This National Latino Media Council, which met with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in April to ask for a greater Latino representation within the organization, has applauded the fact that the Academy list of 276 new members, released earlier today, includes 22 Latinos.
In the acting category alone, seven Latinos were among 22 invitees. They are Miriam Colon, Rosario Dawson, Jennifer Lopez, Alma Martinez, Michael Peña, Geno Silva and Danny Trejo.
PHOTOS: Jason Bateman to Jennifer Lopez: The Actors of The Academy's 2013 Class
"We applaud the actions by the Academy, and look forward to continue to work with them in the future,” Congressman Esteban Torres (Ret.), NLMC chairman, said.
The April meeting between representatives of the Academy and members of NLMC, led by Torres, was held to discuss concerns about diversity following an outcry within the Latino community when the Academy failed to include actress Lupe Ontiveros, whose film credits include The Goonies and As Good As It Gets, in the “In Memoriam” tribute at February’s Oscar show.
Martinez, who has appeared in Born in East L.A. and Under Fire and who was among those receiving an invitation today, said, “I can't remember a time in our recent history where there has been so much Latino political activism occurring simultaneously across so many fields and across the country. I received a letter inviting me to become a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. To say I am elated is an understatement."
A list of the 22 Latinos included on the Academy follows.
Actors
Miriam Colon - "City of Hope," "Scarface"
Rosario Dawson - "Rent," "Frank Miller's Sin City"
Jennifer Lopez - "What to Expect When You're Expecting," "Selena"
Alma Martinez - "Born in East L.A.," "Under Fire"
Michael Peña - "End of Watch," "Crash"
Geno Silva - "Mulholland Drive," "Amistad"
Danny Trejo - "Machete," "Heat"
Cinematographers
Checco Varese - "Girl in Progress," "The Aura"
Costume Designers
Paco Delgado - "Les Misérables," "Biutiful"
Directors
Pablo Larraín - "No," "Tony Manero"
Documentary
Rebecca Cammisa - "God Is the Bigger Elvis," "Which Way Home"
Eduardo Coutinho - "As Canções," "Cabra Marcado Para Morrer (Twenty Years Later)"
Patricio Guzmán - "Nostalgia for the Light," "The Battle of Chile"
José Padilha - "Secrets of the Tribe," "Bus 174 (Ônibus 174)"
Renee Tajima-Pena - "Who Killed Vincent Chin?," "My America (Or Honk If You Love Buddha)"
Makeup Artists and Hairstylists
Luisa Abel - "The Dark Knight Rises," "Inception"
Kim Santantonio - "Gangster Squad," "Frost/Nixon"
Members-at-Large
Victoria Alonso
Mindy Marin
Music
Cliff Martinez - "Drive," "Traffic"
Sound
Jose Antonio Garcia - "Argo," "Babel"
Edward J. Hernandez - "Real Steel," "Basic Instinct"
Showing posts with label Academy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Academy. Show all posts
Friday, 28 June 2013
Scott Feinberg: Why This Year's Academy Invitations Give Me Hope (Analysis)
The Academy has been harshly criticized in recent years for being predominately composed of white male senior citizens. (A 2012 Los Angeles Times investigation found the average age of an Oscar voter was 62 -- and that the Academy was 94 percent white, and 77 percent male.) But the only ways for the Academy to quickly change that makeup would be for it to eliminate from its roster some of its older members who are no longer active in the industry, or add a considerable number of newer and more demographically diverse members to the rolls.
Last October, the Academy's Board of Governors met and seemed to endorse the latter idea by eliminating a 2004 rule capping the number of new members that each of the Academy's 16 branches could add each year. The rule had kept the number of overall Academy membership around 6,000. Today the Academy announced its invitation of 276 new members, 100 more than last year. (178 were invited in 2011; 135 in 2010; 134 in 2009; and 105 in 2008.) The selections clearly indicate that the Academy of the future will not look anything like the Academy of the past.
As has always been the case, a chunk of the newly invited members are probably on the list this year largely because they were nominated for -- and in some cases won -- Oscars last year. They include best actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva (Amour), the oldest woman ever nominated in that category, who probably should have been invited decades ago; best director and best adapted screenplay nominee Benh Zeitlin (Beasts of the Southern Wild); the directors of three best foreign language film nominees, Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair), Pablo Larrain (No), and Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg (Kon-Tiki); Chris Terrio (Argo), scribe of best adapted screenplay winner Argo; John Gatins, scribe of best original screenplay nominee Flight; and Rich Moore, director of best animated feature nominee Wreck-It Ralph, among others.
