Ranpitsu

When someone like Oprah, who is a very smart businesswoman, sees that a new media platform is worthy of her engaging on it, it signifies a real sea change…The mega-celebrity marketing machine that is Oprah seems like the next level of adoption.

It looks like they might bring this one in at under three hours, so I’ll curb my complaining. And I’ll close by noting that this seemed not only like a relatively brief Oscar ceremony, but a small one. Maybe this is a harbinger of things to come. Like it or not, the movies have lost their pop-cultural supremacy, and the fate of the Oscars may either be to go after a vanished mass appeal or to scale down, acknowledge the shrinking of the audience and turn into something like the Tonys. More of a coterie affair, appealing to the aficionados and the curious. It would be an honorable outcome.

There were no permits and no planning — just sheer nerve. “After 26 blocks, from Bay 50th to Bay 24th Street, I ran out of film, but I knew I had enough,” Mr. Friedkin said. “The fact that we never hurt anybody in the chase run, the way it was poised for disaster, this was a gift from the Movie God. Everything happened on the fly. We would never do this again. Nor should it ever be attempted in that way again.

The “right” number [of children] seems to lie somewhere between China and Nadya Suleman. And each of us believes we know it when we reach it (and we know that it’s been crossed by someone else.) But on what do we base that belief? The ability to pay for the children? The limits on the attention they will receive? Is Suleman right when she tells Curry that people are judging her not because of the size of her brood but because she chose to have them as a single Mom? How many is too many, and who gets to decide?

I worked the Oscar circuit in 2006 and watched Mr. Ledger in support of “Brokeback Mountain,” then a favorite for best picture, and can say he never was much of a campaigner. A polite, nice man, he had little aptitude or appetite for trite talk at parties or events, even when he was up for a best actor Oscar, as he was then. For “The Dark Knight” the studio has eschewed any R.I.P. allusions in its trade advertising, instead relying on a steady (and not frantic) visual presence of somebody now best known for his absence, showing him in various guises: the crazed man in the nurse’s uniform, the immovable object standing in the middle of the street.

If you enjoy watching men tossed out a window, struck by a bus, slammed face-first into the bars of a zoo cage, hit by a golf club, tackled by a football player or laid low by a snow globe to the crotch, then this Super Bowl was for you.

Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself….If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened.

‘People walk up to me and start complaining about some crawl they just saw on CNBC,’ said [Tom] Brokaw, referring to the business news channel owned by his network. ‘And I have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s like the ‘Star Wars’ bar.’

Perhaps more important for television viewers, the network [NBC] said it would embrace a year-round prime-time programming schedule, jettisoning the frequently criticized practice of saving most shows for the traditional September-to-May television season.

According to a study of how children ages 5 to 13 spend their time, by Isabelle Cherney and Kamala London, psychologists at Creighton University and the University of Toledo, respectively, and published in the journal Sex Roles, girls tend to become less stereotypical in their play as they age — choosing more neutral toys, sports and computer games — while boys remain emphatically masculine in theirs. There was one exception to that trend: television-watching. The viewing habits of girls become strikingly more feminine in their tween years.