Marty, Jerry bask in Oscar spotlight
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - An Oscarcast first: the award show host (or in this case hostess) running a vacuum cleaner in the audience. As amusing as it was, DeGenerously speaking, it did take the glamour of the Oscars down a notch or two.
And if it seemed as if Jerry Seinfeld was maybe auditioning for a future Oscar host gig, fuggedaboudit. He's been asked to do so by the Academy several times but has always said no. However, his time onstage as a presenter Sunday added such zing to the show that one hopes he'll reconsider one of these years.
Vacuum cleaners aside, the night did deliver one of the all-time great Oscar moments: the sight of Martin Scorsese, at last an Oscar champ, standing onstage with Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas. Talk about a memorial photo op.
And although Oscar quibbling is a tradition in itself, one certainly can't complain about a show that not only brings an Academy Award to Scorsese and such talented people as Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Hudson, Sherry Lansing, Ennio Morricone and the others honored at Oscar's 79th but also offers for any reason Catherine Deneuve.
One little post-Oscar cautionary tale for you winners: Enjoy your triumph to the fullest, but give a compassionate thought to some gents who celebrated with all their might back on April 14, 1969, when their movie "Young Americans" was named best documentary feature. It was a joyful time for producers Robert Cohn and Alex Grasshoff.
But on May 7, it was learned that "Americans" had first been shown in a theater in October 1967, which made the movie ineligible for consideration. Soon after, the fellows had to give back their beautiful, shiny Academy Award statuettes; on May 8, the first runner-up in that category, "Journey Into Self," was declared the official winner.
It was, to say the least, a bummer for Cohn and Grasshoff but an unexpected and belated windfall for "Journey" producer Bill McGaw. Hiding your new Oscar, just in case, won't help if that should happen to any of you Oscared on Sunday. But you can take comfort in the fact that such a kerfuffle has happened only once in the Academy's 79-year past.
Philip Seymour Hoffman didn't have time to linger in L.A. after being a presenter at the big O festivities. He's already back in Manhattan for Tuesday night's first preview of "Jack Goes Boating," the new play he's starring in for the Labyrinth Theater Company at the Public. It opens March 18.
Previews also begin Tuesday at the Al Hirschfeld on "Curtains," the Kander & Ebb murder mystery satire with David Hyde Pierce and Debra Monk, which did a test run in Los Angeles. Its opening night is set for March 22. On Thursday, "Altar Boyz" at the Dodger Stages begins its third year off-Broadway.
BitTorrent launches legit service
LOS ANGELES (AP) - BitTorrent Inc., makers of a technology often used to trade pirated copies of Hollywood movies, is launching a website that will sell downloads of films and TV shows licensed from the studios.
The BitTorrent Entertainment Network was set to launch Monday with films from Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate and episodes of TV shows such as "24" and "Punk'd."
The service is squarely aimed at young men and boys who regularly use BitTorrent to trade pirated versions of the same films and who more often watch such files on their computer, instead of on a big screen TV in the living room.
The San Francisco-based company is betting at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded the BitTorrent software will be willing to pay for high-quality legitimate content, rather than take their chances with pirated fare.
"The vast majority of our audience just loves digital content," Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent, said.
"Now we have to program for that audience and create a better experience for that content so the audience converts to the service that makes the studios money."
To help wean users to paying for content, BitTorrent is featuring content and pricing that appeal to its target demographic - males between the ages of 15 and 35.
TV episodes are US$1.99 to download to own, which is typical for competitor sites such as Apple Inc.'s iTunes.
The new site will rent movies for a 24-hour viewing period for $3.99 for new titles and $2.99 for older films but the site has decided not to sell films for now because the prices demanded by the studios are too high.
"We're really hammering the studios to say: 'Go easy on this audience,"' Navin said.
"We need to give them a price that feels like a good value relative to what they were getting for free."
The service also will offer Japanese anime and high-definition video, which is popular with its users. Individuals will be able to publish their works to the site, which will compete for attention beside studio content.
The BitTorrent technology pioneered by Bram Cohen assembles digital movies and other computer files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet. Its decentralized nature makes downloading more efficient, meaning a full-length movie should download in about a half-hour, about twice as fast as some other sites.
Navin said TV episodes should download in about one-third that time.
BitTorrent's decentralized structure also frustrated the entertainment industry's efforts to find and identify movie pirates.
In 2005, after the studios won a key legal decision against another pirate software company, Grokster, Cohen agreed to remove links to pirated files and start talks to licence legitimate content.
Studios also were more comfortable with the idea of distributing content over peer-to-peer networks after they adopted strong digital rights management safeguards created by Microsoft Corp.
BitTorrent's content is protected by Windows Media DRM and will only play back using Windows Media Player.
