Brave new world
So how do you like it here in the future?
In my typesetting days I used to marvel at the fact that printing/publishing technology did not markedly change between Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of mechanical movable type in 1439 (he wanted more people to be able to the read the Bible on their own) and the mid-20th century. In my first newspaper job in the 1970s, the local paper was still doing a lot of printing by pressing metal letters formed from molten lead—not unlike in Gutenberg’s day. By that point, however, things had begun to change. Hot type was being replaced by cold type. That meant inked letters were pressed directly on paper galleys as someone like me typed on a keyboard. In the next few decades, particularly after the advent of Apple’s Macintosh and Adobe’s software, printing/publishing became the province of computers. Technological advancements have continued apace ever since.
The same thing has happened in the visual arts with moving images. After a century of capturing images on celluloid film, developing it and editing it painstakingly with the mechanical equivalent of scissors, filmmaking became digital. Images were captured as bytes. Editing and post-production moved to computers. A side-effect of all this was that publishing and filmmaking both become more accessible to individuals and thus democratic. Even people like me can publish their novels (a new one coming Real Soon Now, by the way), while any aspiring film student can make a technically proficient movie.
The chain of events set off by the technical revolution goes well beyond the fact there are a lot more books and movies out there. The reverberations inevitably shake up the institutional establishments that have traditionally curated these things. In recent months, these changes have gotten a forward-pushing shove from the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Ireland we have felt the coronavirus mainly in terms of causing us to be locked down, keeping us out of the pubs, making people get Mass on the radio or online, causing food-shopping trips to require more planning than before, ordering more things (coffee and wine in my case) from websites, and forcing Hollywood actor Matt Damon to spend several weeks living in a south County Dublin town to the bemusement of the locals.
There are more long-term effects, however, and some of the most interesting ones are in the area of mass entertainment. For example, a couple of months ago the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences suspended the rule that, to qualify for the Academy Awards, a movie must have had a theatrical run in a cinema. This year, films debuting on streaming services will be eligible. The change is for the current year only, but how long until pressure causes it to be a permanent change?
Getting rid of the theatrical-run requirement, even temporarily, further blurs the line between movies, television series, limited series, miniseries, web series, etc. Given the strange categories that the Golden Globes come up with in normal times (e.g. “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy,” “Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Limited Series or Motion Picture Made for Television”), the mind boggles at what they might do in an increasingly blurry world.
If made permanent, this change would, for example, presumably save Netflix the hassle and expense of owning the Paris Theater in New York, which it runs expressly for the purpose of qualifying its movies for the Oscars. In a further nod to the pervasiveness of watching films online, the Academy announced that, in an ostensible move to be more carbon neutral, it will no longer mail DVDs of nominated films to Academy members, who number in the thousands. A certain number of those DVDs have always ended up getting pirated, but I don’t know how much of a consideration that was at this point. It is notoriously easy to pirate streamed films.
There was a time when I had an quasi-unwritten rule on this website that I would review only films I had seen in a cinema. That was based on the notion that seeing movies on a large screen in a dark auditorium as part of an audience was the only way to fully appreciate the filmmakers’ intent. Over time that rule became increasingly relaxed, and now it is all but meaningless. For some time now, some prominent new movies have only been available through streaming. That is more true now than ever. Also, the viewing experience in my living room is now arguably superior to certain multiplex auditoriums. Will I be rushing back as soon as my local cinemas are open again? In truth, events had already conspired to cut down my cinema-going well before the advent of Covid-19.
There is another effect of the pandemic on the Academy Awards for movies released this year. The date for the awards ceremony has been pushed out to February 28. That means, in my time zone, it will actually be broadcast in March. After years of bringing the telecast forward on the calendar because of the constant stream of new product, the show has now slipped out again.
This means for most punters it will be harder than ever to remember most of the nominees—even the ones they may have actually seen.
-S.L., 22 June 2020
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