And -- again -- as has always been the case, this year's invitation list includes a number of veterans who clearly should have been invited in years past, but were overlooked. This year, many of those names come from the documentary branch, which invited 42 new members -- more than any other. That represents about a quarter of its current membership. Last year the branch invited only 10, presumably due to the Academy's since-abolished quotas. This year's newcomers include 87-year-old Claude Lanzmann, best known for the epic Holocaust documentary Shoah (1985), which the Academy famously overlooked; 85-year-old Marcel Ophuls, director of the classic best documentary feature nominee The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) and best documentary feature winner Hotel Terminus (1988); and 85-year-old Agnes Varda, who has been making narrative and documentary features since 1955, was a staple of the French New Wave and continues to work to this day. (Granted, the Academy was far less international when those filmmakers were in their primes, and the same goes for Riva.)
But this year's list is also younger, and much more diverse -- not just in terms of ethnicity, but also in terms of their work in genres that the Academy has not historically embraced: comedy, action and sci-fi. Consider the following, who will be familiar to most moviegoers: actors Jason Bateman (Juno), Rosario Dawson, Lucy Liu (the Kill Bill films), Paula Patton (Precious), Michael Pena (End of Watch), Jason Schwartzman (Moonrise Kingdom), Chris Tucker (Silver Linings Playbook); directors Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) and Todd Phillips (the Hangover films); and writers Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture), Ava Duvernay (Middle of Nowhere) and Rian Johnson (Looper).
Some will look at these choices and claim that the Academy is pandering to the masses -- who don't watch the Oscars anyway, and who would, if they had their way, turn Hollywood's most iconic night into the MTV Movie Awards, and elevate films like Twilight instead of films like Argo. I think that's hyperbolic nonsense. The Academy doesn't have to, shouldn't, and, I believe, won't abandon its demand for greatness in order to reconnect more with the public. It just needs to expand its notion of what greatness means.
Yes, a comic book adaptation (The Dark Knight) actually can, in the right hands, be more worthy of a nomination than a Holocaust drama (The Reader), to cite the famous 2009 example of Academy close-mindedness, which provoked the rule changes and category contractions and expansions of the past few years. Members need to be open to all sorts of films and evaluate them based on how well they achieved what they set out to achieve. A more diverse membership makes that more likely.
Sure, one can quibble with the merits of a few of this year's invitees -- to be perfectly candid, I'm not sure about Milla Jovovich (the Resident Evil films) or Jennifer Lopez, who stopped pushing herself as an actress sometime back in the 20th century -- but that's true of any year. And I, for one, am far happier with an Academy that embraces excellence and diversity of all sorts, like this one did today by inviting the other aforementioned folks -- plus Julie Delpy (the Before films), Steve McQueen (Hunger, Shame and Twelve Years a Slave), Emily Mortimer (an indie queen), Sarah Polley (Away from Her and Stories We Tell) and so many others -- than I was with the old white man's club that used to reign supreme.
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Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Film Academy Nears Trial Against GoDaddy Over 'Oscars' Trademarks
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is on the verge of a big showdown against GoDaddy.
AMPAS, most famous for its annual Oscars awards ceremony, is suing GoDaddy under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, alleging that the domain registrar giant traffics in unauthorized trademarks. Specifically in dispute is GoDaddy's "CashParking" program that allows customers to buy a domain like Oscarbets.com or Oscarsornot.com, "park" that page and collect a portion of revenue from GoDaddy's advertising partners on a pay-per-click basis.
On Friday, the Academy took a big step forward in the lawsuit when a California federal judge rejected GoDaddy's summary judgment motion and ruled that the defendant isn't eligible for safe harbor. The Academy got other wins by getting the judge to acknowledge that GoDaddy "uses" and "traffics" in domain names, although the judge declined to give the "Oscars" trademark owner a complete victory. For example, the judge says that whether the Academy's marks are really famous is something that would be left to a jury to decide.
Read the full ruling.
Judge Audrey Collins refused GoDaddy's bid for safe harbor by agreeing with the Academy that GoDaddy did not function solely as a registrar when it allowed users to park domain names like traveloscar.com and oscarshotel.
"First, the Parked Pages Program applies to pages already registered with GoDaddy, indicating that GoDaddy has fulfilled its registration role by the time it implements the parking programs," writes the judge. "Second, through its Parked Pages Program, GoDaddy uses its servers to create webpages for registered domain names, and to place advertising on those pages for which it can collect a fee-per-click. Creating webpages, placing ads, and collecting ad revenue is not registration activity."
The judge says it's not important that the Academy hasn't shown it has profited from this.
"The safe harbor provision simply does not apply to conduct, like operating the Parked Pages Program, that goes beyond mere registration and maintenance," adds the judge. "Furthermore, a registrar’s mere bad faith intent to profit – as opposed to actual profit – is sufficient to disqualify it from safe harbor protection."