Studios striking deals with peer-to-peer networks is a good first step toward allowing users to more freely distribute films and TV shows on the Internet but it may take another five years or more for Hollywood to become completely comfortable with that, one analyst said.
"Their biggest concern is that an anonymous person passes it to an anonymous person," said Les Ottolenghi, chairman and president of Intent Mediaworks Inc., a company that helps content owners protect their works on peer-to-peer networks.
Ottolenghi recently chaired a task force that looked at digital watermarking, a technology that helps content owners track the route of its files as they make they way around the Internet.
"Their greatest hope is that someone at home passes it on to someone at home, from one device to the next and that becomes a value to the consumer," he said.
Aerosmith to rock Prince Edward Island: report
Rock veterans Aerosmith will be hosting Prince Edward Island's biggest concert ever according to a local newspaper.
The Charlottetown Guardian says it has confirmed the rock band will play the Charlottetown Driving Park Entertainment Centre on July 21.
The all-day event, part of Aerosmith's Ambassadors of Rock tour, will feature local performers such as Two Hours Traffic, In-Flight Safety and Nathan Wiley.
The tour's only other Canadian date is July 19 in Sarnia, Ont.
About 30,000 fans are expected to turn up, far more than the 18,000 who attended the Black Eyed Peas concert last year at the same venue.
Concert organizer David Carver is the person behind inviting Aerosmith to the Island. However, Carver ran into problems after last September's Black Eyed Peas event.
In early February, Deputy Mayor Stu MacFadyen said the city wouldn't allow Carver to host another concert until he paid a $17,000 bill for security. MacFadyen did say he was confident the debt would be settled soon.
John Gaudet of the Greater Charlottetown Area Chamber of Commerce, predicts the event will bring huge economic rewards to the region but also wonders if it might draw visitors away from other events during the summer.
"Does one large event take away from the other?'' Gaudet asked in the newspaper. "It's something we'll be discussing.''
Aerosmith, which has sold 100 million albums worldwide, begins its tour April 15 in Buenos Aires. The band's other stops include Dubai, Frankfurt, Paris, London and Moscow.
Labels weigh potential fallout of satellite merger
NEW YORK (Billboard) - Would a merger between XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio be good or bad for the music business?
That's the question industry executives have been wrestling with since the two companies announced plans to combine in a $13 billion deal that creates a single satellite radio behemoth.
Officially, label executives are taking a wait-and-see approach. But privately, they are debating the ramifications of the tie-up on everything from promotion opportunities to licensing revenue to existing litigation strategies.
Some of the biggest question marks surround the impact of consolidation on satellite radio's role as a promotion and exposure platform.
XM claimed 7.6 million subscribers at the end of 2006, while Sirius had 6 million. If the two companies are integrated, similar channels likely will be eliminated, giving the labels fewer outlets where they can promote new artists.
Label sources say that support from XM and Sirius in terms of airplay for baby bands oftentimes can be a key early component in building momentum to take budding acts to terrestrial radio and MTV.
Such strategies have worked effectively, particularly in the rock genre with bands like Panic! at the Disco and Hellogoodbye.
"Anytime you take away airplay it hurts," said Mike Easterlin, senior vice president of promotion for Lava/Atlantic. "There's (fewer and fewer) places to go to break new music, and this is one place where we had a couple outlets that were aggressive about it. Now we're losing one."
That's not to say that a merger of the satellite radio rivals is going to be felt immediately in terms of sales.
EFFECT ON SALES UNCLEAR
Radio promo executives note that exposure via XM and Sirius is tough to gauge in terms of CD and download purchasing.
"When MTV is really spinning a video you see the sales," Easterlin said. "I don't know (that) you necessarily get a sense from satellite radio whether it turns into sales. It is difficult to quantify what is happening there."
But not everyone is convinced that consolidation among satellite radio players is going to negatively affect the music industry's ability to find early champions for developing artists.
Edison Media Research analyst Sean Ross suggests that airplay from the combined entity will have a greater impact on the artists it plays due to its increased size and potential reach of more than 13 million subscribers combined.
If a merger is allowed to go through -- far from a certainty, according to analysts like Maurice McKenzie of Signal Hill Capital, who calls the prospects of the deal clearing regulatory hurdles a "low probability" -- the merger could also hit the labels on the bottom line.
Record companies collect licensing fees of a few million dollars each from the two satellite operators. Income the labels take in from satellite is expected to increase meaningfully when the Copyright Royalty Board announces new rates for noninteractive performance rates for sound recordings. An opinion is expected to be delivered by March 5.
Labels are also trying to determine just how a merger would affect a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the four major record companies against XM last May over the Inno, a handheld device that allows for downloading of satellite programming. A federal judge in January denied XM's attempt to dismiss the lawsuit. Some industry sources have suggested the merger could force XM to settle the deal.
