Never Mind The Quality, Feel The Width

A thousand people at the hippest party in Hollywood and not one of them could give two bytes of energy for the Oscars. How selfish is the online world? Young good-looking go-getters were not in short supply, the future was here at the Yahoo! Online film festival. British director Mike Figgis said he was carried away by the "collective feeling unleashed by this new technology. This doesn't feel like LA, it feels great! This is the opposite of the word Oscar, this is the future." Figgis' film Time Code was much acclaimed by an audience including Jodie Foster and Quentin Tarantino. Roger Ebert, America's most powerful film critic, in his trademark style labeled the two-day event, "The birth of the Liberation of Film. The globe is being brought into a matrix of communications." Ebert said real estate says location, location, location. "Film on the internet has three words, bandwidth, bandwidth and bandwidth.' In what must be a first, the Hollywood key speaker quoted Karl Marx, well misquoted him, "the means of production have been put in the peoples' hands . with a $1500 camera and a $1500 computer." Lenin must be disappointed he never got to see a student film about soap melting in a dish streaming to him over a 56k modem from crapshort.com. Although he acknowledged the distance between the promise and the future, Ebert said, "The day is here. Film makers have the freedom that writers and poets have enjoyed. We are living right now in a revolutionary time." Michael Kotman, the director of business development at the fabulously hip bigstar.com, said he had been amazed by the "esprit de corps of the festival." His personal commitment to bringing films to the web was more than just bringing "cool projects to the mainstream, it's all about putting the people who care about film in touch with each other and giving them the tools to work with." LA correspondant: David Kelly