WHO (else) IS COVERING THEM?

• TheMovieBlog.com will be “live-podcasting” – posting short podcasts between various segments of the show.
• Defamer will be liveblogging, also Twittering from the Kodak itself!
• Styledash, though likely it’ll be more about the clothing than the movies.
• Nikki Finke will be liveblogging.

WHO IS NOMINATED?
The official list, straight from the Academy itself.

Sorry it was late. Here’s my liveblog of the Oscars:

THE POST
Art Direction: Pan’s Labyrinth

8:50ish – Very funny thing between Will Ferrel, Jack Black, and John Reilly

Achievement in Makeup: Pan’s Labyrinth

9:00 – Abigail Breslin just screwed up.

Best Animated Short: The Danish Poet

9:03 – Jaden screwed up now.

Best Live Action Short: West Bank Story

9:03 – West Bank Story acceptance speech brought us a new word: Sticktoitivness. West Bank Story’s website is down, unfortunately. Looked good.

9:11 – Hollywood Sound Effects Choir. This is pretty crazy. I don’t know if I believe it.

Sound Editing: Letters from Iwo Jima

9:16 – Just cut off one of the Sound Editing guys

Sound Mixing: Dreamgirls

Best Supporting Actor: Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine

9:24 – Ellen is wandering

9:30 – Randy Newman and James Taylor are singing/playing song from Cars
9:32 – Melissa Etheridge singing her song from An Inconvenient Truth

9:35 – Al Gore and Leo are on stage… Leo says – “Is there anything you want to announce?”

9:37 – We were this close to having Al Gore run again for president.

Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet

9:45 – Screenwriting time… doing the tribute montage now

9:48 – This montage was too long

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Departed

the iPhone Advertisement is online

10:00 – “one singular problem”

Best Costume Design: Marie Antoinette

10:04 – Oh goodness, Tom Cruise is on stage. Honoring Sherry Lansing.

10:11 – First funny Ellen moment all night – Ellen has Stephen Spielberg take a picture with her and Clint Eastwood – for Myspace. You had to see it, it was funny

Achievement in Cinematography: Pan’s Labyrinth

Readers, feel free to comment. Satisfied with how the Academy voted? We’re always curious!

Best Visual Effects: Pirates of the Carribean

10:22 – Can they please stop cutting people off?!

10:28 – Enduring another long montage, this isn’t as bad as adapted screenplay though

Best Foreign Language Film: The Lives of Others!!! THE MOST SHOCKING UPSET OF THE NIGHT – Pan’s Labyrinth does not get the Oscar!

10:33 – I’m mad. Pan’s Labyrinth deserved the Foreign Language Oscar – it managed not only to be a fantastic film but it threw itself into the mainstream. I’m mad.

Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls

10:41 – Short break, I hope I didn’t miss anything. I’m going to bet on An Inconvenient Truth losing (when we get there). I just have a gut feeling.

Short Form Documentary: The Blood of Yingzhou District

10:44 – Jerry Seinfeld. I think he wants to host. Let’s let him.

Best Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth. I was wrong.

Special OSCAR for lifetime score achievement, Ennio Morricone

11:00 – Since when was Clint Eastwood a translator?

Best Original Score: Babel

11:09 – Short bit on AMPAS.
11:10 – Kirsten Dunst is a zombie.

Best Original Screenplay: Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine

11:19 – Announcer sayz: “[Jennifer Lopez] is a reason for a high-definition television.”
11:20 – Performances from Dreamgirls by the cast themselves. This is a performance that I will admit I don’t mind.
11:27 – Dreamgirl bit really rocked. I dug that.

11:28 – The one that they “can’t talk about” is Hairspray. John Travolta is playing “Edna Turnblad”, a character pioneered by Harvey Fierstein on Broadway (the character is female).

Best Original Song: Melissa Etheridge, I Need to Wake Up, An Inconvenient Truth

11:33 – Little Miss Sunshine spotlight.

11:36 – Another montage. Next year let’s lose the montages.

11:40 – I love how they’re doing the editing sequences – showing the various shots that are online and showing the used cut. For some though, I’d assume more cameras are being used than three.

Achievement in Film Editing: The Departed

11:44 – Honoring those we’ve lost this year. Don Knotts, we hardly knew ye. Other notables: Joe Barbera, and Sidney Sheldon, Robert Altman, and Peter Boyle (no clips from Raymond for him).