'The Departed' wins best picture
LOS ANGELES - Martin Scorsese's mob epic "The Departed" won best picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday and earned the filmmaker the directing prize that had eluded him throughout his illustrious career.
"Could you double-check the envelope?" said Scorsese, who had been the greatest living American filmmaker without an Oscar. He also had never delivered a best-picture winner before, despite crafting such modern masterpieces as "Raging Bull" and "Goodfellas."
Scorsese received his Oscar from three contemporaries and friends, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. "So many people over the years have been wishing this for me," Scorsese said.
In an evening when no one film dominated as the Oscars shared the love among a wide range of movies from around the world, three of the four acting front-runners won: best actress Helen Mirren as British monarch Elizabeth II in "The Queen"; best actor Forest Whitaker as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland"; and supporting actress Jennifer Hudson as a soul singer in "Dreamgirls."
The other front-runner, Eddie Murphy of "Dreamgirls," lost to Alan Arkin for "Little Miss Sunshine."
"For 50 years and more, Elizabeth Windsor has maintained her dignity, her sense of duty and her hairstyle," said Mirren, who has been on a remarkable roll since last fall as she won all major film and television prizes for playing both of Britain's Queen Elizabeths.
"She's had her feet planted firmly on the ground, her hat on her head, her handbag on her arm and she's weathered many many storms. ... If it wasn't for her, I most certainly wouldn't be here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the queen," Mirren said, holding her Oscar aloft.
"The Departed" led the evening with four Oscars, also winning for adapted screenplay and editing.
The Oscars had their most diverse and international scope ever, with wins for two black actors and global dramas that included "Pan's Labyrinth," "Babel" and "Letters From Iwo Jima."
The soft-spoken Whitaker won for an uncharacteristically flamboyant role as the barbarous yet mesmerizing Amin.
"When I was a kid the only way I saw movies was from the back seat of my family's car at the drive-in movie," Whitaker said. "It wasn't my reality to think I would be acting in movies, so receiving this honor tonight tells me it's possible. It is possible for a kid from east Texas, raised in south-central L.A. and Carson, who believes in his dreams, commits himself to them with his heart, to touch them and to have them happen."
Arkin played a foul-mouthed grandpa with a taste for heroin in "Little Miss Sunshine," a low-budget film that came out of the independent world to become a commercial hit and major awards player.
"More than anything, I'm deeply moved by the open-hearted appreciation our small film has received, which in these fragmented times speaks so openly of the possibility of innocence, growth and connection," said Arkin.
Hudson won an Oscar for her first movie, playing a powerhouse vocalist who falls on hard times after she is booted from a 1960s girl group. The role came barely two years after she shot to celebrity as an "American Idol" finalist.
"Oh my God, I have to just take this moment in. I cannot believe this. Look what God can do. I didn't think I was going to win," Hudson said through tears of joy. "If my grandmother was here to see me now. She was my biggest inspiration."
"Little Miss Sunshine" also won the original screenplay Oscar for first-time screenwriter Michael Arndt.
The film follows a ghastly but hilarious road trip by an emotionally messed-up family rushing to get their darling girl (10-year-old supporting-actress nominee Abigail Breslin) to her beauty pageant.
"When I was a kid, my family drove 600 miles in a VW bus with a broken clutch," Arndt said, describing a road trip that mirrored the one in the film. "It ended up being one of the funnest things we did together."
The nonfiction hit "An Inconvenient Truth," a chronicle of Al Gore's campaign to warn the world about global warming, was picked as best documentary.
"People all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It's not a political issue. It's a moral issue," Gore said, joining the film's director, Davis Guggenheim, on stage.
"An Inconvenient Truth" also won original song for Melissa Etheridge's "I Need to Wake Up."
"Mostly, I have to thank Al Gore for inspiring me, showing me that caring about the earth is not Republican or Democrat, it's not red or blue. We are all green," Etheridge said.
The openly gay Etheridge kissed her partner Tammy Lynn Michaels on the lips when her name was announced and onstage referred to Michaels as her wife. The couple held a commitment ceremony in 2003 and are the parents of twins.
"Maybe someone at home is going, `Did she say wife?'" Etheridge said backstage. "I was kissing her because that's what you do, you kiss your loved one when you win an Oscar, that's what I grew up believing."
Earlier, Gore appeared with best-actor nominee Leonardo DiCaprio to praise organizers for implementing environmentally friendly practices in the show's production.
DiCaprio set up a gag with Gore, asking the 2000 presidential candidate if there was anything he wanted to announce.
"I guess with a billion people watching, it's as good a time as any. So my fellow Americans, I'm going to take this opportunity right here and now to formally announce my intentions ...," Gore said, his voice trailing away as the orchestra cut him off.
