It feels like the future to go to the web site ArtMuseum.net, and be able to enter and stroll around a 3D version of a van Gogh painting. It feels like the future when your youngest child is watching a DVD of The Matrix on a 3-pound laptop computer in the backseat of the car. And it will feel not at all like the future when they announce the Oscar winners for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and actress. The actor is an endangered species. I think the first big leading indicator was baby boomers' abandonment of live theater.
Younger people tend to find live theater too intimate, too unmediated, too real, too creepy.
Around the same time we realized that animated characters could be more engaging and more moving than human beings, TV also discovered that real people could be more compelling than actors playing roles. Now the post-actor ante is about to be upped. The first movie, Shrek, comes out in May, and the second, Final Fantasy, in July. Based on the trailers, the artificial stars are amazingly lifelike. As it happens, around the same time those movies are gonna be released, The Screen Actors Guild, the union that represents all the actors in film and on television, will decide whether to go out on strike.