You don't need to be a member of the Academy to warrant inclusion, but that's the case about 95% of the time, I'd wager. (It's hard to know for sure because we don't know exactly who's a member of the Academy and who's not.) If you were a massive star otherwise and the Academy doesn't want to deal with the P.R.…

I think Temple of Doom has some really great set pieces—the opening shootout in the cabaret, the secret passage leading to the totally ridiculous cult set-up and subsequent ripping-out-of-some-dude's heart, the mining cart chase, the suspension bridge scene at the end. Those are all classics and so perfectly…

Asked for insane appearance fees (upwards of $100K per appearance) to make appearances at film festivals/smaller award shows/etc. during Precious's Oscar push, mostly. This is an expected part of the job when you're working on an Oscar nominee-caliber film, and even the biggest stars don't get paid extra for it. The…

I could have sworn I read an interview where she alluded to this, but I can't find it now. Maybe it was somebody else commenting on the alleged boys-don't-read-girl-books phenomena?

Is he meant to be so fake and self-satisfied

Do you really think Westerfeld hasn't broken through to mainstream success? Obviously he's not at Hunger Games levels, but the Uglies series sold a few million copies and was basically the trend-setter
for the current heap of dystopias out there. (M.T. Anderson with
Feed, too—he hasn't released anything serious in a…

I'm sure that there are a million and one reasons behind it, depending on the person, but I've found that a major draw to reading Twilight (or Harry Potter or whatever) isn't the actual books, it's part of being a part of a shared experience. You can go to midnight release parties, you can discuss the books with your…

I didn't watch the movie, so I can't speak to that—I can understand your frustration with the trailer, though!

Yeah, I mean, Bloom is an aesthete at heart, by which I mean he cares a bunch more about the quality of the prose than he does about the ideas that the prose communicates. He would rather have 100 played-out Shakespearian love sonnets than one less-stunning poem that explores more interesting ideas. He'd rather have…

It's would be entirely possible for Katniss's mother to be white and her father to be not white and for Prim to still have blonde hair and blue eyes. Not terrible likely, but definitely possible.

Yeah, there are definite legitimate complaints about the Hunger Games series to be made—the world-building being a major flaw. But not exploring sophisticated ideas is not a particularly valid critique of the series, in my opinion.

The problem with The Fault in Our Stars is that it's a deconstruction of a Cancer Novel that can also be read, by less introspective readers, as a Cancer Novel. On one hand, I think that probably explains its runaway success—the vast majority of its readers had never read Green's work before and were mainstream…

But that's the problem—people think that since this is YA, it must be unsophisticated and exploring unsophisticated ideas, so they don't recognize those ideas and concepts when they pop up. Example: The Fault in Our Stars is a deconstruction of the Cancer Story; it pointedly undermines Love Story/Lurlene…

Generally:
- a protagonist between the ages of 12-19 (this used to be a pretty hard rule, but there's been more elasticity with it lately)
- themes and plots that would appeal to young adult readers

I'm wondering where that argument is coming from, too. Not even counting people like Hinton or Blume who aren't really active in the genre anymore—yes, John Green is huge, but he's the only male author who's really made it huge off of realistic YA fiction in recent years. The other guys who have been really successful…

Well, it was a fashion/beauty-related forum where we also discussed other stuff, not a media-focused forum, so I don't think that was the problem with the sample! Posters did skew middle-class and educated, though, so I wouldn't expect it to reflect the general population.

Meyer and Rowling are definitely on a different level than pretty much anybody else in the business, but I think you're underestimating Green's sales—he made Forbes' list of the top-earning authors in the world last year. The Fault in Our Stars sent him into an entirely different stratosphere than he'd been operating…

Is the idea that adult readers of YA are otherwise non-readers or limited readers statistically supported, though? My anecdotal experience would suggest the opposite—that readers that are willing to branch out from their usual genre to try one outside of their comfort zone/that isn't marketed towards their demographic…

She also made the protagonist of her series male instead of female because she figured girls would read about a male protagonist but boys wouldn't read about a female one.

It's tough, because on one hand, Looking for Alaska is absolutely the better novel, but on the other hand . . . most of the random internet hate piled on Twilight absolutely has a gender-related bent to it. Less about Meyer's gender (although that too), and more along the lines of girls liking stupid things and…