Composer Gustavo Santaolalla won his second straight Oscar for original score for "Babel," a film "that helped us understand better who we are and why and what we are here for," he said. He won the same prize a year ago for "Brokeback Mountain."
The dancing-penguin musical "Happy Feet" won the Oscar for feature-length animation, denying computer-animation pioneer John Lasseter ("Toy Story") the prize for "Cars," which had been the big winner of earlier key animation honors.
"I asked my kids, `What should I say?' They said, `Thank all the men for wearing penguin suits,'" said "Happy Feet" director George Miller (news, bio, voting record).
The savage fairy tale "Pan's Labyrinth" took three Oscars. The Spanish-language film won for art direction, makeup and cinematography.
"To Guillermo del Toro for guiding us through this labyrinth," said art director Eugenio Caballero, lauding the writer-director of "Pan's Labyrinth," the tale of a girl who concocts an elaborate fantasy world to escape her harsh reality in 1940s Fascist Spain.
Germany's "The Lives of Others," about a playwright and his actress-girlfriend who come under police surveillance in 1980s East Berlin, won the foreign-language Oscar, the films it beat including "Pan's Labyrinth."
"Letters From Iwo Jima" won the sound-editing Oscar for Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman. Murray's father was an Iwo Jima survivor.
"Thank you to my father and all the brave and honorable men and women in uniform who in a time of crisis have all made that decision to defend their personal freedom and liberty no matter what the sacrifice," Murray said.
The record holder for Oscar futility, sound engineer Kevin O'Connell, extended his losing streak to 19 nominations without a win. This time, O'Connell and two colleagues were nominated for sound mixing on "Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's portrait of the savage decline of the ancient Mayan empire, but they lost to another trio of sound engineers that worked on "Dreamgirls." "Apocalypto" lost in all three categories in which it was nominated, all for technical achievements.
Once an evening of back-slapping and merrymaking within the narrow confines of Hollywood, the Academy Awards this time looked like a United Nations exercise in diversity.
The 79th annual Oscars feature their most ethnically varied lineup ever, with stars and stories that reflect the growing multiculturalism taking root around the globe.
"What a wonderful night. Such diversity in the room," said Ellen DeGeneres, serving as Oscar host for the first time, "in a year when there's been so many negative things said about people's race, religion and sexual orientation.
"And I want to put this out there: If there weren't blacks, Jews and gays, there would be no Oscars," she said, adding: "Or anyone named Oscar, when you think about that."
The 79th Annual Academy Awards
Best Motion Picture of the Year
Winner: The Departed (2006) - Graham King
Dan's Prediction - Little Miss Sunshine
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Winner: Forest Whitaker for The Last King of Scotland (2006)
Dan's Prediction - Forest Whitaker
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Winner: Helen Mirren for The Queen (2006)
Dan's Prediction - Helen Mirren
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Winner: Alan Arkin for Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Dan's Prediction - Eddie Murphy
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Winner: Jennifer Hudson for Dreamgirls (2006)
Dan's Prediction - Jennifer Hudson
Best Achievement in Directing
Winner: Martin Scorsese for The Departed (2006)
Dan's Prediction - Martin Scorsese
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Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen
Winner: Little Miss Sunshine (2006) - Michael Arndt
Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published
Winner: The Departed (2006) - William Monahan
Best Achievement in Cinematography
Winner: Laberinto del Fauno, El (2006) - Guillermo Navarro
Best Achievement in Editing
Winner: The Departed (2006) - Thelma Schoonmaker
Best Achievement in Art Direction
Winner: Laberinto del Fauno, El (2006) - Eugenio Caballero, Pilar Revuelta
Best Achievement in Costume Design
Winner: Marie Antoinette (2006) - Milena Canonero
Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score
Winner: Babel (2006) - Gustavo Santaolalla
Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Song
Winner: An Inconvenient Truth (2006) - Melissa Etheridge ("I Need To Wake Up")
Best Achievement in Makeup
Winner: Laberinto del Fauno, El (2006) - David Martí, Montse Ribé
Best Achievement in Sound
Winner: Dreamgirls (2006) - Michael Minkler, Bob Beemer, Willie D. Burton
Best Achievement in Sound Editing
Winner: Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) - Alan Robert Murray, Bub Asman
Best Achievement in Visual Effects
Winner: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - John Knoll, Hal T. Hickel, Charles Gibson, Allen Hall
Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
Winner: Happy Feet (2006) - George Miller
Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
Winner: Leben der Anderen, Das (2006)(Germany)
Best Documentary, Features
Winner: An Inconvenient Truth (2006) - Davis Guggenheim
Best Documentary, Short Subjects
Winner: The Blood of Yingzhou District (2006) - Ruby Yang, Thomas Lennon
Best Short Film, Animated
Winner: The Danish Poet (2006) - Torill Kove
Best Short Film, Live Action
Winner: West Bank Story (2005) - Ari Sandel