OSCAR ODD COUPLE RETURN FOR THE 84TH

No introduction is necessary: Billy Crystal and Oscar already know each other quite well.
The actor-filmmaker-comedian has hosted the Academy Awards eight times, and he’s now on deck for his ninth. He’ll preside over the movie industry’s 84th annual ceremony Sunday, Feb. 26, on CTV … and given this year’s nominees, don’t be surprised if he goes silent like an “Artist,” shows some iron in the guise of a former prime minister or sports a dragon tattoo.
Crystal agreed to return after originally scheduled host Eddie Murphy exited, following the departure of initially set producer Brett Ratner (replaced by Brian Grazer, who now is producing the event with award-show veteran Don Mischer). In other ways as well, Crystal felt the timing was right for him to take the job again, as he explained to this writer.
Q: Have you kept up with this year’s nominated movies?
A: I’ve seen pretty much everything. There were certain performances I hadn’t seen that I went back and looked at to see if a joke might be made, because whoever that person is will now be in the audience. We’d been developing things, but when the nominations came out, that’s when we really started grinding for four or five weeks.
Q: You’ve acknowledged that a lot of expectation comes with your return to host the Oscars. Are you managing that well?
A: Well, I don’t know how well I manage anything! Anxiety can be a very healthy thing, too. In the past, I’ve always tried to top myself in what we’ve done on the show, and we’re going to try to do that again. People seem happy that I’m coming back, and I’m happy that I’m coming back, so I want to give them the best show I can. With that comes pressure to make it as good as you can.
Q: When people anticipate you’ll insert yourself into clips from the past year’s movies and do your musical satire “It’s a Wonderful Night for Oscar,” how do you work with or against that to stay surprising?
A: What I like to do and what the audience wants me to do can be two different things. In my mind, I’m not going to do certain things they want … then you start thinking about it and go, “Well, maybe I should.” I’m just looking to have a good time and hopefully, the audience will, too.
Q: After things fell apart with the original hosting plans for this year, it seemed you got on board pretty quickly.
A: Yeah, it took one day. I was in Atlanta finishing up a movie that’s coming out in November — “Parental Guidance,” with Bette Midler and Marisa Tomei, something I’d really been struggling to get made for the last five years — and that’s where I’d spent most of my energy, besides my Broadway show and touring.
We were 2 1/2 weeks from finishing that when (the Oscar plans) started to unravel, and I had a feeling they were going to come to me. Then Brian called and said, “I want you,” and I said, “Let me think about it.” And when I hung up, I actually was angry. I was like, “I’m finishing up a passion project that’s been going great. I don’t want to be thinking about this now.”
Q: What changed your mind?
A: I woke up at 3 in the morning in the hotel, and I had an idea that I thought was funny, and I wrote it down. And it made me laugh, and I couldn’t sleep. Then I had another idea and another, and I said to myself, “OK, try to fall asleep again. If you wake up with a smile, then you’ll do it.”
When I woke up, I called my wife, Janice. In 41 years of marriage, we’ve made every decision together, right from the beginning. I said, “What do you think?” She said, “Are you smiling?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Then do it.” And I called Brian, and I said, “OK.”
Q: Your relatively brief appearance at last year’s Academy Awards got a huge response. How far did that go toward your decision about this year?
A: That was a big part of it. That moment took my breath away, and I’m somebody who’s not usually at a loss for words. It was very warm and loving, and it got me a little itchy. This will be my ninth time, second only to Bob Hope in the number of times someone has hosted the Oscars, and being welcomed back in that way made me think about doing it again.
Q: Do you reflect much about often being mentioned with Bob Hope and Johnny Carson as the best Oscar hosts?
A: In those quiet moments, you say to yourself, “Wow. Look at these guys I’m with.” I grew up watching them, especially Bob; when I first became aware of the Academy Awards, it was his show, and I always thought he was so great. Johnny was great, too, and when you see your name with theirs, it’s incredibly satisfying and humbling.
The best moment I’ve ever had with the Oscars actually happened the morning after one of the shows, when Johnny called me. He couldn’t have been more kind and congratulatory. He just said so many beautiful things to me, I hung up and said to myself, “I don’t ever have to do this again.”
Q: Since you are doing it again, what are your hopes for the unexpected to happen, as with the night your “City Slickers” co-star Jack Palance won best supporting actor and started doing push-ups onstage?
A: You hope something like that happens … and also that you’re out there for it. Last year, they had me backstage in a freezing little storage room so no one knew I’d be coming out, and I was watching the show on a monitor. I saw Kirk Douglas come out and play around, then Melissa Leo dropped the F-bomb. Those are the moments when you go, “I want to be there!” w

