Crystal Shawanda, Eagle & Hawk top nominees for Aboriginal Music Awards
Country singer Crystal Shawanda and Winnipeg rockers Eagle & Hawk each have a leading five nominations for this year's Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards.
Eagle & Hawk, an alternative rock group, are nominated for best group, best album for Sirensong and best single and best songwriter for the title song Sirensong.
The group, which won a Juno in 2002, is scheduled to perform with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra next year.
Shawanda, of Wikwemikong, Ont., has made a splash in Nashville and on the Canadian country scene with her chart-topping debut album Dawn of a New Day.
She's nominated for best album, best country album, best female singer, best video and best single. The Ojibwa singer's surname, Shawanda, translates to "dawn of a new day."
She is competing against Vancouver's Christa Couture and Savona, B.C.'s Farah Palmer for best female artist.
Shawanda and Eagle & Hawk will vie for the best album honours along with Tanya Tagaq, the Inuit throat singer nominated for her album Auk-Blood.
Tagaq, a native of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, who has been filling concert halls for her unusual performance with strings group Kronos Quartet, has nominations for best traditional female singer and best album cover.
Red Power Squad of Morinville, Alta., and Lester of White Rock, B.C., have been nominated for best group.
The nominees for best male artist are:
Mitch Daigneault of Battleford, Sask.
Main Event of Barrie, Ont.
Jace Martin of Ohsweken, Ont.
Nominees for best rap artist:
7th Generation, from Penticton, B.C.
Feenix, from Edmonton.
Wabs Whitebird of Toronto.
This year's ceremony adds several new awards, including categories for best original score and best hip-hop music video.
The Canadian Aboriginal Music Awards, in their 10th year, will be given out Nov. 28 at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.
Michael Moore political movie released free on Web
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Filmmaker Michael Moore released his latest documentary for free on the Internet on Tuesday, marking a first for the maverick director who aims to encourage young people to vote -- preferably for Democrats -- in November's U.S. presidential election.
"Slacker Uprising," a feature-length film documenting Moore's tour of swing states during the 2004 presidential election year, was made available for a free download instead of being released in movie theaters.
The maker of the award-winning anti-Iraq war blockbuster "Fahrenheit 9/11," said in a statement the gesture was "entirely as a gift to my fans."
"The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters at the polls in November," Moore said.
Moore has long been known as a firebrand filmmaker. He took on large corporations in 1989's "Roger & Me" and the U.S. gun industry in 2002's "Bowling for Columbine," which earned him an Oscar. "Slacker Uprising," made for about $2 million, comes on the heels of Moore's blistering expose of the U.S. health care system, "SiCKO," in 2007.
Although "Slacker Uprising" chronicles the director's efforts to get young people on either side of the political spectrum to vote, he said the documentary was also a "tribute to the young voters who are going to save this country from four more years of Republican rule."
Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are in a neck-and-neck race for the White House in the November 4 election, according to opinion polls.
Moore encouraged fans to download, e-mail or share the movie with everyone and anyone, or to show it in schools, colleges, church halls and community centers, adding, "I don't want to see a dime from this."
He said several websites, including iTunes and Amazon.com, were providing streaming or downloading services for free.
Moore marked the release with a one-hour online chat with fans. Hundreds of Obama supporters responded on the www.slackeruprising.com message boards, thanking Moore.
"Wow .. I really enjoyed the film ... sent it to all my friends on yahoo, myspace, facebook ... we cannot have another republican in the White House ... Vote Obama 08," wrote a contributor called Don.
The documentary is also available as a low-cost DVD for those not in the download community.
WHAT YOU DIDN'T SEE AT THE EMMYS
The stars of TV stumbled back to work yesterday - after a three-hour Emmy telecast and a night of partying.
Sure, it was the biggest night of Tina Fey's life - three Emmys for her sitcom, "30 Rock."
But here's a glimpse of what went on away from the cameras:
A LEGEND WIPING OUT
Mary Tyler Moore, on hand to pay tribute to former co-star Betty White, took a nasty spill while climbing a red carpet platform to be interviewed by "The Insider."
The actress, 72, was helped back to her feet and was able to walk away, telling reporters: "I feel fine, thanks."
ARI GOLD TEARING UP
Jeremy Piven got all choked up when a reporter asked what his late father would think of the "Entourage" star's third Emmy.
"I was talking to my mother before I came here and she was sayin' 'Just raise it up to him,'" he said, holding back tears.
ONE MAD WRITER
Kirk Ellis (Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, "John Adams") was mad as hell at his acceptance speech being cut short.
"When I got up there, as soon as I got up there, they were already flashing the 'Wrap It Up' light," he complained backstage.
"I find it very interesting that we can have 30 minutes of the ceremony devoted to reality show hosts, but the people who actually create the work, don't get time to talk!"
