Grammys Postponed: “The 64th annual ceremony, which had been set for January 31 in Los Angeles, has been rescheduled, according to a joint statement from the Recording Academy and CBS, as the Omicron variant has led to a surge in cases nationwide. The new date will be announced soon, the statement said: ‘The health and safety of those in our music community, the live audience, and the hundreds of people who work tirelessly to produce our show remains our top priority.'”

Kyle Buchanan Seeks “Crowd-Pleasers” For Oscar

“I was seeing where everything was headed. But [the video] was premature. It wasn’t the right timing, and it wasn’t the right thing. It was in poor taste. All pure intentions, but sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye, right? I felt like I wanted to take the air out of it, so that was a delightful opportunity to do that.”
Gal Gadot On Celebs Singing “Imagine”

“The most depressing thing about Don’t Look Up: that even it knows how little it can actually hope to do. That hit especially hard for me. As a writer and journalist, I’ve long wanted to believe in the power of words to influence and effect change, even while suspecting that all the thoughtfully constructed columns in the world will do far, far less to save the planet than ten minutes with a crowbar in the control room of a coal-fired power station. Here’s hoping I’m wrong. Or, alternatively, that it will inspire a generation to finally pick up some crowbars.”
Don’t Look Up Seen From Down Under

Aces Go Places
“American Cinema Editors (ACE) announced today that the 72nd Annual ACE Eddie Awards, recognizing outstanding editing in film and television, will be held on March 5 at the Theater at the ACE Hotel, with an after-party to be held at the historic Clifton’s Republic. (The previously announced ceremony date was February 26.) “We are thrilled to be partnering with the Theater at the ACE Hotel for the 72nd Annual ACE Eddie Awards,,” stated ACE executive director Jenni McCormick.  “We are monitoring the situation and should we deem it necessary, we are prepared to make the Eddies completely virtual this year. We are also working alongside the Art Directors Guild to avoid any overlap in our ceremonies.”

Golden Globes 2022: No Booze, No Hosts, No Guests, No TV Show, No Booze

“Ontario And Québec Movie Theatre Shutdown Is Shameful”: “As a human being who requires some—any!—simple cultural pleasures to make this life worth living, I’m depressed, confused, anxious, distressed, exhausted and Howard Beale-level furious. Ontario businesses, workers ‘disappointed’ in new round of closures, capacity limits…This new shutdown will mark the fourth time that Ontario has closed movie theatres since March, 2020, each instance absent public-facing data proving that cinemas are helping to spur the public health crisis… Cinemas are one of the most controlled indoor public environments available for a quick escape outside one’s home, at least in Ontario: fifty-percent capacity, mandatory masking, little to no talking or movement, and, recently, a concessions ban to foil any mask mischief (a move that also makes the business essentially unsustainable). Ontario’s various movie industry players issued carefully worded statements of regret. Cineplex, which has sixty-seven locations in the province, assuaged customers by noting that all presales would be refunded automatically.  And TIFF, whose five-screen Lightbox finally reopened this past September for daily screenings, said it was ‘disappointed that we won’t be able to bring some light and inspiration to our audience for a while, but we look forward to sharing the big-screen experience of community and film with you again soon.’”

Co-Producer Joseph Patel On The Making Of Summer Of Soul: “As many of us music journalists have come to know, once you meet Ahmir, he’s just like one of us: He’s a fan. He knew my byline and pieces I had written. So we just geeked out over music. After the interview, I ended up hanging out with him for like 10 hours; actually, the whole weekend, like off the clock. In a lot of ways, Summer of Soul is the result of that 25-year relationship.”