When did IMDB become so beautiful? They lost the Times New Roman…

Actress in a Leading Role: Helen Mirren, The Queen.

11:53 – YES! /me is happy

11:59 – Can we fire Ellen now? She sucks. I’m sorry, she’s just begging for laughs and she ain’t gettin’ ’em.

12:07 – Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg on stage to present Best Director. No doubt to Scorsese.

Best Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed

HERE IT IS FOLKS, THE BIG ONE…

Best Picture: The Departed

——————————————————–

Well folks, that’s all. The Oscars for the ’06-’07 year of films are now over. More thoughts tomorrow. Maybe. I might be too tired from all the hoopla from tonight.

As promised, here’s a video review of the newly released Celtx 0.99.

RSS subscribers: if you see nothing, you’ll have to click through to this post to see the Flash embed.

On their way to 1.0, Celtx released a brand new version of their free and open source screenwriting application.

The new version is incredibly exciting. The fantastic, new dark interface is a refreshing change for the usual Mozilla-esque app. The icons are totally redesigned and more descriptive of their functions. Everything in the app screams polish, and it’s much easier to use overall. Some of the core UI elements have been restructured too, making the app simpler.

One of the biggest changes is the modification made to Project Central. Maintaining your project’s online presence is now done via a “Web Services” tab. There, you can also manage your project’s project page, and determine who is allowed to view it. Further, this is where slogans, project images, and that fun stuff is all managed. You can also add and remove project collaborators here.

You can now add storyboards. It’s barebones functionality, but it works as advertised. There is functionality for sequences and then shots, the basic stuff you need. I’m sure the Celtx community will have ideas on how to tie this into the other parts of the app soon! There is also the ability to play back your storyboard, which I demonstrate in an upcoming YouMakeMedia video review.

Be sure to check out this new release of Celtx, and check out the full list of new stuff at the Celtx Blog. I only went into detail about the big stuff, but there are a lot of little improvements too!

Congrats to the Celtx team, at this rate, 1.0 will be a killer app, no doubt!

Hey international readers: I missed this in my first pass of the press release earlier, but the new version also features A4 support. To quote you all: “FINALLY!”

We are working on getting a YouMakeMedia video review published, I’ll post the link as soon as I get it online!

Our sister site GizBuzz reported today that Viacom will be hosting and allowing embeds themselves, sidestepping YouTube’s increasingly important role in the distribution of online video.

I thought this would be a good time to outline some advantages and disadvantages to hosting remotely and hosting yourself.

	YouHost	YouTube
Metrics	Hosting yourself allows you a broad range of possibilities for capturing where your viewers come from. You can track individual hits on the file downloads and use GeoIP tools to figure out what markets your viewers come from.	Video sharing sites provide one metric – view counts. Theoretically, you could embed your video on a page at your site and use a statistics package such as Google Analytics to track all views of that page, however if someone clicks through to the video’s page you lose that viewer’s information.
Price	Hosting yourself isn’t cheap. Aside from paying the standard space and bandwidth fees, you’ll also have to have some extra cash on hand in case your video goes viral. If you hit “Evolution of Dance” levels, pay up!	Free!
Audience	When you host, it is harder to get to people. You can – and if you do it is better for you because you can more easily know who these people are. The problem is, however – people may not know about your site.	YouTube and its posse, on the other hand, have huge numbers of crazy folks from around the world who spend their days and nights entering random search terms and watching whatever they find. Much easier to target.

What’s best? It depends on what you want – and who you are. Smaller producers may find luck with YouTube, Vimeo, and co., however if you have a respectable ranking at Google and a high hit count, you will probably enjoy the increased control you gain through self-hosting.

Similar to the Flixn widget that we discussed last year, Twango launched a webcam widget that uses Flash to record webcam messages.

Like Flixn, Twango’s widget does not require membership for use of the widget. Twango does add the ability to save video to a Twango account if you are a member though – making it a great way to easily create short videoblogs. YouTube offers a similar feature, Quick Capture.

Unlike Flixn, this is not an ad supported service. One of my personal “concerns” with Twango is that there is no evident business model (and if there is one, they aren’t putting it into action). This is the perfect opportunity to put in post-roll ads and get a bit of value off what is surely a bandwidth hogging application. Still though, a quick and easy way to get your message across to family, friends, and co-workers!