Order reigns at the 90th awardsAnne Glover and David Beard bring the new and the notable.
If you didn’t stay up to watch all of the Oscars last night,
you probably do know after glancing at your smartphone that “The Shape of
Water” was the
big winner, with four awards. Not everyone was convinced it should have
been, however:
At least there was no mix-up this year, though people clearly still hadn’t forgotten about it when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway reprised their Best Picture presentation:
The 90th edition of the awards were
largely orderly and — dare we say it — a bit yawn-inducing as the night wore
on. (Apparently no one was serious about winning the personal watercraft
being given away for the shortest acceptance speech, though “Phantom Threads”
design winner Mark Bridges took
it home at the end of the show.)
The most rousing
moment of the night came courtesy of Frances McDormand, who set her Oscar
on the stage and then asked all of the women nominees of the night to stand
in solidarity. She urged action, not talk, and ended her speech with two
words: “inclusion rider.” Which of course a lot of people on the room
grasped, but not so much people watching:
Here’s a short look at some of the
other things that caught our attention throughout the night:
·
Vox noted that the montage devoted to
the #MeToo movement was way
too polite and missed an opportunity to shine a light on the abuse that’s
gone on in Hollywood’s system for so many years.
·
Tiffany Haddish's and Maya Rudolph's
take on “white
people with clipboards” deserved every bit of love it got on Twitter.
·
A DACA shout-out: ““We’re dreamers.
Dreams are the foundation of Hollywood, and dreams are the foundation of
America,” Lupita Nyong’o and Kumail Nanjiani said during the introduction of
a design award. They added, “to all the dreamers out there, we stand with
you.”
·
Host Jimmy Kimmel directly
mentioned Harvey Weinstein and urged Hollywood to finally get its act
together on workplace harassment. “The world is watching us. We need to set
an example. The truth is if we are successful, women will only have to deal
with harassment all the time every other place they go.”
·
Who were all
of those people standing on stage as Common and Andra Day performed the
nominated song “Stand Up for Something” from the movie “Marshall?” The
Academy provided the answer:
·
The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman says
Hollywood’s necessary
battles weren’t fought on the red carpet. “Hollywood has deep, serious
work to do in changing — but that work must be done at the level of its power
structure. Women and people of color need to take their place at the levers
of decision-making.”
·
Even before the statuettes,
cartoonist Nate Beeler of the Columbus Dispatch figured out why this year was
different.
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BEHIND THE NEWS: Research skills lead librarian to national reporting for NBC News
Journalism is better off that Brandy
Zadrozny wanted to move on from her job at the Burlington (Vermont) Public
Library.
For
the past five years, she’s been a senior reporter and research at The Daily
Beast, uncovering facts about Russia’s meddling in America, Eric Trump’s
wacky charity, Vice’s rampant harassment, the secret life of a pro-Trump
school shooter. Now the Tampa native again is moving on to NBC News as a
national reporter, taking her specialized skills to an even bigger audience.
“My mission on the Reference Desk is
the same as it is now. To inform the public that is hungry for answers to
their questions,” says Zadrozny, just one of many news researchers
to play key roles in Trump-era scoops. “At the Reference Desk it was,
‘What is the capital of Montana?’ And now, it’s: ‘Who is this person who is
being retweeted by our president?’ … or, ‘Who is the person who runs the
Internet Research Agency?’”
Please read here
for the entire interview. But first, here are the other media stories you
need to know today.
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THE CONSEQUENCES OF
KILLING JOURNALISTS: The assassination of
investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia will “dramatically” affect
Malta’s position in the
World Press Freedom index, says Reporters Without Borders. “I intend to
tell the world more about the worrying climate in Malta, because ultimately
it is this climate that allowed Daphne to get murdered and these very serious
issues need to be addressed before another journalist gets killed,” says
Rebecca Vincent, director of the organization’s London bureau. Malta is
currently ranked 47th in the press freedom index, between Romania and
Botswana. Ten people have
been arrested in the car-bombing in October of Caruana Galizia, who was
investigating high-level corruption in the Mediterranean island nation.
BEYOND ALEXA:
Voice-activated streaming, already a $2 billion business, could grow 20-fold
by 2022, USA
Today’s Charisse Jones reports. "We really see this as the next big
disruptive play in U.S. retail,’’ Jones quotes John Franklin, associate
partner at OC&C, as saying. Franklin’s company surveyed 1,500
smart-speaker owners in December.
PROMOTED: Grant
Moise, hired a year ago as general manager of the Dallas Morning News, will
become publisher, the newspaper
announced. He replaces Jim Moroney, who will continue to serve as board
chairman, president and chief executive of parent company A. H. Belo
Corporation.
INFOWARS: Alex Jones has been accused of anti-Semitism, racism and sexual harassment in EEOC complaints. One employee, in his complaint, said he was referred to as “The Resident Jew,” and believed Jones was grooming him for homosexual sex. A second employee said he grabbed her butt and said: “Who wouldn’t want to have a black wife?”
ASKING TOO MUCH?
Journalists looking for jobs are being asked to take increasingly complex
editing tests, sometimes working up to 20 hours on a single application
(without pay, no less). Columbia Journalism Review wonders if all
of that testing is necessary.
THE SIMPSONS FACTOR:
The animated cultural icons are ubiquitous, but this might possibly be the
first time we know of that their GIFs have been used to explain
steel tariffs.
A LOT OF WORK …: went into this piece of explanatory journalism investigating the dimensions of NPR’s so-called “tiny desk” used in its concert series. All we’ve got to say is that some people have too much time on their hands.
WHAT TWO PEOPLE CAN DO:
Kevin Rothrock and Anna Veduta run some of the
best reporting on Russia. Their English-language site,
Meduza, a branch of a bigger, Latvian-based Russian-language site, has
100,000 readers monthly. They include academics, students and lawmakers in
the United States and Europe, Veduta tells Nieman Lab’s Shan Wang.
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Daily Dose of Dust
Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
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