The Oscars!

So, the Oscars and as we discussed in an earlier blog the point of these awards is to raise awareness of the films that are being celebrated. How many people in the UK had heard of Slumdog Millionaire before its nominations? But today everyone is talking about it. Expect it to go up in the box office charts this week as people catch up with it. This is all about INSTITUTION (who made it and who is selling it), but interestingly Warner Bros. whose logo appears on the trailer, didn't really want to pay to show it cinemas, it was going to go 'straight-to-video', usually this means that a film isn't very good - how wrong in this case!

For us though the other big story is that Wall-E won the Best Animated Feature Oscar (told you it would!). This wasn't a surprise and actually won't make much difference to the film - most of Wall-E's AUDIENCE (small children) aren't interested or don't know what the Oscars are - in terms of sales. Still, it deserved its Oscar.

As Media students you should be able to talk about all aspects of a media text so INSTITUTION is important, you should know who made a film (not just the studio, but the director as well) as well as be able to identify the LANGUAGE features (camera angles and so on). In terms of the Oscars think about the type of media coverage that they are given; how many Oscar news reports focus on the dresses being worn? Why is the AUDIENCE interested in this? How are the stars being REPRESENTED?

As well as Animated Film, the other exam topic this year is News in the Print and Electronic Media. A good exercise would be to see how news websites are using still images and video (interviews in particular) to cover the Oscars, and not just using text. These bits all together are called 'packages'.

So, the Oscars, done for this year but a useful example in how the Media industry works.