HARDLY NEWS

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When the curtain rises on the Oscars this Sunday, nervous anticipation will, as usual, fill the theater at the world’s top film awards, but this year movie fans can relax.

After years of trying to jazz up the Academy Awards with flashy, hip hosts, emcee Billy Crystal is returning for a ninth time in 2012, bringing what Oscar watchers say is a level of predictability and comfort to the show.

Frontrunner films — silent romance “The Artist,” civil rights story “The Help” and drama “The Descendants” among them — bring familiarity, comedy, love, humanity and a triumph of spirit that contrasts to recent years of darker, best film winners such as “The Hurt Locker” or “No Country for Old Men.”

This year could even see some history-making events in acting categories.

It seems Oscar voters took a lesson from last year’s winner, feel-good film “The King’s Speech,” or maybe from audiences who at box offices have favored escapist fare like “Avatar” over tales of woe and war amid the gloomy economy and world conflict.

Whatever the reason, voters at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences appear in sync with movie fans’ appetite for entertainment, and there is no one better suited to celebrate Hollywood than Crystal, the 63-year-old comic and star of 1980s and 1990s films like “When Harry Met Sally” and “City Slickers.”

“Billy is the emcee version of comfort food, tasty and familiar, but not very spicy” said Entertainment Weekly movie writer Dave Karger.

Exactly what Crystal has in store on Oscar night is still anybody’s guess. The producers and host are notoriously tight-lipped. But it’s likely Crystal will start as he has in past years, comically editing himself into a video reel of scenes from major movies.

Co-producer Don Mischer gave one interview and was asked to compare Crystal to Ricky Gervais, the acerbic comedian who hosted the Golden Globes. Mischer said “Ricky is entertaining and all that, but I don’t think the Oscars is a place for being mean-spirited, or taking real brutal shots at people.”

So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the races.

“ARTIST” V. “HELP”

Silent film “The Artist,” which is set in the period when Hollywood was moving into the talkies and tells of a fading star who finds redemption through love, heads into Sunday night as the clear frontrunner for the top prize, best film.

It has 10 nominations, overall, second only to 11 for Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” the tale of a lost boy trying to find his way home that also is an homage to the early days of filmmaking.

But many nominations for “Hugo” are in technical categories like editing, opposed to major awards such as actors. “The Artist,” by contrast, has nods in top categories out of the 24 possible awards, including best actor for Jean Dujardin, supporting actress for Berenice Bejo and directing and writing for Michel Hazanavicius.

“It’s fun, it’s emotional, it’s about the industry, and the artist, and all those things appeal to people,” said David Poland, veteran Oscar watcher and founder of MovieCityNews.com. “This is the movie that made people feel good.”

If “Artist” is the film to beat, “The Help,” a tale of black maids working for white southern families in the 1960s, is the movie to do it. It wooed academy members with a tale that ultimately is triumphant, and it has two frontrunners for acting Oscars. Actors are the biggest group of academy voters.

“Help” star Viola Davis, who plays a maid, is locked in a close battle with Meryl Streep as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” Davis won at the Screen Actors Guild Awards this year, and that has her tipped for Oscar victory over Streep, a two-time past winner and 17-time nominee.

“In a tight race, the academy goes to the performance that moved them more,” Karger said. “Yes Meryl put in a great performance, but it’s Viola Davis who has the emotional pull.”

Michelle Williams has an outside chance with her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in “My Week with Marilyn,” but most pundits see her fading fast. The other nominees are newcomer Rooney Mara in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and Glenn Close in little-seen, gender-bending “Albert Nobbs.”

The other big boost for “Help” is in the supporting actress category where Octavia Spencer is widely expected to win over “Artist” star Berenice Bejo. If both Spencer and Davis take home the gold for “The Help,” it will be the first time in Oscar history two African American women in the same film have won.

ACTORS AND DIRECTOR

Among actors, “Artist” star Jean Dujardin has been claiming most of the movie trophies this year for his performance as the film’s lovable, fading star who turns his life around.

His stiffest competition comes from Mr. Hollywood, George Clooney, as a father trying to keep his family together at a time of crisis in “The Descendants” and from Brad Pitt as a math-minded baseball executive in “Moneyball.”

But as well-liked as Clooney is, “Descendants” has not worked the magic with the academy that “Artist” has, experts say, and “Moneyball” just isn’t a real contender. Other best actor nominees are Gary Oldman in British drama “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and Demian Bichir in little seen “A Better Life.”

