I had my reservations about the Academy Awards’ “Best Picture” category being expanded into 10 nominations when they announced it last year, and now that the nominees are out, some of my concerns have been confirmed — but there’s hope for absolution.

First, the obvious concern was that the category would become over saturated, with too many slots to fill and not enough quality films. Happily, I wouldn’t say that happened this year. The only real lenience the abundance of spots brought was allowing titles like “Up,” which was a very good movie but not a great one, to receive some recognition for its achievement. Up isn’t really in danger of winning the award, but a nomination is a fine accolade that it wouldn’t have gotten in a 5 nominee set.

But the real concern here is that the expanded category would be the beginning of the end for The Oscars as the last true semi-artistic award show. One would hate to see yet another show like the popularity-driven Grammys or the marketing-soaked Golden Globes (where lifetime achievement awards magically transform themselves into ads for upcoming features). And now, with the addition of the PR machine that is Avatar and the saccharine The Blind Side being added when they may not have been otherwise, some are suggesting that a win for either could spell disaster for the Oscar’s prestige.

Avatar was a fine film, and its normalization 3D gimmickery is something many a producer is cheering about. But if it were to somehow win best picture on the merits of being either paradigm-shifting or hugely popular (because if it wins, it probably won’t be on its merits as a film alone), then how long will it take for the diluted nominee field to include popular titles with even less artistic value? If there were ten nominees in the past, would Jurassic Park have snuck a best picture crown? Would Cameron have also won for Terminator 2?

I hope this is just nonsense and my such concerns are proven entirely ridiculous. And heaping this much pretense and gravitas onto an award show which is already considered meaningless by some is probably not healthy. But I do know one thing:  If Avatar wins, it probably won’t be because it was the best film out this year, and that’s not a good thing.

[First published on 10.12.08]

Last week, a pastor in Texas became a pop phenomenon when he suggested to his followers that they have more sex.  It was a funny, quirky, cute story.

And it took nearly a week for the likes of Tucker Carlson to politicize it:

Overall, according to a 1997 study in the British Medical Journal, men with the most active sex lives have a death rate half that of those with the least active. Sex prolongs life.

You’d think that someone other than Ed Young would have noticed this. Maybe one of the tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats paid to worry about America’s health might have caught on and launched an ad campaign on billboards and city buses. (“Sex: It’s the Right Thing to Do,” or “Take a Minute for Couchball.”) But no. It took an evangelical.

Yes, it “took an evangelical.”  Just like it took a million evangelicals to convince Bush and his subordinates that “abstinance only” could somehow be related to the idea of “education.”

Carlson has never backed down from a challenge, but he should probably quit while he’s ahead when it comes to dressing up the most anti-sex demographic on the face of the Earth as the kingpins of the activity.  You can’t slap a bowtie on a pig and call it a genius.

Hulu.com is an amazing website.

An ironic partnership between Fox and NBC, Hulu is a video sharing site featuring high-quality, professional videos from each network’s primetime shows and webisodes — including the popular Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, and Family Guy.  Since it’s inception just over a year ago, Hulu has also added plenty of extra content to its ranks, including viral video machines The Daily Show and The Colbert Report — and unlike YouTube, Hulu shows many of those programs in the form of full episodes, and even quite a few in HD.

And of course, the fix for YouTube was in as soon as Hulu launched.  Unlike other online content ventures from major media outlets, Hulu allows their videos to be imbedded in one’s blog or website — even full episodes.  Now, it appears as though Hulu will very quickly surpass YouTube in terms of advertising revenue:

The feat suggests traditional media companies can make money online without having to cede control to Google, as the music industry did to Apple, whose iTunes music store dominates the digital music market.

It also shows the difficulties other social networks might have in generating revenues from their amateur content.

Obviously, the ability to become associated with professional, monitored content is more appealing — for now — to advertisers than appearing on random YouTube viral videos is.  That easily explains why Hulu’s 6 million visitors is currently pulling in nearly as much as YouTube’s 80 million.  But I still believe that advertisers skittishness toward online advertising is on its way out, however slowly.

Why Coke or Pepsi or Budweiser thinks that flashing their logo on TV and in magazines is more valuable than flashing it on a website is beyond me.  Branding is branding, and they can reach just as many people on Facebook as they can in Maxim Magazine — only in Maxim, readers cannot click on their logo and be taken directly to the product’s website.  Yet advertisers still complain about “low click-through rates” — a marvelous concept that doesn’t even exist in other advertising mediums, but still manages to disappoint CEOs.

Once the internet becomes as integrated in our society as television, Hulu will have to have an audience, not just a product, to rival YouTube’s.  Until then, congratulations to them.  They’ve succeeded where other media companies have failed miserably for a decade.