I don't think arguing that it's about the racial issues and not the behind-the-scenes business shit, or vice versa, makes any sense—because at the end of the day, all of these issues are interrelated and impossible to divorce from each other. Like, I don't think that people in the Academy were saying, “Hey, that's a…

12 Years a Slave and American Sniper were expected to be in the Oscar fight from the beginning, thanks to their directors' pedigrees, and were treated as such. Selma wasn't expected to be reviewed nearly as well as it did, and thus they didn't even begin their Oscar campaign until the second half of December, when…

It wasn't expected to be Oscar nominated, which explains the lack of an Oscar campaign. The studio didn't push it very hard because most similar pictures in recent years (middle-brow historical dramas with largely black casts and no white savior figure—Red Tails, The Great Debaters, etc.) haven't done particularly…

I can't blame Paramount, because I don't think they knew how well the movie was going to be reviewed or that it would even have a shot at Oscar nominations. They received the final cut of the movie on November 26th (I think?), and it usually takes six weeks to make screeners. When they saw how well it was being…

Yeah, they only sent them to Academy/BAFTA members, which meant that they lost out on any opportunity to build buzz at the guild award shows, and they were sent so late that a lot of Academy members didn't get them before they voted. I don't think it was snubbed so much as a victim of circumstance. The film was only…

Apparently Paramount didn't get the Selma screeners out to Oscar voters until December 17th—they had no idea it was going to be reviewed as well as it was—which meant that they missed out on sending them to most of the earlier guild award shows and lost that opportunity to build buzz, and most Oscar voters were busy…

Yeah, I thought about that after I posted! I still can't see them wanting to cut off the Japanese market, but it's considerably more plausible than going up against China.

Wasn't he crazy before Crystal Skull came out? I remember cringing when I found out he was cast in it.

Yeah, I would rather go backwards in time than forwards, if they could find a way to sell it. That 1850-early 1900s window of exploration provides us with tons of great adventure settings. Once you pass 1950, the world has more or less been explored to death, and the idea that there are these mysterious pockets of the…

I don't think that Disney would ever paint the Japanese as the villains, as that would inevitably make the film a tough sell in Asia/the overseas market.

I wish—if they have to do this—that they'd just re-cast LaBeouf's role with a different actor and then make no reference to the fact he was ever played by anybody else.

TCM plays it unedited (as always). Some of the other channels cut it, I think.

NPR did an April fool's joke where they posted a semi-controversial headline, and then the text of the article was basically, "Yeah, we totally made that up. We're have a hypothesis that lots of our commenters rush to comment without reading the article, so we're testing that out." And needless to say . . . they were…

The numbers dropped, but I don't think they dropped any more than the network was expecting. They obviously knew it wasn't going to do last year's numbers because so many of last year's viewers turned in for the sheer curiosity of it (both in how a live theater production on TV would work, and to see how Carrie…

I think part of the problem is the difference between "family friendly" and "appealing to children." There's nothing in, say, Guys and Dolls that I wouldn't show to my hypothetical children, but there's also nothing in it that's going to draw a kid that isn't already a musical theater buff, and NBC obviously needs to…

I didn't realize they'd already decided on the next show, and was trying to guess what they might pick next: The King and I, maybe Annie a few years down the road, if they can get the rights to it. Bye Bye Birdie? R&H's Cinderella is pretty much a gimme if they can get the rights, right? It has a good television…

I think the caveats here are that a) in that era, most people wouldn't necessarily understand what a shot wound and the accompanying blood was "supposed" to look like (even now, the only reason most of us think we do is TV/movies, and you can tell from olden-day movie wounds that their conception of a realistic…

I don't really pay much attention to comedy, and occasionally I'm like, "Well, that's weird; why don't I? I should remedy that." And so I click on lists like this, and then they're 90 percent men, and I'm like . . . "Oh. That's why I don't pay attention to comedy."

"Ten Little N——-" was the British variation on the song. In the U.S., even in the 1930s that wasn't going to fly, so it was published alternately between "Ten Little Indians" and "And Then There Were None" until the 1980s, when they switched entirely to the latter. The UK versions also used their original title into…

In America, it's hard to sue someone for claiming you raped them, because under our slander/libel laws, that means you have to prove you never raped them, which is obviously . . . not very provable. At least in most cases.