A SHORT film made by a group of students from Far Eastern University (FEU)-Manila took home the majority of the awards at the 13^th Piling Obrang Vidyo or POV XIII: Celebrating the Power of People’s Narratives organized by UP Cinema. Ma? won Best Cinematography, Best Sound, Best Performance (in a tie with Nandito Naman Tayo Para Sa Isa’t Isa, ‘Di Ba? by Gilb Baldoza of UP Diliman), Best Poster, Cinemasters’ Choice (selected by the organizers), and Audience Choice at the awards ceremony held on Jan. 21 at UP Cine Adarna. The 10-minute film tells the story of Andre (Antonio Collantes), a boy who suddenly finds himself alone in the house in the middle of a blackout. FEU Film Society Vice-President Ralph Quincena wrote the screenplay, edited and co-directed the film with fellow FEU Department of Communication student Patricia Ramirez. Lutab by Ma. Jerowe Papin and Efren Orpiada, Jr. of Ateneo de Naga University won Best Narrative Film and Best Editing (in a tie with Processions by Steven Paul Evangelio of UP Diliman). Processions also bagged Best Screenplay while The Last Gig on Earth by Mariah Reodica, also from UP Diliman, won Best Production Design. In Memoriam by Jeremy Quing and Catrina Mae Oblefias of Southern Luzon State University got the Best Documentary prize while Ang Pagkalaglag ng Ginintuang Salamin ng Pagkakilanlan by Tricia Sotaso of Mapua won Best Experimental Film. Award-winning filmmakers Lav Diaz and Jason Paul Laxamana, actresses Angeli Bayani and Irma Adlawan, cinematographer Tey Clamor, editor Carlo Francisco Manatad, production designer Mao Fadul, and sound designer Mikko Quizon comprised the narrative film jury. Kiri Dalena, Sheron Dayoc and Cha Escala judged the documentaries while Hector Barretto Calma, Mervin Espina and Rox Lee served as jury for the experimental films.

K-pop star in Manila

KOREAN RAPPER and dancer Jay Park will perform tonight at the Valkyrie at the Palace as a special guest of K-Beauty Philippines, a beauty fair hosted by Yeppunonnie Philippines. A former member of K-pop group, 2PM, the model-choreographer is also the founder and CEO of the AOMG (Above Ordinary music Group), a Korean independent record label specializing in hip hop. Mr. Park was last seen in Manila as a solo artist in May 2012 for a three-day mall tour. Several Yeppunonnie’s beauty partners will be on hand to conduct demonstrations and introductory presentations on the makeup and skincare products sold online. Ouniwang, a Korea-based affiliate who is also engaged in online sale of Korean beauty products, is a co-presenter. The event starts at 8 p.m. Select ticket holders will have a chance at a meet the Korean pop star. For ticket inquiries, call 0906-561-3849 or 0927-541-4302, e-mail hello@yeppunonnie.ph or visit the official Facebook page, Yeppunonnie Ph.

SmartKids children’s fair

A DRAGON DANCE is a festive opener for SmartKids Asia Philippines (SKAP), to be launched on Chinese New Year. SKAP is an edutainment kids’ fair that will be held at the SMX Convention Center from Jan. 28 to 29 from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Now entering into its third year, SKAP continues to provide a slate of educational activities for parents and kids. At this year’s fair, family oriented brands will bring in their own stage performances and activities which include dance numbers with mascots; mind-stretching games with prizes; and arts and crafts sessions, among others. There will also be free complimentary classes. For two days, SKAP attendees can avail the Smart Trial Classes that will tackle coding introduction sessions, cooking demos, creative classes, financial wellness talks, and a mental arithmetic discussion, to name a few. According to the SKAP organizers, it is best to register early because only 40 slots are available for the classes due to limited space. There will be over 100 exhibitors at the event that will offer their own games, raffle activities, and product sampling for the attendees. At the side of the venue, there will be a play area for children and a couple of food stalls. SmartKids Asia started in Malaysia 14 years ago, then made its way to Singapore, Indonesia, India, and the Philippines. Discounted tickets are available now at MetroDeal. Regular priced tickets will be on sale at the venue. For details about the roster of activities and booths, visit www.smartkidsasia.com.ph.

