Salon.com > Scott Kirsner

“Don’t call it the nerd Oscars”

Tue, 21 Feb 2006 21:00:00 +0000

The camera crews from "Entertainment Tonight" and "Access Hollywood" were clearly vexed: Unlike at other banquets held during the busy season leading up to the Oscars, full of famous faces, no one streaming into the International Ballroom at the Beverly Hilton on Feb. 18 was even remotely recognizable to them. Most of the attendees' garb looked as though it was bought off the rack at Nordstrom, and no one was wearing gaudy baubles borrowed from Harry Winston. When interviewed by the TV and radio reporters positioned behind the black velvet ropes, the evening's award winners were more likely to discourse on compression algorithms, cloth-simulation software or robotic camera mounts than to grin and gripe about the nonexistent limo gridlock outside the hotel.

The occasion was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual Scientific and Technical Awards, which each year's Oscar host fleetingly refers to as "a ceremony held earlier" before cueing a 30-second video summary of the event. There's usually a grand total of one celebrity at the Sci-Tech Awards: the evening's host. The banquet's organizers at the academy have a solid record of landing actresses on the way up, including Charlize Theron, Kate Hudson and, last year, Scarlett Johansson. This year's host was Rachel McAdams, seen recently in "The Family Stone," "Wedding Crashers" and "The Notebook."

Missing the hybrid moment

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 20:30:00 +0000

An invitation to visit General Motors' main R&D facility, just north of Detroit, is like being given a ticket back to a mid-1950s World's Fair. The General Motors Technical Center, as it is called, was designed by the architect Eero Saarinen -- who would later collaborate on the IBM pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. Saarinen's research campus for GM features a stainless-steel water tower that resembles a spacecraft ready for liftoff, stately rectangular reflecting pools punctuated by fountains, a 65-foot-tall dome, and sprawling, low, International Style office buildings. All that's missing as I park my rental car is the surging, glockenspiel-heavy "World of Tomorrow" soundtrack.

Drive-in summer

Wed, 01 Nov 2000 16:00:00 +0000

My parents tell me that I saw my first movie at a drive-in. But the only clear memories I had of the outdoor theaters that Variety used to call "ozoners" were of the Tropicaire Drive-In in Miami, where we used to go to the flea market on Saturdays, and of John Travolta singing sullenly in front of a drive-in screen in "Grease."

It wasn't until late in the summer of 1999, when I was living in Boston, that I first went to a drive-in behind the wheel of my own car. I'd known for some time that the Wellfleet Drive-In was the last remaining drive-in on Cape Cod, the meandering, sandy arm of land off the southeast corner of Massachusetts. Every year, the Wellfleet Drive-In is the subject of at least one big "last of a vanishing breed" stories in a Boston newspaper or magazine. I was spending a long weekend in the fishing village of Wellfleet with my girlfriend, Amy, and another couple. We watched Steve Martin's "Bowfinger" and the superhero parody "Mystery Men," four of us piled into the flattened cargo area of my Jeep Cherokee, which we'd parked backward, with the gate open.

Old school is oddly cool

Tue, 05 Sep 2000 18:35:00 +0000

A parade of Charles River rowers passed under the JFK Street bridge as Sterling Powell headed for her first day of orientation at Harvard Business School. It was a brilliant late-summer day, but Powell's mind was clouded with questions: Would the two-year-long, $50,000-plus MBA program prepare her for a job in the Internet economy? Would there still be an Internet economy in two years? As a HomeRuns.com delivery truck rumbled past her on the bridge, it seemed as if the ground was shaking beneath Powell's feet.
At the core of the curriculum at the august Harvard Business School are case studies, written in the style of the paragraph above, that use nonfiction narratives to teach students analytical skills and decision making. "Harvard Business School brings the complex realities of business into the classroom in a variety of powerful ways," states the school's Web site. "Through the case method and other learning techniques, students examine problem-focused situations in ways that are managerially relevant, intellectually and emotionally engaging, and highly interactive." The typical course at HBS examines 20 to 30 cases in a semester.
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Digital deprivation

Wed, 12 Jul 2000 18:41:00 +0000

This seems to be the summer of deprivation. On PBS's "1900 House," a British family lives for three months without a water closet. On CBS's megahit "Survivor," the denizens of Pulau Tiga get by without electricity or sturdy shelter. On MTV's latest season of "The Real World," seven youngsters carom around a New Orleans mansion from day to day without the burden of superegos.

In keeping with that spirit, when my Macintosh PowerBook fell prey to crippling seizures in early June, I sent it off to be repaired and resorted to using an i-opener, a stripped-down Internet appliance, for a week.