‘FAMILY COOK OFF’ SIZZLES IN LEG-IN-BOOT SQUARE

The knives are out, the skillets are sizzling, and the kitchen is heating up as intergenerational families vie to join the ranks of Canada’s best home cooks. Which family has the cooking savvy, creativity and teamwork to win Canada’s ultimate food fight? The fun, twelve-episode, half-hour series ‘Family Cook Off’ (shot in False Creek South’s Leg-In-Boot Square and produced by our very own Force Four Entertainment Inc.) premieres at 9pm on Thursday, March 1 on Food Net, with two episodes airing back-to-back each week.
  Each team is represented by four of the family’s most enthusiastic and skilled cooks, any combination of siblings, parents, cousins, grandparents, young kids or in-laws. All participants – from the oldest competitor at age 67 to exuberant nine-year-old twins – are eager to whip up their favourite dishes, and come together as a family in hopes of winning the coveted Golden Frying Pan and $1,000 worth of groceries.
  Hosted by Entertainment Tonight Canada’s Kim D’Eon, each episode of Family Cook Off features two Canadian families going head-to-head in an over-the-top, outdoor home cooking extravaganza. Their challenge is to prepare their favourite family fare in two rounds: Main Entreés and Desserts. The teams are given a mandatory ingredient they must incorporate into their recipes to create tasty dishes and impress the judges. With only 20 minutes per round to prep, cook and plate a complete dish and accompaniments, they must be organized and work fast to avoid chaos.
  Celebrity chefs and cookbook authors Anthony Sedlak (The Main) and Trish Magwood (Party Dish) bring years of culinary experience to their roles as judges. They evaluate each family’s creations, awarding points for taste, presentation and style.  A total of 24 families demonstrate their talents in Family Cook Off, from the lively Boyes family who already has their own annual family cook-off, to the enormous Silver family whose family meals often comprise of up to 200 people.

PLANES ON DISCOVERY

When you’ve got a monster international hit like the Canadian-grown documentary series “Mighty Ships,” you don’t argue with that success.
You look for ways to replicate it. That’s one of the reasons Discovery Canada is taking to the
skies with a six-episode thrill ride called “Mighty Planes,” premiering Sunday, Feb. 26. Once again, the same team that delivered smooth sailing with “Ships” has unsnarled miles of bureaucratic and corporate red tape to secure unprecedented access to some of today’s most amazing aircraft, starting with backto-back episodes devoted to a flying hospital and the world’s largest seaplane, which now is devoted to fighting fires. And access is indeed the key to it all, explains executive producer
Kathryn Oughtred.
“I knew, having launched the ‘Ships’ show, that this (new series) was going to be a tricky one,
because aviation generally is just a lot harder to tackle technically,” she explains. “Storywise, being on a plane as opposed to a large ship
that could present many storylines was something else we had to think about. But just getting the access to large companies like Lufthansa and the Airbus and the U.S. military, big huge entities with which we had to establish trust quickly so we could move along and hopefully get in and get the show we were hoping to get, was a big challenge.”
One obvious hurdle was that security in commercial airports has become exponentially tougher in the years since 9/11, much more
so than issues the team faced with ports while filming “Mighty Ships.” “It was like nailing jelly to a wall for the first few months, but our associate producers/researchers are fantastic and, I think, can talk themselves into just about anything now, so we were able to get access to
some of the most amazing planes doing most amazing jobs. Some of them, like Orbis, were cautious as anyone would be at the start, but
they realized that what was good for us was also good for them in terms of showcasing the good works they do in the world.”
Orbis, the world’s only flying “eye hospital,” is in the spotlight for the series opener, which follows the plane’s team of pilots, technicians
and doctors as they prepare to fly from Dubai to Mongolia to provide urgent ocular medical care to Third World patients. Bearing state-ofthe-
art medical equipment and internationally respected staff, Orbis travels to a designated airfield, where patients struggling with near blindness receive sight-restoring surgeries as local physicians watch via an onboard screening system that trains them in follow-up procedures so they can treat the patients after Orbis departs. The program gets unexpected drama for the episode because, due to unexpected circumstances, the aircraft had been sitting on a tarmac in Dubai for 90 days before departing
for Mongolia, and the desert weather conditions had taken their toll on the engine, resulting in some white-knuckle technical issues during
the flight. “It was completely a fluke, the
engine trouble,” Oughtred says. “Everything that happened really happened. We don’t manufacture anything just for the sake of drama. That isn’t normal for them, though. Normally, they can get a mission off without a lot of issues .” w

