You behind a plow you aint got no mo business wid uh plow than uh hog is got wid uh holiday

A column chronicling conversations and events on the awards circuit. AFI president and CEO Bob Gazzale spoke a real truth about the money-making Hollywood awards machine as he opened the proceedings for Friday’s annual AFI Awards honoring the year’s best in movies in television as chosen by a distinguished jury. “This is the only event of its kind where you are informed of your honor and then not asked to pay to attend,” he said. The Top 10 films AFI selected this year include Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis , Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Fabelmans , Nope , She Said, T á r, Top Gun: Maverick , The Woman King and Women Talking , with an AFI Special Award for The Banshees of Inisherin. On AFI’s top 10 TV list are The Bear , Mo , Pachink o, Severance , Somebody Somewhere, Abbott Elementary, Hacks , Reservation Dogs , Better Call Saul and anthology series The White Lotus. Stars, creatives and executives connected … [Read more...] about AFI Awards Bring Out The Best In The Season; ‘The Whale’ Rising?; Oscar’s Longshots Hoping For A Miracle – Notes On The Season

Heinrich Böll’s short story, ‘Anecdote Concerning the Lowering of Productivity’ might be one of the most famous tales of the internet era. Although it was originally published in 1963, its brevity and “gotcha” ending have made it the prime subject for IM and social media sharing. It’s so popular it’s one of those things that are so misattributed, misquoted, and modified that at a certain point nobody knows where it originally came from. All of you surely know it already. A smug tourist attempts to lecture a scruffily dressed fisherman about how to live his life and ends up receiving quite the lesson. The story is fantastic, definitively one of Böll’s best, but it has been shared so many times on grandma’s Facebook page and co-opted by so many wellness gurus that I can’t help cringing at it. Speaking to these surfers that have spent their lives pouring their blood, sweat, and tears to improve their local communities, the overused tale suddenly came back to me, and I must … [Read more...] about Surfers tell us why Western Australia is the best place in the world to live like a retired rockstar

The coming together of the creative brains behind two of Netflix’s biggest international hits, The Crown and Money Heist , certainly sounds like an eye-catching proposition on paper. For Netflix, it was irresistible. Left Bank Pictures boss Andy Harries and Vancouver Media’s Álex Pina flew into LA in February 2018 to sell their vision for a sun-soaked, sepia-toned saga, set in the breathtaking climes of the Balearic Islands. Netflix was their first stop, with their meeting coming just weeks after Money Heist had taken off like a rocket on the streaming service. “They basically bought it in the room,” Harries recalls. Fast-forward more than two years and Netflix is dropping White Lines this Friday, a 10-part series that tells the story of a British Ibiza DJ who is brutally murdered in the 1990s and his sister’s investigation into his death 20 years on. Not only is the drama set across two different periods in time, it also brings together two … [Read more...] about ‘White Lines’: How Netflix’s Sun-Soaked Spanish Saga United The Creators Of ‘Money Heist’ & ‘The Crown’