Hollywood
E-voting for Oscars simplified
MUMBAI: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is making significant changes to simplify its electronic voting system, which got almost as much flack last awards season as the Obamacare website is currently receiving. The changes involve reducing the number of passwords required, making the VIN number assigned to each member invisible to users and making it easier to change passwords.
The changes, developed over the past eight months since e-voting was used by the Academy for the first time to determine winners of the 85th Oscars, come in response to gripes from members who found the online voting website, offered as an alternative to a traditional paper ballot, difficult to navigate.
The Academy also is encouraging its members to log on to their member accounts on Monday to pay their annual dues and to register how they wish to vote this year, either electronically or by paper ballot. The email outlined the improvements that have been made to the online voting process.
The biggest change to e-voting this year is that members will now be able to use a single user name and password for both sites. Also, the Academy is making it easier to change passwords.
In spite of last year’s e-voting challenges, the Academy eventually reported, at an unprecedented all-members meeting on 4 May that there had been record voting-participation of 90 per cent in large part because of e-voting.
Hollywood
Utopai Studios partners Huace to deploy PAI for long form content
Deal includes revenue sharing as Huace adopts AI engine across global ops
MUMBAI: Lights, camera… algorithm, the script just got a silicon co-writer. In a move that signals how storytelling itself is being re-engineered, U.S.-based Utopai Studios has partnered China’s Huace Film & TV Co. Ltd. to bring artificial general intelligence into the heart of long-form content creation.
At the centre of the deal is PAI, Utopai’s cinematic storytelling system, which Huace will deploy as a core engine across its production pipeline from development and creative iteration to global localisation. The partnership includes a large-scale annual usage commitment from Huace, alongside a usage-based revenue-sharing model, underscoring both ambition and commercial confidence on both sides.
For Huace, one of China’s largest film and television companies, the bet is not on automation alone but on scale with control. With distribution spanning over 200 countries and a presence across more than 20 international platforms, including Netflix and YouTube, the company brings a vast content ecosystem where even marginal efficiency gains can translate into significant output shifts. Its extensive TV IP library further positions it as fertile ground for AI-assisted storytelling workflows.
The choice of PAI follows what Huace described as a rigorous evaluation of existing AI tools, many of which remain limited to fragmented use cases such as video generation or editing. What tipped the scales, according to the company, was PAI’s ability to handle long-form narrative complexity maintaining continuity, structure, and creative coherence across entire story arcs rather than isolated clips.
Utopai, for its part, is using the partnership to anchor its international expansion strategy, pitching PAI as an enterprise-ready system built for customisation, privacy, and regulatory adaptability across markets. That positioning becomes particularly relevant as global media companies increasingly scrutinise how AI integrates into proprietary workflows.
The timing is notable. Earlier this month, Utopai upgraded PAI to support three-minute 4K video generation and advanced multi-shot sequencing features designed to tackle one of AI storytelling’s biggest hurdles: consistency across scenes.
What emerges is not just another tech collaboration, but a glimpse into how the grammar of filmmaking could evolve. Because if stories were once crafted frame by frame, the next chapter might just be coded scene by scene.
