Category: media

“We don’t even see a big bump anymore when a best picture winner hits home video. The Oscars are about ego and recognition. The spending just doesn’t stand up to any rational analysis. The culture has changed. The era when an elite institutional award could have a lot of sway with the public is pretty much at an end.”

“[The] Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker … is to recreate the Pakistan Army garrison town Abbottabad in India for her new film on the US Navy Seals who tracked and killed Osama bin Laden.”

“It’s a TV show. Television is the reason movies get made and watched, and TV is the only reason anybody cares about them. Why was the awards show moved from its traditional March date to February? To put it into the February TV sweeps period. That’s why.”

“Twickenham Film Studios, which have been used for films as diverse as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and current Oscars hopeful My Week with Marilyn, are to be closed just one year ahead of the facility’s centennial anniversary.”

“China has agreed to ease restrictions on the number of foreign films shown there, and to increase the amount film studios can make from ticket sales. A quota of 20 foreign movies, which are mostly US exports, remains. A further 14 Imax or 3D films will be allowed.”

“The Italian docudrama Caesar Must Die from octogenarian sibling film-makers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani won the top prize at the Berlin film festival on Saturday. The film follows real-life inmates of a high-security jail as they rehearse for a performance of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.“

L. Frank Baum’s 1899 novel may be in the public domain, but Warner Bros. still owns, and profits from, the classic 1939 film. With Disney’s Oz, the Great and Powerful on the way, the studios have begun legal battles over both copyright and trademarks.

Title sequences can set up the rest of the movie. Of course, the rest of the movie often disappoints. That’s OK: New title sequence websites mean you never need to watch a full movie again.

New figures say that in the new media world, “the recorded music business, for all its troubles, is actually faring far better in the transition to digital than the British music press.”

“With the future of motion pictures headed quickly toward an all-digital format played only on pricey new equipment, will the theaters be around? Or will they be done in by the digital revolution that will soon render inadequate the projectors that have flickered and ticked with a little-changed technology for more than 120 years?”