Having survived the 1994 Northridge earthquake (scariest experience in my life), I’ve come to think that Hwood, being built upon a grinding set of tectonic plates, is both sympatico and ironic. The entertainment industry has always been subject to slip-thrust faults shifting underfoot, either through technological advances, cultural changes, economics, or all simultaneously.
So I would not be surprised to hear that folks on the Westside felt a little temblor last Saturday night, emanating from the Wadsworth Theater where this (per The Wrap) was taking place:
Funny thing: Awards shows represent everything that’s gone wrong with Hollywood, but on Saturday night, an awards show captured what feels right about the fledgling web TV industry.
It was the very first Streamy Awards, sponsored by Kodak and presented by the newly minted International Academy of Web Television, formed late last year to try to give some institutional structure and heft to the scattershot world of web TV.
Several hundred people filled the Wadsworth Theatre in West L.A. to watch the Academy give out 24 awards in a format that closely followed the Oscar or Emmy ceremonies, down to the mini-red carpet outside the theater. It was a show where traditional celebrities, including Lisa Kudrow and Linda Blair, joined cult-figure web TV stars like Sandeep Parikh and Felicia Day of the tech-nerd comedy series “The Guild.”
Yet another jolt to the status quo. That fact was noted by none other than a writer-director-producer who has worked in TV and movies — Joss Whedon:
Predictably, the big winner of the evening was a show with several strands of Hollywood DNA, Joss Whedon’s “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” which won Best Writing for a Comedy Web Series for Whedon. The show’s star, Neil Patrick Harris, also won Best Actor in a Comedic Web Series for playing the musical serial-killing, romantically frustrated Dr. Horrible.
“I feel like the establishment guy,” Whedon said apologetically as he picked up his award. He offered a sanguine view of the web TV industry’s future: “The TV industry right now is in a very funky state and seems to be falling apart. The Internet is coming up — I have no idea where they’ll meet, but I know it begins here, and the people here are creating the bedrock of what’s going to be not just the ‘new media,’ but the media.”
It’s all headed that way: Music, movies, TV. Everything hurtling toward your computer screen via the Web. Is it possible that someday, the International Academy of Web Television swallows up the Grammys, Emmys, even the Academy Awards, that what happened Saturday night at the Wadsworth is a little foreshock presaging a massive paradigm shift / quake?
As Whedon put it, new media becomes the media?
I’m not a futurist. How about you? How do you see this thing shaking out? In 20 years, what will have become of TV, movies, music? To accompany your visionary reflections, here’s another taste of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:
