The Stoning of Soraya M. just won the Audience Award at the LA Film Festival, not only being a quality film, but having become a reflection of current unrest in Iran in recent months. Oscar-nominated actress Shohreh Agdashloo has been an outspoken voice about Iran for years, no more so than through her role in this film and the discussions since. She sat down for a 30 minute chat…
The complete video interview in QT after the jump… and the podcast is available here.

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I just became aware that Entertainment Tonight Online… a Paramount-owned business… is running an EXCLUSIVE “last photo of Michael Jackson.” He is on a stretcher with a breathing bag taped to his face.
In their haste to publish this EXCLUSIVE, did it occur to him that the man was most likely as dead at that moment as he was when he was finally pronounced an hour or two later?
We know, last I checked, that he was in cardiac arrest and not breathing when the paramedics got to his rented house. We can tap dance around the pronounced time all we want, but I have seen zero indication that he was ever alive in any way other than semantic at that time.
Shall we look forward to more EXCLUSIVE photos of the corpse?
And by the way… all the media drooling over TMZ calling him dead first… is anyone actually thinking about this? The guy was dead before he arrived at the hospital. All TMZ did was to announce without the kind of confirmation that journalists consider legitimate. And had he miraculously been revived, all the gossip rag would have been accused of was jumping the gun… they have no journalistic credibility at stake. And yet, the media marvels are whoever said it FIRST!
Who is responsible for the degradation of the news? We are ALL responsible…. but especially Old Media outlets where the highest standards are supposed to be held and are often forgotten when dazzled by the speed of new media… until the porous standards of much of new media fail journalism and old media starts kicking the entire medium for the crime.

I just caught this chat from a few months ago, done for PBS’ In The Life, between the producer and the actress. I enjoyed watching it and hope you will too.

Brooks Barnes’ NYT piece commits the ultimate sin for a journalist. It seems to purposefully avoid the facts and instead throws around snarky opinion without backup, like “That harsh sentence…is as good an example as any of the prevailing sentiment about Mr. Murphy these days.” Prevailing sentiment? Did they do a survey or did he just read a bunch of blogs?
Again… the facts… Eddie Murphy’s had two flops in a row. The three films before that grossed, worldwide, $799 million, $159 million, and $155 million.
As I wrote 10 days ago, the ONLY stars who can match that run of success in the last 2.5 years are Will Smith, Ben Stiller, Matt Damon, and depending whether you count Shrek The Third or not, Vince Vaughn.
That is why people still want to be in the Eddie Murphy business. No one cares if you hated Norbit when it grossed over $150 million.
As I also pointed out, if the New York Times is going to do stories about why actors are working, they will need to go after Clooney, Pitt, DiCaprio, Wahlberg, and pretty much everyone else also, because Eddie has delivered better than they have in the last 2.5 years… even with his two flops.
This doesn’t make Eddie a great guy to all or easy or the studios’ friend. But a movie star he still is. And one of the top 10 in the world without much doubt.
The question I always ask when a story that seems to intentionally tell only one side of the story, even quoting friends of the victim, is who wanted this story out there and why? And the answer here seems to be Brad Grey’s camp, who are working every press angle they can these days to spin the second major screwed-up in hire of a president of production at Paramount.
In addition, the Richard Pryor movie that has been kept out of the press gossip rounds for the sake of getting a deal closed, was most certainly not some sort of “we don’t like Eddie anymore” flat rejection by Paramount, but rather a personal stand-off between Murphy and Grey over a deal point taken very seriously by Murphy and which added no intrinsic value to the film, making Grey’s stubbornness equally if not more dubious. If not for this minor point, raised to a stand-off, the film would be in production right now for the studio with Murphy working for almost nothing, sharing risk with the studio.
But, for the record, Murphy has issues with Fox as well, over Meet Dave, which prevented Murphy’s dream project from landing there as well.
So the list of people and studios that Eddie refuses to work with grows. Though ironically… other studios where there have been issues on both sides would still be happy to work with him on the right project.
But forgiving and moving back into business is not Mr. Grey’s way. So now, we are getting a Tom Cruise-style smear job. Now it’s John Lesher AND Eddie Murphy’s fault that the studio has no big summer movie next year, aside from the Marvel sequel on which they get paid 8%.
(Note To Aspiring Smearers: When you are the company that released the last 3 hits, owns the most recent failure, and fears the presumed next failure and you aren’t even “no comment”ed in an attack story that you had to be called on by a legit news publication, your fingerprints get CSI-clear.)
Eddie Murphy is many problematic things. And he is in that 50-year-old range where stars find their old tricks failing them. But this effort to throw him out in the trash is simply idiotic… not my opinion… just the facts.

