Photograph of Queens native Amy Ryan, nominated for best supporting actress for her role in Gone, Baby Gone At 8:30PM (following a half-hour red carpet special), the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony will begin, finally putting an end to the "There Will Be Oscar" or "Oscar Country for Old Men" type headlines. You can prep yourself with the Oscar nominees list as you watch (or avoid) red carpet coverage. You could read NY Times......

The Oscars are in town! Well, at least some 8-foot Oscar statues for the official New York Oscar night celebration at the Carlyle hotel, where east coast industry folk will come together Sunday night as the show goes down in Hollywood. Nominees were announced on January 22nd with Best Picture nods going to Michael Clayton, Atonement, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men and Juno. The love and buzz continues to surround the......

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has secured the votes necessary to purchase Dow Jones & Co., Inc. which includes The Wall Street Journal itself. The win comes after a lengthy proxy battle in which the Bancrofts––the family that has acted as stewards of the company from afar for more than a century––resisted a very generous overture from Murdoch. The Australian media tycoon eventually won the day by convincing a......

The owners of a controlling interest in Dow Jones & Company, Inc. may be considering a move to sell the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. When the news that Rupert Murdoch was interested in acquiring The Wall Street Journal and adding all of Dow Jones to his News Corp. media empire, we wrote about the potential reluctance of the majority owners of the acquisition––the Bancroft family––and their longheld view that family ownership of a......

Rupert Murdoch did not become a media tycoon by turning tail at the first sign of resistance in his business dealings. New York Times media columnist David Carr examines Rupert Murdoch's past successes in wooing reluctant sellers into folding their companies into the News Corp. family with promises of benign oversight and marginal interference at best, only to run roughshod over the company and imprint it with Murdoch's style before the ink is dry on......

Hours after CBS decided to fire Don Imus yesterday afternoon for his comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team, Imus, joined by his wife, and the basketball team and coach, joined by university officials and others, met at the NJ Governor's mansion . This afternoon, Rutgers coach C. Vivian Stringer said :We, the Rutgers University Scarlet Knight basketball team, accept -- accept -- Mr. Imus' apology, and we are in the process of forgiving.......

CNBC's Maria Bartiromo has been in the news for all the wrong reasons lately. Not only are there reports that Bartiromo, a 39 year-old native of Bay Ridge, has trademarked the phrase "Money Honey," but Bartiromo's name has come up in the firing of a Citigroup executive. In her filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Bartiromo lists several things that she plans to use "Money Honey" for: children's entertainment (TV, movies,......

If things have seemed quiet at the usual New York haunts of movie folks like Film Forum or Grey Dog Coffee this last week, it's because practically the whole community is in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival. The annual launching pad of many subsequently huge independent features (see this year's Best Picture Oscar nom and last year's festival break out, Little Miss Sunshine), Sundance is a crazy week. Parties, swag, deal-making and......

At the Sundance Film Festival, the film Waitress will premiere this afternoon. Written and directed by Adrienne Shelly. Last November, Shelly had been waiting to hear whether her film was going to be accepted by the Sundance Film Festival when she was found dead in a the Greenwich Village apartment building she had an office in. Initially, police suspected Shelly killed herself, since her body was found hanging from shower rod, but her family......

The non-election-related water cooler question: Did you see Borat? Did you brave crowds of people (mad rush at multiplexes, lines around the block at smaller theaters) to witness a Jewish Englishman portray a hapless Kazakh journalist with a chicken in his suitcase? Did you wonder how the crew was not arrested? Everywhere we went, people were talking about Borat. At the restaurant. At the grocery store. In the subway. All. Talking. About. Borat. Hell,......

Tom Coughlin may not want to hear about it, but this is a classic “trap” game. With the big, bad Bears coming to Giants Stadium next Sunday night, all the ingredients are in place for New York to look past this weeks tilt with the 2-5 Texans. Luckily for the Giants, they should be able to do that and get away with it. Yes, Houston has beaten Jacksonville this year, but they are 0-3 on......

Well, considering that there's been a deathwatch for Lloyd Grove for weeks (if not years since he moved from DC to do NYC gossip), it's not a shock that Lloyd Grove buried at the end of his column today that he would be leaving the Daily News (on announcing his departure: "Let's make it short and sweet — and, most of all, unsnarky."). In David Carr's NY Times column, Grove does admit, "New York is......

- There's an air quality advisory today - ozone levels are high! - Another look at the Atlantics Yard project and Brooklyn politics - The noisiest neighborhood - or at least the one with the most 311 complaints - is Washington Heights/Inwood - ANIMAL has an interview with graffiti legend QUIK - check out his website here - Ooh, a timelapse video of the Shack Shake Webcam - will the fun never stop when......

It's been a big week for Gawker. On Monday, the NY Times David Carr tried to put Gawker on his lap for a spanking for being a blog. Then today, various blogs speculated that Gawker was sold to Yahoo, mistaking a distribution deal for the potential of having Gawker Yahoo Messenger window. Which can only mean something crazy will happen on Friday, either a note from Peter Braunstein, some flowers from Judith Miller or a......

Perhaps you were as surprised as Gothamist when you saw a meteorologist mentioned in the Sunday Styles section of the Sunday Times. In the essay David Carr offers his explanation of how the "changed the world" genre of pop history books that have recently become popular. You know the kind, "How the Irish Saved Civilization"; "Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World"; and "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius......

Gothamist is just noting that it's so cute that Donny Deutsch, ad man, one-time New York magazine bidder, associate of Donald Trump, CNBC squawker, all-around idea man, is called "Donnie" Deutsch in David Carr's article about Michael Wolff leaving New York magazine for Vanity Fair. Something about a Ronnie: Run! Ronnie! Run!, that went straight to video and even Cross and Bob Odenkirk want it dead ("Run, Ronnie, Run Away") but features many Mr. Show......

With flusher economic times in most sectors, the power lunch booms once again. The Times' David Carr does his media thing, but now with a side of food, as he examines the restaurants where the powerful tend to eat. The hot restaurants are The Four Seasons, Michael's, DB Bistro Moderne (deemed downtown, even though it's only on 44th!), and newcomer Lever House, where the booths are tables du jour. Other restaurants include Eleven Madison......

Scratchy voiced Alan Light and John Rollins (Gothamist doesn't know anything about Rollins' voice, only Light's because he'dcomment on ANYTHING on VH1) bring a new music magazine offering with Tracks, oriented to more adult readers. The Times' David Carr looks at this venture, which seems to follow the music industry's realization that older consumers will buy, versus download, music, but the older consumers are simply not being spoken to. One doubtful industry expert, wondering if......

The Post says that New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. denies that his family made him ask Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd to resign. He had, famously, right after the Jayson Blair scandal emerged, said that he would not accept Raines' and Boyd's resignations. "Towards the end of last week, and even more towards the beginning of this week, it became clear to them, and in turn to me, that the best thing......

The Primeda exodus continues with New York magazine publisher Alan Katz going over to Conde Nast to head up the boy version of Lucky. David Carr of the Times writes: Mr. Rogers was hired away from NBC in 1999 to expand Primedia from a hodgepodge of magazines and directories into an integrated media company that embraced the Internet. But the ill-fated purchase of About.com, rising debt and a declining ad market made Mr. Roger's effort......