6 February, 2000
MOVIES
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is best known for its annual awards for cinema excellence, it has many more functions. This official site of the Academy takes you beyond the Oscars and into the working of this body which was founded way back in 1927 with Douglas Fairbanks Sr as its president. Here you can get info about its history, its present board of trustees, its administration, a calendar of events and its publications. Then, for the first time it is marketing copies of its official poster for the Oscars 2000 which you can purchase online for $20.
Oscar.com
The official Oscar Awards site lies dormant the year through with mainly archival info available on it. But come nomination night and the site hums with activity. This year, the nominations for the 72nd Annual Academy Awards will be announced on Tuesday, February 15, 2000 at 5:30am, Pacific time (PT), 13.30 hours behind IST. Oscar.com will then kick off with a flurry of activity starting with the live coverage of the nominations from the Los Angeles Shrine auditorium. These will culminate at 5:30pm (PT), on Sunday, March 26, with the presentation of the Awards themselves with Billy Crystal once again lording it over the ceremony.
Hollywood
If we talk of the Oscars, we cannot help putting in our two bits about Hollywood itself. The site has a separate section paying tribute to the Oscars (just add �/oscars� to the URL to go directly there). However, the Hollywood site itself is a treat. The features include a movie and video guide, movie talk, movie tunes, Hollywood news, and a DVD guide. You can search for movies by release (now, soon, this week); by genre: sci-fi, action, art, foreign, drama, comedy, documentary, and horror; or just by selecting from the A to Z section. Selecting a movie will give you reviews, a link to the film�s official Website and other info like release dates, running time, cast, premiere highlights, and interviews with the stars. There are also 600 movie trailers which you can view in your Real Player.
American Film Institute Online
The American Film Institute Online, with over 25,000 links, is arguably the largest film and media directory on the Net. Its film data base contains information on films and links to the individual film sites from all over the world, including India. Here you can search for a film by keyword or browse the lists from A to Z. Though this data base is the main draw, the site has links to other film-related resources like magazines, festivals, cinema training programs and cinema schools. Then check out the digital archives which features galleries of some of the top Hollywood personalities who have received the AFI lifetime award like Dustin Hoffman, Betty Davis, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock. Also, don�t miss out the multimedia exhibitions 100 Years 100 Stars, and 100 Years 100 Movies commemorating the first 100 years of American movies.
All Movie Guide
The All Movie Guide is another great movie site. Here you can find a film by just some words in its title, by two people co-starring in a film, by a character name, author name, location or technical criteria. Then you can enter your search by plots like action, cops and crooks, other worlds, home & family or just being human. At this site you can get the low down on 131,000 films, 12,000 bios, and 200,000 cast.
Internet Movie Database
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was started in 1990 as a newsgroup by a group of movie fans. In April 1998, the IMDb became a part of the Amazon.com family of companies. The USP that the site claims is its search capabilities. It has a catalog of all sorts of information on over 200,000 movie and TV titles plus even more on over 400,000 actors and actresses, nearly 40,000 directors and hundreds of thousands of other people �who help make magic on the big and small screens.� All this is well organised into a cool structure to facilitate searching and browsing � all for free. Like, do you want to know with whom you share your birthday? Just enter your birth date in the relevant box and go. It carries award winners not just of the Oscars but also of over 300 other events. Then there is cinema trivia, quotes from films and a list of films rated by site users. Yes, you too can contribute your bit to this list.
Contact: Manuel Fernandes
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Updated 9/May/2000