A hearty CONGRATS to all the winners last night at The Hollywood Reporter's 36th annual Key Art Awards. There was some amazing creative last year and it's great to see it all honored.
Other highlights of the evening:
Rob Corddry hosting (miss him on The Daily Show).
Wes Craven waxing poetic about the good 'ol days.
Robert Rodriguez being honored with the Visionary Award.
And big thanks to Tamara Conniff, Andrew Lin and Alex Hanan for hooking Real Pie up. We all had a blast.
Congratulations to all the nominees of the 36th Annual Hollywood Reporter Key Art Awards! Here's the Internet nominees:
WEB SITE DESIGN
Children of Men -- Project C, Universal Pictures
Miami Vice -- Project C, Universal Pictures
X-Men: The Last Stand -- Hybrid Studio Inc., 20th Century Fox
Eragon -- 65 Media, 20th Century Fox
Casino Royale -- Whittman Hart, Sony Pictures Entertainment
SPECIAL-RECOGNITION INTERNET
Snakes on a Plane: Personalized Viral Campaign -- Varitalk, New Line Cinema
Eragon: Community -- 65 Media, 20th Century Fox
Pan's Labyrinth: Journals of Imagination -- Deep Focus, Picturehouse
The Black Dahlia: Dark LA Viral Video -- Exopolis, Universal Pictures
A Scanner Darkly: Banner Campaign -- the Aura Group, Warner Independent Films
There's been a lot of talk this week about bad buzz and All The King's Men not performing well. It just goes to show how incredibly plugged-in consumers are now to what used to be industry sausage-making. Soon fans will boycott films because a favorite actress or director passed on it 2 years ago.
In "The Tyranny of the Customer?", MediaPost's Wendy Davis takes issue with Chris Anderson's remarks at a recent event. Paraphrasing, she disagrees with his assertion that Google now controls your brand more than you do, and that one customer can now create enough bad-buzz to bring a brand down.
Now, I wasn't there, but I'll bet Mr. Long Tail was engaging in a bit of hyperbole to make a bigger point - that fewer and fewer people are having larger and larger impacts on public opinion due to the equalizing effect of the Internet. It's a good thing.
Even more interesting than Davis' post are the comments that follow, mostly in disagreement. Nicholas Wright from Wireless World Forum writes:
"The tyranny of the customer is really just the overthrow of the tyranny of the marketers, sales is more of a two-way process than ever before. If you will, the marketing has actually fallen into the hands of the customers and placed greater pressure on companies to improve and provide the service they should be providing anyway. Brands must interact or at least observe and respond to their customer reaction if they want to survive: whether this counts as a tyranny or not is in the minds of marketers."
As for All the King's Men, we could take away that studios need to be more careful about chosing and pushing release dates, but I hope instead we think of new ways of addressing bad buzz for whatever reason, by engaging with the customers - not trying to control them.
I'm loving the digg and del.icio.us links on the official Jesus Camp website.
But the "Wish I'd Thought Of That - Bet Your Ass I'll Steal It" award goes to the Coordinate With Friends To See Jesus Camp that links to a Google calendar with cities listed on corresponding dates. Bravo!
And by the looks of that trailer, I think they should've co-opted An Inconvenient Truth's tagline: "By far the most terrifying film you will ever see."
An interesting 5-part series of articles on "The MySpace Generation" kicks off today in the L.A. Times with analysis of a recent Times/Bloomberg Entertainment Poll.
So far, old media is proving old media still reigns ... how convenient.