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A SCENE from the short film Ma?

LOS ANGELES — All eyes will be on Hollywood Tuesday (Wednesday in Manila) as the list of nominees for this year’s Oscars is unveiled with critical darlings La La Land, Moonlight, and Manchester by the Sea set to fare well.

But beyond the suspense surrounding the batch of nominees, the announcement is also expected to address the long-running #OscarsSoWhite controversy that cast a shadow over last year’s awards ceremony because of its lack of diversity.

The nominated films, actors and filmmakers will be unveiled at a pre-dawn announcement which for the first time will be streamed online.

Industry watchers are predicting that Damien Chazelle’s whimsical, romantic musical La La Land — buoyed by a record seven Golden Globe awards earlier this month — will also triumph at the Feb. 26 Oscars bash with possible golden statuettes for best movie, best actor and for several other categories.

But the movie starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling is facing stiff competition from Moonlight — the coming-of-age tale of a black man in Miami — and Manchester by the Sea, about a depressive loner played by Casey Affleck.

Both films also received nods at the Golden Globes, though far fewer than the seven to La La Land.

Other front-runners for best picture are Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi thriller Arrival; Mel Gibson’s bloody WWII movie Hacksaw Ridge; Garth Davis’s family drama Lion; and Theodore Melfi’s biographical comedy-drama Hidden Figures.

In the lead actor category, Affleck, Gosling, and Denzel Washington, who plays an African-American father trying to raise his family in the screen adaptation of the Broadway hit Fences, are leading the pack.

Other contenders are Andrew Garfield, who plays an army medic in Hacksaw Ridge and Viggo Mortensen who plays a father trying to raise his six kids in Captain Fantastic.

The field is also crowded in the best actress race, where Stone is expected to vie for an Oscar opposite Natalie Portman, who plays a grieving JFK widow in Jackie; Isabelle Huppert, for her performance in the rape-revenge thriller Elle; Amy Adams, who plays a linguist able to communicate with aliens in Arrival; and Meryl Streep, who stars in the comedy biopic Florence Foster Jenkins.

Huppert — often described as France’s equivalent of Streep — scooped the best actress award at the Golden Globes for her staggering performance in Elle, which also won for best foreign film.

Industry pundits say the 63-year-old could very well walk away with an Oscar next month, becoming one of the rare actresses to win for a foreign language performance.

“After a very surprising Golden Globe win earlier this month, we not only expect Isabelle Huppert to receive an Oscar nomination on Tuesday but to be a strong contender to even win in February,” said Chris Beachum, managing director of awards prediction Web site Gold Derby.

French actress Marion Cotillard won the award in 2008 for her performance in La Vie en Rose, a biopic about the life of legendary singer Edith Piaf.

‘OSCARS NOT SO WHITE?’
As for diversity, the word on everyone’s mind ahead of this year’s Oscars, Beachum said he expects the upcoming nominations to reflect efforts by the 6,000 plus members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be more inclusive.

Last year the Academy came under scathing criticism for its overwhelming bias toward white nominees — and vowed afterwards to double by the year 2020 the number of women and people from minority backgrounds among its voting members.

“With films like Fences, Hidden Figures, Lion, Moonlight all set for major nominations, it seems like diversity will thankfully win the day for this year’s Oscar nominations,” Beachum said.

But the woman behind the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, April Reign, said although Hollywood has made progress, it was still too early to cancel the hashtag.

“One year does not fix a problem that has been going on for over 80,” she told National Public Radio in a recent interview. “There has been an increase in the number of films that reflect the black experience.