CASE OF THE MISSING PURSE
"If anyone has seen a small purple purse with an iPhone in it with a picture of a naked toddler, please let me know," Tina Fey pleaded backstage.
"I left it under my chair when we went up to accept the award (for Outstanding Comedy Series for '30 Rock')".
NEXT YEAR, CABLE
Add up the ratings for the Emmys - the lowest in 18 years - and the number of awards going to cable TV shows like "Mad Men" and "Damages" and what do you get?
The four broadcast TV networks - which rotate the Emmys each year - may be ready to let the Emmy show go to cable.
The current Emmy contract ends in 2010, Variety reports, and the old-line networks may want to see the the back of the awards show.
BALD & THE BEAUTIFUL
"I was late getting here because I really won't leave the house until my hair is perfect," "Breaking Bad" star Bryan Cranston joked after picking up his first-ever Emmy (Lead Actor in a Drama). "It feels like Velcro to me. And it works like Velcro. There are all kind of things sticking to my head, fuzz and Jujubes."
WARDROBE MALFUNCTION
It took some extra time for portly "Lost" star Jorge Garcia to get his Woody Wilson tux red-carpet ready. "I had to call housekeeping for some safety pins," he admits. "I discovered one of my suspenders broke."
ISN'T IT TIME
...that Heidi Klum got some speech lessons?
All she says on "Project Runway" is "You're either in or you're out" and "Auf Wiedersehn."
Using her as a comedienne at the Emmys was a mistake. Her lines, delivered in a thick accent, were incomprehensible.
TALK ABOUT MISSING A CUE
How jaded do you have to be to not give cancer-comeback kid Christina Applegate a standing ovation?
The only standing O all night was when Kathy Griffin ordered the crowd to its feet for Don Rickles.
'Godfather' films finally restored to glory
The Godfather is remembered as a dark picture. But over the years it has become less dark than intended.
The opening scene of the best-picture Oscar winner is the ultimate example. Emerging from shadow is the face of Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), the father who asks Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) for a favor on the day of the Don's daughter's wedding.
But when director Francis Ford Coppola saw the 1972 film on a screen for its 25th anniversary, he thought, "Gee, the picture doesn't look like I remember it looking. This very, very beautiful photography of (cinematographer) Gordon Willis over the years had faded."
The movie is back to its inky finest — thanks to an assist from Steven Spielberg — on The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration, available today on a new five-disc DVD collection with all three Godfather films and two discs of bonus features, as well as a four-disc Blu-ray set ($73 and $120, respectively; each film on individual DVDs, $20).
The Godfather was a victim of its own success. It earned $135 million in the USA, which in modern terms would make the film the No. 21 box-office earner of all time, according to boxofficemojo.com.
To meet demand, Paramount quickly made large numbers of copies to ship to theaters. As a result, "the negative was ultimately destroyed through the practice of printing it so much," Coppola says from Buenos Aires while editing the film Tetro.
A decade ago, Paramount stored all its Godfather film elements in a cold vault to help preserve them until a full digital makeover was possible. "No matter how seriously the studio wished to solve the problems at that time, it would not be possible until digital technology provided the tools," says Robert Harris of The Film Preserve, which eventually handled the restoration of both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II (1974).
Fast-forward to 2005: Coppola, looking to renew the preservation effort, wrote to Spielberg when DreamWorks was acquired by Paramount. Could Spielberg, who had been involved in restoring Lawrence of Arabia, spur on the project? It was an offer Spielberg could not refuse. He took the request to studio chairman Brad Grey, who set into motion the two-year process, overseen by Paramount post-production executive Marty Cohen and done at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging in Burbank, Calif.
No single usable Godfather negative remained that was suitable as a source. In the end, Harris and the preservation team gathered a bunch of backup film elements and an Italian-subtitled print used as a color reference.
Over months, the restoration technicians carefully scanned the material and then began cleaning up the footage in its digital form, 4K files (meaning the video is made up of 4,000 lines of horizontal resolution, more than four times the quality of HDTV).
In addition to digitally removing scratches and repairing damage — more than 1,000 man-hours of dirt removal was performed on The Godfather— the technicians were able to fix errors that were more than three decades old. The restaurant scene in which Michael (Al Pacino) shoots Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and Capt. McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) had been filmed over two nights. But one night's footage had been incorrectly processed, resulting in less detail and a washed-out look — an error that has been corrected digitally.
"Without those innovations, we would not have been able to move forward with the same results," Cohen says. "This is about rebuilding to some degree and putting new paint on the house."
Coppola and Willis consulted on every step of the restoration, which is detailed in a documentary on the new collections. Thanks to the restoration, Willis has regained his title "Prince of Darkness," Coppola says.
"So much of his art was to have the blackness of the black be so vividly black that everything else stood out from it," he says. "The restoration achieved that again."