Announcing the award for Best New Narrative Filmmaker at the Tribeca Film Festival's awards party, Uma Thurman had to use her stage voice when the microphone suddenly cut out. Later, Robert De Niro lost the envelope with the final winner of the night and wound up reading it off a press release.

In short, the ceremony was not perfect, but it wound up as something better than that: Human.

Barry Levinson knows the beast that is mass media.

The director explored the impact of television on family life with his 1990 drama "Avalon," and he revealed the ways politicians use the news to manipulate the public in his clever satire "Wag the Dog." Now he's turned the camera on himself and his peers with a film essay entitled "Poliwood" about celebrity activism.