With Glowing Hearts

I THINK I just more or less came to the conclusion right now that I won't be watching the Oscars tonight. I have a party to go to and everything.  But I won't be going.  I probably won't even watch.

Why?  Because as is the way of the freelancer, I've had meetings and work pushed so that this whole weekend & the next few days are about a desperate attempt to turn around an outline and a draft for two separate projects before I smack into a long-arranged time commitment for a third.  Such is the way.  I don't have a spare 3 hours to spend on ephemeral movie-stuff that isn't  that important to me anyway.

Quite a change from a week ago, when I and everybody else in Canada, it seems, couldn't tear our eyes away from the TV -- the Gold Medal Final in Hockey and the aftermath meant that I even found myself watching the Closing Ceremonies of the Olympics - if anything, under normal circumstances, an even lamer live event than your average Oscar telecast.

Just because that's kind of how my brain bubbles, I of course managed to relate it back to Canadian TV.  Others here did the same thing, musing on what the Own The Podium mania meant for our particular, colonized culture.  So here, in one place, a few ruminations on what could be with our domestic TV.  Enjoy the Oscars.  I'll be pounding the keyboard, sweating blood onto the keys.  And no one will likely ask what I'm wearing.  Track pants, if you must know.

So be it.

From DTOS:

Why the Giant Beavers & Flying Moose Mattered.  - What the iconography of the closing ceremonies signals about the shifting winds of Canadian Storytelling.

Gold is Everywhere. - How a quest for excellence might look if we bothered to carry it into domestic TV & film, and why the chimera of importing Americans won't save us.

Prospectors take note.  - In which a Canadian network finally brags about its homegrown show besting someone else's homegrown show -- and why putting those two shows head to head puts  the lie to the "Canadians won't watch Canadian Tv" canard.

From Will Dixon's Uninflected Images Juxtaposed:

Will weighs in on maybe where that prejudice comes from.

From Jim Henshaw's The Legion of Decency, he asks you to stop blaming the actors.

Note to MP's, or CRTC commissioners:  If just once we saw evidence that maybe some of these arguments were at least in your wheelhouse of understanding, you might just gain a few people who know how to craft a narrative. That's kind of a useful thing in politics. Just saying.

But instead, we hear that there's a National Digital Strategy, but it doesn't really consider any thought of how film & TV production -- which has been shown to be extremely effective in stimulating communities in just about every independent study ever done -- fits into it.

But you know, at least the Culture minister has a Twitter account.