Kevin Kelly On Public Domain: “It is in the commons that ideas blossom. When scientific discoveries are shared, they can be accelerated. When the blueprints of inventions are shared (and not hidden) new inventions spring up faster. Walt Disney made his fortune by reworking public domain fairytales. Because the stories were already in the commons, he was able to re-interpret them into modern forms. As many others also did. In recent years, Disney has begun to create new fairytales, but they are not shared in the commons. Even after the death of Disney, when he can no longer be incentivized, his stories are given a monopoly. The maximum gain to society would come if those stories, too, were returned into the public domain commons. But ironically, Disney has been the chief force in preventing copyrights in the U.S. to return to the commons. Rather than concede there are multiple origins, our current system rewards the first person who claims to be the first. But the ownership we bestow on the first to claim originality it is rather arbitrary, although it does indeed spur more effort.  A better way of accounting is to admit that all ideas and intellectual goodness is actually born from the commons and into the commons, from the pool of all that is known. That is, ideas arise from the commonwealth of all knowledge and current ideas. Without this commonwealth of knowledge, there would be no new ideas. However, if no one is rewarded for working on bringing new ideas to life, then far few would try. So even though the reward for originality is arbitrary, it is still useful. My proposal then is that we continue to award monopolies briefly on those who claim first rights (while acknowledging it is basically arbitrary). So for a brief period of time we remove this idea from the commons and bestow a monopoly upon it. The ‘owner’ has exclusive rights for that monopoly period. But as soon as possible it is returned to the commons where great things can happen. A novel thing is born from the commons, and it is returned to the commons as soon as possible. In the meantime to encourage future creation we give it a temporarily limited monopoly… For best results for society, this monopoly should be as minimal as possible in its duration and privileges. ‘Soon as possible’ is the key phrase. No IP should last a century, no matter what. In our fast-moving world, 20 years of protection is more than enough for most ideas. Another step is to emphasize the rights of monopolies should have corresponding duties. Those duties might include publication, dissemination, education, APIs, platform tools, or many other tools that would facilitate its use when it returns to the commons.”

Cineplex Closes All Sixty-Seven Ontario Cinemas Over Outbreak

“Mailer—whose sins and obsessions, dark, comic, revealing, have always been his subject; and whose centennial collection has been uneventfully underway for many months—helps make the curious point that it isn’t, in fact, the work that causes concern but rather the prospect of controversy itself that scares corporate entities away. Trying to avoid more controversy as a byproduct of trying to avoid controversy, no senior editor or executive at Random House was willing to talk about the Mailer project, referring all comment to a publicity department representative who issued a non-denial denial saying that—although agreement had been reached with Mailer’s estate, the book had an editor, David Ebershoff, and Random House had agreed to foot the bill to pay Mailer’s biographer, J. Michael Lennon (Norman Mailer: A Double Life, published to acclaim in 2013), to select the essays—a final contract had not been signed, therefore the book was not technically canceled, it was instead, not acquired. The publisher’s fig-leaf of virtue... With Random House having previously gobbled up most of the publishing industry (including with it many of Mailer’s former publishers), and having most recently agreed to acquire Simon & Schuster, one of its few remaining rivals, there aren’t many options left for a major new publication of the Mailer essays, many of which have helped reshape modern journalism.”

“U.S. movies accounted for just 12 percent of China’s total box office sales, or $899 million, down from a 30 percent share in 2019 and total sales of $2.8 billion.”
China World’s Largest Theatrical Market For Second Year

Aaron Gell At Los Angeles Surveys The Variety-Rolling Stone-Ankler Circumstance With Reporter Tatiana Siegel

Morbius Moves To April Fools’

IT’S THE THEATRICAL, STUPID: “In the wake of global box office roaring back with Spider-Man: No Way Home, studio executives would be foolish to put this year’s slate of event movies—Avatar 2; Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness; Thor: Love & Thunder; Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; Sonic 2; Top Gun: Maverick; The Batman—theatrical day-and-date with streaming. But with older adults slow to return to theaters during the pandemic, the question becomes whether more of these types of movies, often Oscar-bait ones, will be released day-and-date or on a truncated theatrical window.”

How The Kids Of C’mon, C’mon Were Cast, Including Devante Bryant 

Greg Olear: “Almost every review I’ve read of Don’t Look Up suggests that it’s about climate change. I’ve watched it twice, and this take honestly never occurred to me. It can certainly be read as a commentary on vaccines/covid. But for me, it’s about the Trump/GOP attack on our democracy—an incontrovertible fact that half the country (and most of the media) has don’t-look-upped into a both-sides political issue.”

“Everything you need to know about The Legend of the Lone Ranger is this: it takes an hour before he even puts on his mask. The 1981 flop has plenty of other issues, which you can see for yourself streaming on Amazon or Pluto TV. All of them are as plainly evident now as they were when critics first roasted it forty years ago. It’s humorless and sluggish. For a movie about character who famously never shot to kill, it’s strangely hyper-violent. Most egregious of all, it’s just no fun. The Legend of the Lone Ranger is a movie so determined to reinvent the western hero that it all but ruins him. And the story behind its failure is one of Texas-size hubris.”

Random House Drops Posthumous Norman Mailer Book

Jon Stewart On J. K. Rowling’s Anti-Semitic Cariacatures