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Is It The Social Web That Gave The Verdict In Oscars Vs Baron Cohen?


The independence of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and of the United States of America is admirable. The sheen on its prestigious Oscar awards night, as the second most watched event in the US, has only got brighter in recent times. However, it looks like the social web can now influence how the Oscar award ceremony is conducted and will continue to do so in the future.

Every year the controversies around the award night, which surface both before and after the gala event, generate more interest and discussion than the event itself.
This year it was the turn of Sacha Baron Cohen to kick up the storm and grab his share of attention by intending to appear in the outfit of his role in his upcoming movie "The Dictator" with an urn of the 'ashes' of his friend, the real world dictator Kim Jong-il, even as many people felt that it was too much self serving and the Academy threatened to refuse him admission
Proving how the academy worried about the disruption to the biggest event in the industry and the fall out in its reputation, the Academy President Tom Sherak has issued a statement dismissing the speculation that the Academy was somehow in on the whole stunt of Baron Cohen.
"I'm telling you the truth, this is not a stunt that we were involved in at all. We can have another conversation about how things happened and whether we overreacted - but trust me, it was not like we helped make this up."
That raises the question why did the Academy object to the request of Sacha Baron Cohen to appear in his now famous uniform in the first place? Judging from his contribution to the motion picture industry and the record of box office success of his films, the Academy had only reason to welcome him as an honoured guest, especially as a cast member of Hugo, which received several recommendations and was considered a front runner for the top award.
It seems his reputation as a 'Controversy's child' and his Jewish origin have more to do with the reticence of the Academy than a mere intention to let his pranks annoy the guests and ruin their show. As mentioned in a piece on the Wiki about Baron Cohen:
"Aside from the comic elements of his characters, Baron Cohen's performances are interpreted by some as reflecting uncomfortable truths about his audience. He juxtaposes his own Jewish lineage with the anti-Semitism of his character Borat."
No doubt, the character of Admiral General Aladeen could have had unpredictable reactions in a world unsure about the gentle breeze of the Arab spring, which the Academy was in no position to judge and perhaps causing nightmares to its members who were trying to foresee the repercussions.
The Academy also has failed to reckon the genius of Sacha Baron Cohen, who perhaps unintentionally, has blunted any adverse reaction by releasing his famous clip but certainly meant to underscore his main theme of ridiculing dictatorship by the act of spreading the ashes of Kim Jong-il on the famous red carpet and thus send his real message to the whole world.
However the 'viral' and positive reaction to his clip of objection released on the web two days before the Oscar night must have given as much relief to the Academy members as the pressure of negative world opinion, if he were to be banned from the event for his prank which more and more people were ready to accept as such.
It appears that, after all the showing up of a "Dictator" for the Oscars could be a funny prank and nothing objectionable, thanks to the collective wisdom of the social web, which has the sea change in attitude towards dictatorship the Arab world has recently witnessed to its credit.
Baron Cohen was not alone to get an admission to the Oscar 2012 night thanks to the power of the social web. Uggie, the ten year old dog who was refused an entrance to the event on grounds many people will consider frivolous on the part of the Academy, finally got to share the Oscar and the stage with his co actor Jean Dujardin. The appearance of Uggie on various shows like the TMZ live before the night prompting public appeal on TV and the public outcry on and off the web has earned Uggie the fame and place in history he so well deserved.
With sentiment analysis tools like Wisewindow, which can listen in on the 'chatter' on the social web and analyse with natural language algorithms, is now possible to gauge what the world thinks and how it intends to act on various issues.
Applying such sophisticated tools on the social web allows you to anticipate the winners, taking some of the surprise and excitement from the award night gala. But, more importantly, the social web is also silently changing the politics and morals of the Oscars.
There are in fact plenty of reasons why the Academy should listen to the voice of the world.
Article first published in The Huffington Post as  Has the Social Web Tamed the Oscars if Not Sacha Baron Cohen?
Follow Sreedhar Pillai on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lastingrose
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Posted by Unknown

Baron Cohen Has Made His Point, But Will "The Dictator" be There?


Will Sacha Baron Cohen upset the 2012 Oscar gala and the celebrities? That seems to be the question on everyone’s mind this weekend rather than who will be taking the prestigious award home in the prime categories.
Though Sacha was assured to be declared as a person non-grata, if he turned up in the costume of Admiral General Aladeen of Wadiya from his movie The Dictator, which resulted in strong protest from Sacha who released a clip on the internet to register his protest, apparently the organizers have sensed the public mood and sent him the entry passes.
Though the objection to Sacha Cohen’s appearance in the now famous costume was officially declared as being “promotional” for his yet to be released film, it is not difficult to see the huge global political fall out and the repercussions in an already strained and thinly balanced international relations, and the embarrassment the organizers are desperately trying to avoid.
Whether Sacha will decide that his immediate aim has been met in terms of gaining publicity and that taking things too far will only eventually hurt his cause, is a matter to wait and see till the award night.
Apparently Sacha Cohen is not the only thorn in the famous celebrity feet which will grace the famous red carpet tonight.
There is a widespread feeling that the Oscars, the biggest and most anticipated and prestigious of awards, and the most watched award ceremony itself are somehow ignoring the very aspects of the movies which endear them to millions of viewers.
The case in question is how Uggie, a ten year old sweet doggy, who has stepped in to make “The Artist”, a silent movie and hot contestant for the award in the best movie category, so much more lovable to viewers around the world, is refused an attendance at the prestigious night.

