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- And The Award For The Most Dead Entertainment Medium Goes To… The Web
- What 'The Social Network' Won (Three Awards, But Not Best Picture) #Oscars
| And The Award For The Most Dead Entertainment Medium Goes To… The Web | Top |
| You Californians sure seem obsessed with this "Oscar" thing. As I write these words, every one of my friends with a 9x zip code is dressed to the nines, snarking their way through one of the forty three billion Academy Awards parties taking place across the state. I am not amongst them: partly because I am unforgivably late with this column, partly because I haven't seen any of the movies nominated for the major categories, and partly because watching Anne Hathaway and James Franco (pictured left) being funny is like watching a Chuck Lorre remake of Joanie Loves Chachi. But that's not to say I don't love the Oscars. In fact I adore them. As an unabashed old media snob, nothing pleases me more than an annual reminder that Hollywood still exists. That, for all the ways Internet piracy has chipped away at the bottom line, billions of dollars still churn annually through an area of roughly 24 square miles. And that – forget Zuckerberg and Williams and Pincus – there is still an army of bona fide celebrities earning a crust simply from being glamourous and wonderful and radiant. You wouldn't catch Natalie Portman dead in an Addidas hoodie and a pair of flip flops. (Speaking of Natalie Portman: if I were Nassim N. Taleb I'd tell my publishers to immediately re-release The Black Swan with a picture of a ballerina on the front. Fuck 'em.) The spectacle of Oscar night has also prompted me to consider the received wisdom that one day the grand Hollywood dream will die. That piracy will finally claim victory over ticket and DVD sales and the only people able to continue making films will be children with Flipcams and indie documentary makers with trust funds (imagine a very tight Venn diagram). One day, we’re told, all entertainment will be free, and quality will be replaced by quantity: magazines by blogs, newspapers by tweets, movies by clips, stories by SEO. For those of us who care about storytelling and spectacle and five years of hard work for 120 minutes of screen time, it's a depressing future, but it's one we've been warned to expect for some time. Laugh it up, Hathaway, your days are numbered. And. Yet. There's no doubt old media is struggling: newspapers are shuttering, Borders and Blockbuster are screwed, movie attendance is down, people are cutting the cable cord — all that crap. But to assume all of those eyeballs are heading online for free content is just plain wrong. Yes, they're heading online, but increasingly they're continuing to spend: buying books on the Kindle (ebooks are now outselling paper books on Amazon), watching movies on Netflix (20 million members, paying at least $7.99 a month is no chump change) and now subscribing to newspaper and magazine apps on the iPad. It's traditional at this point to give a personal example of the phenomenon, presented with enough availability bias chutzpah to suggest that the author's own experience must automatically be evidence of a trend. So here goes: yesterday I was in a Tiffani Thiessen mood (as I have been since 1996) and went to Hulu to catch up on the current season of White Collar . My God, I love that show. I watched the previous season entirely for free that way, gladly tolerating the "limited commercial interruption" between acts. This time though: no such luck. Episodes are only available 30 days after their original airing. I was outraged. 30 days! I demand satisfaction immediately! Of course what I could have done at this point – and what experts in digital native behaviour tells us we all do – is to spend twenty minutes trawling the free web for a torrent of each episode, and then maybe another hour downloading them. But that's not what I did. What I did, and what any grown up with $1.99 to their name would do in the same situation, is to head over to Amazon and plunk down two bucks to watch the current episode on demand . And then another $1.99 to watch the previous episode, and then another $1.99 to… yeah, I know, I should have bought a season pass. The point is this: both actual and anecdotal evidence tells the same story: paid content is not dead. In fact, it’s making a serious comeback. Most adults do not want to steal intellectual property if there's an affordable alternative to doing so. As producers of content get smarter; knowing how much to give away for free, settling on impulse price points, streamlining purchasing down to a single click, it becomes easier and easier for those adults not to steal. Ease of payment is only part of the equation though. The real sea change in our willingness to pay for content has come as a result of dedicated devices – Kindle, iPad, TiVo – that offer a significantly improved media viewing experience to a laptop screen and a built in payment method that's quicker and easier than stealing. It's simply easier for me to pay to read the Economist on my iPad than it is to read it for free on the web. Likewise it’s increasingly more straightforward for me to buy books on my Kindle and Fight Club and movies on my iPad than it is to steal either. Meanwhile free web content continues its race to the bottom: companies like Demand Media, Associated Content and – yeah – Aol have dropped any pretense of quality journalism in favour of churning out page after page of SEO horseshit. Previously austere publications like Forbes Digital (as was) have turned into link-grabby collaborative blogs. To survive online, newspapers have replaced text with slideshows, news with gossip. It’s no wonder those who produce content that requires more than a ten second attention span – book publishers, movie and tv studios – are fleeing to the safer ground of dedicated devices. The truth is that the grand idea of the web as a content platform has failed. To make money on a web it’s all about grabbing more and more eyeballs to compensate for plummeting CPMs. On that web there's no place for quality, and in five