.”

In a statement posted to its website, the company said that the decision was made “only after careful consideration and was based on data and traffic.” It added, “We have concluded that IMDb’s message boards are no longer providing a positive, useful experience.”