According to an article by Time, ABC’s airing of the 2020 Academy Awards was watched by the smallest audience in history, reaching only 23.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen. Now, nearly 24 million may seem like a large number, but this is a 20% decrease from the 2019 Oscars. The 2018 Oscars, which initially held the record for lowest ratings, was 26.5 million. These ratings were a surprise to some who considered this year’s Oscars to be one of many historical and cultural firsts. Parasite became the first-ever foreign language film to win the best picture, the night’s top award. Others felt that the early February airing of the show might be to blame for the low ratings, as it prevented the adequate promotion of the show. 

As one journalist put it, “It was too predictable, too white and too boring.” Those who took home some of the night’s top awards were Joaquin Phoenix, Renee Zellweger, and Brad Pitt, who had also been among the winners and previous awards. This left very few surprises for viewers who anticipated the trend of earlier awards would carry over to the Oscars. Although Parasite’s win was a surprise to some, a large number of viewers had not yet seen the movie, leaving little emotional investment in the film.  

This was the second year in a row where the Oscars were without a host, a detail some critics felt was detrimental to viewership numbers. Other critics joked that the broadcast was on “autopilot,” adding the show was “three and a half hours of Hollywood cruising along at 35,000 feet.” The lack of structure and sensible flow made the show feel somewhat disorganized and random. In the past, the Oscars fluctuated between 35-45 million viewers. It was often considered the second most-watched cable program of the year behind, of course, the Super Bowl. As little as five years ago, the show received 37.3 million viewers. 

Still, the Motion Picture Academy is not entirely to blame here. Live television has experienced a significant drop in viewership in recent years due to the upsurge in streaming services. With that being said, as streaming services continue to advance and grow in popularity, cable network event producers must consider how this growth may affect the success of their program. Similar award broadcasts, including the Golden Globes and Grammy Awards, also experienced declines in viewership, although neither were as steep as this year’s Oscars. 

 

Columbus Ohio is getting a boost to their public transportation sector with the latest in U.S. funded autonomous technology testing. This week Columbus will become the first United States city to have a completely autonomous public transportation shuttle. These smart buses will travel on three mile rout that starts at the linden transit center, goes through the cities largest public housing development, and eventually stops at St. Stephens community house which services around 22,000 residents annually.

Stemming from the Smart Cities Challenge, a program implemented by the Obama administration aiming to encourage cities to step up and develop more advanced transportation modes, Columbus was able to beat out six other finalist cities to become the winner of a 40 million dollar federal grant, “Smart Columbus” was born.

Columbus is a fast growing city and with the rapid growth to its population transportation systems will begin to stress under the increased workload. The implementation of the new transit system will work towards connecting neighborhoods and making sure none are left behind. For example the south linden neighborhood has an above average infant mortality rate, the city hopes that this new transit technology will improve access for pregnant women to the St. Stephens clinic and its food pantry. Smart Columbus plans to have over 300 pregnant enrolled at the start of the program.

Article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-05/self-driving-mass-transit-arrives-on-american-streets

Image: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-05/self-driving-mass-transit-arrives-on-american-streets

As the movie industry is in a period of transition, the Oscar nominations reflect that. With the overflowing content coming from streaming services, there are more movies to review than ever. Netflix has greatly impacted the movie industry by adding their own originals such as Irishman and Marriage Story. Although these movies got great reviews, there is still a gap between those who liked the movies and the critics saying it was not good enough. Because these movies are not played in theatres, the number of tickets sold at box office and awards received are not going to correlate.

With Netflix expanding the pool of movies to choose from, studio movies such as Avengers: Endgame and Frozen II were left out. This is to much surprise for the box office numbers did well. Old School studio movies did well like 1917, Once Upon a Time, and Ford v. Ferrari. By that measure, Joker made the cut earning $1 billion worldwide.

The Academy also went through a lot of criticism for not nominating enough movies with people of color and women. That being said, no women were nominated for best director and only two actors of color. Although many critics would have liked to see more actors and directors of color, a South Korean movie titled Parasite got a nomination for best picture. It being only the 10th- foreign language film to be nominated for best picture, this was a win for those who advocate for diversity.

As the academies approach it is always important to understand the importance of this award show. The academies tells a lot about the period in which the movies were released. This year, the Oscars can tell a lot about what American is going through with increased streaming services and demand for diversity.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/13/entertainment/oscars-2020-analysis/index.html

There’s no better way to celebrate another #BlackHistoryMonth than with a full dose of… superficial black washing of classic novels? This past week, publisher Penguin Random House announced its new editions of “literary classics”, but with a twist: they feature black characters on the covers of the novels. You might be quick to say, “oh, woah! We love #Inclusion“, unfortunately, in this case it would be more of a #Illusion with another lazy attempt to market to an underserved demographic.

