Morning Shots: Don't Laugh At People Who Really Care About Oscar Campaigns

2011-02-04

We'll kick off this morning with a couple of items about Oscar campaigning. Deadline has this roundup of the "final stretch" of each campaign, confirming that even though most of the ten Best Picture nominees have no real chance of winning, they're determined to stay in the hunt until the end.

Meanwhile, Movieline looks at the grand tradition of awards prognostication, topping off its piece with the quite understandable headline, "Oscar Index: Okay, Everyone, Just Freaking Calm Down About The King's Speech."

The Smithsonian continues to acquire items of pop-culture significance, and this week, it was Farrah Fawcett's red swimsuit from her iconic late-'70s poster.

Fans of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert may be happy to know that both their Comedy Central shows have returned to Hulu, almost a year after they vanished from the site. There are also episodes of Jersey Shore (WHAT A RELIEF, not really), but only if you have Hulu Plus. New ones will apparently show up 21 days after their airdate. (Frankly, I'm most interested in news that they may have some old episodes of Viacom shows including The Real World. If you go back to the seasons when that show was interesting, I would watch the heck out of it.)

Also from the online streaming content world, Amazon is apparently circling Netflix and preparing to launch some sort of streaming-movie service — though it looks like they have no intention of shelling out the bucks Netflix does to stream fairly current movies, meaning it may be largely a service for watching older stuff.

"Avoid movies with big red fonts on their posters" is a cute idea currently circulating with a cute graphic, even though it's pretty easy to disprove it as a solid rule.

And finally: I am 100 percent on board with the observation made in this post that sprawling movies like Valentine's Day and the upcoming New Year's Eve are completely ruining Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.

Source: NPR