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Volume 1 Number 2                  April 1996

By Don Fass, Editor, ENN

ACADEMY AWARDS!

The Academy Awards or &quotOscars," are still Hollywood's 

biggest glitz, glamour and most watched extravaganza.  The 67th. 

Academy Awards, despite a fine job of hosting by Whoppi Goldberg, 

were pretty slow-moving. But the appearance by courageous wheelchair-bound 

Christopher Reeve, the salute to the magnificent Kirk Douglas (recently 

the victim of a stroke) and the tribute to the late Gene Kelly were very 

moving moments in the world telecast.

Best Picture


Braveheart

Best Director


Mel Gibson for 

Braveheart

Best Actor


Nicholas Cage for

Leaving Las Vegas

Best Actress


Susan Sarandon for

Dead Man Walking

For more on the 67th. Academy Awards, click here

or go to the Interactive Oscars Guide.

SEAL, ALANIS and ROSE KISS

At a fairly straight-forward, music-filled but eventless 1996 Grammy Awards, 

Seal's Kiss from a Rose won Record of the Year and Song of the Year.  

Alanis Morissette's Little Pill was Album of the Year.  Sixties fave Joni 

Mitchell was a big winner too, as was Stevie Wonder, who won this year's 

Lifetime Achievement Award.  For more on this year's Grammys, 

click here.

OSCAR NOMINATES A PIG AND A BRAVEHEART!

The Motion Picture Academy has nominated a number of movies, actors

and actresses that either won Golden Globe awards or nominations.

(See Golden Globe story below for details and links.)  Oscar

voters have also chosen Richard Dreyfuss for Mr. Holland's Opus, 

Madonna's ex, Sean Penn, for Dead Man Walking and 

Apollo 13.

But Apollo star Tom Hanks isn't in the running for a 1996 Oscar. 

Unlike the Golden Globes, John Travolta didn't get nominated 

for his great Get Shorty portrayal. Oscar pigged-out on Babe with 

seven of them!

THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE ...

1996 GOLDEN GLOBE MOVIE WINNERS

Best Movie-Drama:
Sense and Sensibility

Best Movie-Comedy:
Babe

Best Actor-Comedy:
John Travolta for Get Shorty

Best Actor-Drama:
Nicolas Cage for Leaving Las Vegas

Best Actress-Comedy:
Nicole Kidman for To Die For

Best Actress-Drama:
Sharon Stone for Casino

Cecil B.Demille Award:
Sean Connery

Best Supporting Actor:
Brad Pitt

Best Director:
Mel Gibson for Braveheart

Best Screenwriter:
Emma Thompson (for Sense and Sensibility)

The Golden Globe Awards, given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, often pre-stage the Academy Awards in the Spring.

Look for Elisabeth Shue, Nicolas Cage and Leaving Las Vegas as strong contenders. Sir Anthony Hopkins for Nixon, Susan Sarandon for "Dead Man Walking," James Earl Jones for "Cry the Beloved Country," Meryl Streep for "Bridges of Madison County, John Travolta for "Get Shorty" and Emma Thompson for "Sense and Sensibility" are also well in the running. You can keep track of Oscar News directly from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The Grammy Awards also have lots of picks and you can check past winners and present nominees with them. There are a ton of exciting new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees this year as well. And you'll find news of all awards and nominees on our Backstage/What's Hot and our Latest Entertainment News pages.

I didn't attend this year, but Dick Clark's 23rd.Annual American Music Awards at LA's Shrine Auditorium was again a glitzy, music-filled affair, with stand-out performances and a shock or two.

Shortly after he sang a new song about the tragedy in his Oklahoma City home town that brought tears to many members of the celebrity audience, Garth Brooks walked off stage after protesting winning the Favorite Artist of the Year Award. Garth said that, in a lackluster 12 months in the music biz, Hootie and the Blowfish should have won the award, instead!

This was the 9th.year in a row that Reba MacEntire won the award for the Favorite Female Country Artist. Mariah Carey was voted Favorite Female R&B artist and the Eagles Favorite Adult Contemporary Artists. Glenn Frey, Don Henley and Company also were named Favorite Rock/Pop Album Artists for "Hell Freezes Over." Boyz II Men won Favorite Soul/R&B for their "II" CD, Garth Brooks Favorite Country Album-"The Hits." Pearl Jam took the honors for Favorite Heavy Metal Artists. And the long career of Tammy Wynette was saluted--she was given this year's special "Award of Merit."

Among the other musical highlights: The emotional return of Lionel Ritchie to performing, Reba singing "Rambling Man," ("Please Come to Boston") and Luther Vandross performing "The Impossible Dream."

And while I didn't make it to Shrine Auditorium this year, I have gotten to interview producer Dick Clark many times over the years, mostly in Las Vegas elevators and hotel hospitality suites. Once, my radio co-host Deanna Baron asked Richard, backstage on Broadway, "how do you stay so young looking?" His reply: "I stay in dark closets alot!"

After attending a trio of major electronics and computer shows since November, it looks to me like 1996 will see more millions around the world connected to the Internet, the on-line services like Compuserve, Prodigy and America On-Line will grow (and Microsoft Network will as well---appearing on the Web itself. Direct access natiuonal providers like Pipeline and Earthlink will expand and so will local providers, but Apple e-World might bite the dust.

Oracle will lead the pack with a simple $500 computer by the Fall, the Web will continue to cut into tv viewing and long-distance telephone calls. People will also start higher-speed access of the Internet through cable services like @Home and a new cable box on top of their tvs, through those 18" satellite dishes and companies like DirectTV or through high-speed ISDN. Prices for the phone companies access and ISDN modems will continue to drop, just to keep pace.

