Media

The Walt Disney Company bought most of Mr. Murdoch’s entertainment assets last year in a $71.3 billion deal. That included the 20th Century Fox studio and its art-house sibling, Fox Searchlight. On Friday, the employees at the main movie studio arrived to a new email format (@20thcenturystudios) without the Fox. A Disney spokesman confirmed that both labels would drop Fox from their logos. Disney had no further comment. – The New York Times

Agencies are under growing pressure “to scale up and adapt to a changing media industry. The rise of streaming and the expected decline of TV packaging — where agencies collect fees for packaging talent on shows — combined with the effects of the longstanding writers boycott, have squeezed talent agencies, some of which have weathered high-level executive turnover, laid off workers and cut back on overtime pay for assistants.” – Los Angeles Times

At the moment, the Oscars reflect the Academy, but the Academy reflects nothing but its august name; plausible deniability and the shunning of responsibility are built into the current system. Paradoxically, counting only votes from members with a stake in the image of the industry put forth by the industry would cast onto the Oscars the sharp light of accountability, would be, in effect, a truth-in-awards program.” – The New Yorker

Elsewhere, we carp, battle and grind one another down for bragging rights and total triumph. Sports culture and champion-making has seeped into nearly every aspect of life. It’s all just a little (or a lot) more elbowy and contentious — primary campaigns, award show nominations, lists of the decade’s best albums. – Washington Post

Pop-star holograms are exploding out of a chemical reaction between three elements that have been influencing human decision-making for thousands of years: supply, demand, and survival instinct. – Artnet

“Unlike Hollywood, where actors and filmmakers have [frequently] spoken out against governments, A-listers in Bollywood — the world’s second-best paying film industry — have largely remained apolitical public personas. … Now, as protests spread across India over a controversial new citizenship law and attacks on students, Bollywood women are breaking with that pattern even as the biggest male actors … stay quiet.” – OZY

Seriously, is this the brave new world of streaming? Where press releases go out daily about the wildly “diverse” television creators drafted by Netflix (and to a lesser extent Amazon) but the Oscar-nominated Netflix films come from Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach? – The Los Angeles Times

“Perel, a famed Belgian cross-cultural psychologist and educator who has written numerous books and given countless talks on the subject of relationships and sexuality, conducts these sessions based on a structural conceit: couples who apply and get accepted are given only one session. There’s a functional purpose to the one-and-done format. The scarcity raises the stakes for the people going into them, incentivizing a need to get as much on the table as soon as they can. The result, when documented, is a concentrated capsule of human drama.” – Vulture

Some film critics now differentiate themselves from amateurs through the practice of Extreme Film Criticism. In it, critics subject themselves to physical, film-related challenges that bear little resemblance to long-form criticism of decades past but would nonetheless intimidate most amateurs. Then they write about it. Landing somewhere between product placement and a fraternity hazing ritual, these pieces constitute a response to major shifts in the landscape of both the news media and the film industry, with serious implications for the life expectancy of criticism as a form, and perhaps for the individual critics themselves. – Los Angeles Review of Books

Top-line figures obscure “hidden secrets” plaguing the film industry. Chief among these is the fact that the average occupancy rate of theaters across the country has hit a new five-year low, at a time when the movie-going of audiences in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities — previously hailed as the driving force of future box office growth — has stagnated. -Variety

Despite a plethora of diverse films competing for Oscar love this year, the Academy largely maintained its traditional point of view, handing out the most nominations to four very male, very white films. The best-picture category can have as many as 10 or as few as five nominees, depending on how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spreads its support. This year there were nine. – The New York Times

While the digital technology that helped create realistic fur in both films is “advancing all the time,” it can’t rescue a flawed approach to a project. “The techniques [you use] can’t do it. All movies are fake. There’s nothing real in them, and the illusion of that world that you’re building is created by the sum total of everything – not just one item in that.” – Variety

When it came to de-aging De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino for The Irishman, the $140 million Netflix production opted for a specific kind of fountain of youth, created from artificial-intelligence software, first-of-its-kind motion-capture technology, and an experimental three-camera rigging system that rendered the Oscar-winning trio of septuagenarian actors as eerily smooth-skinned incarnations of their younger selves. – New York Magazine

In overruling the lower court’s injunction barring Netflix from continuing to stream The First Temptation of Christ, Supreme Federal Court President José Antonio Dias Toffoli said, “One cannot suppose that a humorous satire has the ability to weaken the values of the Christian faith, whose existence is traced back more than two thousand years.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

“[Samantha] Barbash alleges her character and likeness have been exploited and is seeking $20m compensation and $20m in punitive damages. Court documents show Barbash is targeting production company STX and Lopez’s own Nuyorican Productions.” – The Guardian

“The film entitled The First Temptation of Christ, by the Brazilian production company Porta dos Fundos, came out on December 3 and drew strong criticism from conservative politicians in the mainly Catholic country, the church itself and from evangelicals. … Judge Benedicto Abicair said Wednesday he was ordering the film yanked for now so as to calm tempers until courts can consider the broader merits of a suit against the movie brought by a Catholic association called the Don Bosco Center for Faith and Culture.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

“As Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker‘s second unit director, and the first woman to ever hold the megaphone on a Star Wars movie, [Victoria] Mahoney got to experience all of it. Now that the movie is out, Mahoney — who’s been a writer, producer, actor, and director (Grey’s Anatomy, I Am the Night, her indie film Yelling to the Sky) — can finally talk about it.” – Wired

“On Dec. 20, as Cats opened in theaters domestically, Universal made an unprecedented decision to send exhibitors a new version of the film with ‘some improved visual effects.’ By then, however, it was too late.” (includes video) – The Hollywood Reporter

“The controversial practice of ‘brownface’ in Indian cinema, where actors with lighter skin wear brown makeup to play certain roles — often reinforcing negative stereotypes — has been attracting attention. [What’s more,] actors with lighter skin are frequently seen as more ‘sellable’ at the Indian box office and often receive higher profile parts.” (video) – BBC