Who was asking for Dave Chapelle or Shane Gillis?

Honest question to Lorne: Who is asking for Nicky Fucking Haley to be on SNL? 

Chapman was without doubt the highlight of the night, just an incredible performance.

Egad. First Nikki Hayley and now Shane Gillis? Is this SNL's "Republicans buy sneakers too." momemt?

A major issue is that nearly every writer from the past years is gone, replaced by new, disposable people who are trying to make a name for themselves without making real sparks, plus the two proverbial cockroaches who have outlived nuclear apocalypse, Barsanti and Hughes. At this point, the AV Club is mostly an IP, a…

We’re just innocent bystanders. Univision (back when it was still named Univision) buying a majority share in Onion, Inc. was the beginning of a long, slow slide into mediocrity. Univision bought up The Onion sites and the Gawker sites thinking they’d use them to make content for their short-lived English language…

Okay but do the women get to be “attainably” hot too, or do they still all have to look like Meg Ryan?

AI has no more inherent right to free expression than your toaster. It also has no self to express and no ability to express at all. It can only regurgitate.

What is it satirizing? You can’t just say everyone imitating someone is automatically satire. If your goal is to make a copy that is as close as possible to a real person / performance, you’re violating copyright, not creating a satire.

Yep, agreed. “Then we can’t do it at all” is not a compelling argument to me. Find other ways to stand up for yourself or stop doing what you’re doing.

The AI people all say if they had to pay to license the content it’s trained on, it would be impossible. In which case, I feel like that’s fine. I can’t do all kinds of things because they’d be illegal.

I really hope this lawsuit (or one of the hundreds of others) is successful and sets a legal precedent that AI can only be trained on work that is explicitly licensed (and paid for). I suspect it may be too late to stop the inevitable tide of shit, but it would be some protection for artists.

Problem is, the “there were just too many good directors this year” argument gets used *every* year. And it’s usually true that there’s a lot of good directors, but the fact that this happens year after year just emphasizes the fact that the Academy’s approach is “nominate the dudes first, then maybe we can consider…

The Gerwig snub is the worst of the lot. She did something that showed remarkable creativity and craft based upon a doll that already had a bunch of silly little-kid cartoons associated with it. The only anyone didn’t think it would be a disastrous idea from the very beginning was that her name was attached to it. 

Greta’s snub will be more and more shameful as time goes by.

It makes me think of high school, where there was some kid who was kind of annoying and you didn’t like, but then some obnoxious dick in class would make fun of them in a really off-putting way that actually made you like them a little more just out of spite.

I really miss the AV Club.

Just a friendly reminder that these award nominations are done for “comedy” and the voting body has admitted to not watching movies they nominate.   So maybe we should just not look 

I like the insanity of The Tommy Westphal Theory: If St. Elsewhere was entirely a made-up hospital in the mind of young Tommy Westphal, then any character who appeared on the show who’s from a different TV show must also be part of his invention, and consequently the other show itself.

In an odd way, St. Elsewhere’s finale gave it a sort of TV immortality. Look at how many different theories and discussion it’s had 35 years after it ended. Had it been a typical finale, it wouldn’t have been remembered. For example, ER was a much more popular and longer lasting medical show. How many people can…