The COMDEX show in Las Vegas in November had a staggering 205,000 attendees and following along wherever Bill Gates went, the Internet itself and Virtual Reality were the most popular attractions.

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas followed in January with almost 100,000 people attending. There was more on High-Definition TV and new video disc players that will someday replace VCRs, but the Internet stole the show again. Second-place clearly belonged to the Adult Video Expo, off by itself in the Sahara Convention Center. Lines were long as mostly guys lined up for autographs and pictures with a few dozen female video "stars."

At MacWorld in San Francisco in January, 72,000 people jammed the aisles. In the middle of its run, Apple announced its down-sized and other financial ills, but you couldn't tell from all the people who were buying everything in sight! Down-sizing, concentrating on higher-end computers and leaving the lower-priced models to new clones will probably save the company and assure new software being developed. But the rumors persist that Apple will be sold.

At the Spring National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Convention, again in Las Vegas (where else!), the Internet was again set to occupy a major part of the huge exhibit halls.

Old friend Richie Havens was in Emeryville, (between Oakland and Berkeley, Ca), to perform in a Borders Bookstore coffee house and promote a wonderful new and delightfully interactive CD-Rom called Geo Safari, which he narrates and hosts. Later, he performed at the Fillmore. His songs, like "Freedom" and "Here Comes the Sun." still bring tears to baby-boomers. Richie isn't new to the technology revolution or to being devoted to working with kids.

And speaking of being devoted to helping others, performing wonderful songs that delight several generations, I need mention Noel Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary. Noel Paul's generosity, through his Public Domain Foundation, (established with royalties from the song he wrote, "Where There is Love"), helped greatly to make this site and all our Youth and Children Net sites possible. He was also a pioneer in on-line information, long-ago founding and being sysop of the Celestat BBS way up in Maine.

Todd Rundgren, who I don't know, and Arlo Guthrie and COUNTRY JOE MCDONALD, who I do, are just a few of the other SIXTIES performers who have kept pace with '90's technology, software, CD-Roms and other innovations.

You can hear realaudio excerpts of some of my own interviews with Sixties rock icons Jerry Garcia and Bill Graham at RockWeb Interactive's site.

By the way, 76,000,000 people are baby-boomers, and the first, James Sickler, Jr. of Missouri, born January 1, 1946, 1 minute after midnight, still drives a baby-blue 1971 Mustang!

Teri Hatcher, Lois from Lois and Clark, is now the most down-loaded gif (that doesn't sound quite right!) on America On-Line. She had been downloaded 83,000 times by the end of 1995!

On the Web, heavy-weight "downloadees" include supermodels Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Kathy Ireland, actresses Sandra Bullock and Julia Roberts and my own favorites, Debra Winger, Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon and Heather Locklear.

The Cyber-Dudes include Get Shorty star John Travolta and his Pulp Fiction Director Quentin Tarintino, Friends' Matthew Perry and Golden Globe Best Supporting Actor Brad Pitt (see "Envelope Please" story) and his temporarily out-of-the-spotlight Vampires Co-star, Tom Cruise. There's also X-Files star David Duchovny and NYPD Blue Co-star Jimmy Smits, winner of the Best TV Actor Award at this year's Golden Globes. But don't forget my NYC rock journalist friend Anne Leighton's favorite Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris!

Stars aren't the only ones who win awards. Several of the sites we've created at SC Metro are winning web awards. Youth and Children Net was just awarded GNN/American On-Line's "Best of the Net," Sixties! was picked by both Prodigy and Discovery Online School and featured on TV, our World Nightlife A-Z AND our Sixties! were voted "best content on the web" awards by NBNSOFT! and our entire Entertainment Network News Megasite received Yahoo's coveted "yellow glasses! And we're giving some awards of our own... Our brand-new Kidz in the Newz site is awarding children and teens who do something outstanding to make a difference and help better society!

NOWHERE MAN SUPERB PARANOIA

Bruce Greenwood is perfect as Thomas Vail, in Lawrence Herzog's surprise UPN hit, "Nowhere Man." It is an always suspenseful, often paranoid and fequently moving cross between The Prisoner and The Fugitive.

Greenwood plays a photographer, whose identity has been "erased" by an unknown CIA-like force, because of something he saw that he shouldn't have. "They" also want the negatives of a photo he took of some sort of execution.

Vail narrates from a diary he keeps of his travails. Often, the series is just plain good, but many of the episodes are more--masterfully crafted.

Flashbacks, deep paranoia-filled adventures, a highly-dramatic theme and score and a sensitive portrayal by Greenwood, always on the run and always looking over his shoulder, combine to make Nowhere Man work. The highly- volatile coming attractions alone can keep you coming back each week.

One of the most brilliant episodes centered around a young man who helped Vail enter cyberspace to find answers, but, in the end, Vail's new friend got stuck in a virtual reality vortex he might never return from.

Its not all intrique however. Like Fugitive and Route 66, there are almost- love stories, reunions with Vail's father and a brain-washing and drug- induced romance to take the edge off for just awhile, until Vail is on the run again, running from "them," or again seeking the life that was taken from him.

For more on Nowhere Man, check out the OFFICIAL Nowhere Man site or, My Name is Thomas Vail.

• Don Johnson in CBS' Nash Bridges
  
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• Robin Williams in The Bird Cage
  
• ENN's NEW Celebrity Page
  

• Kevin Costner in "Tin Cup"
  
• Meg Ryan in "Courage Under Fire"
  

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