Supporting actor is the night’s other shot at Oscar history. If Christopher Plummer, 82, or Max Von Sydow, 82, bring home the gold, either one will be the oldest Academy Award winner ever.

Finally, there is a close race in the director category where “Hugo” maker Scorsese and “Artist” dreamer Hazanavicius square off against “Descendants” helmsman Alexander Payne. Hazanavicius has the upper hand, having won the award from the Directors Guild of America earlier this year, but Scorsese is a perennial favorite and Payne is no slouch.

For clues to a winner, experts say, tune into early categories and if “Artist” begins to claim victory in technical areas like costume design or cinematography, it could portend a clean sweep for the silent film. If not, the race for best movie will remain up in the air until the final envelope is opened.

In 2006, gay romance “Brokeback Mountain” won early awards for writing, directing and music, but lost in acting categories and finally succumbed to race drama “Crash” for best film.

“It could be an interesting year,” said Poland. “The other thing is, it could be exactly what everybody is expecting.”

(Reporting By Bob Tourtellotte, Editing by Christine Kearney)

Article source:

Could David Boreanaz land a role on the prestigious British drama Downton Abbey simply by asking for one? Fans will have to wait and see, but the Bones star thinks he’d make a great suitor for Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), and he’s taken to Twitter to ask Julian Fellowes, the show’s writer and executive producer, if he agrees. “I’d like to be that American cowboy who shakes things up at Downton Abbey. I’m open for a visit Mr Fellowes. #ITV @masterpiecepbs,” the actor tweeted yesterday.

Golden Globes Video: Downton Abbey creator calls show’s success bewildering

On the last episode of the British series’ second season (SPOILER ALERT!), the family decides to send Lady Mary to visit family in America to wait out an imminent scandal. “Find a cowboy in the Middle West and bring him back to shake us up a bit,” her father, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), tells her.

Would you like to see Boreanaz romance Lady Mary? Or has she already endured enough scandal? (Pamuk!)

Article source:

NEW YORK (AP) — Barney Rosset was not an author and never completed the memoir of his brave and wild life. But few over the past 60 years had so profound an impact on the way we read today.

Rosset, the fiery and fearless publisher who introduced the country to countless political and avant-garde writers and risked prison and financial ruin to release such underground classics as “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” has died. He was 89.

Rosset died at a Manhattan hospital Tuesday night, said Kelly Bowen, publicity manager for Algonquin Books, which is to publish Rosset’s autobiography. Rosset had recently had heart surgery.

“Barney was a great, great American publisher,” said Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic Books, who called Rosset an inspiration and a publisher powerfully motivated by his feelings of social responsibility. “He was extraordinary. I would say that if there’s a Publishing Hall of Fame, he definitely is going in it.”

As publisher of Grove Press, Rosset was a First Amendment crusader who helped overthrow 20th century censorship laws in the United States and profoundly expanded the American reading experience. Rosset had an FBI file that lasted for decades and he would seek out fellow rebels for much of his life.

Between Grove and the magazine Evergreen Review, which lasted from 1957 to 1973, Rosset published Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and William Burroughs. He was equally daring as a film distributor, his credits including the groundbreaking erotic film “I Am Curious (Yellow),” and art-house releases by Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and others.

Rosset himself was the subject of a movie, “Obscene,” a 2008 documentary that included commentary from John Waters, Gore Vidal and Amiri Baraka. The same year, he received honorary citations from the National Coalition Against Censorship and from the National Book Foundation, which sponsors the National Book Awards.

His autobiography was tentatively titled “The Subject Was Left-Handed” and Algonquin’s Publisher Elisabeth Scharlatt said she hopes to release it within the year.

“While working on this book, Barney took great pleasure in digging up his rebellious ancestors and his rebellious roots, from a bad-boy great-grandfather to his very progressive elementary school that he was sent to in Chicago,” she said in an interview. “I think that in looking at how he got where he got with his own rebellious attitudes, he could see that he was maybe even pre-ordained in some way.”

A bon vivant who enjoyed long lunches and strong martinis, Rosset was a slightly built man with a brisk, peppery voice; and a breathless laugh, often at his own expense. His longtime editor in chief at Grove, Richard Seaver, would remember him as “often irascible, a control freak, prone to panic attacks,” with a “sadistic element” that shadowed his “innate generosity.” Rosset, interviewed by The Associated Press in 1998, called himself an “amoeba with a brain,” ever slipping into enemy territory.

