Ugh, Chadwick Boseman NFT included in Oscars "Everyone Wins" swag bag
Film Features Chadwick Boseman
If there’s one thing the Oscars are known for, it’s memorials. In addition to the speedy and controversial-as-always In Memoriam segment this year, the Oscar celebration got a little crazy with their tribute to nominee Chadwick Boseman. No, they didn’t do that tired cliché of the posthumous Oscar. Could you imagine? How insensitive. How bizarre. How utterly macabre and disrespectful. Don’t worry; they simply turned a golden illustration of the beloved Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Black Panther star into an NFT to be auctioned off for a million dollars.
It’s not as bad as it sounds, and the letters NFT usually sound pretty bad at this point. First, the Academy did not commission the artwork by Andrew Oshea. The piece was part of “Everyone Wins” swag bag by Distinctive Assets, an LA-based entertainment marketing company, which was auctioned off with proceeds going to the Colon Cancer Foundation.
“The way to immortalize an artist is to honor them with art,” tweeted Oshea. “I was tasked to create a tribute NFT for Chadwick Boseman for the Oscars! Bringing this piece to life has been one of my most challenging & rewarding experiences as an artist.”
According to Oshea, this digital golden sculpture of Boseman’s head had a “buy now” price of $1.2 million with 50 percent of the proceeds are going to charity. That only leaves 50 percent to make everyone feel a little uncomfortable about the whole thing. The auction began earlier tonight and will run through Tuesday on rarible.com.
Boseman, who died last August after a four-year colon cancer battle, was a favorite to win the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In a surprising, anticlimactic upset, Boseman lost to The Father himself, Anthony Hopkins. At least Boseman’s NFT will keep the actor’s memory alive as it collects digital dust on the hard drive of some rich guy’s MacBook.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science had commissioned the NFT. This was incorrect. We’ve amended the article. We regret the error.
54 Comments
Yeeeeeeey lets melt the environment with a tacky memorial to a popular actor. I’m so thrilled….
HE’D LOVE IT!
wow
Whatever it takes to make Hollywood feel better about itself, I guess.
It used to just take a couple of metric tonnes of cocaine.
Well you know with tolerances and everything sometimes you have introduce new pathways for that sensation.
As has been pointed out on twitter, the NFT is especially embarrassing as its mainly just using a 3D head model of Boseman that someone else created and made freely available online, the “artist” did pretty minimal work, but at least its all 50% for charity.
It’s also super-bandwagony in a way that feels tacky, even if I put aside my own innate sense that NFTs are a scam. It’s like if the Grammys had memorialized Kurt Cobain by auctioning off a $1.2 million commemorative pog. Maybe just make an actual statue until we’re sure we’re not going to be laughing at the idiots who still own these in six months?
“Grunge is back…in Pog form!”
$1.2 million commemorative pog
This would be a great username for someone.
super-bandwagony in a way that feels tackyDoesn’t that describe pretty much every “charitable” endeavor that comes out of the entertainment industry? Those always have a very big “LOOK AT ME!” aspect to them.
At least those we look at. There’s also acts of generosity that are way more discreet, those we only indirectly learn about, long after the deed, and, certainly, those we don’t learn about.Charity is a very complicated thing. All the more if you add the aspects of example giving and of public support. It’s often ambiguous, but also too easy to simply dismiss or snicker at.
Well, it’s not surprising that when people whose entire job is “look at me” do something, it has a “look at me” element to it.As much as I agree that there’s a ton of egotism and pretension in the entertainment industry, I don’t think it’s justifiable to both be happy to consume their product and at the same time complain when they want more attention. You can’t really have one without the other.
I don’t get it. I thought the whole concept of NFTs was that you (nebulously) own something, so what happens when you give away the same NFT to hundreds of people?Is it like owning stock in an NFT?
You actually own a link to a image. So in this case hundreds of people own their own individual link to the same image. Also you only own the link, not the image and, like anything on the internet, the link can end up going to nothing if the host server goes down or goes away.
Holy hell, people are insane.
it depends, it’s like a security in the way a painting is like a security, sort of. you could get the copyright to the image as well or only one link to the image could be in circulation and you could be a sole owner…or the issuer could vow or contract only to have a certain number in circulation…or it could be like a lithograph set where you have number 154 of 300…or it could be infinite. If like a limited edition litho, more lithos can be made (though in that case they would be numbered as part of a different set, like 2nd run 221/500). The NFT could be worth what the market will pay, or if it has an assigned value it could eventually be regulated as currency (if, for example, all pictures of Benjamin Franklin are $100). There is still value to scarcity or perceived scarcity, but at this point I think a lot of it is going to “got there first” with a low “edition” number. Also it isn’t quite like a litho, because the value of a litho is not 100% tied to the value of the underlying artwork…here the NFT IS the underlying artwork, so if as with paintings the artist croaks and their work is worth more, your NFT would rise with the tide.
UGH, WTF NFT? IMHO, LOL IIRC!
STICKS NIX HICK PIX
I’ve been seeing the (sorta deserved) outrage of a +$200K swag bag.I wouldn’t lose any sleep if Oscars had to admit their price tag is pure BS.
