This year’s Oscar nominations are out, with a few surprises in the prestigious Best Picture category: It’s still full speed ahead for Oppenheimer this awards season, with a whopping 13 Academy Award nominations. A handful of other popular movies also made impressive sweeps, including Poor Things with 11 nominations, Killers of the Flower Moon with 10, and Barbie with eight — and all of them are nominated for Best Picture. Joining the face-off for the top award as well are American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, Maestro, Past Lives, and The Zone of Interest.

Could this finally settle the Barbenheimer duel? Barbie and Oppenheimer — which have been pitted against each other as the two biggest films of 2023 after being released on the same day — have done well for themselves, with 21 Oscar nominations and USD 2.4 bn in ticket sales between them, according to Entertainment Weekly. But so far, Oppenhemer Oppenheimer is coming out ahead, having raked in more Golden Globes and being the frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Picture.

History was made: Lily Gladstone is the first Native American nominee (for Best Actress) and could be the first-ever Native American nominee in any category after suspicions of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s (1983 Best Song winner) ancestry have come to light. Martin Scorcese, director of Killers of the Flower Moon, is now the most nominated living director with a 10th Best Director nomination under his belt.

With every nomination comes a snub: Barbie took a couple of hits with director Greta Gerwig missing out on a nomination for Best Director and Margot Robbie being overlooked as a Best Actress contender for her role as the titular character. Leonardo DiCaprio, who knows a thing or two about an Oscar snub, also missed out on Best Actor for Killers of the Flower Moon. (Hollywood Reporter | The Guardian | Variety)

Google is rolling out their AI features onto Chrome for users based in the US.It’s no secret that Google is placing all their chips on AI. But rather than make Bard a built-in part of their browser, Google is rolling out a few of the AI chatbot’s features to make Chrome better to use.

THE FEATURES-

#1- Tab organization: Google’s new Tab Organizer will suggest tab groups based on your open tabs and create them for you. If you’re working on multiple tasks at the same time, clicking on the Organize Similar Tabs will make the browser automatically group the tabs based on task.

#2- Personalized themes: Last year, Google introduced generative AI wallpapers to Pixel 8 and phones running Android 14. The same text-to-image model has been added to Chrome so that you can customize your browser to your liking. You can do this by clicking on Customize Chrome in the side panel, Change Theme, and choosing Create with AI.

#3- Writing aid: Not sure how to word something? In next month’s Chrome release, this facet of Google’s experimental AI features will help you write whatever you’re posting online — be it a restaurant review, an email, or maybe even social media posts. You’ll be able to right-click within any text box and select Help Me Write. After entering a prompt, the AI will kickstart the writing process for you.

The beginning of the AI browser takeover. This is just the start of the features Google plans on adding to Chrome. No specifics have been mentioned beyond integrating Gemini into the browser later this year, but we expect more sophisticated persians of Chrome’s article summarization.

Google’s experimental mode is available to use on personal accounts now — you can enable it by going to settings and turning on the Experimental AI switch.

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