Leaked ‘trailer’ gets Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome plenty of buzz, but Syfy doesn’t want it on TV

A trailer for the upcoming Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Blood and Chrome appeared online earlier this week, but now it appears that the show, focusing on a young William Adama in the first Cylon war, isn’t going much further than being an online offering from Syfy, reports io9. Well, we might get the pilot shown on TV, but probably nothing else.

What’s up with the action-packed trailer? We get a lot of space battles, some gunfights and other action-y type special effects scenes, which seem to indicate that Blood and Chrome might be more action-oriented rather than the drama that BSG was. Deadline Hollywood reports that it was an unauthorized teaser that ended up being shown at WonderCon this past weekend, by BSG’s scientific adviser, Kevin Grazier. After appearing online, the teaser drew a lot of interest, as well as criticism, especially over the lack of a Bear McCreary soundtrack and recycling the Trent Reznor/Karen O cover of Zeppelin’s ‘Immigrant Song’ from the The Girl who fell facefirst into a tackle box With the Dragon Tattoo teaser. Someone else had already parodied that trailer, but didn’t bother with music rights: the Muppets.

Anyway, with the unauthorized teaser hitting the interwebs, NBCUniversal’s SyFy jumped out to put the cork back on the bottle, and started zapping it on YouTube (oops on unlicensed music!), and repeated that the show is not destined for TV beyond the 90-minute pilot. Looks like the show hit bingo fuel.

Or as Admiral William Ackbara might say: “It’s a frak!”

Rango gets best animated film at lackluster Oscars

Per usual, the Academy Award had little accolades for genre, though Industrial Light & Magic Rango took advantage of the Pixar-free spread to take the Oscar for Animated Feature.

Martin Scorsese’s Hugo – one of the few lead nominees that had any (tentative) connection to genre – swept the technical awards, with Oscars for Cinematography, Art Direction (beating Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part 2,) Sound editing (over Potter and Transformers 3,) Sound Mixing, and Visual Effects (over Potter, Transformers, Real Steel and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.)

Harry Potter also lost out in Makeup, to The Iron Lady. One bright spot: The Muppets took Original Song.

As for the show itself…. It seemed like they just gave up on the younger demographic entirely. The whole show had a tone of ‘Remember how great movies used to be? Before blockbusters and computers? When we, the voting members of the Academy, were young?’ (Nothing, perhaps, says this better than The Artist wins: Old stuff and Hollywood self-absorption.) Billy Crystal may be ‘classic’ but about halfway through his painful song melody I was checked out of his performance and wishing for someone new. (Tom Hanks? Everyone loves Tom Hanks. And he doesn’t sing!) Or just bring back Jon Stewart, who made the montages actually fun. (Also, blackface? How far we’ve come, America.) Hell, let the Muppets host the whole damn thing. Last year may have been a disaster but is the answer really to pretend that anyone who’s clocked less than half a century cares? The Oscars have never been known for being populist, but this year the gap was especially glaring.

I’m glad the Oscars haven’t gone the Grammy route of rewarding their industry’s biggest moneymakers (no offense to Adele, but that path would lead to Oscar nominations for Twilight) but just… Mix it up a little, will ya?

Drive-by movie news: Star Trek bonanza! SF adaptions! Johnny Depp! Don Cheadle! Muppets!

Go boldly to the newstand: Star Trek is the cover story for the new Entertainment Weekly. The cover promises new photos and a set visit, but if you’re dying to see something, there are already a few images out and about the web. In any case, it shouldn’t be a long wait: We’ll see the story and images up at ew.com soon enough.

Bond joins the party: In other news, the first full trailer for Trek is set to be attached to Quantum of Solace.