Chatterbox: The best of the best bits

While there are plenty of forerunners to the Oscars here's the one we like best: The Golden Trailer Awards.

No, not a prize for best use of a towbar in a supporting role, but awards for movie trailers, those cut-downs which sometimes can be better than the films they advertise. "We definitely are geared to the attention-deficit crowd," says Evelyn Brady, founding director of the awards, which were presented in Los Angeles this week.

The awards recognised the minutiae of trailer production, with prizes for best voice-over (Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt) and best music (Dreamweaver, which is in the trailer of About Schmidt but not on the soundtrack), as well as for trashiest trailer (The Rules of Attraction) and for best trailer for the worst film (the surfing movie Blue Crush).

Austin power:

Those great New Zealand jet-setting garage rock outfits the D4 and the Datsuns were the hit of the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Times singled out the two bands as being among those which created the most buzz among the 1000 acts performing at the five-day convention, the United States' highest profile event for new acts. Meanwhile, the D4 is confirmed to play on The Late Show with David Letterman in New York on Wednesday American time which should mean we can see them via Prime's delayed broadcast on Thursday night.

In from the cold:

They are still chipping away at it, it seems. That's former Cold Chisel members Jimmy Barnes and Ian Moss who, by coincidence, pass through the country next month on separate tours. Just a flight delay or wrong turn on SH1 might have seen them meet up for a bevy. But as it stands old Chisel fans and those who've followed their solo careers should now start saving their pennies. Singer-guitarist Moss brings his band through - it includes former CC bassist Phil Small - for shows at the Kings Arms (April 23), the Roadhouse Papakura (April 24) and the Kaponga Backgammon Club (April 25). Barnesy's Say It Loud tour (also the title of his recently written book) kicks off in Christchurch on April 19 and makes its way up country to Auckland for a show at the St James on May 2.

You can be replaced dept:

A Spanish company is claiming it knows how to spot hits - using a computer. Hit Song Science (HSS), software developed by Barcelona-based Polyphonic HMI, is designed to spot hits before they are released. The company says it picked out Norah Jones for stardom months before her debut album garnered eight Grammy awards (er, so did we actually by using something called a "music critic" - yes they are hard to boot up but once you get 'em going ... ). The HSS software looks for songs that match the musical traits of known hits - identifies characteristics such as melody, harmony, beat variation, tempo, rhythm and pitch that supposedly send songs to the top of the charts.

The funniest thing we've seen all week: This is a bit of stone-throwing-from-glasshouse-dwellers. But it was hard not to giggle when a certain Sunday newspaper columnist usually employed on the wine and cheese round extended herself to art criticism. She thought it high time it was pointed out that the late Colin McCahon had spelling mistakes in his paintings. How terrible. Pity that in the same paragraph she spelt the plural of gallery, "gallerys".