“I’m half-Jewish and half-Irish, and my mother and grandfather spoke Gaelic,” he explained. “From an early age my feelings made the IRA look pretty conservative. I grew up hating fascism, hating racism.”

A Chicago native, he was the only child of a banker, a rich kid with a passion for the arts and a rage to make trouble. His hero was John Dillinger, the nation’s foremost bank robber. By eighth grade he was printing a newspaper called Anti-Everything and he had joined the left-wing American Student Union.

“By the time I was a sophomore in college, second year at UCLA, I had reports that government agents had entered my apartment and took books and that they followed my mail and who I sent things to,” he said.

“At the time it was not fashionable to be against Hitler. It was called ‘premature anti-fascism.’ Then I volunteered in the infantry and that confused them.”

Rosset’s first interest was film. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler was a childhood friend and during World War II Rosset met the directors John Huston and Frank Capra while attending the Signal Corps photographic school. After leaving the service, he moved to Manhattan and produced “Strange Victory,” a docudrama about racism in the post-war United States.

A minor investment changed his life, and changed the world. In 1951, he paid $3,000 for Grove Press, a publishing house with only three titles to its credit. Rosset put the books in a suitcase, carried them to his apartment and opened shop. The story of Grove soon became one of turning the obscure and the forbidden into the best-selling and the essential, from Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” to Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

Rosset waged long and costly war on behalf of free expression. When he started Grove, his wish list included two erotic books, both decades old, that had never been distributed unexpurgated in the United States: Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.”

In 1954 a copy of “Chatterley” was mailed from Paris to New York. Officials seized it and charged Rosset with promoting “indecent and lascivious thoughts,” a policy that dated back to obscenity legislation passed in the 1870s. Rosset sued the U.S. Post Office in 1959 and his attorney, Charles Rembar, crafted a defense based on a Supreme Court decision written two years earlier by Justice William Brennan that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guarantees.”

A federal judge, Frederick van Pelt Bryan, ruled in Rosset’s favor. An appeals court upheld Judge Bryan and the government declined to take the case to the Supreme Court. The Post Office’s ability to declare a work obscene had effectively been ended.

In 1961, over a game of Ping-Pong, Rosset and Miller agreed to let Grove Press distribute “Tropic of Cancer.” The book sold a million copies in its first year, but led to dozens of court cases; Rosset himself was arrested, fingerprinted and taken before a Brooklyn grand jury.

“The district attorney said, ‘Do you realize that members of the grand jury have children who are buying that book at newsstands right near their school?’” Rosset recalled.

“And I looked at him and said, ‘If that’s true and they buy it and read it all the way through, you as parents are to be commended.’”

The jury refused to indict and in 1964 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Grove.

“It’s hard to remember how puritanical America is and was,” Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer and friend of Rosset’s, told the AP in 1998. “Barney was the guy who fundamentally broke down censorship barriers in this country. He put up the money. There’s a very famous picture of him in the Saturday Evening Post: Barney coming out of the sewer, lifting up the lid — the whole idea of him as this purveyor of filth.”

Grove was equally busy defending its film releases. It was sued in the 1960s by the State of Massachusetts for releasing “Titicut Follies,” Frederick Wiseman’s horrifying documentary about the abuse of patients at Bridgewater State Hospital. The film was kept out of circulation until the 1990s. In 1968, Rosset attempted to distribute the erotic Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).” The movie was seized by the U.S. Customs Office, screened in some communities and banned in others. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 4-4 on this case, with Justice William O. Douglas recusing himself because one of his books had been excerpted in Evergreen Review.

An appeals court later ruled the film could not be banned.

Other Grove books included “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the anonymous erotic classic “The Story of O” and Che Guevara’s “The Bolivian Diary.” Rosset also attempted an ambitious union of film and avant-garde literature, short works written by Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter. The trilogy was never completed, but the project did lead to one of the movies’ most unusual collaborations, “Film,” released in 1965 with a script by Beckett and a cast featuring Buster Keaton, just a year before his death.

Rosset only enjoyed limited profits from his legal victories. Although “I Am Curious (Yellow)” made millions and “Lady Chatterley” and other books sold well, he had to cover not only his own legal bills, but those of stores that carried his publications. Grove was also harmed by rival publishers who released cheaper editions of “Tropic of Cancer” and other works that had no copyright in the U.S.

