HollywoodIdiocy.com

While it may do a lot for Hollywood investor relations, tonight’s 80th annual Academy Awards are nothing I care about all the much, other than the pending broadcast of the ceremony helped bring the writer’s strike to an end at last.

To be honest, there’s simply no actor, actress or movie nominated this year that I feel very strongly about, and given the recent trend toward blatently politicizing the Oscars anyway, I have plenty of more-pleasant ways to spend my evening. For exmaple, taking my wife out to a movie, if she’s up for it; or writing my blogs, or doing some Torah study, or flipping in a movie to watch.

No matter what I do, it’s certain to be a better use of my time than watching a bunch of HollywoodIdiots pat themselves on the back for being good at their craft. Never mind that fewer and fewer of these films are going over well with large audiences.

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There may be light at the end of the tunnel after all, folks.

Six days after the Directors Guild of America began negotiations with the Hollywood hotshots (otherwise known as AMPTP, the negotiating arm for producers), the DGA struck a deal with producers to avoid a strike of their own and may, in the process, have paved the way for labor peace between scribes and studios.

At least one Hollywood type who is a member of the WGA says he’s amazed at what the DGA negotiated out of the AMPTP, and if writers get a carbon copy deal, it would be groundbreaking. That person is ER executive producer John Wells.

“This is a genuinely landmark deal. I’ve been involved in negotiations for 20 years. This is the best deal I’ve seen that anyone’s been able to negotiate,” Wells told online sources on Friday. “The DGA took all the leverage the writers gave them and negotiated a hell of deal. I didn’t think we’d be anywhere close to this.”

Wells went on to predict the writer’s strike would be over in two weeks or less, if the WGA is willing to accept a carbon-copy deal of what the DGA agreed to. If so, maybe irate TV fans can put their rakes and pitchforks back in tool storage and return to the business of watching scripted dramas and comedies, rather than, y’know… communicating with their family members for the first time in 35 years.

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Hollywood may be filled with idiocy, but not everything is stupid in this grand ol’ world of ours.

Take Car Angel for example. Here’s a nonprofit company that accepts things like car donations and turns them into funds for giving away videos to kids and teens in need.

Giving away videos might seem a bit odd; but their content is important and they’ve been able to help something like 2.4 million kids so far, so they must be doing something right.

In Hollywood, with the writers strike, you have a lot of folks doing pretty well for themselves, fighting to do even better. If it all seems a little narcissistic, it probably is. That’s why it’s nice to see a group like this, thinking of others. Especially at the height of the holiday season.

Happy Hanukkah!

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Personally, I think the Hollywood studio and network heads all need to submit to a corporate performance management survey and take their share of the blame for the 2007 WGA Strike, or as it is otherwise known, a big *edited* mess!

Even though networks and studios are making a small but growing killing off Internet downloads, media streaming, cell phone downloads and of course, DVD sales, they are too greedy to admit they need to share some of the fat of this undiscovered country with others. Currently, writers are paid a pittance - four percent - on DVD sales and nothing on all those episodes of The Office you downloaded to your iPod for $1.99 per episode.

I haven’t seen anyone specifically state, in hard figures, the WGA’s demands, but it seems clear to me that the DVD percentage should rise modestly to about six percent - which would represent a 50-percent raise - and that this six percent figure should be extended to cover all forms of electronic media sale, whether they are sold via Sprint cell phone, iPod Touch, Xbox 360, PC download or whatever other way they can dream up to sell episodes of free TV shows for $1.99 a pop.

That’s only $0.12 per episode out of the studio’s pocket, and about $2.99 per typical $49.99 “complete season” DVD collection to be divided among the writers of a typical 22- to 24-episode season.

It’s not much money until you start selling millions of copies or downloads. And studio fat-cats are calling the writers unreasonable?

Unless writers blink, which doesn’t seem likely this time, it seems to me the Six Percent Solution would represent a good middle ground for everyone to settle on. So: can we just skip the six months or so of work stoppage, agree to it now, and get everyone in Hollywood back to work, please? NBC has already fired over 100 employees involved in producing The Office, with no guarantees of being able to reassemble the same crew six months down the line when this finally does shake out.

Real lives are being affected by the work stoppage. I’m not talking about writers here, even; I’m talking about the much-less-well-paid techies who make the entertainment industry tick. Let’s skip the protracted thing and just get on with both sides being reasonable enough to settle where we all know they ought to be anyway.

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