Remember last month, when Netscape handed out our own awards for the Golden Globes telecast? The plan was to do the same for the Academy Awards. But last night's production was a strange one, too odd in many ways to be reduced to bullet points, and one largely unworthy of praise. According to Matt Drudge, the general public wasn't even watching--if overnight estimates prove accurate, it will be the third least-watched Oscars in history. Nikki Finke warned us last week that telecast producer Laura Ziskin had a four-hour monster on her hands, but no one wants to believe that kind of bad news in advance. And based on the reports that have so far hit the Web, even those who get paid to watch these things could barely sit through this year's installment. The few bright spots have so far been glossed over by critics who seem appalled in equal measure by the show's lack of spectacle and host Ellen DeGeneres' velvet pantsuit.

These early reports (particularly Brian Lowry's review in Variety and Alessandra Stanley's analysis in the New York Times) sound simultaneously naive and hackneyed. At the Oscar viewing party I attended, at the IFC Center in downtown Manhattan, nobody in the local, primarily film industry-tangential crowd seemed particularly surprised that the show itself was overlong and, for long stretches, dreadfully dull. Certainly no one suggested that what the evening really needed was more production numbers and fewer flamboyant outfits. The New York crowd simply slogged through, clapping some but mocking more, waiting for the good stuff. For our perseverance, we were rewarded with four big wins (Film Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Picture) for the hometown favorite, Martin Scorsese's The Departed. The genuine sense of joy in the room when the final award of the night was announced made sitting through the show's interminable middle three hours seem almost worthwhile.

When the final episode of the Fox drama The O.C. airs tonight, it'll mark the end of an era. There will be distraught fans, such as 19-year-old Coleeeee, who informs the world via one the show's many MySpace groups that her "life is over when The O.C. is." Cast and crew will have to find new jobs, and moving on may be tough for some -- as star Benjamin McKenzie put it in a statement released by the show's publicist, "I'll probably miss working with everyone." But the loss will also be felt by indie rock bands and fans, by fashion designers and young style mavens, and by comic book producers and consumers. For though The O.C. 's ratings were at best average (and sometimes totally abysmal), the show served as a remarkably effective clearinghouse for totems of teenage cool.

The show was created in 2003 by television novice Josh Schwartz who, at age 27, was the youngest person to develop and produce his own one-hour drama in the history of network television. In a 2004 interview with the New York Times, Schwartz admitted to using a "Trojan Horse strategy" to get his foot in the door. Knowing that FOX was looking for a prime-time soap to replicate the success of Aaron Spelling's just-retired dinosaur Beverly Hills 90210, Schwartz crafted a pilot script that self-consciously hit all the high notes of the Spelling drama genre: pool parties, massive mansions, diva rivalries, cocaine. Then, as he later put it, Schwartz inserted "characters that were a little bit funnier and more soulful and different and specific than the kinds you usually see in that genre."

Much of the story of life in the luxurious (and fictional) Southern California suburb of Newport was seen through the eyes of Seth Cohen (played by Adam Brody), a friendless ninth grader obsessed with comic books and emo bands. In the series pilot, Seth's public defender father brings home Ryan Atwood (Benjamin McKenzie), a juvenile offender from less-than-desirable Chino, who has returned from a night in jail to find that his mom has skipped town without leaving so much as a note.

Soon this miscreant was installed in the Cohen family pool house. Ryan and Seth quickly formed a bond as outsiders, simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the glamour and excess of the Newport lifestyle. And the show's creator got to have it both ways. Schwartz gave Fox their shiny, highly-marketable soap sensation, all the while building a one-hour prime time drama about a friendship formed by two teenage boys, each of whom, though undeniably telegenic, fell somewhere outside the mold.

Rory Kennedy opens her latest documentary, The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, with footage of the Milgram Experiment, a 1961 behavioral study designed to ask the question, "Could the entire Holocaust really have been the work soldiers following orders?" The results demonstrated that most people will step way beyond their personal moral boundaries if directed to do so by an authority figure. In the Milgram case, subjects thought they were inflicting near-fatal electroshock treatments on unseen prisoners (in reality, they were causing no harm). Conversely, Kennedy demonstrates that the American soldiers involved in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture incidents were made to think that they were doing nothing wrong. When images of the extreme interrogation techniques leaked and the government needed a scapegoat, many of those same soldiers were then sent to prison for following orders.

Netscape sat down with Kennedy last month at the Sundance Film Festival. It was the morning after President Bush's State of the Union speech, and the director, a member of America's most famous left-leaning political family, discussed not only her film but the War on Terror, military history, governmental transparency, and why she thinks the majority of Americans "are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore." Ghosts of Abu Ghraib premieres Thursday, February 22 on HBO.


