By Sandy Cohen, AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES --The film academy is continuing its new tradition of presenting honorary Oscars at an untelevised ceremony months before the Academy Awards.
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Tom Sherak says the second annual Governors Awards will be held Nov. 13. The private dinner event will be produced by past academy president Sid Ganis, Sherak said.
“In its first year, it turned out to be a really great evening,” Ganis said. “It was the sweetest, most personal way for the academy to bring extra special recognition to those artists and their lifetime accomplishments.
“It was relaxed, it was of course not televised, and it was super star-studded. My job is going to be to at least duplicate what happened in that first year.”
Some of the academy’s highest honors, including the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, may be presented at the event. The board of governors will meet in August to determine the 2010 honorees.
Lauren Bacall, Roger Corman and Gordon Willis received honorary Oscars and John Calley was presented with the Thalberg award at the inaugural Governors Awards last year.
“It’s still brand new, and it’s something that I’m almost positive will be around for a long, long time,” Ganis said. “We’ll keep making it something extraordinary, and we’ll make sure that it has its proper moments on the big show.”
Ganis, who served four years as academy president before Sherak took office in August, said he’s excited to help pay tribute to some of the legends in entertainment.
“This is about my heroes,” he said. “These men and women put out a lot of good, and for me to be a part of honoring them is pretty cool.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More