Jorge Camara / WireImage/Getty Images

While we were on holiday, the Writer’s Guild denied the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s request for a Golden Globes waiver. If they go ahead with the show using non-Guild writers, the nominees won’t show up out of fear of getting pies thrown at them by WGA picketers, not to mention “you’ll-never-lunch-in-this-town-again” proclamations. Cancellation is more likely.

There’s a good chance the WGA will change their minds at the last minute – this could be a ploy for quick negotiations. After all, awards season is one of the few times that writers get to shine, and several Guild members are nominated. We support the writers whole-heartedly, but come on – don’t take the Gay Super Bowl away from us!

By the way, the dude pictured above is Jorge Camara, the President of the HFPA. He’s sweating bullets about now.

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Jeff Vespa / Teen Vogue via WireImage/Getty Images

Nickelodeon star and sister-of-Britney Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant. Some dude named Casey is the baby daddy. Looks like “Zoey 101″ is all grown-up. If you want more colorful commentary on the matter, look elsewhere. We just hope she takes care of the little lamb without the help of court monitors.

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Jon Furniss / WireImage/Getty Images

After a prolonged slump, the box office bounced back in December with a few boffo performances – chief among them Will Smith’s actioner “I Am Legend,” which opened to a phenomenal $77.2 million the weekend of December 14. This was the biggest December bow in history, edging out “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”’s opening in 2003. Alvin and the Chipmunks, which analysts had written off as another holiday failure-in-waiting, shocked the industry by opening next to I Am Legend with a jaw-dropping $44.3 million. As of Christmas Day, Alvin has raked in an incredible $94 million.

The pre-Christmas weekend saw another strong showing, with Nicolas Cage’s family-friendly adventure sequel National Treasure: Book of Secrets bringing in $44.8 million. The above holdovers were strong, making the last two weeks by far the biggest in December history, a badly needed bounce for a struggling year-end marketplace.

New openers were soft, though opening numbers at this time of year are less meaningful due to the holidays. Due to all the family movie-going, openers tend to have good legs. Charlie Wilson’s War led the pack with $9.7 million, Sweeney Todd followed with $9.4 million (at less than half the theatres of Charlie), P.S. I Love You was unimpressive with $6.5 million, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story bombed with $4.2 million.

In limited release, Atonement and Juno had successful expansions. Juno is performing exceptionally well, and with all the awards buzz it will remain a strong contender for at least the next month. Numbers aren’t yet in for the Wednesday platform bow of There Will Be Blood, but analysts expect a massive per-theatre average.

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Don Arnold / WireImage/Getty Images

We hope everyone had a fabulous holiday! Back to the grind…with a completely incongruous shot of Daft Punk’s December 22nd show in Sydney. Robot rock!

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Gay Pride March – Thousands marched from Zoo Lake in Rosebank in Johannesburg to show their pride and celebrate diversity. Photo by: Shepherd Tozvireva 

A woman carries the one piece of furniture she has left – a chair- after she was evicted from her apartment building in Johannesburg. Photo by Sechaba Nhlapo

As the second class of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program (PDP) is about to graduate and the first class graduates are proving their skills in their new jobs, it’s time to display and acknowledge the work done by the students.

PDP is a year-long photography course which provides aspiring photojournalists in South Africa the practical support of leading professionals and necessary skills to enter this highly competitive field. It culminates in a three month internship for each emerging photographer at a local newspaper.

To view some of the images from the newest generation of Africa’s photojournalists, don’t miss Portfolio 07 – an exhibition of work from the latest PDP graduates. The exhibition will run through February 6, 2008 at the Photo Workshop Gallery at the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg.

This course was launched in 2005 with significant support from Getty Images. After two cycles, seven students have graduated and 8 more will earn their certificates by the end 2007. Not one week passes in Johannesburg without PDP students’ images on the front pages and inside local publications.

A man is arrested by police for public violence while protesting against poor service delivery. Photo by Sechaba Nhlapo.

Sister Bernadette Boulle (pictured above) is the only one of her five siblings still alive. She worked as an office clerk for nine years before entering the faith as a nun. Picture by Samantha Simmons.

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Avik Gilboa / WireImage/Getty Images

What’s that curious tingle coursing through my body? Could it be all the Lexipro I took this morning, in anticipation of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association shafting Paul Thomas Anderson in the Best Director category? Ridley Scott for “American Gangster” beat him out. Puh-leez. Scott is a bona-fide bad-ass (Alien, Blade Runner, etc.), but this was not among his best.

