How Hollywood conquered the world (all over again)

In the frenzied final weeks before the Feb. 26 Academy Awards, a curious behind-the-scenes battle was taking place to persuade Hollywood that the leading Oscar contender, The Artist, was an American film — even though a Frenchman wrote and directed it, another Frenchman produced it with French money, and a Frenchman and Frenchwoman are the two leads. Harvey Weinstein, head of The Weinstein Company, which is distributing the acclaimed movie, even persuaded the City of Los Angeles to proclaim January 31 “The Artist Day,” arguing that the movie was shot there. Indeed The Artist, a black-and-white tale about a silent star’s fall from grace and subsequent return to fame, has a chance to become the first non-Anglo-Saxon film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar, even though it has made just $29 million in the United States since it went into general release on January 20.

Facebook is using you

LAST week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and mine.

L’Oreal ad banned for being ‘misleading’

The advert for L’Oréal’s anti-wrinkle cream featuring a striking photograph of Oscar-winning actor Rachel Weisz appeared too good to be true. “Skin looks smoother, complexion looks more even,” said the double-page magazine spread. “It’s not a facelift, it’s Revitalift.”

Is Twitter evil?

Twitter, it is said, has become evil. The company announced at the end of last week that it would censor tweets on a country-by-country basis. If a government really doesn’t like your hundred and forty characters, Twitter may white them out. Tweetavists reacted with outrage and warned darkly of unreported massacres in Syria. A #twitterblackout protest was organized. Forbes proclaimed that the company was committing “social suicide.” The information and communication technology minister in Thailand, where officials really don’t like you mocking the monarch, announced that it was a “welcome development.”

Wikipedia shuts down to protest SOPA

With a Web-wide protest on Wednesday that includes a 24-hour shutdown of the English-language Wikipedia, the legislative battle over two Internet piracy bills has reached an extraordinary moment — a political coming of age for a relatively young and disorganized industry that has largely steered clear of lobbying and other political games in Washington.

In praise of the Golden Globes

Imagine a world in which most of the cosmic injustices perpetuated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not take place. I know it’s hard, with the wound of of The King’s Speech’s victory over The Social Network so fresh, but imagine a world in which Fincher’s film had been victorious—a world where Brokeback Mountain did not lose out to Crash and E.T. beat out Gandhi, where Chinatown won best film and Coppola won best director for Apocalypse Now. Oh, and while we’re at it, an armful of trophies for Some Like Hot and a little something for Alfred Hitchcock.

Will YouTube help revolutionise television?

On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural transformation in YouTube’s seven-year history. Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience—twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music—and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands. “People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.”

The Joy of Quiet

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

The secret to Madame Tussaud’s Success

Madame Tussauds is like a safari, only it’s celebrity you’re stalking, and about halfway through you begin to feel more hunted than hunter. You are, after all, the only thing moving, unless you count the eyes that flick mechanically back and forth on the French revolutionary waxwork. And the revolutionary is hidden many, many famous faces away—past Brangelina, past Harry and Wills, past JFK and MLK—in a far-off “zone” devoted to the place’s own history.

Reading books in the digital age

Readers of The New York Times discuss the choices to be made in the digital age: buy books online or at the local bookstore? Read e-books or paper books?