“However with respect to people of color overall, with respect to marginalized communities — which is what #OscarsSoWhite is all about — it’s still been a relatively poor year.” — AFP

LOS ANGELES — Split, a thriller about a man who imprisons three teenage girls in an underground bunker, debuted as the top ticket seller at North American movie houses, preliminary Hollywood figures showed on Sunday.

The protagonist in the film is afflicted with a personality disorder, with one particularly violent alter ego known as “The Beast.”

The movie — directed by M. Night Shyamalan, the Indian American director also responsible for the Sixth Sense and other films in the horror genre — grossed an estimated $40.2 million, box office tracker Exhibitor Relations said.

A Vin Diesel action flick, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, opened in second place with about $20 million in anticipated box office receipts.

The car-chase, sex-laden vehicle is the third movie in the Xander Cage franchise and the second to star muscleman Diesel.

Hidden Figures, a story about three black women mathematicians who helped NASA put the first men in space, ended its two-week run as the number one film and was in third place this weekend, selling $16.25 million in tickets.

The Fox film, a biographical comedy-drama based on a book of the same name, stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae, whose characters must deal with workplace segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Universal’s animated musical Sing was in fourth place with a $9-million take over the weekend.

In fifth place was La La Land, a nostalgic tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals. It earned an estimated $8.4 million this weekend after garnering a boatload of accolades, including eight Golden Globes earlier this month.

Rounding out the Top 10 are: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ($7 million); Monster Trucks ($7 million); Patriots Day ($6 million); The Founder ($3.8 million); Sleepless ($3.7 million). — AFP

POP SINGER Madonna, who said in a profanity-laced speech at Saturday’s Women’s March in Washington, DC, that she had thought about “blowing up the White House,” said on Sunday that she was speaking metaphorically.

Madonna’s speech, which was criticized on social media, led some television networks to abruptly stop their live feeds of the march, which drew hundreds of thousands of people in demonstrations across the United States to protest the election of Donald Trump as president.

“I am not a violent person,” the singer songwriter said on Instagram. “I spoke in metaphor and I shared two ways of looking at things — one was to be hopeful, and one was to feel anger and outrage, which I have personally felt.”

The 58-year-old led the crowd on Saturday in chants of, “Yes, we’re ready” to take on policies promoted by Trump, who alienated many women during the election campaign with comments’ about rivals’ attractiveness and promises to outlaw or diminish abortion rights.

Trump’s comments in a decade-old video declaring that women would allow him, as a celebrity, to kiss and grope them without their consent further outraged many women.

But Madonna preceded the chants with coarse words for critics of the march.

“To our detractors that insist that this march will never add up to anything, fuck you,” the pop star said. She then repeated the expletive.

Her words drew immediate criticism on social media. On YouTube, where the speech was posted live and in recorded formats, several users called the singer “evil.”

Others expressed outrage over her comment that she had thought about blowing up the White House. On Twitter, some users demanded that she be investigated for making terrorist threats.

Turnout for Saturday’s march was unprecedented, as organizers took credit for mobilizing 5 million marchers worldwide.

Official crowd estimates for the Washington centerpiece of the demonstration were not available, but turnout in the nation’s capital clearly exceeded the 200,000 projected in advance by organizers, filling long stretches of downtown Washington around the White House and the National Mall. — Reuters

VIACOM, INC.’s Paramount Pictures reached a co-financing agreement with Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media that will help the money-losing studio pay for movie production over the next three years.

The deal could be worth as much as $1 billion, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the terms are private. Shanghai Film and Huahua Media will co-finance Paramount’s full movie slate over the period, the companies said in a statement Thursday. They will open and jointly maintain an office on the Paramount lot starting this year, according to a statement.

The financing solves a long-term money problem for Paramount, whose parent Viacom had at one time considered selling a stake in the studio to Chinese bidders. The studio has struggled at the box office in recent years and posted a loss of $445 million in fiscal 2016.