Jean-Jacques Beineix is in LA for the American Cinematheque US premiere of one of his films and for the Cinema Libre DVD roll-out of his entire catalog, including Diva, Betty Blue, and a package of shorts that include the real life look at the man who wrote The Diving Bell & The Butterfly. The writer-director sat down for a 30 minute chat.
The complete video interview in QT after the jump… and the podcast is available here.

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Anne Fletcher spends 30 minutes chatting about her new hit film, The Proposal.
The complete video interview in QT after the jump… and the podcast is available here.

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This has been delayed by a couple of days because I was without a computer, but now I have my computer and this link, in which we have pulled the Top 20 from our annual critics’ Top 10 chart. Here is what my personal look at the last 3 years delivers…
2008/9 Oscar Nominees
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire
Note that nominee The Reader was #32 on this list… the only case of a nominee outside of this measure’s Top 20 in these last 3 years.,
I have no problem picking 5 more excellent nomination candidates from the critics consensus top 20
Wall-E
The Dark Knight
The Wrestler
Rachel Getting Married
Man on WIre
A Christmas Tale
The Visitor
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
And that doesn’t even include Doubt, which would surely be one of the next five nominees.. and was ranked #25.
2007/8 Oscar Nominees
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
I have no problem picking 9 more excellent nomination candidates from the critics consensus top 20
The Diving Bell & the Butterfly
Into The Wild
Ratatouille
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days
Sweeney Todd
I’m Not There
Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead
The Lives of Others
The Savages
And that doesn’t even include Zodiac, which has a very passionate following.
2006/7 Oscar Nominees
Babel
The Departed
Letters from Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen
I have no problem picking 6 more excellent nomination candidates from the critics consensus top 20
Pan’s Labrynth
Borat
Little Children
Dreamgirls
Volver
The Proposition
And that doesn’t even include United 93 or Children of Men or Half Nelson, which have very passionate followings, U93 most likely to make the cut.

Every surprise of The Academy keeping a secret and making a controversial, but forward thinking move is a little undone this morning with the fumbling of a press release and planned Monday news conference to announce a change that may kill off Best Song and moving the honorary awards from the telecast to a November dinner.
This is classic over-responding to a problem in one case and crazy responding to another.
In the first case, the songs, this is a weird interim plan that is even worse conceived than foreign and doc. There will be a “quality” hurdle to qualify the category. Wha?
In the second case, the idea of a full event and dinner for these honored folks makes sense. But how can they not still end up being acknowledged during the show? It’s not that these moments make great TV, as a rule. But why do they do any of it? To honor their best, right?
The reason for this decision, on top of hoping to shorten the show, was that the Board found itself not honoring John Calley and Alan Ladd, Jr last year in a time concession. Much of the board realized that this was a travesty.
But they need to think bigger. They need to seriously consider a TV event, highly produced, to celebrate the tech nominees. A show that really celebrates how movies are made, complete with a lot of behind the scenes content, could be its own modest hit. And either give out Oscars that night… or don’t. If you want to give awards out during the big show, you can do 8 of those in 30 minutes or less if you remove the set-up.
Anyway…
Announcing today came as a result of some fumbling of multiple press releases… sigh. And the idea this time? Not as exciting or controversial. And so it goes…

So what could be a more intriguing insider story this week than Nikki Finke being hired for large dollars by the next wannabe Gawker? The Academy moves to 10 Best Pictures. Top Farrah Fawcett, dead and documented at 62? goodbye Michael Jackson. Transformers: Revenge of Another Robot Thingy That Cant Be Distinguished From The Rest opening to mega-business? Yawn. Public Enemies dissapointing many as not bad, but not enough? Yawn. Even Bruno, whose embargo seems to have held, gets outed for having a MJ moment. (The LA Film Festival – and any filmmaker with a premiere – must have suffered last night, being in Westwood in the middle of the MJ mess.)
Busy busy.
One more note about the Oscar thing. Roger Ebert does a very good job of getting the story of how this all happened. But he starts a little late in the game. Even before Bill Condon and Larry Mark were hired last year, the obsession of the Academy Board was – as it still is – saving their TV show. It is the fiscal engine that makes everything good The Academy does possible.
The most wanted thing, which was dismissed over and over and over again was to shorten the show by doing fewer categories on the main show’s air. The problem was/is that “smaller” categories board members would vote in a block to keep every category in the main show. The best that Condon & Mark could do was to create the packages of awards with one presented keeping them together in a tight block during the show. But the show still ended up running over 3 hours and slightly past the 3:13 target. Part of the fill were the packages of genres of film… and these ran even as other packages were cut from air.
The new 10 BP law will play out as it does. No one knows what the precise outcome will be… more genre… more indie… more art… docs… foreign. But we do know that the show is now a little longer, not shorter. And we do know that there are still branches pushing for new awards.
The Academy still faces the Old to New Media challenge. Like others, they have to either make strong leaps or they will end up left behind. The 10 was a very interesting start.