Oscar fans may lose in Cablevision-ABC fee dispute

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Some New Yorkers hoping to watch the Oscars could see black screens instead of golden statues on Sunday.

This week Disney and Cablevision began warning the cable operator's 3.1 million New York-area subscribers that their ABC station may go dark Sunday, Mar. 6, at 12:01 a.m. because of a fee dispute.
The Academy Awards broadcast, one of television's most-watched live events, is set to air on ABC that night.

Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) wants Cablevision to pay a fee for the right to deliver its ABC broadcast channel to the cable operator's subscribers, which would amount to an additional $40 million a year in new fees, said Cablevision spokesman Charles Schueler in a prepared statement.

Cablevision (CVC, Fortune 500) currently pays Disney more than $200 million a year to carry its cable networks, which include ESPN, the Disney Channel and ABC Family.

A Disney spokesman notes that Cablevision charges customers up to $18 a month to receive just the basic broadcast networks -- ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and PBS -- but that Disney does not share in any of that revenue.

Cablevision contends that Disney's move will "force Cablevision customers to pay a new TV tax for programming [that] ABC Disney gives away free, both over-the-air and on the Internet."

Rebecca Campbell, president and general manager of WABC-TV, shot back in a statement: "We can no longer sit back and allow Cablevision to use our shows for free while they continue to charge their customers for them."

Following the money
The stalemate is similar to a heated battle between News Corp. (NWS, Fortune 500) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) over paying to carry the Fox network. The companies came to an agreement hours after the Dec. 31 deadline, but programming was not disrupted. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The disputes are part of a sea change in the television industry's business model, as programming choices expand and advertising revenues plummet.

Unlike cable networks, which both collect advertising revenues and subscriber fees from pay-TV providers, broadcast networks rely solely on ad revenue. But as that money is drying up, they are in search of new sources of revenue.

For their part, cable providers say they are cash-strapped as a result of costly efforts to upgrade technology in order to fend off satellite and telecom TV providers as well as Web-based programming.

The Disney-Cablevision contract expired more than two years ago, a Disney rep confirmed. The companies have extended the agreement each month as talks continue.

Disney set up a Web site at www.saveabc7.com while Cablevision's site is at http://cablevision.com/abc.

Source:/money.cnn.com/

The Hurt Locker: 10 things you need to know about the Oscar-nominated film

1. ‘Hurt Locker’ is American military slang for being hurt by an explosion – you get “sent to the hurt locker”.


2. Mark Boal, nominated for Best Screenplay, developed the story after spending two weeks embedded with a bomb disposal squad in Baghdad. His experiences were then fictionalised for The Hurt Locker. He said: “It was difficult to quantify the threat when you don’t speak the language and the enemy is not wearing a uniform or engaging in traditional warfare but using hit-and-run ambush tactics. I tried to capture all this in The Hurt Locker.”


3. Boal has written for Playboy.


4. The film's opening quote, "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug", comes from New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges’ 2002 book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning.


5. Kathryn Bigelow is only the fourth woman ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar - and none of the previous female nominees went on to claim the award.

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6. Bigelow, whose previous films include Point Break, is up against ex-husband James Cameron in the Best Director category. The pair were married from 1989-1991. Cameron is nominated for box office smash Avatar.


7. The Hurt Locker is an independent film made on a relatively low-budget of $11million. It is one of the lowest-grossing films to be nominated for Best Picture - it has made less than $17 million at the box office so far, compared to Avatar’s record-breaking $2 billion.


8. Best Actor nominee Jeremy Renner has previously appeared in 28 Weeks Later, where he played Sergeant Doyle, and as Jesse James’s cousin Wood Hite in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.


9. Co-star Anthony Mackie plays rapper Tupac Shakur in Notorious.


10. The film may be Oscar-nominated but it is not free of timeline errors. Set in 2004, soldiers play on an Xbox 360 which wasn’t released until 2005, YouTube gets a mention even though it did not launch until 2005 and 2008 game Gears of War is seen being played

Source:mirror.co.uk/

Will Up's Annie Award lead to Oscar?

