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Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the best director award from the Directors Guild of America on Saturday with her Iraq war thriller The Hurt Locker, a film gathering awards momentum ahead of the Oscars.
The winner of the Guild’s top award has gone on to take the best director Oscar all but six times in the last 61 years.
Oscar nominations will be announced tomorrow and modestly budgeted The Hurt Locker is expected to garner several nods, including best film and best director.
Bigelow beat out her former husband James Cameron, who had won the Golden Globe for best director this month for his mega-budget blockbuster Avatar.
The Hurt Locker tells the story of a US military bomb squad that defuses explosives amid the fighting and insurgents. Many critics consider the film to be the best portrayal of the Iraq war since it began in 2003.
Meanwhile, the music world was celebrating all over Los Angeles this weekend with tributes, rehearsals, parties and, of course, a gift suite or two in anticipation of the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards.
Elton John, Norah Jones, James Taylor, Dave Matthews and more than a dozen other artists honored Neil Young as the MusiCares Person of the Year at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The singer-songwriter and more than 2,000 other guests were treated to new interpretations of 20 of his timeless songs, including Harvest Moon and Cinnamon Girl, during the nearly four-hour program.
Young was feted Friday night for his decades of philanthropic service, including work with Farm Aid and the Bridge School Concerts, which raise money to provide services for kids with severe speech and physical impairments.
“I’d forgotten how many songs I’d written,” the 64-year-old musician said.
Elsewhere, Taylor Swift performed a rollicking version of her hit You Belong With Me as she rehearsed for her big Grammy moment, but she may have provided the most excitement when she came off the stage.
Swift was among a parade of A-list artists rehearsing at Staples Center on Friday, including Dave Matthews, Maxwell, Green Day, Black Eyed Peas, Sheryl Crow, Stevie Nicks, Mary J. Blige, Andrea Bocelli, Drake, Eminem and Lil Wayne.
Several young fans were waiting anxiously as Swift gave a couple of quick television interviews. Afterward, she posed for pictures, and made one young man swoon when she shook his hand.
As of press time, Michael Jackson had won yet another posthumous honor, joining six other musicians including Leonard Cohen and Loretta Lynn who received Grammy awards for lifetime achievement. The major awards were to be announced last night, Los Angeles time.
An unshaved Cohen, sporting a fedora and bolo tie, wryly noted that he never won a Grammy for any of his recordings.
“As we make our way towards the finish line that some of us have already crossed, I never thought I’d get a Grammy award. In fact, I was always touched by the modesty of their interest,” he said to loud applause.
The 75-year-old Canadian poet and singer did receive a Grammy two years ago as one of the featured artists on Herbie Hancock’s surprise album of the year winner.
In other Grammy news, gay rights groups angry about a Grammy nomination for jailed Jamaican reggae singer Buju Banton took out a full page advertisement on Friday, protesting the honoring of an artist they said had “promoted the murder of gay people throughout his career.”
Banton, 36, was up for a best reggae album award for his Rasta Got Soul release at the Grammys last night. He is currently in jail in Florida awaiting trial on a cocaine charge.
In an advertisement in Hollywood showbusiness paper Daily Variety, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center urged Grammy organizers to use yesterday evening’s televised ceremony to denounce music “that promotes or celebrates violence against any group of people.”
The lyrics of Banton’s most controversial song Boom, Bye Bye in 1988, promote the murder of gay men by shooting or burning.
Banton was quoted late last year as saying he saw “no end to the war” between himself and gay men.
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Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
The slashing of the government’s proposed budget by the two China-aligned parties in the legislature, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), has apparently resulted in blowback from the US. On the recent junket to US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, KMT legislators reported that they were confronted by US officials and congressmen angered at the cuts to the defense budget. The United Daily News (UDN), the longtime KMT party paper, now KMT-aligned media, responded to US anger by blaming the foreign media. Its regular column, the Cold Eye Collection (冷眼集), attacked the international media last month in
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
Feb. 10 to Feb. 16 More than three decades after penning the iconic High Green Mountains (高山青), a frail Teng Yu-ping (鄧禹平) finally visited the verdant peaks and blue streams of Alishan described in the lyrics. Often mistaken as an indigenous folk song, it was actually created in 1949 by Chinese filmmakers while shooting a scene for the movie Happenings in Alishan (阿里山風雲) in Taipei’s Beitou District (北投), recounts director Chang Ying (張英) in the 1999 book, Chang Ying’s Contributions to Taiwanese Cinema and Theater (打鑼三響包得行: 張英對台灣影劇的貢獻). The team was meant to return to China after filming, but
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