Internet appliances have been the "next big thing" since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started trumpeting their potential in the mid-1990s; the difference now is that they're actually available to consumers. By Christmas, there could easily be a half-dozen different models on the market.

The insta-business plan re-strategizer!

Fri, 14 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

It used to be that an Internet start-up was in great shape if it could alter its strategy and its story as nimbly as a next-day tailor. But these days, the market's so moody you've got to swing with the alacrity of a well-greased weathervane.

This week the New York Times quoted Robert Lessin, the co-CEO of Wit Capital, saying, "There will never be a new stand-alone business-to-consumer dot-com created again." The Wall Street Journal reported that Safeguard Scientifics, a venture group, had decided to stop investing in business-to-business plays in order to focus on the "next big thing": infrastructure that supports the Web's growth. CNET's News.com described the "gloomy climate" for open-source companies, noting the stock slides of Red Hat, VA Linux Systems and Andover.Net, and Linuxcare's delayed IPO.

Brand builder

Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Bob Davis has the persistent and unembarrassed lock-stare of a skilled salesman, who will not once in the course of a conversation offer you the opportunity to say no. The chief executive of Lycos manages to be relaxed and intense at the same time, lounging on a sofa in his Waltham, Mass., office, surrounded by trophies representing successful acquisitions and investments -- pristine baseball caps from Tripod, Wired Digital, PlanetAll.

Davis, a native of Boston's working-class Dorchester neighborhood, began his career as a salesman for General Electric before moving on to Wang Laboratories, where he hawked minicomputers to big companies. In 1995, Davis was hired by venture capital firm CMGI @ventures to shepherd to market a Web search technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

Davis, Employee No. 1 at Lycos, had never even used e-mail before taking the job, but he quickly acclimated to the emerging world of the Web and began building the Lycos organization, with a strong focus on ad sales. Ten months later, he and CMGI had taken Lycos public, in what was at the time the fastest NASDAQ initial offering in history.

Frequently asked questions to end the millennium

Mon, 27 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Okay, you've got less than a week before the new millennium hits and you've suddenly realized that, beyond purchasing a pair of 62 kilowatt diesel generators, you haven't done a thing to prepare yourself. Is it too late? What is everyone else doing? And most importantly, will Mr. Coffee still be capable of brewing his magic elixir on Jan. 1?

I don't pretend to know the answers to any of these questions, but I was asked to weigh in, based on having researched and written about the Y2K problem for more than two years, and having watched six and a half minutes of NBC's made-for-TV movie "Y2K," starring Ken Olin. I felt a sense of obligation and duty. If civilization collapsed as a result of widespread Y2K glitches, I didn't want to be sitting at home wracked with guilt that I could've done more to try to prevent it. I wanted to be out looting at the mall.

Do you have what it takes?

Fri, 08 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

When I was a kid growing up in Miami, my father, hoping to encourage my interest in writing, would take me to see authors read from their books. I remember seeing literary lights as diverse as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Dave Barry, Ted Koppel and James Michener. Toward the end of each evening, the master of ceremonies would indicate that it was time to take questions from the audience. After I had been to one or two of these events, this announcement began to make me cringe, and I could usually detect a bit of ill-concealed apprehensiveness in the visiting author as well.

Audience members would line up behind a microphone in the aisle. Some would inevitably be clutching brown envelopes stuffed with copies of their novels, which they intended to thrust into the hands of the visiting author before the night was through. This was the mid-1980s, when having a book on the bestseller list was still a viable way to achieve celebrity in America. These people wanted an agent, a contract, a publisher, and they would ask questions that struck me, even in my early teens, as incredibly inane:

"Do you use a typewriter or a word processor, or do you write longhand?"

The modest inventor

Wed, 15 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The inventor of the World Wide Web is not an easy man to get to know.

I discovered that when I went to interview Tim Berners-Lee in 1996 for the now-defunct WebMaster Magazine. After I'd lobbed my first question, he was silent for a very long time.

Then, in his clipped British accent, he asked, "Have you looked at my Frequently Asked Questions? You'd get a lot of points with me as a journalist if you'd actually looked at them first."

His hope -- then and now -- was that a FAQ posted on the Web would render interviews superfluous, insulating him from stupid, redundant or intrusive questions. (One of the questions on his current FAQ, for example, reads, "Can you tell me more about your personal life?" The answer: "No, I can't.")

So why, then, write "Weaving the Web," Berners-Lee's account of how and why he devised the most important new communications medium since television? A central motivation, apparently, was to forever alleviate his frustrations with journalists and members of the public who insist on learning the particulars of the Web's origins.