By Sandy Cohen, Entertainment Writer
PARK CITY, Utah (AP) --As the Sundance Film Festival kicked off on Thursday, founder Robert Redford weighed in on the controversy over the lack of diversity this year among Oscar nominees in acting categories.
"I'm not focused on that part," the two-time Oscar winner said. "To me, it's about the work, and whatever reward comes from that, that's great. But I don't think about it."
Sundance has always embraced diversity because of its independent nature, he said, declining to address how mainstream Hollywood might replicate those demographics. This year's Oscar nominees include only white actors and actresses. Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith and Spike Lee, a winner of this year's Governors Award, have said they will skip the ceremony.
"Diversity comes out of the word independence. Basically, that's the principal we operate from," Redford said of Sundance, where such filmmakers as Ryan Coogler ("Creed") and Cary Fukunaga ("Beasts of No Nation") honed their craft and premiered early work. "Diversity comes out of that. It's an automatic thing. If you're independent-minded, you're going to do things differently than the common form."
Sundance Institute director Keri Putnam said part of the organization's mission is to discover new voices "from across the spectrum of our society."
"Together with a lot of organizations like ours whose job it to support and find new storytellers, we do provide a really great pipeline of talent into the mainstream," she said. "We have a seat at that table in terms of providing a voice, a constructive voice, to the decision makers to say, 'hey, take a look at this range of talent.'"
This year's festival includes 123 feature films chosen from more than 12,700 submissions. Forty-nine are from first-time filmmakers.
The festival's documentary slate continues to expand. Redford included non-fiction films in the festival from the start to "create a platform to elevate documentaries and see they're much closer to narrative films."
Celebrated documentarians such as Werner Herzog and D.A. Pennebaker are premiering their latest films at the festival this year. Lee will unveil his documentary about Michael Jackson on Sunday. Emerging filmmakers, meanwhile, are addressing such issues as gun violence and access to abortions in the U.S. in their films.
This year also marks the 10th anniversary of the festival's New Frontiers section, which celebrates the intersection of technology and storytelling. And this year, it's all about virtual reality, said festival director John Cooper.
"It just kept coming and kept coming and it's fascinating," he said. "I was slightly a little bit of a nay-sayer about it, until you start putting on that headset and going into these realities that are so moving."
With the ongoing expansion of the festival over its 30 years, what keeps it in Park City?
Joked Redford: "Missionaries."
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