With the 2102 LA Film Festival gearing up to start next week, Film Independent announced the jurors in its narrative, documentary and shorts competitions. Actress Rachael Harris, actor, writer, producer and director Robert Townsend and film critic Sheri Linden will be in charge of the narrative films. Frozen River producer Heather Rae, Karin Chien and 2010 LA Film Fest Audience Award-winning director Mark Landsman will handle the documentaries. Art and film critic Ernest Hardy, cinematographer Nancy Schreiber and 2010 Sundance Audience Award winner Javier Fuentes León have the shorts covered.

FishbowlLA will be at LAFF for the second year in a row and we’re pretty excited about it. Keep an eye out for our event coverage starting exactly one week from today.

In an intriguing piece of LA Times commentary, author Ernest Hardy reminds that it’s not just the Oscars that can be guilty of slighting an industry icon and then belatedly trying to make up for the oversights with a career nod. This weekend, it will be the Grammys’ turn to embrace the phenomenon of residual voter shame.

Hardy’s piece begins, simply, with the sentence “Diana Ross has never won a Grammy.” He notes that her Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony this Saturday will not be televised and frames this weekend’s “consolation prize” within a larger failure:

The Grammys aren’t the only place where 67-year-old Ross, a primary architect of modern pop culture over her five-decade career, has been undervalued. It’s long been fashionable to lampoon her in the media and in critical circles, to dismiss her voice and her trailblazing accomplishments–to cast her in the one-note role of incorrigible diva…

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It’s been a little over a year since LA’s only lit mag Slake made its debut. And tonight marks another milestone. The mag will be holding the first reading for its third issue “War and Peace” tonight at 7:30 at Skylight Books in Los Feliz. We’re told there will be free fancypants coffee and readings by James Greer, John Waldman and Ernest Hardy among others.

Slake is also having a second reading on Sunday at Vroman’s, featuring two generations of Coopers–both Marc Cooper and his daughter, author Natasha Vargas-Cooper, will be reading.

Big weekend for Slake. More info here.