Jeff Bridges Nominated For Best Actor, True Grit - Oscar Nominations 2011

The nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards have been announced and one pleasant surprise was the emergence of The Coen Brothers great work True Grit in several of the major award categories. That includes Best Actor for Jeff Bridges.

Bridges won Best Actor at the 2010 Academy Awards for Crazy Heart, and he's right back in the mix again this very next year. Bridges expertly played Roster Cogburn, the hardscrabble, irritable, gunslinger who protects young Hailee Steinfeld in the movie.

Steinfeld was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

More from this space.

Oscar Nominations 2011 Livestream Live Blog At 5:30 AM PT

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) says that the Oscar race begins today at 5:30 AM PDT, but really it's over at that time.

When the nominees are announced it will mark the end of the marketing period, where studios and producers try to get Academy voters to pick their films for the award categories they applied to be considered for.

Now, all of the ballots from Academy members are in (one hopes) and the votes are going to be tallied. But the real voting basis, who's nominated for what category, is announced today.

Oscars Livestream

You can watch the announcements online here via the Oscars livestream. The page with the video will appear with a click here: http://oscar.go.com/ Meanwhile, I'll provide the blog updates here, below.

Here we go with Tom Sherak and Monique!

The Result: True Grit Enters

The announcements are over, and overall the surprise is the solid entry of True Grit in the major categories. Jeff Bridges is rightfully nominated for his role as Rooster Cogburn in the Coen Brothers take on the classic film that starred John Wanye in 1969.

True Grit was controversially snubbed at the Golden Globes.

Stay tuned for more commentary. The entire Oscars Nominees list is here.

Huff Post Shows Oil Glove From PetroEcuador Oil, Says It's Chevron

In a total freaking joke of a blog post, Joanna Zelman somehow managed to get the Huffington Post to allow her to post a totally fraudulent entry accusing American Oil Company Chevron of environmental damage to the tune of $100 billion.

 And their proof is a oil-stained glove that anyone who's paid close attention to this case knows comes from oil fields that are owned not by Chevron but by PetroEcuador, the state-owned oil company.

It's commonly known that only a fool would believe that Chevron or any American Oil Company would be responsible for such a high level of environmental damage. Chevron's not operated in Ecuador for almost 20 years. Over that time there have been well over 100 - YES 100 - oil spills, and as many as 118 by 2009, including several by PetroEcuador that have, for all practical purposes been covered up.

Why?

So Ecuador can continue its attempt to extort American Oil companies in an effort to maintain oil revenues for its rich, while exploiting and starving its poor. Everyone who knows this case knows that Ecuador's involved with it, and that the lead lawyer, Steven Donziger, has worked with the government of Ecuador as well as conspired to threaten judges and intimidate the court of Ecuador.

This Ecuadorian trial is a joke, but if you've got an ounce of sense, you're not laughing at all.  Ecuador's trying to get off scott free.  Shame.  Just a plain shame.

And shame on the Rainforest Action Network for helping the corrupt Ecuadorian effort.

Stay tuned.

Brad Jefferson - Animoto CEO Interview At Pre-Crunchies Party

On Friday this blogger had the opportunity to interview Brad Jefferson, the CEO of Animoto, and during the Pre-Crunchies Party to introduce the firm's new offices at 333 Kearny Street in San Francisco. Animoto is an online platform that takes your photos, music, and other media and creates high-quality videos. The firm's about 7 years old, and the platform has about 1 million registered users.

As described in the blog post on the party itself, the offices look like they're right out of a sci-fi movie. You know, the kind where the scientist is this young, cool, hipster cat. That's Animoto's SF digs, and Jefferson's office.

His office carries the theme too: it's entirely glassed in, and reminds you of those experiments where the person's locked into a room without any connection with the outside World except that you can look in on him. But it's also a place where Jefferson can see what's happening in the office without leaving his bubble.

Bubble aside, we talked about Animoto.

"There's four of us that co-founded the company. The inspiration was about how you get really high quality video to the masses. So, instead of using (video) editing tools, how do you have them just point to their photos, pick a song, and have it done for them. Something they'd just really be proud to share. Almost like a movie trailer of your photo album. One of the key parts of that," Brad said, "was Stevie Clifton, our CTO."

"He was working as a lead animator for ABC's documentary group. In that role he was trying to figure out how to automate his job. How to do some of the real heavy lifting that real animators have to do, in an automated manner. A lot of us grabbed on to that, and said 'that's great for you, but if we could make this a mass-market kind of thing, that would be a big idea. So that's what we quit our jobs for."

The Future Of Animoto

Brad says that the ability to see photos in the way Animoto allows is "pretty jarring" to some, and leads to a lot of possible applications for the future, though he did not explain what those would be.

Copyright Issues?

With all of the photos one can use to create a video using Animoto, you'd think there would be a number of users that ran up against copyright issues. Jefferson explains that's not the case because the terms of service "explicitly state that you cannot use copyrighted material, so we haven't had that much of a problem." That's a cool way of saying the users follow the Animoto rules.

