The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow battled her way into Oscar history books on Sunday, topping her movie’s best film honor with her own Academy Award for directing to become the first woman ever to earn that distinction.
The low-budget film, which has earned US$20 million at box offices, picked up six awards in all and bested Avatar, directed by Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron. Avatar is the top-grossing movie of all time with US$2.5 billion.
In a ceremony that harkened back to old Hollywood with glamour, music and comedy, the gritty drama about a squad of bomb-defusing specialists also secured writer Mark Boal the Academy Award for original screenplay and claimed honors for film editing, sound editing and mixing.
“This really is, there’s no other way to describe it, it’s the moment of a lifetime,” said Bigelow. Backstage, she told reporters that she hoped she was only the first of many women directors to win an Oscar.
Boal highlighted the struggle to make the movie when only a few years ago in Hollywood money for such true-life drama was hard to find after audiences turned their backs on war films.
“This has been a dream, beyond a dream,” said Boal, a journalist who was embedded with US troops in Iraq.
At best, he said, the film’s makers hoped “we would find a distributor and someone would like the movie.”
Avatar walked away with three Oscars, but in technical categories — visual effects, cinematography and art direction.
FAMILY NIGHT
Veteran Jeff Bridges claimed best actor for playing a drunken country singer in drama Crazy Heart. The son of Hollywood star Lloyd Bridges held his trophy high over his head, looking to the heavens and thanking his deceased parents.
“Mom and Dad, yeah,” he shouted. “Thank you Mom and Dad for turning me on to such a groovy profession.”
Sandra Bullock was named best actress for The Blind Side in a first for the actress once dubbed “America’s Sweetheart” because she won so many early fans in her romantic comedies.
For The Blind Side, however, she took the part of a real-life, strong-willed mother who helps take a homeless youth off the street and makes him into a football success.
“Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” she joked on the Oscars stage.
She held back tears when thanking her own mother, whom she called “a trailblazer” and major influence in her own life.
“To the moms who take care of the babies, no matter where they come from. Those moms never get thanked,” Bullock said.
Family film Up, one of the best-reviewed movies of 2009, won two Oscars for best animated movie and original score with its tale of an elderly man who ties balloons to his home and flies off on an adventure with a young boy.
Dark drama Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire also earned two Oscars including best supporting actress for Mo’Nique and, in another piece of Academy Award history, adapted screenplay for writer Geoffrey Fletcher, who became the first African American to claim that honor.
LOOKING BACK
Mo’Nique told reporters backstage that in her hair she wore the same gardenia Hattie McDaniel had when she won supporting actress in Gone With the Wind — a trailblazing win because it was the first ever Oscar for an African American.
“I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all she had to so that I would not have to,” Mo’Nique said on stage.
Austrian actor Christoph Waltz won best supporting actor for his turn as a menacing Nazi officer in revenge fantasy Inglourious Basterds, which follows a band of American Jews killing their enemies behind lines during World War II.
But it was the only trophy Quentin Tarantino’s Basterds could claim after being the second-most nominated movie with eight nods to nine apiece for Hurt Locker and Avatar.
Oscar organizers promised a fast-paced show with lots of laughs from co-hosts Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. And after an old-style musical from Neil Patrick Harris with showgirls and men in tuxedos and tails, Baldwin and Martin put on a stand-up routine picking out stars in the audience.
“There’s that damn Helen Mirren,” Martin said.
“No Steve, that’s Dame Helen Mirren,” Baldwin came back.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
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Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s