The judge also goes a long way to establishing one of the prongs of GoDaddy's alleged cybersquatting activity by determining that it has "used" domains by acting affirmatively to place domain names in a program designed to make money and engaged in "trafficking" by receiving from registrants a license to place revenue-generating ads on webpages. GoDaddy's argument that it is merely routing domain names is thoroughly rejected.
There are still many questions to be answered.
One is whether the Academy's marks are famous. GoDaddy has objected to the fact that the Academy hadn't taken the time to do consumer surveys and sought to fill the void with its own studies that allegedly showed that respondents couldn't recognize domain names in dispute as being entertainment-related.
Judge Collins says that marks related to "Oscars" may be distinctive, but that it's a triable fact as to whether the Academy's marks meet the tests of recognition.
Another unresolved question has to do with whether the domain names -- like betacademyawards.com and oscarsunplugged.com -- are "confusingly similar" to the Academy's marks. In the ruling, the judge gives some guiding principles on what she will be looking for, but holds off on any ruling until the parties can present a unified list of domains in dispute. The Academy has alleged more than 100 of them, but a few have been taken out of the lawsuit for being presented too late.
Finally, the Academy wins another important victory by lowering its burden of proof. Judge Collins rejects GoDaddy's assertion that the Academy has to show "actual dilution" of its marks. Instead, it appears that the plaintiff will only need to show that the domains in question were merely dilutive of its marks.
The parties still need to figure out a day for the trial. The judge has extended discovery on certain issues and there are likely witness lists and evidence to be sorted. The dispute could be handed to a jury by the end of the year.
AMPAS, most famous for its annual Oscars awards ceremony, is suing GoDaddy under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, alleging that the domain registrar giant traffics in unauthorized trademarks. Specifically in dispute is GoDaddy's "CashParking" program that allows customers to buy a domain like Oscarbets.com or Oscarsornot.com, "park" that page and collect a portion of revenue from GoDaddy's advertising partners on a pay-per-click basis.
On Friday, the Academy took a big step forward in the lawsuit when a California federal judge rejected GoDaddy's summary judgment motion and ruled that the defendant isn't eligible for safe harbor. The Academy got other wins by getting the judge to acknowledge that GoDaddy "uses" and "traffics" in domain names, although the judge declined to give the "Oscars" trademark owner a complete victory. For example, the judge says that whether the Academy's marks are really famous is something that would be left to a jury to decide.
Read the full ruling.
Judge Audrey Collins refused GoDaddy's bid for safe harbor by agreeing with the Academy that GoDaddy did not function solely as a registrar when it allowed users to park domain names like traveloscar.com and oscarshotel.
"First, the Parked Pages Program applies to pages already registered with GoDaddy, indicating that GoDaddy has fulfilled its registration role by the time it implements the parking programs," writes the judge. "Second, through its Parked Pages Program, GoDaddy uses its servers to create webpages for registered domain names, and to place advertising on those pages for which it can collect a fee-per-click. Creating webpages, placing ads, and collecting ad revenue is not registration activity."
The judge says it's not important that the Academy hasn't shown it has profited from this.
"The safe harbor provision simply does not apply to conduct, like operating the Parked Pages Program, that goes beyond mere registration and maintenance," adds the judge. "Furthermore, a registrar’s mere bad faith intent to profit – as opposed to actual profit – is sufficient to disqualify it from safe harbor protection."
The judge also goes a long way to establishing one of the prongs of GoDaddy's alleged cybersquatting activity by determining that it has "used" domains by acting affirmatively to place domain names in a program designed to make money and engaged in "trafficking" by receiving from registrants a license to place revenue-generating ads on webpages. GoDaddy's argument that it is merely routing domain names is thoroughly rejected.
There are still many questions to be answered.
One is whether the Academy's marks are famous. GoDaddy has objected to the fact that the Academy hadn't taken the time to do consumer surveys and sought to fill the void with its own studies that allegedly showed that respondents couldn't recognize domain names in dispute as being entertainment-related.
Judge Collins says that marks related to "Oscars" may be distinctive, but that it's a triable fact as to whether the Academy's marks meet the tests of recognition.
Another unresolved question has to do with whether the domain names -- like betacademyawards.com and oscarsunplugged.com -- are "confusingly similar" to the Academy's marks. In the ruling, the judge gives some guiding principles on what she will be looking for, but holds off on any ruling until the parties can present a unified list of domains in dispute. The Academy has alleged more than 100 of them, but a few have been taken out of the lawsuit for being presented too late.
Finally, the Academy wins another important victory by lowering its burden of proof. Judge Collins rejects GoDaddy's assertion that the Academy has to show "actual dilution" of its marks. Instead, it appears that the plaintiff will only need to show that the domains in question were merely dilutive of its marks.
The parties still need to figure out a day for the trial. The judge has extended discovery on certain issues and there are likely witness lists and evidence to be sorted. The dispute could be handed to a jury by the end of the year.
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