SUZUKI SEES TRAGEDY & HOPE

 A year ago, the Tohoku region of Japan was shaken by three catastrophic events: two natural and one man-made. More than 13,000 people died in the first two short disasters. There was the magnitude 9 offshore earthquake, which shook more than half the country. Then there were the resulting tsunamis, which rolled onto the eastern shore of Honshu, rising as high as 40 meters. Near Sendai, the hardest-hit city, they traveled inland as far as 10 kilometers.
As for the third disaster, the meltdown of the Fukushima reactors, as David Suzuki found out, the extent is still mostly unknown.
In “Journey to the Disaster Zone: Japan 3-11,” airing Thursday, Feb. 23, on CBC Television’s “The Nature of Things,” Suzuki drops the protective camouflage of series host and takes on the role of reporter. He returns to the land of his forebears to see whether things are beginning to return to normal and to find out exactly what normal is these days in the badly shaken country.
“It’s astonishing,” Suzuki says. “Every area we went to that was demolished by the waves was still absolutely flat.
“There wasn’t any sign in any of the villages we went to, of rebuilding.”
Everywhere, he says, there are giant piles of debris being sorted and carried off or burned — and dozens and dozens of temporary shelters. The shelters and the destruction may conjure up visions of Hurricane Katrina taken to a higher level, but that’s where the resemblance ends, Suzuki says.
Japan is not a society in which people take things into their own hands, but neither is it one that easily falls into disorder.
“This is the thing that is going to be the thrust of the film,” Suzuki says. “The great strength of that society is this tremendous sense of social cohesion that results from conformity and fitting in.”
Suzuki and his crew went to Japan in December and spent 2 1/2 weeks touring the country — a week looking at ground zero and the rest of the time exploring the Japanese response to the three disasters.
“We were looking at both the impact of the earthquake and tsunami around Sendai,” Suzuki says. “But we also went to areas like Tokyo, where we interviewed several scientists. And we went to areas on the other coast, where there are people working on things like tidal power and so on.”
It’s not surprising that the disaster that preoccupies people the most is the nuclear meltdown — because it’s still going on, and no one really knows its impact yet.
“What was interesting is that we visited a number of people who are under the radar,” Suzuki says. “They’re looking at other ways of living.”
One of the things he says he found is a growing interest in decentralizing the power grid so that it isn’t so dependent on big industry. Another is an almost limitless source of power literally lying at the feet of the Japanese people, but which they have barely begun to exploit.
“We visited a community in which they showed us that barely 150 meters down, they tap into steam, or superheated water, that just comes gushing out,” Suzuki says. “The community is completely heated by this, and they use it to run turbines — which is what nuclear power is all about. You generate electricity by producing steam.”
As Suzuki says, it seems strange that the Japanese would opt for nuclear power when they’re sitting on one of the most seismically active areas in the world, the Pacific Ring of Fire. On the one hand, the instability of the area makes nuclear power a disaster waiting to happen. On the other, there is enormous free power lying just a few hundred feet below the surface of the Earth, in the form of hot springs.
“This is a country that is so seismically active, for whom hot springs — onsen — are almost sacred,”
Suzuki says. “They’ve got lots of hot water there. Why would they opt for such complex, dangerous technology?”
If anything good comes out of the earthquake, Suzuki says, it may be another of the sudden social transformations for which the Japanese are so famous.
The country went from feudal isolation to world power in a little more than a generation. And it emerged overnight from postwar devastation to become one of the most technologically and economically advanced countries in the world.
Similarly, Suzuki says, Japan could come out of this disaster as a world leader in solar, wind and geothermal technology. The Japanese already export some of the world’s most advanced geothermal technology; they just haven’t put it to work at home yet. Suzuki says, “For me, this film is about a crisis that is a tragedy but also an opportunity.” w