The film uses the Milgram Experiment as a structuring metaphor. Did you begin the project with that in mind?

I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of ordinary people who commit extraordinary acts of evil. We were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then, like so many other people, I was horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib, and continued to be haunted by them years after. I found myself asking: Who were these people and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths? What was their childhood like? And so I then went back to HBO, where I had been developing the film on genocide, and I said, "How would you feel if we were to change direction and look at Abu Ghraib as our example?'" They were excited about that, and I was then able to get access to a number of the soldiers involved in the abuse--and ultimately to the detainees.

When I talked to these people and asked the question, "Why did you do this?'", they all said the same thing: "I did it because I was told to do it." So Ghosts of Abu Ghraib became much more of an investigative film, and less of a psychological film.

Early on in Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, Donald Rumsfeld announces that the U.S. Army is about to engage in "the first war of the 21st century." There's an unmistakable note of pride in this statement, which dates from the eve of the Iraqi invasion in 2003. And that archival clip is a fitting place for Ferguson to begin his argument, which takes the former Defense Secretary to task for his arrogance, stubbornness, and general refusal to admit mistakes.

Ferguson built the film, his first (the Brookings Institute fellow received guidance from co-producer Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room fame) out of 200+ hours of interviews with diplomats, scholars, former Bush administration officials and U.S. soldiers. The filmmaking team also ventured into war-torn central Baghdad, at great personal risk--this is the first film I've seen in which members of a security detail are given on-screen credits in advance of the editor and cinematographer. Ferguson's goal: to meticulously examine the first year of the conflict, pinpointing the key mistakes that continue to hamper the war effort today. The resulting film, though clinical in its treatment of the facts, paints a damning portrait of the Bush Administration's insistence on staying the course. Netscape News sat down with Ferguson and Gibney at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where No End in Sight premiered to standing ovations and was ultimately awarded a Special Prize by the Festival's Documentary Jury.

Netscape: I personally have a knee-jerk reaction against charges that key members of the Bush Administration are "stupid" or "evil." What's a more reasonable way of explaining why these guys made so many bad decisions?

Charles Ferguson: I think it's much more about blindness, and perhaps also arrogance. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are intelligent, accomplished people. But they seem to have been very narrow-minded, unwilling to listen, and also, in a number of cases, dangerously arrogant.

Alex Gibney: I also think this administration has had an obsession with executive power. I mean that in both the literal sense--in terms of the chief executive, the President--but also in terms of other executives, such as Jerry Bremer, in whom they invested a tremendous amount of power. This is something that goes back into deep history. Ever since Nixon's resignation, I think both Rumsfeld and Cheney have been obsessed with that idea. And that's fed into this larger sense of arrogance, of a kind of willful blindness, because they're determined to retain the prerogatives of the executive, the ability to do what they want to do, no matter what anybody else says.

There are a number of title cards in the film, referencing Bush administration officials who wouldn't speak to you on camera. What do you think is behind that shared reticence, given that Rumsfeld, Bush, etc, seem so confident in their deeds and ideas when they speak to the press?

Ferguson: Well, they're confident when they speak to the press. They're not, in general, nearly as enthusiastic or confident about accepting critical questions from the press when they can't be controlled. And that, unfortunately, has been the experience of not just myself in making this film, but of many journalists who have tried to explore what happened.

An estimated 30,000 prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib Prison by Saddam Hussein, their bodies buried in shallow mass graves, and in most cases, all record of their existence erased. Shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Saddam granted amnesty to all living persons incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. He then used the vacated prison cells to incinerate reams of documents recording the misdeeds that had taken place at the prison.

in Rory Kennedy's documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, both baby-faced grunts and seasoned intelligence professionals describe feeling "haunted" on the grounds of the prison. There were wild dogs digging up corpses, DayGlo portraits of Saddam still adorning the walls, and the pervasive funk of sweat and human feces exacerbated by the 130-degree heat. It was, in short, a climate that sapped soldiers of the ability to exercise rational morality. It's Kennedy's thesis that this climate turned soldiers into the perfect vessels for a defense policy that was willfully defiant of the Geneva Conventions, thus making the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal possible.

Speaking at the Sundance Film Festival on the morning after Bush's State of the Union address, Kennedy (the daughter of RFK and niece of Senator Ted Kennedy) says she came to the project almost by accident. "I had originally planned to do a very different film, which was more about the nature of people who commit extraordinary acts of evil, and we were looking to genocides to exemplify that. And then I, like so many other people, was really horrified by the photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib. I saw them and found myself asking very similar questions: Who were these people, and what motivated them? Were they the kids next door or were they psychopaths?" When the director asked the soldiers themselves why they had participated in the abuse, they all gave her the same answer: "I did it because I was told to do it.'"

