Category: media

“Last fall the German Film Critics Association held a symposium on the future of the Berlinale titled ‘What Now After All the Bad Reviews?’ The Berlinale’s director, Dieter Kosslick, who has headed the festival since 2001 and whose contract was recently renewed through 2016, has a ready answer for detractors: Look at the numbers.”

“The Oscar nominees may not be just a demonstration of a sudden burst of nostalgia. They may be a demonstration of the self-contempt of an industry that is finally tired of itself and of the movies that have defined it for two decades. This doesn’t mean that they will retreat from teenage blockbusters. It just means that they are using the Oscars to stage a small protest against the sorts of movies they feel we the audience sadistically forces them to make.”

After a decade, Cirque de Soleil gets another invitation to the Oscars show. Producers just hope the 50-performer extravaganza isn’t quite as boisterous this time.

J. Hoberman: “In the 52 years since Shelley Winters won a supporting actress Oscar for The Diary of Anne Frank, there have been 20 nominated features — including foreign-language and documentary films — that treated the Holocaust from the perspective of its victims. Only two have gone home unrewarded.”

Although “it’s been pretty fashionable for different pundits to bash television,” said Bill Duggan, group executive vice president at the advertiser association, watching video content and interacting with it on various screens is booming.

In a collaboration with PEN American Center and the ACLU, Doug Liman “will create a feature-length film whose script is compiled from various documents on prisoner abuse and torture [during the Bush administration’s War on Terror] … and whose footage will consist of user-submitted videos of their readings of these documents.”

“Eastman Kodak had been seeking to end the $74m, 20-year naming rights deal it signed in 2000. CIM Group, the real estate company that owns the theatre, objected but a judge ruled in Kodak’s favour this week.” Fun Fact: “Of the nine films nominated for this year’s best picture Oscar, seven were shot on Kodak film.”

“It must have been excruciating for the National Museum of American History’s archivists to have the earliest known recordings of the human voice but not to be able to listen to them. The records, made in the Volta Lab of Alexander Graham Bell in the early 1880s, were too fragile to play. But the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to scan them optically and retrieve the sound.”

“The new regulations, announced Monday, ban all imported programs during prime time and limit such shows to no more than 25 percent of a channel’s offerings each day.”

Of the more than 800 feature films released theatrically in America last year, more than 300 were documentaries. (At premiere marketplace festivals like Sundance and Toronto, the ratio is similar.) Yet at the Academy Awards, where the film industry lavishly celebrates itself, all of those films compete for one measly award: best documentary. By comparison, dramatic features get 20 chances for an Oscar.