DEGRASSI BACK WITH CLASS OF 2012

Don’t try to reconcile it with the calendar on your own wall, but a new school year is starting as “Degrassi” continues its 11th season starting with a special one-hour episode Friday, Feb. 24, on Much-Music. As at any high school, that means some fresh faces in the hallways and a realignment of the pecking order, as new students in grade nine enter, and last year’s juniors move up. “Thematically, overall we look at ‘season 11-B’ as being one of new beginnings,” says executive producer Linda Schuyler, the former high-school teacher who co-created “Degrassi” more than three decades ago when she thought there wasn’t enough programming that really connected with adolescents.
“We just graduated a whole class, so now Eli and Drew and Bianca [Munro Chambers, Luke Bilyk, Alicia Josipovic] are all the top dogs, and they have to be thinking about where they are going to be going next to university. We also introduce a whole new class at the ninth-grade level.”
To their credit, the “Degrassi” writers and producers strive to let the characters drive the stories instead of clubbing viewers over the head with an “issue of the week” agenda.
One dramatic case in point involves actress Jordan Todosey, who joined the series last season in a groundbreaking role as Adam Torres, who is Dave Turner’s (Jahmil French) co-host on the school radio show — and a female-to-male transgender teen.
An episode focusing on Adam, titled “My Body Is a Cage,” won “Degrassi” its first Peabody Award, the oldest electronic-media award in the world, which is presented to recognize excellence, distinguished achievement and meritorious public service. Todosey admits she was a little nervous when she took on a role that she knew could be a flashpoint for controversy, although the feedback she has received personally has been overwhelmingly positive, she adds.
“Just joining such a well-known TV series was intimidating, and every character on the show speaks to somebody out there,” the actress says. “I wanted to portray the character to the best of my abilities, and Adam is such an awesome guy that I just wanted to do him justice.” w

BILL CLINTON NOT ALL THUMBS-UP

Even if you have a strong recollection of the Clinton years, seeing his life and presidency laid out in an unblinking, four-hour documentary puts him into perspective.
PBS’ “Clinton: American Experience,” which airs in two parts Monday and Tuesday, Feb. 20 and 21 (check local listings), does an excellent job of chronicling the first president to be impeached since Andrew Johnson in 1868. It opens on Dec. 11, 1998, with a somber Clinton in the Rose Garden.
“I am profoundly sorry for all I have done, in my words and deeds,” he says. “Quite simply, I gave into my shame.” If there is any fault with this documentary it is how much time — roughly a quarter — is devoted to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “There’s a lot of time devoted, but it’s more how much time the press was devoting to it,” says longtime Clinton friend Harry Thomason, a TV and film producer who made “The Man From Hope,” which was shown at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.
Neither the former White House intern nor anyone close to her, or for that matter the Clintons themselves, are interviewed, which is in keeping with the documentary series’ format. However, some 70 others are, including those who worked with Clinton. Among those is Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor. Reflecting on whether the economy could have continued to boom as it did then, Reich, now a professor of public policy at University of California-Berkeley, says, “Alan Greenspan cooperated by lowering interest rates, and that combined with a solid recovery, which enabled the economy to do exceptionally well, with 22 million, net, new jobs created over those eight years.”
Yet there are regrets, Reich says. “We didn’t manage to alter the structure of the economy. By that I mean we didn’t invest adequately in schools, job retraining, infrastructure and basic (research and development) and opportunities for poor kids. So by the time the next downturn occurred, the nation was back where it was in the previous recession, and we did nothing to lift the real wages.”
He talks about the politics of trying to pass true reform and how a Republican Congress stymied Clinton. The film also focuses on Clinton’s personal life and examines his marriage. Hillary Clinton, now the secretary of state, knew about her husband’s infidelities early on, and this makes clear that whatever marital strife they endured since their October 1975 wedding, there is a deep love between them. She recognized immediately how advantageous it could be for her husband to go on TV after his endless speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. It was Thomason, at the urging of wife Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who called Johnny Carson’s producer, Fred de Cordova, and asked him to let Clinton go on the “The Tonight Show.” Carson had a policy of not inviting politicians as guests. Thomason did not want to face his wife with the rejection so he called back de Cordova and suggested Clinton go on as a musician. Clinton played the sax, then became the first politician on a late-night show.
The timing for a full look at Clinton was right, says series producer Mark Samels. “Typically in the past, the rule of thumb was a generation needed to pass before you could really enter into the realm of history,” he says. “And we’re sort of in an accelerated period now.” One of the take-aways from this is that Clinton “is often depicted almost solely cynically,” says filmmaker Barak Goodman. “I would say both Clintons are fundamentally driven by idealism.” w

