 Big day for big music news stories, this. So here's another. The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright laws.
The filesharing service, which was set up six years ago, has been facing a Swedish beak on piracy allegations centred on allowing access to torrents for filesharing purposes. Its top brass intend to hold a press conference today (Friday 17th April) at 1pm Swedish time. It will be streamed on the front page of their site: thepiratebay.org
Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde have each been sentenced to a year in jail but are expected to appeal. The site, which has tens of millions of users across the globe, includes a page detailing various legal threats they've received from everyone from Microsoft to Warner and from Apple to Dreamworks. It's been pointed out elsewhere that anyone can use a search engine to find torrents too, so the verdict may have knock-on effects on how the search engines index files on the web. Yet with YouTube announcing deals with major film studios to stream movies free of charge only yesterday and Spotify scarcely seeing a day pass without being trumpeted as the saviour of the recorded music industry, it's also possible that The Pirate Bay, like Napster before it, could find itself fighting yesterday's battle before very much longer.
We've got some broody visuals, Bale's deep and grainy delivery and a hint of a Battlestar Galactica-style plot about robots becoming people too. And lots of things exploding in lots of different ways. For fans of dark sci-fi futures it looks like it might be a real treat. Check it out here.
Some years, the Academy Awards are a triumphant review of excellence in film-making, in which much-supported films and stars step up to receive accolades they once would never have dreamed of. But for every year when Denzel Washington scoops Best Actor or Charlie Kaufman and his imaginary brother take home a statuette for Best Adapted Screenplay (for a film which is only barely an adaptation of anything), there are years when everything happens just the way you expected. 2009's 81st Academy Awards was one of those latter years. 
Sweeping the board was Danny Boyle's excellent Slumdog Millionaire, which won eight out of its nine nominations, including Best Film and Best Director. Most overlooked was David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which despite nominations in almost all the major categories only took home the minor-league stuff: Art Direction, Make-up and Visual Effects. 
Heath Ledger defied exactly no-one's expectations and won a posthumous award for his twitchy performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight.
Kate Winslet broke an exceptional run of bad luck by taking home an Oscar for her performance in The Reader - Meryl Streep was probably the better actress, but the Academy could hardly let Winslet lose again. Supporting Actress was taken by Penelope Cruz for Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Finally, Best Actor went to Sean Penn for his portrayal of Harvey Milk in Milk. While musicOMH could have been happy seeing Frank Langella take it for his astonishing turn as Richard Nixon, Penn's performance was the backbone for Gus Van Sant's entire film and so thoroughly deserves the recognition. There was more British success with a win for The Duchess (for costume design), and a big smile crossed our face when Wall-E took Best Animated Feature. So, enjoy the last few showing of what may be 2009's best films (in the UK, anyway) - and be sure to catch Slumdog and Milk (and Frost/Nixon) before they disappear from screens entirely!
You've probably heard the original über-rant by The Dark Knight star Christian Bale (that's him on the left as Matt Bellamy's doppelgänger). If not, it's here.
There's already been a rather excellent techno remix by RevoLucian.
Now The Mae Shi have got in on the action and have put together a whole song, R U PROFESSIONAL? with Bale samples. Every day Batman gets that little bit more famous.
As with the original rant and the techno remix, Bale's expletives make this definitely NSFW through speakers. Good though, innit?
 From our film section:
The film Doubt has earned Meryl Streep yet another Oscar nomination and has thrust playwright John Patrick Shanley into the spotlight for his first ever film as director. But when we caught up with them last month both were much more interested in talking about the story and the setting than any of the Hollywood buzz. Read the interview here; we've also got our review.
Further comments on the Oscar nominations from Jon... I saw Slumdog Millionaire last night and that's where my money's going: one of the most vibrant, atmospheric and gripping films of the last 10 years - overcoming a thin main storyline through great framing and superb cinematography. Danny Boyle's masterpiece. In the directors category it's the same again, though David Fincher would be an acceptable second choice from where we're sitting. As far as Best Actor goes, this is difficult, but I'd hope it would go to the underdog, Mickey Rourke, for coming from nowhere with such a unstated performance. Otherwise, Brad Pitt deserves one for holding The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button together so well. It's hard to believe that Meryl Streep won't win in the Best Actress category. One of the finest - perhaps the finest - actress of the current generation of stars, it's impossible not to be captivated by everything she does. I'd love to see Robert Downey Jr take the Best Supporting Actor nod. (If you haven't seen Tropic Thunder, now's the time to enter our giveaway ). But let's be honest, it's going to be Heath Ledger (and fans must be gritting their teeth that he didn't get "actor"...) In Best Adapted Screenplay, Slumdog Millionaire falls down... so we're hoping for Frost/Nixon, a powerful play between two powerful characters. For Best Original Screenplay, Wall-E barely counts, having only about ten lines of dialogue the whole way through! Milk should be the clear winner here, although it's nice to see Mike Leigh's film in the running. As for the winners, they'll find out along with the rest of us in a months' time, on the 22nd February.