Animoto Roll-outs

On February 8th, right after the Super Bowl, Animoto will roll out its new website with an improved "user experience," and introduce an ability to access HD quality so you can view videos on your digital television at home. Also, Brad says the time that it takes you to get your videos is going to be "reduced drastically."

Jerry Brown's Plan To End Redevelopment In California Wrong-Headed

California Governor Jerry Brown is known for attacking sacred cows but sometimes he does so without a clear vision of the real objective and how to achieve it. Such is the case with California Redevelopment Agencies (CRAs), which Brown wants to do away with as part of his State of California Proposed Budget.

Governor Brown thinks the move will return $1.7 billion to the general funds of California cities; but such a claim shows Brown doesn't understand Redevelopment, how it works, and what it's supposed to do.  The real objective of returning $1.7 billion will not be done in the way he says, and for several reasons.

First, California Redevelopment is designed such that it allows cities to establish redevelopment areas to keep property taxes. And contrary to popular view, redevelopment revenues from project areas can be used to provide services in those project areas. Many cities have done this, including Oakland.

Indeed, California Redevelopment Law was used by the City of Santa Ana to keep all of its property tax revenue. And while the law was changed to prevent that action by other cities, the City of Santa Ana's example proves that Redevelopment itself keeps property tax revenue under civic, and not state and county share, control. Yes, counties hate CRA's because they keep city property tax revenues from county collection and use. But counties can and do negotiate "pass-through" agreements to get some of that CRA prop tax revenue.

The bottom line is Governor Brown's wrong here and doesn't "get" how Redevelopment works.  The truth is that cities use California Redevelopment to keep property tax revenue and can use it for services.

Second, such a proposal as Brown's brings out every wingnut who has an issue with Redevelopment jumping on the Brown bandwagon, bringing up issues that can be easily fixed with a tweak in the law. For example, many suburban cities don't use their affordable housing set-aside monies. They should be forced to give 50 percent of those funds to a total pool that's then redistributed to the CRAs that have the greatest predetermined need.

Third, if Governor Brown really wants to attack a sacred cow and solve this budget problem, go after Prop 13.

Proposition 13 got us into this mess by throwing an intergenerational choke-chain around California's revenue collection system in 1978. Now, the near-depression recession we faced added another choke chain California has to deal with. The state has too many people chasing too few resources. The only way to reduce the population and increase the resources is by a three-percent increase in property taxes state-wide.

It would present a brutal and ugly fight. Hell, it might cost Brown his job and he'd have the shortest executive career since that pope who got poisoned, but it would be worth doing to really get at the actual problem plaguing California today: it's property tax system.

Be brave Jerry. Do it.

Sen. Mark Pryor's Support Of GOP-ish Amy Russell For Judge Upsets Arkansas Dems

Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor has incurred the wrath of Democrats in his state by pushing Amy Russell, the wife of Bob Russell, his former chief of staff, for a federal judgeship. The problem is Amy Russell is said to be a Republican.

What's bothersome to the Arkansas Democrats is that while blacks have called for black judges to be nominated, both Pryor and the once-sitting-Senator Blanche Lincoln gave them, what one blog called "the finger." Now, here comes Russell, and while she's black and the wife of Pryor's former Chief of Staff, she's not a Democrat.

That's interesting and it shows how far racial politics have come. It's not enough that the judge be black, but also be a Democrat. Personally, that kind of concern may be a good thing because it signals the mainstreamizing of black politics. It also says that, as Eugene Robinson has written, we are "disintegrating" into several groups that don't associate with each other in the way we did in the past.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing at all.

I'm also not exactly certain that a black Republican judge is less desirable than a black Democratic judge. Both are likely to be rather conservative socially and sympathetic to those who may come up in life's short end, if you will.

Still, it places Obama in a bit of a pickle. The basic objective is to keep the party happy, so Obama should just punt on this one. It looks like Arkansas Dems are out for blood.

Rahm Emanuel Can't Run For Mayor Of Chicago, Court Rules

Rahm Emanuel, former Congressman and Chief of Staff in The Obama White House, in a really shocking turn of legal events, can't run for Mayor of Chicago as of this writing. Here's the video by The Associated Press:



According to The New York Times, an Illinois Appeals Court, in overturning the decisions of the Chicago Board Of Elections and a Cook County Judge, had ruled that Emanuel can't run because he didn't meet the basic state residency requirements.

Rahm, who has a wide lead in polling and fund-raising, has said that his time working in The White House should not, essentially, be held against him because he was doing national service.

Now, the matter is certain to go to the State Supreme Court.

Boy, you can imagine what choice cuss words Rahm had for the two judges who went against him. Bet the house he threw something - maybe a paper weight.

But all kidding aside, this blogger can't think of a single time a white house staffer has quit to immediately run for local public office. This is without precedent, and therefore subject to wide legal interpretation.

The news comes just at the time when Rahm's the leader in both polling and in fund-raising, and by a wide margin. It's reported that Emanuel has raised $11.4 million to date. By contrast, Gery Chico, his closest challenger, has scored four times less money from donors than Emanuel.