THE SIMPSONS 500TH EPISODE

The characters, which began as droopier versions in 20-second cartoons on “The Tracey Ullman Show,” have evolved, as creator Matt Groening and star Dan Castellaneta discuss in a long and very rare interview. First, though, consider some numbers. Now in its 23rd season, the show has won 27 Emmy Awards, is seen in more than 100 countries and has 37 million likes on its Facebook page.
Guest stars have included Buzz Aldrin, Anne Bancroft, Tony Blair, Rodney Dangerfield, Bob Denver, Stephen Hawking, Michael Jackson, Jack Lemmon, Jack LaLanne, Paul Newman, the Ramones, J.K. Rowling, Elizabeth Taylor and John Updike. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most guest stars.
Before they worked together, Groening loved Castellaneta’s improv work, and Castellaneta read Groening’s “Life in Hell” comics; the two still get a kick out of each other.
Question: Did you have any notion “The Simpsons” would have such a life or that it would provide your livelihoods?
Groening: I thought the show would be a hit. It was always defined even when they were 20- second cartoons on “The Tracey Ullman Show.” It was designed to be a TV series. However, I didn’t think it would be that successful. Maybe we would get it on the air. I didn’t think we would have it on the air 25 years later. I have been working with Dan since ’87, and I still can’t believe those voices come out of his mouth.I am always reminded of when Dan and I were in New Orleans and walking around the French Quarter, I would throw out ideas to Dan, and one was an idea (that has not been done) when the Simpsons get a pet baboon, and it’s very aggressive, and the Simpsons have to live on the first floor of the house.
Castellaneta: (In Homer’s voice) Stay there, Coco! Don’t play with that! That is the remote. That’s mine. I am beginning to think this is not a good idea.
Q: What are your favorite lines?Groening: My favorite line you ever said on the show was in the ill-fated monorail episode. The control panel opens up, and a mother possum is hanging by [her] tail, and Homer says, “I call the big one Bitey.” He doesn’t understand it is a possum. And he is perfectly happy that it bit him.
Q: Who have been some of your favorite guest stars?Castellaneta: Harvey Fierstein is really great. He played Homer’s assistant, secretary. It was a really interesting character, who basically would fall on a bomb for Homer. I thought it was pretty cool to meet a lot of these rock and roll stars that we had guest on the show, and going to London and meeting the Who.
Groening: The high point of my life was watching Dan crack up Mick Jagger.
Castellaneta: Mick Jagger said, “Homer, we want you to come to the concert.” But Homer thought he would play in the band. And Mick Jagger said, “We just need you to check the mic.” Homer said, (in Homer’s voice) “Can’t you do it?” Groening: No one ever said that to Mick Jagger. Q: Who would you still like to have on the show? Groening: Off the top of my head, it would be cool if Bill Cosby came on the show. … I would love to get Tony Bennett back. I think we could write an anthem for Springfield. Castellaneta: He was our first big name.
Q: Any other stories from guest stars? Groening: When Paul and Linda McCartney guested on the show, we made Lisa a vegetarian, and Paul said he would do it as long as Lisa
remained a vegetarian, not a vegetarian of the week, and it has given us a great deal of material.
Q: Are either of you ever surprised by what you can get on TV? Castellaneta: [Anchorman] Kent Brockman was on [the air]. The town split in two, and they drained the river and found gold at the bottom, so we can buy water so everyone can be taking golden showers. And Kent Brockman was snickering, and I thought, “That is never going to make it on.” And some of the most innocuous — you can’t show Homer’s butt crack more than twice. That’s because we don’t want anyone to get too turned on.
Q: When you’re clicking through stations, will you stop and watch? Castellaneta: I will watch. Groening: When you are working on these episodes, you are trying to make them as good as possible and spend long hours trying to make it look tossed off. To then be able to look at it years later, generally I find I like them more than I did at the time. Q: Why is the show a legend? Castellaneta: Certainly the length of the show, how long it has run. The show carved out new territory. I feel it has influenced a lot of movies and other television shows. You even think some Simpsons were blown up into movies. I have seen some plots of movies, and I have said, “Wait a minute, we did that five years ago.” But I am not saying “The Hangover” was taken completely from “The Simpsons.” Groening: It is fun to know that you entertain people over a long number of years, and some kids have grown up, their world has always been a world in which “The Simpsons” are always on TV. And that we have done this comedy that is basically a checklist of all of the different ways there are of doing jokes, parodies and homages to older movies and silent movies and cartoons and many autobiographical elements of whoever wrote the scene. w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-GRAMMYS

