So, this year The New York Times‘ Carpetbagger Oscar season blog will be written not by David Carr, who created the brand and helmed it for four Oscar seasons, but by Melena Ryzik, a reporter, video blogger and sometime poet previously on the paper’s general culture beat. The Variety story on the matter suggests that Carr stepped down from the post in order to fully focus his attention on “the quickly changing world of publishing,” and also because last year’s Slumdog-centric race bored the shit out of him and he couldn’t fathom pretending to care about a non-competition again contributed to “simple burnout.” Which happens. Even if you’re only doing it part time, four years is a long time to stay chained to a blog.

It is hard to imagine The Carpetbagger sans Carr’s red-carpet-outsider Bagger persona, but I wish Ryzik (seen above, posing with Karl Lagerfeld) luck and I’m excited to see what she brings to the beat. And not, unlike some of my chromosomal compatriots, just because of “girl power.” Because, really — the game of Oscar yelling is already overcrowded. Her being a broad (and, as Carr put it on his Twitter, a “fresh young” one at that) isn’t going to matter much if she doesn’t have something interesting to say, and maybe even more importantly, a way of saying it that cuts through the noise and demands attention.

In other words, I’m not concerned with gender quotas in Oscar blogging. I’m concerned that Oscar blogging has lost its urgency –– as has much of year-round film blogging, as so many of us either waste time bickering amongst ourselves, or piling on the same semi-stories in a desperate quest to chase the traffic that keeps us alive. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope for Ryzik’s sake, she finds a way to shake up the cycle.

I was on vacation/self-imposed internet exile when David Hudson’s IFC blog, The Daily, ceased publishing at the end of last month, so I didn’t realise it had happened until nearly two weeks later. By that point, indieWIRE had stepped in to fill the void with cinemadaily, a five-day-a-week column that usually focuses on one blogospheric meme per day. It was something, but it wasn’t enough: I missed the quick-glance view of the entire day’s worth of news and chatter that Hudson used to offer, and I especially missed his summaries of the Arts sections of international weekend papers.

Today, Hudson is back with a new vehicle for his mad collation/curation skills. The Auteurs Daily will live on the cineaste site’s blog, the Notebook, with a twist: items that would have gone in the section that Hudson used to call Shorts will now be broadcast directly to Twitter. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a dedicated Twitter disparager in the past,” Hudson writes, but he now belives the microblogging platform will be the perfect way to streamline his service whilst broadcasting it in a hyper-timely fashion. You can follow those tweets here. Welcome back, David!

I may be one of the few film bloggers who enjoys the existence of Nikki Finke (you may remember I somewhat defended her earlier this year when Variety made its three-pronged attack). Of course, I appreciate her for the same reason I appreciate a lot of filmmakers I don’t necessarily agree with or like. And for the same reason that I’m glad Fox News exists. She plays by her own rules, doesn’t ever seem to hold back and doesn’t appear to care with whom she becomes enemies.

So, I for one was glad to hear the news that her blog, Deadline Hollywood Daily, was bought by Mail.com Media Corp., which also owns one of my other favorite film blogs, Movieline. Hopefully she isn’t reigned in at all now that she’s got a boss, though I can’t see why MMC would want DHD if they didn’t want the Finke everyone knows and doesn’t love.

It’s hard to tell if anyone else is as excited as I am to see how her transition goes, but those who’ve covered the story at least seem curious. Check out some bloggers’ reactions after the jump:

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Only a handful of people were in attendance for last night’s world premiere of blogger/filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake’s new documentary Indie Film Blogger Road Trip at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives. Apparently most fans and writers of blogs had better things to do, such as read and write posts on the internet. Because really, what is the point of watching a film about writers about films? The only thing more unnecessary and inwardly spiraling — obviously I’m guilty of it here — is blogging about a film about bloggers about film.

Even with the film blogosphere’s reputation for insularity Ekanayake’s doc has no purpose, because its subject matter and content are already well documented on blogs. And anything new that might be discussed, any new questions that might be raised would also be more appropriately written about on the web. The film’s largest offense, though, is that it doesn’t even seem to have an intended purpose. It does not actually attempt to offer anything new to the discourse on film blogging. Nor does it have any sort of cohesive thesis regarding any preexisting discourse. The doc is simply a series of long, mostly uncut interviews with film bloggers. It’s not even necessarily a sufficient profile of the film blog community, in a “Meet the Bloggers” kind of way.

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The Oxford Film Festival took place over the weekend, and if you follow film blogs, chances are the only thing you know about the event is that Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells had so much trouble with the wireless internet in his hotel room that he threw a fit, refused to attend a panel for which the festival had flown him out to appear on, threatened to leave town, then decided to stay when the festival put him up in a new hotel. This incident has made Wells the target of a ton of criticism — on Twitter, in the comments on his own site, on other blogs. And with good reason –– as Eric D. Snider put it, “This is ungentlemanly behavior of the worst order, Wells. You should be ashamed to have wasted the festival’s time and resources so childishly.” Fair enough.

But I also wonder if maybe there was a point buried within Wells’ tantrum that we’d be remiss to ignore.

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Historic news! David Hudson, the master of film blogging behind GreenCine Daily, is leaving that site to start a new blog for IFC. That blog, called The Daily, will launch January 1. Meanwhile, GreenCine Daily will be taken over by Aaron Hillis, freelance writer and co-founder of Benten Films.

Why is this a big deal? In the brief history of the film blogosphere, nobody has ever even tried to aggregate film news and commentary as thoroughly and elegantly as David Hudson. And maybe it’s holiday season fuzzy headed-ness on my part, but the idea that there will soon be two places for me to go for curated bloggy aggregation kind of blows my mind.

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Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE is asking “filmmakers, critics, publicists and other festival organizers” to weigh in on a new rule instituted by the Tribeca Film Festival press office. Here’s the text, as it appears on the Festival’s credential application:

“Embargo” regulation for world premieres
Reviews of films that celebrate their world premiere at the Festival may only be published after the official premiere. All journalists seeking accreditation to the Festival declare their acceptance of this “embargo.”

When I applied for credentials, I saw this text and rolled my eyes, but I wasn’t really surprised. In my experience with the Tribeca Film Festival press office, it’s always seemed like they prioritize coverage of red carpets and parties far above reviews or any sort of serious consideration of the films themselves; every year, much of the program seems to be about courting the attention of Access Hollywood, rather than cementing Tribeca’s reputation as a venue for quality films. But sniping aside: really, Tribeca demanding that journalists refrain from writing about World Premieres before they screen for the public will not end in a materially different result than what happens at Sundance, where all press screenings take place either during or after World Premieres, and as press the only way to see a film before ticket buyers is to obtain a screener from a sales agent, publicist or distributor.

So I’m not exactly outraged by the embargo, but it certainly will change the type and quantity of coverage that I’ll be able to do of the festival. …Read more