Still no major front-runner this awards season. At this point last year it was Dreamgirls, so we all know how accurate those predictions are. One of the biggest surprises of the announcement is the whopping SEVEN Best Motion Picture – Drama nominees. Typically, the HFPA nominates five like everyone else. Too many great films? I can think of a couple they could have knocked off, but in any case it’s a competitive field – with terrific films like Atonement, No Country for Old Men, Eastern Promises (hooray!), and There Will Be Blood battling for the Globe, things could get interesting. If American Gangster or Michael Clayton wins, I’m going on strike.

Atonement won the morning. With seven nominations, including Best Actress (Keira Knightley), Best Actor (James McAvoy), Best Director (Joe Wright), and Best Picture – Drama, it leads all films. The noms were short on surprises, save the following: Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, which cleaned up the Critics Choice Awards noms, was a no-show in the major categories, while Charlie Wilson’s War received five nods, including acting noms for Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.

Todd Haynes’s brilliant Bob Dylan fantasia I’m Not There received only one nomination, for Cate Blanchett’s supporting turn. R.I.P. Clearly, whoever phoned in Michael Clayton made a better impression.

Click here for the full list of nominees (including all the TV folk). Here are the major motion picture noms:

Best Picture – Drama
American Gangster
Atonement
Eastern Promises
The Great Debaters
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

Best Picture – Comedy or Musical
Across the Universe
Charlie Wilson’s War
Hairspray
Juno
Sweeney Todd

Best Actress – Drama
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away from Her
Jodie Foster, The Brave One
Angelina Jolie, A Mighty Heart
Keira Knightley, Atonement

Best Actor – Drama
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
James McAvoy, Atonement
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises
Denzel Washington, American Gangster

Best Actress – Comedy or Musical
Amy Adams, Enchanted
Nikki Blonsky, Hairspray
Helena Bonham Carter, Sweeney Todd
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Ellen Page, Juno

Best Actor – Comedy or Musical
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Ryan Gosling, Lars and the Real Girl
Tom Hanks, Charlie Wilson’s War
Philip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages
John C. Reilly, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Best Director
Tim Burton, Sweeney Todd
Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, No Country for Old Men
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Ridley Scott, American Gangster
Joe Wright, Atonement

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Photo: Erik Dreyer

As an interesting follow-up to the last post about the copyright issues surrounding the Pop Art show in London, is an article in the NY Times a couple of days ago about appropriated photography in fine art. Included are quotes from photographer Jim Krantz, whose work has been appropriated (with much success – the piece in question sold at auction a few years ago for upwards of $300,000) by the most famous ‘appropriationist’ of them all – Richard Prince. Mr. Krantz’s photography is currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum by way of Mr. Prince’s well-received 30-year retrospective exhibition there currently.

Mr. Prince’s canny insouciance is captured nicely in a quote from 1993, where he off-handedly compares his series of appropriated Marlboro Man imagery to bank robbery: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

Despite what one thinks of the means used, Prince’s selection of the Marlboro Man imagery is appropriate in more ways than one – for years the now legendary Prince has been carefully cultivating his own image as one of a cowboy or outlaw of the art world. What could be ‘cooler’ than a successful bank robber? Images of cowboys (from advertising no less), biker chicks, inane one-liner jokes painted on canvas, seedy pulp fiction book covers reproduced as large paintings, actual hot rod hoods as sculpture – it all glows with the “aren’t I a bad-ass”, James Dean-meets-King Midas aura that surely is the unspoken base appeal at work behind Prince’s success. It operates like a cultural pheromone, luring everyone from the bookish critics, curators and academics who have steeped themselves soggy with arcane theory and hope some of the cool will rub off, to the uber-rich and listless collectors of uber-priced art, for whom the promise of an injection of life-blood from the netherworldly cultures of the American hoi polloi is irresistible, to young art students (who in a former era may have gone to Hollywood), who find reassurance in the Prince story (for themselves and their parents as well, who initially balked at the art school price-tags) , sensing that it augurs well for their own future success – after all, looking cool is what they’ve done so well their whole life.

But these more sordid motives are rarely if ever mentioned, indeed perhaps taboo, though easily discernable beneath the kind of intricately coded veil of mystifying sophistry that seems to have become the sole function of art writing (or perhaps always has been?). To wit (from the Guggenheim’s introduction to the current show): “[Prince's] deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making—one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object”.

But I admit to being a bit incendiary here, perhaps betraying the influence of Prince, provocateur par excellence, on myself as well. I do feel Prince to be an important and influential American artist, but also wonder if that importance might not rest at least partially on what he has revealed about the inner workings of the art world in contemporary society (intentionally or unintentionally? yet more fodder for the art sophists) . Whether it’s his influence or not is arguable (certainly not his alone), but when perfect recreations of grunge and gutter-punk get-ups from barely a decade ago sell for thousands of dollars in high-end fashion boutiques, I wonder if we’re any the wiser for it.

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