IATSE President Matthew Loeb called it “a Hollywood ending,” referring, of course, to the last minute tentative settlement between the union, and the AMPTP, to avoid the first-ever widespread crew shutdown of film and TV production.   The phrase conjures up imagery going back to The Perils of Pauline, with the heroine snatched off the... »

“Times have changed, and rapidly. During the depths of the pandemic in 2020 (companies) posted skyrocketing profits… (even with) consumers stuck at home on lockdown… To meet that surge in demand, workers… were leaned on to give up their weekends or to work grueling 12-hour shifts — making extra cash, but losing time with... »

“Everything old is new again…” as the song has it. And so, hello again, Below the Line. And hello, too, to an IATSE that’s decidedly more activist than any of its previous incarnations. Indeed, the last time that craftworkers in Hollywood staged any kind of walkout, the IA was actually on the other side.... »

Although the anointing of a best picture Oscar for Green Book has already sparked a kind of Crash-like umbrage, the truth is this year’s Oscar-fest showed no clear overall “winner” — or do we mean “Favourite?” Green Book wasn’t even nominated in the directing category, but neither was Argo, a few short years back.... »

If the Motion Picture Academy thought it was going to have smooth sailing once they retreated from the firestorm on a “most popular picture” category, and decided to go “host-less” this year, well, they were wrong. Storm clouds returned immediately upon the announcement that the awards for cinematography, film editing, live-action short, and makeup... »

It was a busy week in the February-long run-up to the Oscars, with the Directors Guild of America and the Art Directors Guild sharing not only initials, but awards ceremonies on the same weekend. While most of these shows remain in familiar venues for years on end, it was the ADG that took a... »

It’s truly the “B” in NAB that signals how much the recently concluded annual event in Las Vegas has changed. Once “broadcast” shifted to also mean “streaming,” and since that includes everything digital, NAB has become a show that’s now about, well, almost everything. Everything at least, that you’d see or hear through a... »

  If you bet on every favorite in your office’s Oscar pool this year, you did quite well. It was a year of very few surprises, and stood in stark contrast to last year’s “wow finish” –to borrow a line from the movies. And yet those who won were very thoughtful about their craft–both... »

War for the Planet of the Apes took the upper hand – or, perhaps paw – heading into the Oscar VFX showdown with Blade Runner 2049, as it won the evening’s top prize at the VES Awards, for “Best Visual Effects in a Photoreal Feature.” Indeed, the evening was marked with many instances to... »

For the second straight year, the Academy’s SciTech awards reached into the Star Trek universe to find a host: Last year, John Cho, the current Sulu voyaging on the Enterprise, anchored the evening along with Leslie Mann. This year, there was only one, but what a one: Sir Patrick Stewart, who brought both gravitas... »