Before the internet, tweeting, and instant messaging, Oscar season sometimes lasted till . . . April! By way of explaining my consideration of The Artist‘s sweep at last February’s awards.
Consistent with previous observations, this only confirms Hollywood’s coming out à la française not merely as an international marketplace, but more critically a berth for foreign product. As heinous and Darwinistic Thomas Friedman’s thesis is, the world relentlessly continues to flatten as if in some Ayn Rand/L. Ron Hubbard nightmare scenario.
But instead of the nostalgic look back as most observers have framed it, I think Academy members and perhaps Hollywood generally is in the midst of a ‘media-forward’ conversion. With the internet tolling the end of so very much–scheduled television, celluloid prints, the preciousness of audiovisual production itself–all at once, no wonder in waving an utterly unsentimental goodbye to a kind of Hollywood that’s increasingly hard to justify, it would seem as if the industry is not only recognizing the rest of the world in ways it rarely has before, but embracing it.
Filed under: audiovisual translation, French film industry, French translation, US film industry, Academy Awards, Oscars, The Artist, The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman
