Crossing the Blues
Showing posts with label . Award News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label . Award News. Show all posts

Grammys: On a Night of Bold Performances, Safe Choice Lady Antebellum Rules

Posted by mista

On a night of bold and flat-out weird performances, the 53rd annual Grammy Awards ultimately played it safe by heaping awards on the country-rock trio Lady Antebellum.
Canadian rockers Arcade Fire (pictured below) claimed album of the year for "The Suburbs" and got to perform twice, including to close the show. Their first performance, one of the rawest of the night, featured BMX riders with cameras mounted to their bikes.
But Lady Antebellum dominated. The Nashville-based group, formed in 2006, won record of the year, song of the year, country album, country song, and country performance by a duo or group with vocals for "Need You Now."
When it came to performances, the standout performers were the artists who took the wildest risks.
Cee-Lo Green and Gwyeth Paltrow did a duet that included Green looking like a peacock-ified Elton John and a gaggle of puppet backup singers.
Justin Bieber and Usher performed a medley that included corny canned dialogue about how they met, drummers dressed like ninjas, and a guest appearance by Jaden Smith.
Also odd -- but compulsively watchable -- was an Eminem performance that segued from a duet with Rihanna into a tribute to his mentor, Dr. Dre. It was Dre's first live TV performance in a decade, but he hadn't been gone from the scene long enough for many viewers to realize he had left it.
Bob Dylan also stood out, but seemed like part of a different show: He and his band wandered out onstage to perform "Maggie's Farm" like the Grammys were just another stop on a freewheeling carouse.
Mick Jagger's first Grammys appearance was in a tribute to Solomon Burke that exploded with energy. "Mick Jagger is crazy fresh!!!," tweeted Kanye West, getting it exactly right.
Barbra Streisand made the bold move of showing up, making an exceedingly rare live TV appearance.
Lady Gaga, a master of stealing shows, offered a straightforward performance of her new single, "Born This Way" -- once she emerged from an egg. Her midriff-baring outfit did little to steal attention from the Madonna-inspired song. Later she won best pop vocal album for "The Fame Monster," wearing a leather bubble-butt thing you can try for yourself to make sense of (left). She also won best female pop vocal performance and best short form music video for "Bad Romance."
Aside from the standout numbers, the telecast bounced around amiably from a tribute to Aretha Franklin to Miranda Lambert to a driving perfomance by Muse to a Motown-influenced Bruno Mars number.

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Grammys: On a Night of Bold Performances, Safe Choice Lady Antebellum Rules

Posted by mista

On a night of bold and flat-out weird performances, the 53rd annual Grammy Awards ultimately played it safe by heaping awards on the country-rock trio Lady Antebellum.
Canadian rockers Arcade Fire (pictured below) claimed album of the year for "The Suburbs" and got to perform twice, including to close the show. Their first performance, one of the rawest of the night, featured BMX riders with cameras mounted to their bikes.
But Lady Antebellum dominated. The Nashville-based group, formed in 2006, won record of the year, song of the year, country album, country song, and country performance by a duo or group with vocals for "Need You Now."
When it came to performances, the standout performers were the artists who took the wildest risks.
Cee-Lo Green and Gwyeth Paltrow did a duet that included Green looking like a peacock-ified Elton John and a gaggle of puppet backup singers.
Justin Bieber and Usher performed a medley that included corny canned dialogue about how they met, drummers dressed like ninjas, and a guest appearance by Jaden Smith.
Also odd -- but compulsively watchable -- was an Eminem performance that segued from a duet with Rihanna into a tribute to his mentor, Dr. Dre. It was Dre's first live TV performance in a decade, but he hadn't been gone from the scene long enough for many viewers to realize he had left it.
Bob Dylan also stood out, but seemed like part of a different show: He and his band wandered out onstage to perform "Maggie's Farm" like the Grammys were just another stop on a freewheeling carouse.
Mick Jagger's first Grammys appearance was in a tribute to Solomon Burke that exploded with energy. "Mick Jagger is crazy fresh!!!," tweeted Kanye West, getting it exactly right.
Barbra Streisand made the bold move of showing up, making an exceedingly rare live TV appearance.
Lady Gaga, a master of stealing shows, offered a straightforward performance of her new single, "Born This Way" -- once she emerged from an egg. Her midriff-baring outfit did little to steal attention from the Madonna-inspired song. Later she won best pop vocal album for "The Fame Monster," wearing a leather bubble-butt thing you can try for yourself to make sense of (left). She also won best female pop vocal performance and best short form music video for "Bad Romance."
Aside from the standout numbers, the telecast bounced around amiably from a tribute to Aretha Franklin to Miranda Lambert to a driving perfomance by Muse to a Motown-influenced Bruno Mars number.

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Details of Dramatic Changes for Oscars Telecast

Posted by mista

Oscar StatueOscar producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer explain to The Hollywood Reporter that they are taking a radical departure from past shows.

The Oscars are entering the world of virtual reality.

“We’re doing six or seven scenic transitions during the show, but they are each sort of a different concept,” Cohen explains. “In other words, one might be a scene from a film, one might be a more specific time in history, one might be a specific event, one might be a specific genre. The hope is that we briefly leave the Kodak in 2011 -- not literally, but metaphorically -- and take the audience, both in the room and on television, to a specific time and place.”This year’s Academy Awards telecast is taking a radical departure from past years. Producers of the Feb. 27 show are abandoning the concept of a traditional set. Instead, they will rely on a series of “projections” to give the show a constantly changing look.

