SEVEN UP FOR YOU AM I

You Am I have announced their seventh album will be released locally by Virgin Records/EMI.The album, Convicts, will be out on May 13. The first single, It Ain’t Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore, will be released online from April 11.

MULTIMEDIA MONKEYS

The Arctic Monkeys are going multimedia. A British filmmaker has produced two short films inspired by their track When the Sun Goes Down. A DVD of two shorts written and directed by Paul Fraser and filmed in Sheffield will be released on April 10 with the video for the track.

PIMPS REJOICE

Clearly stunned hip-hop trio Three 6 Mafia picked up an Oscar for best song for It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp from the film Hustle & Flow this week. After their rambunctious acceptance speech, host Jon Stewart joked: "I think it just got a little bit easier out here for a pimp. That’s how you accept an Oscar."

NEWS

Are you well and truly tired of THE OSCARS? If so, why not derail any post-mortems by launching into a discussion of the 2007 Academy Awards? Confound the office knowit- all by confidently declaring that The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong cop thriller Infernal Affairs with LEONARDO DiCAPRIO and JACK NICHOLSON, is MARTIN SCORSESE at his most commercial and will bypass statue season. Casually suggest that BRAD PITT is a chance for best actor with Babel, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s follow-up to 21 Grams.

Point out that you can’t go past CLINT EASTWOOD, who’s now shooting the World War II drama Flags of our Fathers. Finish up with a round-up of the hip indie flicks that might cross over - the literary adaptation Running With Scissors, starring GWYNETH PALTROW, and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, the successor to Donnie Darko - and then walk away.

Meanwhile, the grandfather of mope pop, MORRISSEY, has been questioned by the FBI after making comments on stage about the health of President Bush.

"I always assume that so-called authoritarian figures just assume that pop-rock music is slightly insane," he claimed in a press statement (actually, it’s this column that has always assumed that pop-rock singers are slightly insane).

Most of the queries were standard, but one FBI agent, with a thinning fringe and "How Soon is Now?" T-shirt over his bulletproof vest, did ask if THE SMITHS would reform. After eight seasons of combining the supernatural and tight singlets, CHARMED has been cancelled.