It’s the morning after and Chris Rock is already being praised for his pull-no-punches monologue, during which he skewered the Academy and Hollywood-at-large for failing to promote racial diversity. But interestingly enough, crickets were heard after one of his most clever and cutting jokes of the night.
When Stacey Dash was sarcastically trotted out as the “new director” of the Academy’s “minority outreach program,” everyone in the audience seemed clueless, including the actress herself.
Courtesy of NBC News, here’s a snippet of the blog post she published after her appearance: “When they added ME to increase the diversity, I’m sure many black people rolled their eyes. I’m not ‘black enough,’ they say. But guess what? I’ve heard that all my life. I would rather be a free thinking black than a cookie cutter black who thinks — and votes — just like all my friends.”
Though it fell flat, Rock’s joke was that the Academy is so out of touch with black culture that it would put Dash front and center in an effort to mitigate the diversity controversy, even though her views run contrary to those of the majority of the black community. The fact that no one seemed to get the joke actually made it even funnier, since it seemed to prove the underlying premise.
In reality, Dash has actually been very outspoken against the idea of the Oscars boycott and went so far as to call it “ludicrous” during a Fox & Friends appearance last month. Later in the interview, she decried both BET (Black Entertainment Television) and Black History Month for setting a double standard and promoting segregation, rather than integration.
You can debate those views on their own merits but, if you’re looking to issue a public mea culpa for the lack of diversity at your awards show, she’s probably not an ideal ambassador.
To its credit, the Academy has been publicly contrite since the #OscarsSoWhite controversy came to the fore, but we’ll have to wait and see if Hollywood’s most prestigious awards show (and Hollywood itself) will actually take steps to be more inclusive in the future.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?