“Our design this year is actually going to reflect more content than you would usually expect of an awards show of this type,” producer Don Mischer tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview with fellow producer Bruce Cohen in the Kodak Theater. “We’re using our environment to take us to different places, different times, and it will change dramatically. The look will change from act to act.”
Producers plan to take viewers on a trip through Hollywood history.
Pressed for more detail, Cohen adds, “This is the tenth anniversary of the best animated feature Oscar, so we go to an animated environment to present that Oscar -- actually two, animated feature and animated short -- but the reason we are there is to celebrate that this is the tenth anniversary of the best animated feature Oscar.”
The transitions, Mischer explains, will not be long segments, but 30-45 second set-ups. “We are not going back to teach history, but to put the awards in context.”
The design scheme grew out of the theme that the two producers devised once they began working on the show back in June. In an extensive review of past broadcasts, they were struck by the two-fold nature of the assignment. On the one hand, they have to come up with something new and different. On the other, they wanted to recognize the previous 82 years of Oscar history.
 “Is there any way to approach the show where those two ideas are working together and not fighting each other with every single decision?" they asked themselves. The solution, they decided, was somehow to combine the old and the new.
To that end, they cast Anne Hathaway and James Franco -- two of the youngest hosts to ever front the Oscars -- as audience surrogates for the journey.
“Yes, they are famous, but they are on their way up,” Cohen says of the two stars. “They are not untouchable, they are not unreachable. We hope they will offer [the audience] a way in. So everyone come along, and we’ll see through the eyes of these two up-and-coming stars.”
The hosts’ job, he says, will be “to take the audience on this journey of a show that will hopefully start in one place, and if it all goes according to plan, it will take you back to where we started at the end.”
To realize that on stage visually, the producers have been working with production designerSteve Bass, who’s previously worked with Mischer on such shows as the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards and We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial.
While the production has moved into the Kodak to set up the show, it’s been using the daytime hours to hang the physical scenery on which the projections will be displayed, and then during the night another team has been programming the projections. Working throughout this weekend, the goal is to have the whole system up-and-running by Monday.
So how did the two producers sell the concept of their novel approach to the Academy and ABC, since it wasn’t simply a matter of constructing the sort of physical models that have been used in the past?
While the two producers walked the Academy and ABC through what they call “the story of the show,” Cohen admits, “We weren’t able to show them what the actual images would look like, but we were able to show them what the images would be. For better or worse, I think they have a very clear idea in their heads of what we think the show is going to be. We’re kind of as curious as they are [to see] when it’s all up this weekend, how similar what we’ve had in our heads for the last month or two is to the actual experience.”

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Details of Dramatic Changes for Oscars Telecast

Posted by mista

Oscar StatueOscar producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer explain to The Hollywood Reporter that they are taking a radical departure from past shows.

The Oscars are entering the world of virtual reality.

“We’re doing six or seven scenic transitions during the show, but they are each sort of a different concept,” Cohen explains. “In other words, one might be a scene from a film, one might be a more specific time in history, one might be a specific event, one might be a specific genre. The hope is that we briefly leave the Kodak in 2011 -- not literally, but metaphorically -- and take the audience, both in the room and on television, to a specific time and place.”This year’s Academy Awards telecast is taking a radical departure from past years. Producers of the Feb. 27 show are abandoning the concept of a traditional set. Instead, they will rely on a series of “projections” to give the show a constantly changing look.

“Our design this year is actually going to reflect more content than you would usually expect of an awards show of this type,” producer Don Mischer tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview with fellow producer Bruce Cohen in the Kodak Theater. “We’re using our environment to take us to different places, different times, and it will change dramatically. The look will change from act to act.”
Producers plan to take viewers on a trip through Hollywood history.
Pressed for more detail, Cohen adds, “This is the tenth anniversary of the best animated feature Oscar, so we go to an animated environment to present that Oscar -- actually two, animated feature and animated short -- but the reason we are there is to celebrate that this is the tenth anniversary of the best animated feature Oscar.”
The transitions, Mischer explains, will not be long segments, but 30-45 second set-ups. “We are not going back to teach history, but to put the awards in context.”
The design scheme grew out of the theme that the two producers devised once they began working on the show back in June. In an extensive review of past broadcasts, they were struck by the two-fold nature of the assignment. On the one hand, they have to come up with something new and different. On the other, they wanted to recognize the previous 82 years of Oscar history.
 “Is there any way to approach the show where those two ideas are working together and not fighting each other with every single decision?" they asked themselves. The solution, they decided, was somehow to combine the old and the new.
To that end, they cast Anne Hathaway and James Franco -- two of the youngest hosts to ever front the Oscars -- as audience surrogates for the journey.
“Yes, they are famous, but they are on their way up,” Cohen says of the two stars. “They are not untouchable, they are not unreachable. We hope they will offer [the audience] a way in. So everyone come along, and we’ll see through the eyes of these two up-and-coming stars.”
The hosts’ job, he says, will be “to take the audience on this journey of a show that will hopefully start in one place, and if it all goes according to plan, it will take you back to where we started at the end.”
To realize that on stage visually, the producers have been working with production designerSteve Bass, who’s previously worked with Mischer on such shows as the 62nd Primetime Emmy Awards and We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial.
While the production has moved into the Kodak to set up the show, it’s been using the daytime hours to hang the physical scenery on which the projections will be displayed, and then during the night another team has been programming the projections. Working throughout this weekend, the goal is to have the whole system up-and-running by Monday.
So how did the two producers sell the concept of their novel approach to the Academy and ABC, since it wasn’t simply a matter of constructing the sort of physical models that have been used in the past?
While the two producers walked the Academy and ABC through what they call “the story of the show,” Cohen admits, “We weren’t able to show them what the actual images would look like, but we were able to show them what the images would be. For better or worse, I think they have a very clear idea in their heads of what we think the show is going to be. We’re kind of as curious as they are [to see] when it’s all up this weekend, how similar what we’ve had in our heads for the last month or two is to the actual experience.”

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