years time we'll see the medium for what it really is: a brilliant advertising platform, and very little else. The web continue to be the perfect place to seed clips from TV shows and movies, in order to drive purchases on other platforms. It'll still be a fantastic way to promote Kindle book sales by giving away free chapters and hosting author blogs. It'll remain a wonderful way for news organisations to build their brands through free content, in order to drive subscriptions to iPad apps. And a great way for blogs like TechCrunch to build "mindshare" that allows us to host successful conferences. But as a standalone medium? The web? In five years? Forget it. But I won't care – I'll have long abandoned the web for my entertainment needs, as will anyone else with even a modest amount of disposable income, a dedicated media device or two and a hankering for the uninterrupted pleasure of watching a good story, told magnificently with nary a hint of SEO. And with that thought, a text arrives from an Oscar-watching friend. Natalie Portman has won the Best Actress Oscar for Black Swan. Apparently the poor thing is crying. Don't worry Natalie, dear – it's all going to be fine. | |
| What 'The Social Network' Won (Three Awards, But Not Best Picture) #Oscars | Top |
| Despite losing Best Picture to The King’s Speech , Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s epic Facebook creation myth The Social Network did pick up three Oscars tonight, more than any film about nerds has ever garnered, unless you count A Beautiful Mind. The Social Network won Best Film Editing (Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter), Best Original Score (Trent Reznor) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin) at tonight’s 83rd Academy Awards Ceremony. The film, which picked up four awards including Best Picture at the Golden Globes and was nominated for eight Oscars, was definitely the Twitter and tech crowd favorite but apparently not the Academy’s. We did indeed have something to to root for despite David Fincher losing to The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper for Best Director, Jesse Eisenberg (who played Mark Zuckerberg) also losing to the very-deserving Colin Firth in the Best Actor category, and the film itself losing to The King’s Speech in the most important category of the night, Best Picture. The King’s Speech, with twelve nominees and four wins, was perhaps the “biggest dog in this fight, ” to borrow a term from the film. Traditionally the Best Editing award is usually an indicator of what film will win Best Picture (only nine films have taken the coveted Best Picture award without winning Best Editing) but that rule didn’t hold in this case. Both Inception and The King’s Speech beat The Social Network at sheer amount of awards won, at four to The Social Network’s three. Here’s the full list of what The Social Network won, what it was nominated for and who it was up against, via Slashfilm ( Bold = Winner). BEST PICTURE: Black Swan The Fighter Inception The Kids Are All Right The King's Speech 127 Hours The Social Network Toy Story 3 True Grit Winter's Bone DIRECTING: Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan David O. Russell, The Fighter Tom Hooper, The King's Speech David Fincher, The Social Network Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE: Javier Bardem, Biutiful Jeff Bridges, True Grit Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network Colin Firth, The King's Speech James Franco, 127 Hours ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: 127 Hours (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing), Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin Toy Story 3 (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Michael Arndt. Story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich True Grit (Paramount), Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen Winter's Bone (Roadside Attractions), Adapted for the screen by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini CINEMATOGRAPHY: Black Swan (Fox Searchlight) Matthew Libatique Inception (Warner Bros.) Wally Pfister The King's Speech (The Weinstein Company) Danny Cohen The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing) Jeff Cronenweth True Grit (Paramount) Roger Deakins FILM EDITING: Black Swan (Fox Searchlight) Andrew Weisblum The Fighter Paramount Pamela Martin The King's Speech (The Weinstein Company) Tariq Anwar 127 Hours (Fox Searchlight) Jon Harris The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing) Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter ORIGINAL SCORE: How to Train Your Dragon (Paramount) John Powell Inception (Warner Bros.) Hans Zimmer The King's Speech (The Weinstein Company) Alexandre Desplat 127 Hours (Fox Searchlight) A.R. Rahman The Social Network (Sony Pictures Releasing) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross SOUND MIXING Inception, Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick The King's Speech, Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley Salt, Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin The Social Network, Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten True Grit, Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland @keisertroll Tom Keiser I WANT TO THANK YOU LIKE AN ANIMAL #reznor #oscars about 3 hours ago via web Retweet Reply @dtrinh Danny Trinh Sandra: "Jesse, you've inspired lonely young men around ye world hunched over keyboards." We got a shoutout! about 1 hour ago via Twitter for iPhone Retweet Reply @alexia Alexia Tsotsis Tech bloggers of the world rejoice! You don't have to write another post tonight. #Oscars about 1 hour ago via Seesmic Desktop Retweet Reply @parislemon MG Siegler The Social Network isn't cool. You know what's cool? The King's Speech. 54 minutes ago via Twitter for Mac Retweet Reply @brandchannelhub brandchannel The Social Network wins Best Editing nod, while Facebook won't let you edit what you post. #hmm #Oscars about 2 hours ago via web Retweet Reply CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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