This past weekend was full of award ceremonies (including the BAFTAs), many of which fall on the path toward the Oscars.

• The Writers Guild of America presented its awards Sunday. Top prizes went to Michael Arndt for his original screenplay for Little Miss Sunshine and to William Monahan for his adapted screenplay for The Departed. Both scripts are the best bets for the Oscars. Amy Berg also won an award for documentary writing for Deliver Us From Evil.
• It remains a tight race for the animated feature Oscar, but Cars beat Happy Feet for the top honor at the Annie Awards Sunday. So far the former has taken some big awards like the Golden Globe while the latter has won most of the critics' prizes. Other than Best Animated Feature, Cars only won for its music. Flushed Away took home the most Annies (5), and Over the Hedge won 3. Bambi II won the award for direct-to-video titles.
• Sunday's Grammy Awards had some love for movies, honoring the soundtrack to Walk the Line, John Williams' score for Memoirs of a Geisha, Williams' composition "A Prayer for Peace" from his score for Munich and Randy Newman's song "Our Town" from Cars. Also semi-related are the Dixie Chicks' five wins, which make up for the Oscar snub of their documentary Shut Up & Sing.
• The Visual Effects Society Awards were also presented Sunday. The biggest winner was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest with six awards, including the two top prizes. Other winners were Flags of Our Fathers, Casino Royale and Cars.
• Maggie Gyllenhaal presented the tech Oscars Saturday. You can look forward to the quick montage of winners shown during the Academy Awards telecast in two weeks.

Here's your ironic story of the week, folks: According to a story from Reuters/Hollywood Reporter, The Weinstein Company (TWC) issued a press release late Thursday lambasting NBC for refusing to run an ad for the film Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing!

The documentary tells about the period three years ago when the Chicks stirred up mountains of controversy after lead Chick Natalie Maines said during a London concert that the Chicks were ashamed President Bush is from Texas.

TWC also released documents that appeared to be from NBCs advertising standards division with handwritten remarks about the film having material that "disparges President Bush."

Shut Up & Sing wants to give us a backstage pass to a publicity crisis, but the more interesting story that shines through is about the enormous power that even a travel-sized lead singer can wield over a band. The story begins in 2003 when Natalie Maines, the frosted blonde frontwoman of the Western swing-pop threesome The Dixie Chicks, makes an off-the-cuff to a London crowd about being embarrassed by Bush. The insult bounces around the globe, lands on redneck radio and results in a sturdy boycott that sinks plans for a tour. Maines is urged to back-peddle. Instead, she tries to spin the 'traitor' label into a new, quasi-edgy image for the hitherto-wholesome group. For fickle fans, it's a bridge too far. "You're giving the American public too much credit," her publicist warns. Meanwhile, the other Chicks fume. Fiddle player Martie Maguire wants to chick-scratch Maines' eyes out for gambling with their careers. At one point, in a moment that's almost off-camera, she mumbles: "I'm not gonna try to dig you out."

But Maines knows she is irreplaceable -- the Chicks opened supermarkets before her -- and she doesn't sweat vague threats of ouster. Everything she does, from the way she interrupts meetings with daydreamy musings to her snap decision to cut ties with a wavering sponsor, exposes her as the group's 800-pound gorilla. The film's best moments occur when she pipes up with an opinion, and the other Chicks bite their tongues. As the pressure increases, Maines begins to flirt with severing the group's connection to country music, which she's not culturally wedded to. This leads to a hilarious scene where she drags the other Chicks to the Maharishi-like pad of music impresario Rick Rubin for a musical powwow. Maguire, who was baptized in bluegrass, not Beastie Boys, is lost at sea. She eventually blurts out "What is our role?," prompting Rubin to make a cryptic statement about finding the best sound, 'whatever it may be'. He probably said that to several Chili Peppers drummers before they were axed.

Ever since the Dixie Chicks went off on George W. Bush at a concert in the UK back in 2003, the musical trio have been almost as well known for their politics as for their music. Country music fans, who tend as a group to lean to the right side of the political aisle, took great umbrage to the Chicks making their opinion on the president -- is is from their home state of Texas -- be known to the world. In Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck take a look at the fallout of the Chicks refusal to shut up: The radio stations refusing to play their music, the right-wing bloggers urging fans to boycott them, the letters from fans, one of which inspired both a Dixie Chicks song and the title of this documentary, by telling the women to just "shut up and sing." Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck sat down with Cinematical's James Rocchi and Netscape's Alexia Prichard to discuss their controversial film. You can download the video here (60.9MB, 9: or watch it over on Netscape.

Elements of the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival lineup are slowly dribbling out ahead of the full slate's announcement on August 22. Most recently, it was the 22 documentaries that make up the Festival's Real to Reel segment that were announced, a lineup that includes The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Blindsight, about a group of blind teenagers climbing Everest, Jeff Garlin's This Filthy World, and Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, an examination of the abortion debate in the US. In addition, Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple's film about the band in the wake of their words against President Bush after 9/11, will be the first doc ever to merit a Gala Presentation at the Festival.

(The full Real to Reel lineup probably can be found on the TIFF website, but I'll be damned if I can figure out where it is. Everyone who is smarter than I am and tracks it down, please post a link in the comments, and I'll add it to the post.)

Edit: And the readers come through again -- thanks, robruzic and Madeleine. An external program list can be found here (use the pulldown menu to sort), and the TIFF press releases are collected here.