Hollywood

Though it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as The Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs Miller and the wave of revisionist westerns that came out of Hollywood in the late 60s and early 70s, Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles doesn’t need any artfully hazy Vilmos Zsigmond cinematography to upend Old West mythology. True, it is a comedy where a horse gets cold-cocked, a Native American chief (one of three characters played by Brooks) speaks Yiddish and Count Basie’s orchestra makes an appearance on the plains. Yet from the opening sequence, where Chinese immigrants and recently freed Black slaves work under the white man’s whip to build a railroad, this irreverent Looney Tunes spoof of the genre takes a dimmer view of frontier life than the classics it parodies.

The sixty-sixth annual Grammy Awards drew only 16.9 million viewers “across CBS, Paramount+ and other digital platforms, according to early data from Nielsen,” reports the far-left Deadline.

While this is a 34 percent improvement from 2023, until the arrogant, smug, preachy Woke Gestapo era began in 2017 with the election of President Donald Trump, the Grammy Awards averaged around 25 million viewers for nearly a decade without breaking a sweat.

Social media has exposed and over exposed the “Stars” of our era as weak tea.

Actress and MMA star Gina Carano is suing the Walt Disney Company for firing her from the Star Wars series The Mandalorian in 2021, alleging the studio violated California law by discriminating against her over her political beliefs.

(UPI) — Alec Baldwin pleaded not guilty for a second time to involuntary manslaughter Wednesday in the 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust.”

Baldwin, 65, who starred in the Western and was an executive producer, waived his right to an arraignment — which had been scheduled for Thursday — and entered his not guilty plea in a court filing.

Those Best Picture nominees still in theaters did not get much of an Oscar bump in 2024. We’re a long way from the days when the imprimatur of an Academy Award nomination excited the public enough to spin box office gold.

Celebrities routinely suffer for sharing their political views, and no one bats an eye.

Just ask Kevin Sorbo, who watched his mainstream Hollywood career implode for being an openly Christian conservative. Actor Antonio Sabato, Jr. shared a similar story in recent years, forcing him to create a movie studio of his own to secure work.

“Sound of Freedom” star Jim Caviezel, also openly Christian and right-leaning, says appearing in that 2023 smash cost him two agents.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock lost a mind-boggling $2.7 billion in 2023 as the left-wing legacy studio continues to burn through cash at an alarming rate in the Hollywood streaming arms race.

Peacock’s subscriber base currently stands at around 30 million — still far behind Netflix, which counts around 80 million domestic subscribers.

The Academy Awards used to be a cultural phenomenon. The Oscars ceremony was the pinnacle of the entertainment world, with glamorous stars jockeying for statuettes. For generations, the most deserving actors, actresses, and films usually won — though not always, and I wrote a series a few years ago about the most undeserving winners.

Hollywood’s losing streak in China continued in 2023, with no American movies cracking the country’s top ten list of the highest grossing titles of the year.

The pitiful results come despite Disney CEO Bob Iger’s aggressive efforts to get Beijing to approve more Hollywood titles for domestic release. Disney managed to score Chinese dates for its woke movies including The Little Mermaid, Elemental, and the latest Indiana Jones sequel — only to see them bomb with local audiences.

Smash hit Barbie came away with a glittering trove of Oscar nominations on Tuesday morning but fans claimed one thing – or maybe a pair of things – were missing.

Star Margot Robbie together with director Greta Gerwig were both snubbed by the Academy in two areas.

I have not seen Barbie and may only watch if I am up at 2 am and can’t sleep.

Anyone seen Oppenheimer?

Now that a grand jury has indicted Alec Baldwin on a charge of involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” in New Mexico in 2021, the contours of the looming legal battle are coming into focus.

If the case reaches trial, the challenge prosecutors face will be convincing a jury that Mr. Baldwin was guilty of either the negligent use of a firearm or of acting with “total disregard or indifference for the safety of others” — even though investigators found he was told on the day of the shooting that the gun he was rehearsing with contained no live rounds, and even though the film set was not supposed to have any live ammunition at all.

Mexican-U.S. actress Sara Ramirez, who plays the “non-binary” love interest Che Diaz in the recent Sex and the City woke reboot, has condemned the character she gave life to while slamming the entertainment industry for allegedly making “blacklists” of actors who have shown support for pro-Palestinian terror groups in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.

A New Mexico grand jury indicted actor Alec Baldwin on Friday after hearing evidence in a closed hearing over the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who died in 2021 on the Rust film set after Baldwin’s prop gun fired a live bullet.

The prosecutor in the “Rust” case offered a “favorable” outcome last fall to armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed if she would help explain how live rounds made it onto the film’s set.

But the offer came with a warning that if she refused, she would be hit with additional charges.