This collection of “Diverse Editions” of classic novels, was AI curated. Yeah, meaning some computer scanned through a big database of 100s of texts and tried to pick the ones that featured less obvious mentions of race.

From this obviously thorough & carefully thoughtful process of curation, 12 books were chosen to represent this next generation of classic editions:

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Emma
• Frankenstein
• Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
• Moby Dick
• Peter Pan
• The Secret Garden
• The Three Musketeers
• Treasure Island
• Romeo & Juliet
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Each of these great titles were then commissioned to artist to provide covers featuring non-white illustrations, and there we go! Diverse Editions complete!

…Weak, dude. It’s so weak. There’s so many problems with this fundamentally lazy approach that my little brown fingers don’t even know where to begin with unpacking this. Actually, let’s start there: brown fingers!

@PenguinRandomHouse, how about instead of superficially black-washing canon stories that are written by white authors about white experiences for white audiences, you actually take the opportunity to simply highlight black authors and black stories!

This list is filled with British and American authors whose stories (while total classics and absolutely sick in their own right) cannot be simply converted to colored narratives with the simple change of cover art. When actually reading these books, there are some very clear contextual clues that these characters are white and can only be white and are no less so for a lacking mention of race.

For instance, The Secret Garden. Gr8 book, but is very, very obviously about a little white girl born to British colonialists in India. Although the book never directly describes the color of the protagonist’s skin. It is hard to read the character say things like: “You thought I was a native! You dared! You don’t know anything about natives! They are not people—they’re servants who must salaam to you. You know nothing about India. You know nothing about anything!” and think that little Mary Lennox was down with the brown. #SorryNotSorry #ThatsTheTea

The unfortunate tea is that characters in “classics” are assumed to be white because we live in a culture where white is the default, and these books are filled with problematic depictions of race that don’t suddenly disappear if you change the race of the protagonist on the cover.

It’s insanely naive to believe that an algorithm can smooth over the racial bias that’s baked into reality, especially when these algorithms are like, dripping in racial bias themselves. Industries are staring to get a bit too optimistic with tech. Often it ignores or reinforces the existing inequalities regarding things from housing loans to police surveillance, and now I guess it’s representation

This approach does nothing about the real material and ideological reasons why every character is read as white and presents a superficial fix, meanwhile there are classic stories that totally center non-white characters, explore non-white experiences, and are written by non-white authors. So lets get their voices heard! Meanwhile, this lazy attempt at representation can literally lose my number… the art is dope though.

       A few weeks prior to the Super Bowl the brand Planters took over Twitter’s trending page after killing off their brand mascot, Mr. Peanut. When it comes to Mr. Peanut, he is usually someone that you would hear about in passing. To the younger generation, he doesn’t mean much. Over time, Planters became somewhat of a forgotten brand since not many kids are buying bags of peanuts, and if they are, buying them specifically for the planters brand. Planters realized that they needed to revamp their brand and become relevant again, and to do this, they had to kill off Mr. Peanut…or so we thought.

       The commercial aired by Planters during the Super Bowl started out as a funeral for Mr. Peanut. In the audience were other brand mascots such as Mr. Clean and the Kool Aid Man. As the ad plays out, the Kool Aid Man’s tears bring Mr. Peanut back to life, but this time, as an adorable baby. The hashtag #BabyNut soon took to Twitter. Many people on the app started falling head over heels for Planters new mascot. Soon the brand became more popular in those few minutes than it ever had before.

This idea to rebrand and make their mascot a baby was no doubt caused by the Baby Yoda trend. In an effort to reach a younger audience to become talked about, Planters saw the effect that Baby Yoda on Twitter uses and thought that their brand could get just as popular. By piggybacking off of the Star Wars brand strategy, many people are thinking that Planters is trying to rip-off Baby Yoda with Baby Nut. As the idea for baby themed mascots seems to gain more traction, how many more brands will start to hop on the baby bandwagon.

In this article, it dives into twitter and how they are looking into banning fake videos and photos. There are several faked photos and videos put on to twitter nearly every day. These photos and videos can impact people’s safety and cause harm to others. That is why twitter is creating a “balancing act” so “allowing parody and removing disinformation — that social media companies face as they try to police the content posted to their platforms more aggressively.” Twitter has had a lot of issues with this. They took a survey from 6,500 people, and around seventy percent thought it was unacceptable for twitter to do nothing about it. People distort and lie about the information that can be crucial to the public. Many media platforms try to buckle down on this, but twitter will now face pressure from all around that they do a better job with it. There have been many examples in the past but one being that there was an edited fake clip of former vice president Joe Biden making racial slurs, but it was not real, and it circled the internet worldwide. Joe Biden was made out to look very bad, and it wasn’t even real. I thought this article was so interesting to read because I have also seen for myself faked pictures and videos that are done so well that they are seen as real. Twitter needs to put their foot down and make sure it doesn’t happen again so that the public remains safe.