Telecast

The 83rd Academy Awards will be telecast live on ABC from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood starting at 5 p.m. PT on Feb. 27.

Already the largest cable television provider in Los Angeles, Time Warner Cable Inc. now wants to become the dominant sports programmer in the region. On Oct. 1, the New York company will launch two regional sports networks: Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Spanish-language network Time Warner Cable Deportes. The cable operator has shelled out billions of dollars to snag the Los Angeles Lakers away from Fox Sports West and now has its eye on the Dodgers too. The company is tired of being held hostage by high-priced sports channels and has decided to stop fighting the competition and begin imitating it. The cable operator, which has about 2 million subscribers in Southern California, is taking steps to cut out the middle man. That middleman is News Corp., parent of local cable channels Fox Sports West and Prime Ticket and a formidable opponent.

Pierre Cossette, the avuncular old-school talent agent, manager, music mogul and Broadway producer often called the father of the Grammy Awards telecast for persuading nervous TV executives to put "longhairs with high heels and makeup" on a live national broadcast in 1971, died Friday. He was 85. Cossette, who had suffered in recent years with congestive heart failure, died at Barrie Memorial Hospital in Montreal, not far from his family's summer home in St. Anicet. "He had a rough few years medically, but his spirit and sense of humor never left him," Ken Ehrlich, the longtime Grammy Awards producer, said Friday shortly after learning of Cossette's death.

And the Oscar goes to…social media. The popular online communities of Facebook and Twitter have been cast to play a bigger role in keeping the Academy Awards relevant to viewers and advertisers. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Walt Disney Co.'s ABC television network have been posting comedy bits on YouTube, designing interactive games for Facebook friends and installing cameras backstage to give Internet users a behind-the-scenes peek of Sunday's 84 t h Academy Awards.

As a record of a particular occasion, the "Metropolitan Opera Presents" telecast of "Falstaff," taped last season and airing tonight at 8 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28, KVCR-TV Channel 24 and KPBS-TV Channel 15, has some value. But it doesn't do more than adequate justice to the beauties and depths of Verdi's ultimate opera.

After receiving multiple complaints about NBC's Sunday telecast of the Golden Globes, the FCC said Wednesday that it was reviewing the program for possible violations of indecency rules. Toward the end of the program, director Darren Aronofsky was caught on camera jokingly making an obscene gesture at Mickey Rourke, who was onstage accepting an acting award for Aronofsky's film "The Wrestler." Rourke and other attendees also salted their speeches with occasional off-color language, some of which was bleeped by NBC. An NBC spokeswoman confirmed that it aired the Aronofsky gesture on the live telecast.

At 82, the Academy Awards are long overdue for some cosmetic enhancement. And the show's producers have tapped a new director they hope can do the job. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced Wednesday that Hamish Hamilton would direct the telecast. Like the telecast's producers, Bill Mechanic and Adam Shankman, Hamilton is a newcomer to the Oscars. "One of the things that came to mind from Hamish's shows was an unbelievable use of the most current technology with cameras," Shankman said in a telephone interview.

With "Avatar" continuing to break global box-office records, James Cameron has the Hollywood clout to get just about any actor interested in his next film. But even the visionary director found himself a little wide-eyed when confronted with the star wattage at Monday's annual Oscar nominee luncheon at the Beverly Hilton hotel. "It's always been my fantasy to work with Meryl, or with Clooney," Cameron said, looking around the crowded room where those stars (and dozens of others)

So what did they think, she'd come out in whiteface? "Everybody's really curious about what Whoopi will do and what she will say," said "Entertainment Tonight" star Mary Hart prior to Monday night's humdrum Academy Awards telecast on ABC. All right, her private Friars Club roast turned out to be hotter than expected when her good friend, Ted Danson, kidded her by showing up as a minstrel. The overblown criticism of Danson angered her, and she said so. And four-letter words are no stranger to her stand-up act. Yet just how Whoopi Goldberg acquired a week-before-the-Oscars reputation as an out-of-control, kick-ass neo-Howard Stern--compelling viewers to tune in and hear what outrageous things she would say--only Academy Awards hypesters know.