Ex-Degrassi Drake leads Canada’s 2012 Grammy Pack

 The Grammy Awards celebrate not only a given year’s recordings but the history of music in general.

So, there will be tight races in the many categories for contemporary music — such as the best rap/sung collaboration category where hip-hop phenom Drake is Canada’s best hope for a 2012 Grammy when Global and CBS air the 54th Annual Grammy Awards from Los Angeles’ Staples Center on Sunday, Feb. 12.

Rihanna, Coldplay and Foo Fighters join Sir Paul McCartney as 2012 performers.

Drake — a six-time nominee in the past — is one of two Canadians with a trio of nominations, the other being DJ-producer Deadmau5. Drake will be up against some stiff competition — including himself — in the three categories where he is nominated. The nominations include Best Rap Performance (“Moment 4 Life” with Nicki Minaj) and Best Rap/Sung Collaboration (DJ Khaled’s “I’m On One” and “What’s My Name” with Rihanna).

The 25-year-old Drake, whose full name is Aubrey Drake Graham, got his show-biz start playing Jimmy Brooks on the TV series “Degrassi: The Next Generation.” Success in the music world seems not to have cooled his acting ambitions. Interviewed recently while appearing at the Sundance Film Festival he told an interviewer that he wants to play Barrack Obama in a movie.

“I hope somebody makes a movie about Obama’s life soon because I could play him,” he said. “That’s the goal. I watch all the addresses. Anytime I see him on TV, I don’t change the channel, I definitely pay attention and listen to the inflections of his voice. If you ask anyone who knows me, I’m pretty good at impressions.”

Drake says that often he is offered roles as a rapper or basketball player, but that he is looking for something else that goes beyond what people would expect him to play.

Montreal’s DJ A-Trak also has received a nomination, along with his partner Armand Van Helden (together they are Duck Sauce), for Best Dance Recording. Their international breakout hit “Barbra Streisand” charted at No. 1 in over 12 countries and racked up 65-million YouTube views with arguably the biggest viral video of all time; a quirky, star-studded homage to New York’s downtown scene.

Toronto singer Melanie Fiona received two nominations: Best Traditional R&B Performance and Best R&B Song for her “Fool For You” collaboration with Cee Lo Green. Other Canadian nominees include Sum 41 for a hard rock/metal performance and Vincent Morisset for Arcade Fire’s Scenes From The Suburbs recording package.

As a counterpoint to the Grammys’ competitive excitement, several Lifetime Achievement Award recipients are named each year by the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences. Country-pop crossover star Glen Campbell will be one of them.

“It tickles me,” Campbell says of his latest Grammy honor, after winning two for “Gentle on My Mind” and another two for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” all in 1967.

“They’ve really been nice to me throughout my career. I just think you do your job, and you try to do it the best you can and try to think up some new things. That’s really what I’ve done.”

Now on a farewell concert tour as he deals with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Campbell is part of an impressive Lifetime Achievement class that also includes fellow country star George Jones as well as Diana Ross, the Allman Brothers Band, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Gil Scott-Heron and the Memphis Horns.

“I guess when you get old enough, they lay all those accolades on you,” muses Campbell, who also will team musically with nominees Blake Shelton and the Band Perry on the Grammy stage.

With such hits as “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” in his catalog, Campbell also has made marks in television (“The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour”) and movies (the original “True Grit” with John Wayne). He deems country music’s current state “great. I don’t know if I’d call it ‘country rock’ or ‘crock’ or what, but if you put a song out there, people know whether it’s good or not. That’s the way I always did it.”

