Not even the II. World War had an impact that brutal on the film industrie: US writers are threatening the Oscar organisers to cancel their show. What few people know are the real motives of the strike: It's about the future of our cinema culture.

By the time the latest miniguide* edition went to print, it was utterly unclear whether the 80th Oscar ceremony, scheduled for February 24th, would actually take place, with the very real threat of cancellation along with the Golden Globe ceremony due to the writers’ strike in the American TV and film industry. [It may have been substituted by a low-fi internet podcast, or a pantomimic show with not too many and mostly mute celebrities on the Youtube stage, in the style of vaudeville revues from the beginning of the 20th century.]

The Writers Guild of America managed to touch on the taboo of the showbiz world and threatened the American Film Academy by simply stopping the show from going on. Not even the Second World War at its harshest moments had an impact as brutal upon the industry. After weeks of Jay Leno’s cancelled late night shows, and then improvised programmes with gags falling flat and punchlines missing the point - NBC executives worried about their revenues singled out ‘Red George’, the notorious Oscar winner George Clooney, as the alleged manipulator behind the strike action.

‘Red George’, however, was far from alone – Woody Allen, Sean Penn and other celebrities declared their active solidarity in silent spots aired not on TV, but fittingly on the web. The World Wide Web and its multiple applications such as PDS, mobile phones, etc. are precisely what the whole affair is about. Interestingly enough, internet piracy has not entered into the discussion at all. On the contrary, and unlike most executives of the music industry, the US film and TV business sees the Internet as a roaring future market, as well as a handy distribution channel for their products. Networks and production companies are starting to swap “contents” – shows, TV series and features that originally had been designed to be screened in movie theatres or on home TV - to the Web.

The writers’ argument is this: if these kinds of technologies represent the future, we want to be part of it, and so give us our share of any future royalities. United Artists, co-owned by Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise, was the first big studio to settle with their writers, and so did David Letterman with the writers of his eponymous show. So, in spite of the No-Oscar–threat, good news is rolling in. The downside of the story is that the movie theatre idyll we’ve grown up with is about to become history, with the movie industry in a frenzy of producing ever more features for a shrinking global audience. The times of blockbusters such as Titanic and Star Wars is over, and even big budget releases such as I’m Legend don’t aim to repeat the movie success stories of the past.

The brutal competition has hit even marginalised stars like Richard Gere, who has to work hard just to stay a little more than two weeks on the billboard charts. Dozens of features due to be released at the end of 2007 have been pushed to 2008, or alternately will never be released at all. You might watch Jack Black’s latest flick Tenacious D later in the year, but then probably not in V.O., as happened with Stardust or Hot Fuzz. At the same time, anybody can order these films from amazon.co.uk for as little as £6.

So what are movie theatres good for? The future might be as simple and sober to point to the 42” home-cinema screen, with the capacity to download any film you want to watch. You decide if the film is dubbed or not. The end of the idyllic cinema paradiso world that we’ve all grown up with is near – and would you really miss the smell of popcorn or the snogging teenagers in the back row?

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