In several decades as a television producer, Don Mischer has sat at the controls of some of the world's premier live broadcasts. He has produced opening ceremonies at the Olympics, awards shows such as the Emmys and the inauguration of President Obama. Producing a live television event is like rounding up a giant herd of unpredictable buffalo — while 20 million or 30 million people watch your every lasso. A tiny snafu can mushroom into disaster (just ask those who oversaw the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2004 Super Bowl, an event that prompted organizers to hire Mischer the following year in the interest of righting the ship)

The first time Hans Zimmer made Pharrell Williams' head spin was in 2005, when the former was composing the score for the Ron Howard blockbuster "The Da Vinci Code. " Williams, half of the lauded hip-hop production duo the Neptunes and a third of the experimental rock group N.E.R.D., had heard through a mutual friend, music-supervisor Kathy Nelson, that he and Zimmer (one of Hollywood's most in-demand composers, with Oscar- and Grammy-winning credits including "The Lion King" and "The Dark Knight")

Director Brett Ratner resigned Tuesday as producer of the Oscar telecast after coming under fire for making an anti-gay slur, leaving the motion picture academy scrambling to cast a new team to helm the February award show. Ratner, director of popcorn films such as "Rush Hour" and the newly released "Tower Heist," was an unconventional choice for the job and was touted as someone who could shake up the program and bring more viewers and pizazz to the affair. Although the show's ratings have flagged recently, the Oscars remain one of the most-viewed broadcasts of the year, often second only to the Super Bowl.

Hal Kanter, an Emmy Award-winning comedy writer, and a director and producer whose career included writing for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, directing Elvis Presley and creating a landmark 1960s TV series starring Diahann Carroll, has died. He was 92. Kanter, who for decades was a writer for the annual Oscar telecast, died Sunday of complications from pneumonia at Encino Hospital, said his daughter, Donna Kanter. "What a dear man," longtime friend Carl Reiner said Monday after learning of Kanter's death.

Seven years ago, I was asked to cover the Academy Awards from backstage. To get the necessary credentials, I had to be personally vetted by producer Gil Cates. As I made my way along the shiny floor of the Oscar production offices, I was prepared for Oz, the great and terrible — at this point, having produced the show 11 times, Cates was the Oscars. Instead, I met a man who wore blue jeans and cowboy boots, who twinkled when he smiled and even when he swore. I covered the Oscars from backstage for the next four years; in 2005 and 2006, it was a Cates production — the first time Chris Rock hosted, the second Jon Stewart.

Gil Cates, the Hollywood showman who transformed the annual Academy Awards telecast from a tired and predictable affair into a polished entertainment extravaganza with hosts such as Billy Crystal and Steve Martin, has died. He was 77. Cates may have been best known as the guiding hand on 14 Oscar telecasts, but he was a creative and versatile force. He was an Emmy Award-winning television and film producer and director who also directed plays on and off Broadway, the impresario of the Geffen Playhouse, and he fostered generations of entertainers as a professor and dean of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television.

Hank Williams Jr. is apologizing for using an analogy to Adolf Hitler in discussing President Barack Obama that prompted ESPN to pull his classic intro song to "Monday Night Football. " Williams said in a statement posted on Facebook and his website Tuesday that his passion for politics and sports "got the best or worst of me. " In an interview Monday on Fox News' "Fox & Friends," Williams, unprompted, said of Obama's outing on the links with House Speaker John Boehner : "It'd be like Hitler playing golf with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ]

Congratulations, CBS. With the new scenes, your telecast of "The Outsiders" was fantastic. Keith Tyson, Los Angeles

I would like to thank the academy for limiting Oscar acceptance speeches to 45 seconds, thus enabling a billion people to hear the Interminable Willie Nelson Medley featuring the Worst Guitar Solo of All Time. Perhaps if speeches had been eliminated entirely, they could have heard Willie sing "Jambalaya" with Dr. Haing S. Ngor or maybe--sorry, my 45 seconds are up. Hit it, Willie and Milos! NEAL McCABE Los Angeles I have heard two reasons for why the producers turned down Phil Collins offer to sing his Oscar-nominated song "Against All Odds" and instead invited Ann Reinking to perform: One, the producers wanted someone who was a stage performer and could dance.

In a surprise move, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has chosen Brett Ratner, director of such popcorn films as "Rush Hour" and "X-Men: The Last Stand," to produce the 2012 Oscar telecast along with veteran producer Don Mischer, academy President Tom Sherak announced Thursday. The 42-year-old Ratner's youthful movies often do well at the box office but are panned by critics. He produced the R-rated summer comedy "Horrible Bosses" and will see his next directorial effort, the Ben Stiller film "Tower Heist," hit theaters in November.

— In 1994, Stephen Sondheim's "Passion" beat Disney's Broadway musical version of "Beauty and the Beast," its closest competitor, in the race for the best musical Tony Award. "Beauty and the Beast" collected only one trophy — for best costumes. But in the days after the award telecast, Disney's Broadway musical brought in a record-breaking $1.6 million in sales while "Passion" managed a fraction of that and closed six months later. "It just goes to show you what a best costume Tony can do for you," one insider quipped.