Roger Waters to play southern California festival

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former Pink Floyd mastermind Roger Waters will bring the curtain down on the annual Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in southern California on April 27, organizers said on Monday,

The other headliners during the three-day event in the desert town of Indio, 130 miles east of Los Angeles, are singer/songwriter Jack Johnson on Friday, April 25, and reunited British electronica combo Portishead on Saturday April 26. Waters will perform his band's opus "Dark Side of the Moon" in its entirety.

Friday's lineup also includes such acts as The Verve, Raconteurs, The Breeders, Fatboy Slim, Tegan and Sara, and Madness.

Saturday's offerings will also feature Kraftwerk, Death Cab for Cutie, Cafe Tacuba, Sasha & Digweed, Rilo Kiley, Dwight Yoakam.

Preceding Waters on Sunday will be the likes of Love & Rockets, My Morning Jacket, and Spiritualized.

Tickets go on sale Friday, priced at $269 for all three days, or $90 for a single day. Service fees apply.

Coachella, now in its ninth year, has become one of the premier festivals in the United States, where such events are not as common as they are in Europe.

Coachella promoter Goldenvoice said it would launch a three-day festival near New York City on August 8-10 at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. The lineup for the All Points West Music & Arts Festival will be announced in the coming weeks.

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More SAG Awards presenters announced

LOS ANGELES - Russell Crowe, Kate Beckinsale and John Travolta will be among the stars set to present trophies at this weekend's Screen Actors Guild Awards, officials said Monday.

Crowe, Beckinsale and Travolta will be joined at Sunday's awards ceremony by Debra Messing, Tommy Lee Jones, Terrence Howard, Nikki Blonsky and Holly Hunter, SAG officials said.

Previously announced presenters include Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson, Emile Hirsch and Burt Reynolds at the 14th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards.

The show will be broadcast live on TNT and TBS from the Shrine Auditorium.

The ongoing writers strike is not expected to affect the SAG Awards because the Writers Guild of America has signed agreements allowing its members to work the ceremony.

The Golden Globe Awards' televised banquet was scrapped earlier this month and replaced with a news conference to announce winners. With the guild planning pickets outside and declining to let writers work on the show, no one showed up to accept awards in person.

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Oscar nod 'more likely' for drama

Julie Christie is expected to be nominated for best actress this year
Monday, 21 January 2008, 10:38 GMT


Performers who appear in a drama rather than a comedy are nine times more likely to be nominated for an Oscar, a study suggests.
And women were twice as likely to be nominated as men, it found.

The joint study by the University of California Los Angeles and Harvard University examined thousands of Internet Movie Database records.

Meanwhile, the show's producer says this year's event is "not going to be cancelled" despite the writers' strike.

The odds of being nominated for an Academy Award are so much greater for performers who appear in dramas that it really pays to be a drama queen
Co-author Gabriel Rossman
The authors of the study used the online database's records to look at every Oscar-eligible film made between the first year of the awards, in 1927, and 2005.

They examined records of 171,539 performances by 39,518 actors in 19,351 films.

Study co-author Gabriel Rossman said: "The odds of being nominated for an Academy Award are so much greater for performers who appear in dramas that - at least this time of year - it really pays to be a drama queen."

Fellow author Nicole Esparza said the "underrepresentation" of women in films worked in their favour when it came to nominations.

"Because there are fewer female than male performers in films, and both are eligible for the same number of awards, actresses stand a better chance of being nominated than actors," she added.

"It's a simple matter of arithmetic."

Picket lines

Other factors that made nominations more likely included previous Oscar nominations, having a high spot in the pecking order in earlier movie credits and working on a film with a major distributor.

Meanwhile, Oscars producer Gil Cates has told the Los Angeles Times this year's Oscars would take place with or without the actors.

There are fears that, if the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike is not resolved before the Oscars - due to be held on 24 February - the usual ceremony will be called off or scaled down like last week's Golden Globes.

I don't want to say 'read my lips' but it's not going to be cancelled
Oscars producer Gil Cates
Ahead of the Golden Globes, actors had said they would not cross picket lines in support of writers.

But Mr Cates said: "There are enough clips in 80 years of Oscar history to make up a very entertaining show.

"We'd have a lot of people on stage. Much as this is shocking to people, there are a lot of people who don't act.

"I just hope the actors are there. I pray that the actors are there. I'm planning that the actors are there."

He added: "I don't want to say 'read my lips' but it's not going to be cancelled."

Sets for the show at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood are already being built and nominations will be announced on Tuesday.

According to trade newspaper Hollywood Report, writers are to meet later this week to discuss holding informal talks with studio bosses.

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U2 concert film debuts in 3D at Sundance

By RAQUEL MARIA DILLON, For The Associated Press

PARK CITY, Utah - After a career playing to sold-out stadiums, U2 did what their fans have done for years — stood in line to see U2 perform.


That concert was "U2 3D," a film of the band's 2005-06 Vertigo tour, shot at several shows in South America with new 3-D technology.

"I was really hoping we weren't crap after all these years. Luckily we weren't," guitarist The Edge told The Associated Press before the band donned plastic glasses to watch the movie's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday night.

The Edge, joined by singer Bono, drummer Larry Mullen and bassist Adam Clayton, joked about the absurdity of seeing themselves perform after playing together for more than 30 years.

"It's kind of horrific," to see himself on stage in 3-D, said Bono. "It's bad enough on a small screen. Now you get to see the lard arse 40-foot tall."

The Edge said the 3-D technology allowed "the songs to shine through," though he was surprised to see the chemistry of the band in the details on screen, and how far apart his bandmates were on stage.

"Are you saying you felt lonely up there?" said Bono, smiling.

"No, I felt lonely for Larry," The Edge replied.

"He likes being on his own," said Bono. "Didn't you bring him back a bottle of water?"

Bono said he loved playing to the enthusiastic audiences of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro.

"Irish people are essentially Latin people who don't know how to dance," he said. "When people are screaming and roaring and shouting, the humbling thing is to realize it's not really for the band or artist on the stage. It's for their connection with the songs. A song just can own you ... . I think that's why concerts are so powerful. If that song is such a part of your life, and you hear it, it's too much almost."

Bono also expressed hope that the film would allow more people to experience their music, especially teenagers and college students who might not be able to afford the pricey tickets to their sold-out shows.

The band is working with longtime producers Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno on a new album that will merge Lanois' respect for traditional music and Eno's futuristic sound.

"Music like the band had formed on Venus, and somewhere between that is our next album," Bono said. "Where they join, where something feels always existing but you never heard it before, that seems to be what the two of them bring out in us."

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Cloverfield' sets January movie record

By DAVID GERMAIN, AP Movie Writer
Mon Jan 21, 2:25 AM ET

LOS ANGELES - The creature-feature "Cloverfield" became the first monster hit released in 2008, debuting with $41 million, a record opening for January, according to studio estimates Sunday.


Paramount's tale of a giant reptile causing chaos in New York City surpassed the $35.9 million premiere weekend of the "Star Wars" special edition in 1997, the previous best for January.

Opening in second-place was 20th Century Fox's romantic comedy "27 Dresses," starring Katherine Heigl as a perpetual bridesmaid. It pulled in $22.4 million.

The weekend's other new wide release, Overture Films' crime comedy "Mad Money," with Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes plotting a Federal Reserve Bank heist, opened at No. 7 with $7.7 million.

Overall business surged, with the top-12 movies taking in $135.3 million, up 39 percent from the same weekend last year.

Featuring a cast of unknowns, "Cloverfield" tells its monster story from the perspective of a partygoer's hand-held video camera, which captures the mayhem as the creature tears through the city.

The film benefited from cryptic marketing that sent young moviegoers on a scavenger hunt to decode clues about the movie's plot, images and even its title, which was not confirmed until shortly before its release.

"As we started it, we asked, how do we draw people in and have them say, `Hey, I want to know more about that. That looked cool, that looked intriguing,'" said Rob Moore, Paramount vice chairman. "Then fortunately, they delivered a movie that was as unique and engaging as people had hoped from the marketing campaign."

The big winners at the previous weekend's truncated Golden Globes had mixed results cashing in on their prizes.

Focus Features' gloomy romance "Atonement," the Globe winner for best drama, expanded into wider release and added $4.8 million to its haul, raising its total to $31.9 million. Business was up slightly from the previous weekend.

Yet the Globes' best musical or comedy winner, Paramount's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," also added theaters but took in just $2.6 million, down significantly from a weekend earlier. "Sweeney Todd" has taken in $48 million to date.

The televised Globes banquet was canceled because stars planned to boycott the show in support of a strike by the Writers Guild of America, which refused to let its members work on the ceremony. In place of the glitzy Globes show was a hasty news conference rattling off winners' names.

That deprived studios of much of the luster they count on to boost the box office of acclaimed films during awards season. Had the three-hour Globes show aired as usual on NBC, "Atonement," "Sweeney Todd" and other key winners might have done better business this weekend.

"I can only guess, but I think so," said Jack Foley, head of distribution for Focus Features. "I wish it was televised. It's one of the best commercials there is for film."

Following Heigl's success with last summer's hit "Knocked Up," "27 Dresses" solidifies the "Grey's Anatomy" co-star as a big-screen star.

While "Cloverfield" was more a movie for young males, "27 Dresses" sewed up the women's audience, the two films giving Hollywood a huge lift during what is normally a sleepy time for new releases.

"This is almost like a summer weekend," said 20th Century Fox distribution executive Chris Aronson. "It's almost a counter-programming move where you have two pictures aimed squarely, at least initially, at different audiences, and they both succeeded."

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Tuesday.

1. "Cloverfield," $41 million.

2. "27 Dresses," $22.4 million.

3. "The Bucket List," $15.2 million.

4. "Juno," $10.3 million.

5. "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," $8.1 million.

6. "First Sunday," $7.8 million.

7. "Mad Money," $7.7 million.

8. "Alvin and the Chipmunks," $7 million.

9. "I Am Legend," $5.1 million.

10. "Atonement," $4.8 million.

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