Among this year’s Grammy nominees, Foo Fighters are back with six bids, with “Wasting Light” in contention for album of the year (their second time in that category) and best rock album (their sixth time).

“It’s been a really good year,” frontman Dave Grohl reflects. “I think we finally hit our stride in that confident, 17-year-old-band way. I don’t know what it is, but the shows got longer, and the audiences got bigger.” Grohl maintains that “you never really expect that kind of recognition” when it comes to the Grammys. “It feels good to be appreciated for what you do, but the group lives in such a simple little world. It’s right in the middle of the San Fernando Valley in an industrial section where nobody would expect us to be. Within that studio, we do everything, so we exist within this little bubble and don’t pay too much attention to what goes on outside it.”

Which isn’t to say Foo Fighters haven’t appreciated every nomination they’ve gotten. They’ll perform at this year’s Grammy Awards, and Grohl reasons the organizers “see us as guys who play instruments in a rock band — and these days, that is getting harder and harder to find. I never got into this for a career. I was a high-school dropout stoner who worked at a furniture warehouse and loved playing music on the weekends.”

The frontrunner from this year’s nominees is Drake mentor and friend Kanye West who leads the pack with an impressive seven nominations including Song of the Year and Best Rap Album.

The event has a host for the first time in seven years: rapper and “NCIS: Los Angeles” star LL Cool J. w

WHATS-ON-IN-VANCOUVER-LEACOCK

It’s always sunny in LEACOCK’S Mariposa

 The first thing CBC Drama ever produced for TV was an adaptation of Stephen Leacock’s classic short-story collection “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.”

That was in 1952, and though its stars included John Drainie and Timothy Findley, it was by all accounts a stagy, awkward affair that nevertheless ran two seasons. Such is Leacock’s enduring appeal.

This year is the 100th anniversary of the first publication of the book. And now, 60 years after the series ran and on the 75th anniversary of the corporation’s birth as a radio network, CBC is returning to the well — and taking a who’s who of Canadian talent with it.

The result, says the creator of this version of the classic, is that we’ll see a “very modern ‘Sunshine Sketches’ ” Sunday, Feb. 12, on CBC Television.

Considering that the writer of this TV movie is Malcolm MacRury — whose credits include such dark fictions as “ZOS,” “Cra$h& Burn,” and episodes of “Deadwood” — that could be taken as a given.

“It is a small town, as Deadwood was,” he says by way of placing “Sunshine Sketches” in the continuum. “I guess this is a lighter view of it.”

MacRury says he has been interested in doing something like this since he dropped out of grad school and started to write for humor — and came to the conclusion that all Canadian humor begins with Leacock.

To produce the movie, MacRury “lured” out of retirement Seaton McLean and Michael MacMillan, founders of the late Atlantis Films. Together or apart, they have been responsible for such TV and film productions as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” “Owning Mahowny,” “Traders,” “Lost in the Barrens” and the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s “The Diviners.”

Though the material is a lot lighter and brighter than a lot of what MacRury does, he insists it’s in the continuum with his other work.

“We didn’t want to do ‘Anne of Green Gables,’” he says. “We wanted to do ‘Anne of Green Gables’ on acid.

The cast includes Gordon Pinsent, Jill Hennessy, Rick Roberts, Patrick McKenna, Donal Logue, Michael Therriault, Peter Keleghan, Colin Mochrie, Eric Peterson, Debra McGrath, Leah Pinsent, Sean Cullen, Ron James and Keshia Chante.

At 81, Pinsent is probably the only member of the cast old enough to remember the 1952-53 production.

“I don’t remember seeing it, though I certainly could have,” he says. “I certainly remember all those players.

“We had great writers from radio, and always great things, like Leacock, to draw from.”

MacRury has blended elements of Leacock’s biography into the “Sunshine Sketches,” which were set in Mariposa, Ont. (a fictionalization of Orillia, close to where Leacock lived as a boy).

The author grew up poor in 19th-century small-town Ontario, with a drunken absentee father and a proud, dignified mother (played wonderfully by Hennessy).

So the young Leacock and his mother are at the centre of a story that combines elements of several stories from “Sunshine Sketches” — mainly the struggle between temperance forces and imbibers over the local saloon and the sinking of the local cruise ship in six feet of water.