Apparently, more famous and privileged invitees of a different species objected to the presence of Uggie and the potential loss of camera focus on themselves due to the angle they will be at to catch Uggie who will be closer to the floor level than they are!

However TMZ Live has taken upon them the cause of Haggy and gave Uggie and his trainer and Owner a touching slot on the show. The host Harvey Levin even made an appeal to the Oscar hosts on behalf of Uggie.

A lot of people may not miss Sacha if he didn’t turn up for the Oscar Night, but millions more will be disappointed if they won’t be seeing Uggie steal the whole show.



Sunday, February 26, 2012
Posted by Unknown

Guess Who Lady Gaga Is Eavesdropping On?


While the world waits with ears preened and eyes glued to social media sites to lap up juicy snippets of celebrity life, it’s the celebrities like Lady Gaga who are having the last laugh!

Before you get carried away, this has nothing to do with the phone hacking scandal that has rocked the British and world media. Lady Gaga is only resorting to the latest technology to realise her ambition to make her music truly global and yet satisfy her desire to connect and interact with her fans around the world.

The problem of Interscope, who manages her website, was that while Lady Gaga’s site could hold all her own content, the posts, comments, and blogs of millions of her fans were all spread across different social media and a large number of fan sites, making it almost impossible to pursue her dream.

Interscope and Lady Gaga needed a way to centralize the promotion of Lady Gaga’s content, music and merchandise on a single platform, and still allow her to remain close to her fans, which had been a big part of her success, in spite of the enormous size her fan base has grown in to.

What Arktan, a U.S. based start up, has managed to do is to enable Interscope to search across a huge array of sites like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, blogs and fan websites to find everything being said by people and then pull out that is important right onto Lady Gaga’s website in real-time, allowing her fans to interact with her and feel close to her.

The addition of social streams and the ability to add comments and reply to posts enhance the social influence of the site dramatically. The site’s usability and attraction is further enhanced with rich inline media, comprising of photos and videos from social media sites, which is integrated into each post in real-time and with social interaction around each product in the online store.

If her desire is to get and keep her fans closest to her, Lady Gaga is amazingly succeeding in her efforts with the technology from Arktan, which has enriched her brilliant website with real-time feeds of what her worldwide fans are talking about her and by providing them something like a “back stage” access to directly interact with her, all in real time!

The Technology

Recognising the leveraging they benefit from, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter already provide dynamic and real time comment and activity streams which websites can include in their content with very little or no programming knowledge. Such streams help to engage the visitors who are members of the media to interact with the websites as well as others and also attract new members. However these widgets are limited to single membership and cannot engage multitude of fans or friends simultaneously.

‘Turn your website into a highly engaging real-time social site’ is the motto of companies like Arktan who provides an Enterprise class solution to capture data from any source on the Web including sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Tumblr, etc. and stream to your existing Content Management System in real-time, enriching the data in multiple ways by including photos, videos, maps and visually engaging snippets.

Arktan technology is built on a real-time Social Operating System, developed in-house. In addition to in-house technology that does a great amount of real-time and social web curation heavy lifting, Arktan SocialOS uses Amazon EC2 for a scalable server infrastruc­ture and Echo stream server for a scalable cloud database. This enables Arktan to build products like the life stream product focussing on the real-time end-user experience and innovation leaving the server and database infrastruc­ture to proven cloud building blocks.

The technology package is also based on their Social TV and Live Blogging application in which posts by journalists to different social media sites are aggregated into a real-time embedded stream on their site encouraging conversation letting users to like, reply or share and driving engagement and increasing time spent. 

Leading brands  who are using life stream providers like Arktan to bring real-time conversation and content from the social web back to their websites feel that the technology offers “a sweet spot between just enough technology to make it easy and t a finished product that can’t be improved up on.”

Social web is exploding and blowing away advertising!

Lady Gaga is not alone to recognise that the social web is exploding and the rules of engagement with potential customers are being rewritten with breath taking speed.

The role of social media in changing the way human beings behave socially and react to advertisement and its all engulfing grip is evident from several reports which estimates the membership of Facebook has reached above 800 million and is fast approaching the billion mark, with Google+ and Twitter giving a tight chase.

This explosion has seen a host of social media monitoring tools sprouting up faster than mushrooms on a damp corner. Some like Klout specialise in calibrating and measuring people’s influence across the social media, which appear to replace the advertising sponsorship clout of stars and celebrities.

That is why a direct engagement and interaction with your fans is vital for artists like Lady Gaga.

 Article originally published in the Huffington Post as 

Saturday, February 04, 2012
Posted by Unknown

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