Angel

February 23, 2004

Awards Good; Angel Bad; Trek Bad-Mouthing; Wars Baddie

David Fury, Angel’s executive producer, says they are talking to UPN, but doubts the network will be interested. Basically, "it’s not really financially responsible for them to pick up a show that doesn’t really have much of a future beyond one more season." He also doubts that there will be future TV movies made on Angel, or that Sarah Michelle Gellar will be on the show’s finale. What a party-pooper. — SCI FI Wire ***

The Return of the King won best ensemble in a motion picture at the Screen Actors Guild Awards Feb. 22, with Johnny Depp getting best actor for Pirates of the Caribbean. The Return of the King also won at the sixth annual Costume Designers Guild Awards. Sci-fi movies also (and less unusually) completely dominated the Visual Effects Society Awards with golden Melies Moon Man trophies (?): four for The Return of the King, two for The Matrix Reloaded, and two for Pirates of the Caribbean. Finding Nemo got one for best character animation in an animated movie. TV shows Smallville, Channel’s Battlestar Galactica and Buffy the Vampire Slayer took home some Melies Moon Men as well. George Lucas got a Lifetime Achievement Award — which is kind of like a Melies Moon Man Special Ed. ***

Star Wars: Episode III’s major baddie, Gen. Grievous, will have a second sneak preview in an upcoming episode of the animated Star Wars: Clone Wars series. "In Attack of the Clones, we saw that former Jedi Count Dooku was the political leader behind the Separatists’ movement and instigator of the Clone Wars," Rick McCallum told StarWars.com. "In Episode III, we’ll meet Gen. Grievous, the military leader of all the Separatist armies. He’s part alien and part robot. Grievous is a master strategist and the greatest hand-to-hand Jedi killer the galaxy has ever known." Ten new episodes of Star Wars: Clone Wars begin on March 26. The site also has a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the last (?) Wars film. ***

This isn’t quite an official announcement, but if you check out the Universal Pictures Website, there’s now a listing for an upcoming Firefly movie, Serenity. ***

Variety reports that Morgan Freeman will play Lucius Fox in the next Batman movie, but is now claiming that Liam Neeson won’t be a villain, but will play Ducard, Bruce Wayne’s mentor. ***

According to Mediaweek.com’s Programming Insider, Star Trek: Enterprise’s "Doctor’s Orders" earned a 3.7 overnight rating/5 share. For those interested in more Berman critcism, Garret Wang recently spoke about the VOY DVD release, with TrekWeb: "When Roddenberry passed the reigns over to [Rick] Berman, unfortunately Berman kept the same formula. And he just kept plugging it in....That’s something that I’ve always disagreed with....Maybe I’m not on Rick Berman’s good list because of it but I’ve always said that risks should have been taken. Risks in terms of the way they film it in terms of where the storylines go, instead of just saying A + B = C for every single episode." Wang says, however, that he’d love to play an alien on ENT. Meanwhile, Bacula has a fun interview up on Wayne Brady: ***