With Oscar season in full swing Hollywood is on tenterhooks to see which films will triumph on the industry’s glitziest night of the year. But away from the ‘gifting suites’ and parties ahead of next month’s main event, Hollywood studio executives, financiers and producers are closely following two auction processes that could be better barometers of the industry’s financial health. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio behind Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz is on the auction block, as is Miramax, the company behind Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare In Love, which is now part of Walt Disney. MGM owns the biggest film library in Hollywood with 4,000 titles but is up for sale after a failed attempt to relaunch the studio as a production force. Disney, meanwhile, is selling its 700-title Miramax library after deciding to focus on family fare and its branded divisions, such as Pixar and Marvel. Both sales will test the value of film content at a time when the film and television industries are in severe flux. Pay-TV operators such as Showtime, which is part of CBS, are spending less on buying films and investing more in original programming, while revenues from […]