Up won both Best Picture and Director at the Annie Awards on Saturday night. The movie beat out all four of its competitors for Best Animated Feature Oscar: Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog and The Secret of Kells, as well as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Coraline, which topped the list with 10 nominations, won three Annies: Character Design, Music and Production Design. Princess took three of its eight categories: Animated Effects, Character Animation and Voice Acting. Critics' choice Fantastic Mr. Fox won just one of its three nods, for the script by director Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

Since the academy introduced the Best Animated Feature Award in 2001, winners of the Best Picture Annie and the Oscar have matched up six times.

Source:thestar.com/

Colin Firth, Carey Mulligan and Helen Mirren lead Brit Oscar 2010 nominations

The 2010 Oscar nominations were announced yesterday with Colin Firth, Carey Mulligan and Helen Mirren all receiving nominations

The big Hollywood hitters - Avatar, Crazy Heart and The Hurt Locker - were all there in yesterday's Oscar nominations as announced by Anne Hathaway at 5.38am Los Angeles time.

Anne Hathaway reveals the 82nd Academy Awards nominees…

The nominations are in! Before we get all excited about who'll be wearing what, this year's Oscar nominations are in.

SEE 50 BEST OSCAR DRESSES OF ALL-TIME

Best Actor

Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), Morgan Freeman (Invictus), George Clooney (Up in the Air), Colin Firth (A Single Man) and Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker).

Best Actress

Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia), Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side), Helen Mirren (The Last Station), Gabourey Sidibe (Precious) and Carey Mulligan (An Education).

Best actress in a supporting role

Mo'Nique (Precious), Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air), Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), 
Penélope Cruz (Nine), 
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart).

Best actor in a supporting role

Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds), 
Christopher Plummer (The Last Station), 
Matt Damon (Invictus), 
Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones), 
Woody Harrelson (The Messengers).

Directing

Avatar (James Cameron)
, The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow), 
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
, Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), 
Lee Daniels (Precious).

Writing (adapted screenplay)

District 9 (Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell)
, An Education (Nick Hornby), Precious (Geoffrey Fletcher),
Up in the Air (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner)
, In the Loop (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin and Tony Roche).

Best Picture

Avatar (James Cameron and Jon Landau), 
District 9 (Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham), 
An Education (FionolaDwyer and Amanda Posey)
, The Hurt Locker (nominees to be determined), 
Inglourious Basterds (Lawrence Bender), 
Precious (Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness and Gary Magness, producers)
, A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)
, Up in the Air (Daniel Dubiecki, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman), 
The Blind Side (nominees to be determined)
, Up (Jonas Rivera)



But Brit stars were holding their own in the list of nominees with Colin Firth nominated for A Single Man, Carey Mulligan for An Education and Helen Mirren for her role in The Last Station.

SEE OUR 50 BEST OSCAR DRESSES

Newcomer Carey Mulligan has wowed critics with her performance in An Education, the tale of a teenage girl coming of age in 60s London adapted from the memoirs of journalist Lynn Barber. Mulligan's reaction was ecstatic;

"This is beyond anything I've ever dreamed of. I've definitely never felt such excitement and nausea this early in the morning!"

An Education also scored a nomination in the Best Picture category.

Helen Mirren scored a nod for her portrayal of Sofya Tolstoy in The Last Station and made a statement this morning saying;

"I'm very happy and honored for Christopher, myself and our film. I think Tolstoy himself would have been perplexed by all this, but, Sofya his wife would have been over the moon. So in that spirit, I am too."

Mirren and Mulligan are pitted against each other in the Best Actress in a Lead Role category and will battle it out with Meryl Streep for Julie & Julia, Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side and Gabourey Sidibe for Precious.

Last up representing the Brits in the lead actors category is the delicious Mr Colin Firth who received his first ever Oscar nomination yesterday. Firth portrays a gay college professor in Tom Ford's very stylish directorial debut A Single Man. He'll be up against Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart, Morgan Freeman for Invictus, George Clooney for Up in the Air and Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker.


Source:instyle.co.uk/