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... »

  It would be hard to get more above the line than the Producers Guild Awards, unless the CEOs of the corporations who actually own film studios were to suddenly start awarding themselves. But then again, if everyone on a film is charged with performing a kind of alchemy— the writer putting words on... »

“Back when the American Government actually sponsored the arts,” recalled Homeland executive producer Lesli Linka Glatter, invoking a long-ago incarnation of the USA, “I had a grant to perform in the Far East.” That grant, to study and perform in places like Paris and London, and eventually the Far East, found her in Japan, after... »

One can think of last week’s NAB as simply one of the largest conventions in Vegas — along with the not-unrelated CES. CES, in January, is a gathering to show what kinds of screens consumers will desire, or be led to desire, to both hold and let themselves be beheld. NAB then, is the... »