The smoking, drinking and sexism of Mad Men has made Emmy Award history after bagging 16 nominations and securing a shot at the prestigious Outstanding Drama Series gong.

The critically acclaimed show, set in a 1960s advertising agency, and Damages, an American legal drama, are the first basic-cable programmes ever to be nominated for the best series award.

The nods mark a turning point for the 60-year-old Primetime Emmys, which have only ever awarded the Outstanding Drama Series gong to free-to-air American shows and those from the fee-charging, premium cable network HBO.

(Times Online UK)

And, yes, this year’s show had its share of surprises, but the whole production felt a bit off. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that just down the hill from the Gibson Amphitheatre, firefighters were still struggling to contain the morning fire at Universal Studios Hollywood. Iconic backlot sets that had been used for everything from To Kill a Mockingbird and Inherit the Wind to Back to the Future and Bruce Almighty were destroyed. Thousands of the studio’s film reels were damaged. The 30-foot animatronic robot of King Kong himself perished under the flames.

A slice of film history was dying, but the MTV Movie Awards marched on. And how many times did the show mention the fire that was blazing just a couple of hundred yards away? Zippo.

(EW)

Maybe someone at MTV had a psychic moment: “Movie Awards Weekend Heats Up” was the headline on the channel’s website right around the time of the early morning blaze Sunday that turned a portion of Universal Studios into something resembling a 1970s disaster film.

Despite the fire, the 2008 MTV Movie Awards and its national broadcast from Universal’s Gibson Amphitheatre went ahead as planned. And there was virtually no evidence of the real world amid the Hollywood fantasy.

(LA Times)

MTV has enlisted a slew of stars — including Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black — to create their own short films, which will premiere during the cable channel’s annual MTV Movie Awards on Sunday.

Mike Myers, who will host the event at the Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City, also created two shorts featuring two new characters he created.

(Reuters)

If you thought you had to know your Bertolucci from your Brad Pitt just to get a job polishing Harvey Weinstein’s golf shoes, you’re only halfway there. Movie insiders actually converse in their own “slanguage”, a rich, and often very funny, collection of invented terms popularised by the industry magazine Variety over more than a century of reporting on the world of film. Some of these terms, such as “mogul” and “blighty”, have made the jump into standard usage. Many others, like “preem” (premiere) and “moppet” (child actor) remain strictly within the world of movie jargon.

The festival starts on Wednesday, and if you want to make some deals while you’re there, or at least seem like you’re running with the pack, you could do worse than pick up some of this lingo. Now Variety has put its 2005 book “The Hollywood Dictionary”, a collection of some of the most popular slanguage terms, online for the first time (go to www.variety.com and type in “slanguage” in the search box).

(The Independent)

It took over 25 years, $150 million, and some of the biggest names in show business to bring “Transformers” from an idea, to the big-screen, to a front row seat at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards.

It could take you as little as three minutes to join them.

MTV is calling all filmmakers, provocateurs, and amateur comedians for their “2008 Movie Spoof Contest,” with the winner eligible for a free trip to Los Angeles for the MTV Movie Awards on June 1 and their very own Golden Popcorn.

(MTV)

On Sunday, Feb. 24, the Academy Awards telecast earned its lowest audience rating on record, plummeting 21 percent from last year. Is the Oscars in crisis? And what, if anything, can the Academy do to turn the tide? EW.com spoke with Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

(Source: EW)

US television ratings for this year’s Oscars sunk to an all-time low, preliminary figures showed, as viewers turned their back on a ceremony dominated by dark, bleak films.

According to figures from Nielsen Media Research, Sunday’s three-hour-long ceremony at the Kodak Theatre averaged an audience of only 32 million viewers, the worst since records began in 1974.

The previous lowest figure had been in 2003, when only 33.04 million people tuned in for a ceremony won by “Chicago” that took place just days after the beginning of the US-led war in Iraq.

Final figures are due to be released on Tuesday but are not expected to change significantly. If the 2008 figures are confirmed, it would represent a drop of more than 20 percent from last year’s average audience of 41 million.

The record-low audience came in a year when the Oscars race for best picture was dominated by films that received critical acclaim but struggled to perform at the box-office.

Only one film out of the five best picture nominees — the teenage comedy “Juno” — broke the 100 million dollar barrier this year.

Analysts say there is a high correlation between the box-office popularity of films nominated for the Oscars best picture and television viewership for the Academy Awards.

The largest average audience ever for the Oscars telecast came in 1998, when 55.25 million watched the ceremony which was won by “Titanic”, the highest grossing movie of all time with box-office earnings of 1.85 billion dollars.

Sunday’s Oscars were won by Joel and Ethan Coen’s bleak thriller “No Country for Old Men,” a grim adapation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name.

The film won four awards — best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor.

The acting awards on Sunday were swept by non-American actors for the first time since 1965.

It used to be that violence, even more than comedy, was the kiss of death for Oscar movies. Then came blood-saturated films like “Crash” and “The Departed,” which overturned some of those rules.

But perhaps no movie exemplifies how the Oscars have changed than this year’s best picture winner, “No Country for Old Men,” a dark, disturbing thriller from the Coen brothers.

Shot in a deliberative, unsentimental style, “No Country” is a bone-chilling tale of violence, stupidity and revenge, with a relentless, amoral killer (played by supporting actor winner Javier Bardem) at its center, coolly dispatching anyone in his way with a cattle gun. It is not the only acclaimed movie to have emerged from a forbidding corner of the American psyche. Many of this year’s most compelling movies — notably, two other best picture nominees, “There Will Be Blood” and “Michael Clayton,” as well as “American Gangster,” “Eastern Promises,” “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Bourne Ultimatum” — were meditations on violence, betrayal, revenge and grand ambition run amok.

(Source: Los Angeles Times)