The 2009 Academy Awards nominations are in.
The nominations for best director and best film are identical, with Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader, Milk, Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button up for both. The latter of these leads the way with 13 nominations, with Slumdog Millionaire best of the rest with 10.
As widely expected, the late Heath Ledger gets a posthumous nod for The Dark Knight. His Brokeback Mountain co-star Anne Hathaway is also up for a statue for Rachel Getting Married.
Michael Sheen looks unlucky to miss out on a nod for Frost/Nixon, while his co-star Frank Langella goes up against Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and Mickey Rourke for the Best Actor statue.
Six Feet Under star Richard Jenkins finds himself nominated in the same category for The Visitor in what looks like a very tight race this year.
The main categories... Actor in a leading role: The Visitor - Richard Jenkins Frost/Nixon - Frank Langella Milk - Sean Penn The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Brad Pitt Actor in a supporting role: Milk - Josh Brolin Tropic Thunder - Robert Downey Jr. Doubt - Philip Seymour Hoffman Actress in a leading role: Rachel Getting Married - Anne Hathaway Changeling - Angelina Jolie Frozen River - Melissa Leo Doubt - Meryl Streep The Reader - Kate Winslet
Actress in a supporting role: Doubt - Amy Adams Doubt - Viola Davis The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Taraji P. Henson Best director: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - David Fincher Frost/Nixon - Ron Howard Milk - Gus Van Sant The Reader - Stephen Daldry Best film: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Frost/Nixon Milk The Reader
Eartha Kitt, the singer, cabaret star and actress once described by Orson Welles as "the most exciting woman in the world", died on Christmas Day, aged 81, after a battle with colon cancer.
In a wildly varied life Kitt, born in the cotton fields of Carolina, played Catwoman in the Batman TV series, starred opposite Sidney Poitier on the silver screen, played both the Fairy Godmother and Wicked Witch Of The West in stage productions of Cinderella and The Wizard Of Oz respectively, voiced Kaa the python in a BBC radio adaptation of The Jungle Book, worked with Bronski Beat on the 1989 hit Cha-Cha Heels and gave several benefit concerts supporting HIV/AIDS organisations.
The woman who defined the term "sex kitten" performed her final London shows in 2008 at the Pigalle Club in Piccadilly.
Zavvi, the music retailer formerly known as Virgin Megastores, has been placed in administration, adding further woe to an already miserable year for high street shops and music retailing.
Zavvi's website has been unable to sell anything since the collapse of the Woolworths-owned EUK distributor, Zavvi's main supplier. It has been reported that Zavvi owed a substantial sum to EUK. Administrator Ernst & Young have said they'll try to keep the chain running until a buyer can be found for the business.
In the same week as Whittard of Chelsea and The Officers Club folded and Woolworths' administrators began to close their shops, Zavvi's failing will leave even more shopworkers concerned for their 2009 outlook; the company operated 125 shops across the UK.
If Zavvi closes it would leave the record industry with just HMV, owners of Fopp and Waterstones, as the last major music chain selling their physical products on the high street. It's unlikely that pressure from supermarkets and the internet, in particular Amazon, will let up on the business, but the failures of Woolworths and Zavvi in quick succession should at least give His Master's Voice a breathing space.
In better news, independent record seller Rough Trade, celebrating its 30th birthday in 2008, reported its business growing by an impressive 7% year-on-year despite being caught up in the failure of the distributor Pinnacle earlier this month. If big chains failing offers hope to the likes of Rough Trade, perhaps there's some semblance of a silver lining to the gloom. Here's hoping so at least.
Two instalments of franchises this (belated, summer-drenched, very wet) week: the new X-files movie reviewed and, perhaps more excitingly, the new Harry Potter trailer ready for your delectable viewing. Not a lot of Harry in it... but that's a good thing, right?
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