“We didn’t want to be totally faithful to (the short stories),” MacRury says. “What we wanted to do was bring it alive again — because comedy is an ever-changing target, and there are ever-changing tastes.

“The last thing we wanted to do was make a movie about the guy who created Canadian comedy and make it boring and unfunny.” w

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 PBS doc SHOWS HOW SLAVERY thrived INTO 20TH CENTURY

 The hideous chapter in American history had passed, and the slaves were freed — or so everyone thinks.

PBS’ gripping documentary “Slavery by Another Name,” airing Monday, Feb. 13 (check local listings), chronicles how slavery continued in the South well into the 20th century while the rest of the country ignored it. Laurence Fishburne narrates.

“What I really want people to take away is you can’t partition parts of our history,” says Dr. Sharon Malone, who is featured in the film. “There is not Southern history; it is American history.”

Malone, an obstetrician, is a sixth-generation Alabaman married to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Her older sister, Vivian Malone, helped integrate the University of Alabama in 1963, protected by the Justice Department, which Sharon’s husband now runs. Malone’s uncle, Henry Malone, was arrested and served a year and a day in Alabama’s Monroe County under the peonage system. Precisely what, if anything, he had done is not known. The peonage system was how slavery continued.

Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery by Another Name,” upon which the 90-minute film is based, details the peonage system. Though most people believe the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, blacks were re-enslaved to work, without pay, in coal mines, cotton fields and brickyards. They were shackled, beaten, bought and sold.

They were slaves.

And this was all done under the thinnest veil of legality. Though the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, there was a loophole: except in the case of punishment for a crime.

And crimes for blacks included talking loudly in the presence of a white woman, leaving one job for another, selling cotton after dark and walking along railroad tracks. Even the film’s director and producer, Sam Pollard, whose first assignment as a documentarian was “Eyes on the Prize II,” was not steeped in this period.

“Most of us — black and white — think of Reconstruction as a period of black empowerment,” Pollard says. “The whites were saying, ‘You are not really free. How can we control them? How can we get cheap labor to work in the mines?’ It becomes systematic oppression.”

The documentary does a magnificent job of showing the nameless men and women forced to work in mines, drink foul water and endure face lashings and abuse. The film uses photos, actors and interviews with descendants to tell the story.

It also features a moving interview with Susan TuggleBurnore, whose great-grandfather John S. Williams owned a plantation worked slave labor that was sanctioned under the peonage system.

Even after federal agents inspected his plantation and saw the shackles in the slave quarters, they gave Williams a pass because he had paid for the men’s bonds and gotten them out of jail, and they now were supposedly working off their debt. This was not out of the ordinary in that place and time. But Williams, fearing his world would change, decided to destroy the evidence and murder the 11 men working for him. In so doing, in 1921 he became the only white man convicted of killing a black man in Georgia since 1877. He died in prison in 1966.

“I always knew my grandfather died in prison,” Burnore says at a Pasadena, Calif., press conference. “My family told a story that was, forgive the pun, whitewashed — that he had, along with a lot of other men in Jasper County, Georgia, killed some escaping prisoners.

These were supposedly hardened convicts who had done terrible things and were being worked on the plantation.”

What was terrible was how the men lived and died. Some were thrown alive, tied to farm machinery, off a bridge.

The film is filled with such stories. Though this is not an easy topic to read about or watch, it is an important one. The documentary was just shown at Sundance.

“Vestiges remain, the industrial prison complex,” Pollard says. “Even when you go to the South today, you go down to Alabama and Mississippi,” it’s apparent. And it’s not just buildings where attitudes and the former law of the land linger.

Pollard recalls visiting an aunt in Mississippi in the summer of 1975, who still went the back way into stores.

“She was so used to it,” he says. “No black person would come through the middle of the street. It is not to say that life has not changed in the South, but there are still remnants.”

Though PBS documentaries about history don’t generate the sort of attention that antics on a reality show does, Pollard considers how to entice people to watch.

“You’ve got to say to people you will see the drama of how American history unfolds,” Pollard says. “You have got to know from whence you came to know where you are going,” Malone says in a separate interview. “It makes the progress of the African-Americans all the more remarkable.” w

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