“Shanghai Film Group’s long and successful history as a prolific studio, coupled with Huahua’s strong track-record in the Chinese market and its growing reach globally, make this a natural and powerful move for Paramount,” Brad Grey, Paramount’s chief executive officer, said in the statement.

The agreement underscores the continued interest in US film-making among Chinese companies. Dalian Wanda Group Co., led by China’s second richest man, owns Legendary Entertainment and controls AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., the largest US theater chain.

Other studios have teamed up with Chinese partners to improve their access to China, soon to be the world’s biggest box office market. Sony Corp. recently struck a similar strategic partnership with Wanda.

ACCESS TO CHINA
Paramount also said in the statement it will pursue Chinese coproductions, which allow US studios to keep a greater share of ticket sales in China. The company previously sold stakes in individual big budget films to Chinese companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

Paramount has also partnered with Huahua Media on several films, including Transformers: the Age of Extinction. Shanghai Film Group is an investor on Paramount’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, which came out in October.

Earlier this week, China Film Co., the nation’s largest movie distributor, approved plans to invest in Universal Picture’s franchise film installment Fast and Furious 8. — Bloomberg

CBS CORP. and Paramount Pictures Corp. settled their copyright-infringement lawsuit against a die-hard Star Trek fan who had channeled his obsession with an obscure character from the original TV series into a professional 20-minute YouTube hit.

The studios and filmmaker Alec Peters announced the agreement Friday, 11 days before the case was set for trial in Los Angeles. The deal follows a federal judge’s ruling this month that bolstered CBS and Paramount’s claims by rejecting Peters’s argument that his Prelude to Axanar was fair use of the Star Trek material. The judge said Peters had mined the studios’ copyrighted works down to “excruciating detail.”

“Axanar and Mr. Peters have agreed to make substantial changes to Axanar to resolve this litigation,” according to a joint statement. Peters has “also assured the copyright holders that any future Star Trek fan films produced by Axanar or Mr. Peters will be in accordance with the “Guidelines for Fan Films” distributed by CBS and Paramount in June 2016.”

The case is a rare instance of movie and TV-rights owners throwing the book at one of their own fans. CBS and Paramount alleged Peters has ripped off the plot, characters, costumes and spaceship design from their 50-year-old science fiction franchise. Peters claimed his movie, crowd-funded with $100,000 raised on Kickstarter, was an original work of satire and parody. He has been raising money for a feature-length film budgeted at $1.3 million.

US District Judge R. Gary Klausner said in a Jan. 3 ruling it was difficult to see how the film qualifies for protection as a “criticism” of the Star Trek works.

VULCAN, STARFLEET
“This is not surprising since defendants set out to create films that stay faithful to the Star Trek canon and appeal to Star Trek fans,” Klausner said in the decision.

Peters and his Axanar Productions, Inc. got caught in the studios’ crosshairs after the YouTube success of his 2014 documentary-style short that recounts a confrontation between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. The short film has been viewed about 2.8 million times on YouTube.

Prelude to Axanar features interviews with Starfleet commanders played by professional actors, including the same actor who played Vulcan Ambassador Soval in the Star Trek: Enterprise series reprising his role. The planned full-length movie will tell the story of Garth of Izar, a Starfleet captain who appeared in the original TV series as an inmate at an insane asylum and a hero of Captain Kirk’s.

As part of the settlement, Peters can make a longer movie and post it as two 15-minute segments on YouTube, without ads, Axanar Productions said in a separate statement. The original film can also remain on YouTube commercial-free.

“Over a year ago, we have expressed our desire to address the concerns of the studios, and our willingness to make necessary changes, as long as we could reasonably meet our commitments to Axanar’s over 14,000 donors, fans and supporters,” Peters said in the statement. “We are now able to do exactly that.”

The case is Paramount Pictures Corp. v. Axanar Productions, Inc., 15-cv-09938, US District Court, Central District of California (Los Angeles). — Bloomberg