What a serious bunch of assholes.Because there was no way to win (between “of course they would give him the oscar, as he’s dead, there was no best actor competition this year” and “what the hell, they didn’t even give him the oscar”), I thought there was no way to lose. But they found one. A fucking NFT. A virtual piece of art, made artificially un-copyable (or pretend-uncopyable, for money money), at the expanse of our weak, half-arsed efforts to salvage our planetery habitat. The second most moronic, toxic, disgusting invention for shitheads, after bitcoins.NFT and digital currencies must simply go. Be erased at a stroke. First thing. The hell -the absolute hell- with their users and proponents. And as for using these shits to “pay homage” to a popular artist… Ah, what can I say. This planet’s population deserves what is happening to this planet.
Seems fitting. Whenever I saw a Chadwick Boseman performance, I’d say to myself, “That man truly embodies what it means to be non-fungible.”
I just realized that joke could have been far worse.
And the Oscar for Least Fungible Actor goes to…
“Rob Schneider!”“Wait, what … no, that says least fuckable actor.”
Ripped from a public domain art-site, turned into a link via burning a fuckload of coal in China to be sold to the highest bidder.
Just like Chadwick would have wanted to be remembered, I’m sure.
seems like a very stupid thing to be enraged about
What’s an NFT? Is this something that’s common knowledge such that a little parenthetical (“n____ f____ t____”) was just wholly unnecessary here?
Not necessarily, but there’s no way that writing it out will clarify it for anybody who doesn’t know what it is already. If NFT doesn’t mean anything to you, non-fungible token” sure as hell isn’t going to clear things up.
Non-Fungible TokenIn layman’s terms, it’s a .gif people, for some fucking reason, pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars fo
It’s a bitcoin-ish, power-expensive, digital code that ensures that you can sell digital artwork as “unique pieces”, so that they can be seen as precious, rare, and valid objects of financial speculation. A new way to create artificial monetary value out of thin air, at the cost of ridiculous levels of computer energy consumption and therefore pollution.In short, it’s the bitcoin logic and technology applied to digital, virtual art, to make it function (money-wise) like limited print “objects”.
please google things
I did, but you shouldn’t have to look up abbreviations from a journalistic website.
This is one of those cases where the parenthetical would not be at all illuminating (“Non-Fungible Token”, for what it’s worth). Which is not to say there couldn’t have been more explanation, but you’re probably talking a full paragraph to explain what it is, and another to explain why NFTs are bad as well as stupid.
Writing out “non-fungible token” wouldn’t make it much clearer if you don’t already know what it is.
No, those are English words that I understand.
They’re not English words that I understand, so you’ve got me beat there.
It’s the digital, fingerprinted, unique and non-reproducible equivalent of a piece of scrap paper with “IOU 1 brooklin brij” written on it in crayon.
Wait so you report they didn’t ask that artist to do it:
“First, the Academy did not commission the artwork by Andrew Oshea.”
But he says he was asked to do it?
“I was tasked to create a tribute NFT for Chadwick Boseman for the Oscars!”Which is it?
The Academy has zip to do with this shitty company that puts together these clickbait “swag bags” every year. It’s a marketing stunt for a shady PR firm and the Academy has sued them multiple times for their misleading insinuation that the stunt is associated with the Oscars.Every single year the media reports on them like it’s an official Oscars thing, though.The artist was asked by a shitty PR firm to contribute to their clickbait swag bag stunt that tries to pretend it is associated with the Oscars every year. It’s like Giuliani at that lawncare company trying to pretend he’s at the Four Seasons Hotel.
I’m guessing he was commissioned to do it by the folks that put together the gifts for the oscar attendees and not the academy itself
Read the very next sentence after “the Academy did not commission[…]”“The piece was part of “Everyone Wins” swag bag by Distinctive Assets, an LA-based entertainment marketing company, which was auctioned off with proceeds going to the Colon Cancer Foundation.”
It was commissioned by AdVenture Media and Taillard Capital who donated it to the swag bags. The Academy, itself, didn’t commission it, and I believe there were multiple besides the Chadwick Boseman one.
Hollywoo Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Let’s Find Out!
Sometimes I wonder how Donald honest-to-God Trump managed to win a U.S. election (and then nearly another). Then I read something like this, which captures our nation’s current Outrage Factory of a mindset in an accurate but disappointing way, and it all adds up. Yeesh.
THIS. RIGHT. HERE.
It’s amazing that we keep falling for Ponzi schemes. Can I just demand right now that I’m not paying for a bailout of anyone in the NFT bullshit?
There are no words to express how grossly exploitative this is. Especially since they bumped “Best Actor” to the end to build anticipation that Boseman may win…and then did not.
If they wanted to honor him…give him the win.
Man in addition to everything else, that is some real tacky art. The faux-3d fauna that pops up in front of him, the purple electricity lines that cover the head before it turns to gold; it feels like an OK student project (I say as a former shitty 3d animation student). I would be embarrassed to say I paid anything for it, much less $1.2 million.
it really is ugly. along with the “artist’s” attitude. gross, all around.
I’ll be dead but I am sure when our grandkids are gathering a round a fire for warmth they will tell stories of the before time, when we had the tools to defeat the evil of climate change but then someone invented a way to sell nothing that uses an astronomical amount of computing power and we burned the earth to the ground because of it
Is this 1629?
You buy an NFT, you’re a fool:https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/nfts-digital-art-authenticity-problem.htmlAnd if you’re given an NFT, it has no value—so no big.When the Dutch went stupid over their Tulip Mania during the 1600s:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_maniaAt least those suckers had tulip bulbs as tangible evidence of their folly—NFT buyers don’t even have that.
The shrill browbeating of this opening paragraph and its brazenly-biased agenda sounds like a third grader wrote it.