Early one morning in 2005, a dying man was unceremoniously dropped off at a hospital in Enumclaw, WA, a small town 45 miles outside of Seattle. Hours later, the man, who was carrying no identification, died from internal bleeding caused by a perforated colon. Security camera footage of the car that dropped the man at the hospital led authorities to a horse farm. There they found "buckets full" of video tapes documenting men having sex with horses. The farm was apparently a meeting spot for an online community of zoophiles (they call themselves "zoos"), who would gather to drink daiquiris, watch science fiction films, and engage in sexual intercourse with Arabian stallions. The regular visitors to the farm knew one another by their online screen names. The dead man's name was Mr. Hands.

The incident became a major media event in the Pacific Northwest, and videos confiscated from the farm eventually made their way online. Since there is no law against bestiality in Washington, none of the men who operated and frequented the ranch were charged with a crime. They did, however, come in for their share of public humiliation. Now those men are telling their side of the story, in Seattle-based filmmaker Robinson Devor's Sundance Documentary Competition entry, Zoo.

Devor incorporates audio interviews with regular visitors to the ranch, as well as reenactments of (non-sexual) events, many featuring the actual participants. "We had no interest in regurgitating what was already out there," Devor told Netscape News, referring to the tabloid TV and Internet exposure. "It was difficult. Just getting [the participants] to talk openly was a challenge because we were 'The Media'. And 'The Media' was bad for a lot of people involved. Some of them would have preferred to have seen a hard-line, 60 Minutes sort of documentary expose. But that's not what we do as filmmakers."

For more than 20 years, Michael Musto has mused on topics light (Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt) and dark (AIDS, gender politics) for his weekly Village Voice column "La Dolce Musto." Now the author has gathered his greatest hits in book form. La Dolce Musto: Writings by the World's Most Outrageous Columnist (Avon) chronicles the last two decades of celebrity culture with wit, aplomb, and pure naughtiness. Yet the collection is much more than a parade of bold-faced names. Musto is himself a formidable and flamboyant entertainer--possibly the only essayist able to evoke Sophie's Choice in a story about New York sex clubs, and certainly the only one bold enough to ask Cameron Diaz if she'd actually wear semen in her hair. Dakota Smith of Netscape News recently spoke with the columnist.


Can you talk a little about the evolution of your column over the years?

In the beginning, I thought the way to make a splash was by hating everyone, throwing mud in everyone's face. But I quickly found out that I was denied access to all the big names, because people were terrified of me.

Then came the first big wave of AIDS. For better or worse, that turned me into an activist, a screaming PC nightmare. In the process, I also became a bit restricted in my thinking. No one could say anything about the gay community without invoking my ire. Anything--Silence of the Lambs, Basic Instinct--would set me off, since I was on the warpath and the palette of representation was so small back then. Now I'm a little calmer. And as I've gotten more access over the years, the column has evolved. Celebrities are now more willing to talk to me.

One of your essays is about appearing on VH-1 and E!, and you mention that these networks don't pay any of the guests for their appearances. Is that still the case?

Nobody gets paid. They tell you that it's because you're talking about the news, but how the Olsen Twins are news is beyond me.

As Eugene Hernandez so astutely puts it over at indieWIRE, the Golden Globes are the "awards show that means nothing and everything at the same time." The Globes are selected by members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a loosely-defined, corruption-ridden organization that seems to grant membership to any interested party boasting a non-U.S. passport and an affiliation with the entertainment media. Think of it this way: these are the greatest achievements in film and television as decided by the people who produce the Argentinean version of Entertainment Tonight.

It can be argued that Globe winners have a distinct advantage going into the Oscar race. The Oscars are selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--that is, by working film professionals and former Oscar winners, most of whom are too busy to see a ton of films in which they weren't paid to participate. As such, they're enormously susceptible to buzz. And thanks to the splashy media profile of the Globes (which belies the feeble prestige of the HFPA), buzz is exactly what the winners get.

We can all agree that the Globes themselves have a limited impact on pop-cultural history. But it's hard to resist a media event that brings together the biggest stars in the world, locks them in a room for four hours, points cameras at them, and encourages them to drink. So let me celebrate this dubious award ceremony with my own list of dubious awards. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you my picks for the most memorable moments of the evening:

Most Unfortunate Instance of Irony, Production Elements Edition: NBC's music editors

For the opening montage of celebrities on the red carpet, the NBC telecast piped in "One Night Only" from Dreamgirls. As it happens, this song includes the memorable chorus: "One night only/Let's not pretend to care." Has even NBC given up on pretending like the Globes matter? Making matters worse, there are two versions of the song in Dreamgirls: a slower, soulful version, sung by Jennifer Hudson's character, and a shallow, disco-fied bastardization which is supposed to represent the evils of commodified culture. Guess which version NBC chose for their montage?