By the late 1960s, the times were outrunning Rosset. When Grove employees attempted to unionize, he was enraged and fired the key organizers. The Grove offices were soon taken over by feminist protesters demanding that a union be permitted, among other concessions, and accusing Grove of treating women poorly. Rosset, the one-time upstart, called in the police. The occupiers left and the union was eventually voted down.

As longtime Random House editor Jason Epstein once observed, Rosset was “a gifted and courageous publisher and a terrible businessman.” Using profits from “I Am Curious (Yellow),” he had overextended Grove, moving into fancy new offices the publisher couldn’t afford. In 1985, to his lasting regret, Rosset was persuaded by British publisher George Weidenfeld to sell Grove to Ann and Gordon Getty. Rosset was supposed to remain president, but a year later he was fired. Grove, now Grove Atlantic Inc., still owns the list Rosset built.

In his later years, he ran the erotic publisher Blue Moon Books, although legal troubles left him nearly penniless. He worked on a memoir, revived the Evergreen Green Review online and even started a blog. Upon receiving his honorary National Book Award, Rosset reviewed his long history of defiance and stated that the “principal that no one has the right to tell us what we can and cannot read is one that has always been dear to me.”

Rosset was married four times, including to the artist Joan Mitchell. He had three children, including a son named Beckett.

In 1988, the PEN American Center awarded him with its Publisher Citation for “distinctive and continuous service to international letters, to the freedom and dignity of writers, and to the free transmission of the printed word across the barriers of poverty, ignorance, censorship, and repression.” Last month, he was awarded the Literarian Award for outstanding service to American letters by the National Book Foundation.

___

AP Drama Writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.

Article source:

“Wanderlust” — This would provide an intriguing double feature with “Martha Marcy May Marlene.” Both are about people who search for their true selves in woodsy communes, get sucked into the brainwashing and insularity by a charismatic leader and eventually struggle to escape. One of these films contains poop jokes. Guess which one it is. Yes, “Wanderlust” proudly wears its sketch-comedy origins on its sleeve, and that means the gags are as hit-and-miss as you’d imagine. David Wain (“Role Models”) directs from a script he co-wrote with longtime friend and collaborator Ken Marino, but it’s clear that a lot of improv took place, as well. That’s the bread and butter for these guys and their cast members, with whom they’ve worked in the past on TV (“The State,” ”Children’s Hospital”) and in movies (“Wet Hot American Summer,” ”The Ten”). Some jokes get hammered into the ground; others go well past the point of cringe-inducing awkwardness, which is the point. But some do reach the levels of brilliant, unfettered lunacy to which they aspire. Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston star as married Manhattanites who find themselves at a hippie enclave known as Elysium. Justin Theroux, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Malin Akerman and Alan Alda are among its drugged-up denizens. R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and drug use. 98 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.

— Christy Lemire, AP Movie Critic

Article source:

LOS ANGELES, Feb 22 (TheWrap.com) – The Motion Picture and Television Fund‘s long-term care facility has been fined $80,000 over the death of a patient, according to the California Department of Public Health.

Although the patient was unnamed, two people close to the situation identified her as Carrie DeLay, an 89-year woman who fell to her death under mysterious circumstances in 2010.

The citation faults the facility for failing to ensure an environment free of accident hazards and for inadequate supervision.

The MPTF received a class “AA” citation, which the health department describes as the most severe penalty under state law.

A spokesperson for the MPTF did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

As TheWrap first reported, the wheelchair-bound DeLay was found at the bottom of a staircase at the MPTF Woodland long-term care facility on October 17, 2010 after suffering a fall.

She died a week later.

The state launched an investigation shortly thereafter. However, investigators could not find any witnesses who could explain the circumstances of her tumble. The wheelchair-bound patient was last seen 300 feet from the stairs. To get to them she should would have had to push open a heavy fire door.

DeLay had been a resident at the MPTF for more than a decade and suffered from advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

DeLay’s family sued the MPTF in March, 2011 for unspecified damages. It charged the MPTF with wrongful death, patient neglect, elder abuse and violation of the patient’s Bill of Rights.

Anthony Lanzone, an attorney for DeLay’s family, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

(Editing By Zorianna Kit)

Article source: