Archive for the ‘Hollywood Highlights’ Category
A French film that pays tribute to the silent movie era leads in nominations for the Golden Globes, a high-profile Hollywood award that recognizes the year’s best achievements in film and television.
The Artist, a silent movie shot in black and white, received six nominations. They are Best Comedy or Musical, Best Actor for a Comedy or Musical, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.
Two other movies, The Help and The Descendants, tied for second with five nominations, including Best Drama. The Help tells the story of African-American servants in the pre-civil rights era in the U.S. South, and The Descendants is about a land baron who struggles to keep his family together.
American actor George Clooney, who stars in The Descendants, is up for Best Actor. Fellow American Leonardo DiCaprio, who played the title role in J. Edgar, a film about longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, is also nominated for Best Actor.
For television, Downton Abbey leads with four nominations, including Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.
The Golden Globes, presented each year by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, are considered second in prestige to the Academy Awards and are often viewed as a barometer for movies and actors who will be favored to win Oscars.
The 68th annual Golden Globe nominations were announced Thursday in Los Angeles. The awards will be presented January 15 during an event that will be broadcast live in more than 160 countries.
The non-profit Hollywood Foreign Press Association is made up of 90 members who cover the entertainment industry throughout the world.
The organization uses the awards as a fundraising event for entertainment-related charities. Last year, the awards allowed the association to donate $1.2 million dollars to fund scholarships and other programs.
Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.
Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the world’s most popular movie stars. His films, including Titanic, The Aviator and The Departed have grossed almost $5 billion worldwide. But the actor is trying to use his celebrity status to do more than sell tickets. Alan Silverman has a look at DiCaprio’s off-screen commitment to the environment.
In his new film J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio stars as J. Edgar Hoover, famous for making the FBI into a world-renowned law enforcement agency and infamous for the files he kept on Americans both in and out of power.
“Is that legal?”
“Sometimes you have to bend the rules a little in order to keep your country safe.”
<!–IMAGE-RIGHT–> “It’s interesting in this day and age to do a film about political espionage and wiretapping,” notes DiCaprio. “I don’t think those types of secrets that J. Edgar Hoover was able to obtain and keep would be possible in today’s world. With the Internet and ‘Wikileaks’ it doesn’t seem that those types of secrets can be kept for that long a period of time.”
It’s no secret, though, that DiCaprio is a committed and vocal environmental activist. More than a decade ago he inspired a Hollywood trend by becoming the first among his peers to start driving a fuel-efficient hybrid car.
“I think that every car should have that technology,” DiCaprio says. “It really has dramatically less emissions and, not only that, the gas mileage is unbelievable. If we have the technology to make every car like that – and we should – we would reduce our dependence on oil, foreign and domestic.”
DiCaprio says he’s been fascinated by nature ever since he was a child growing up in smog-choked Los Angeles.
“I actually wanted to be a marine biologist when I was very young. That was a great passion of mine, so I suppose in the off-season when not making movies, I became more and more active as an environmentalist and tried to be more vocal about issues that I felt were important,” he explains.
The Leonardo diCaprio Foundation, established in 1998 to promote a sustainable future, has been active in issues ranging from eliminating plastic grocery bags to ending shark-finning, the brutal practice blamed for a steep decline in shark populations around the world.
“Right now, the campaign that I’m a part of is to save the last remaining wild tigers throughout Asia,” explains DiCaprio. “There are only 3,200 left in the wild. There are more Asian tigers in cages in Texas than there are tigers in the wild and we are at risk of losing this iconic species for all time.”
At an Asian tiger summit in Moscow last year, DiCaprio personally donated $1 million to a program for protecting habitat as well as wildlife.
“Throughout Asia, a lot of countries are selling off jungle and forest rights for palm oil and for paper and pulp companies. So it’s more of land preservation effort,” he explains, “because if you can unify the public behind saving an iconic species like the tiger, like they did with the panda, that means you need to protect their habitat and everything that they hunt.”
DiCaprio has won acclaim for his encyclopedic knowledge of the environment and sustainability. He says he uses his movie star status to draw attention to what he considers a global concern.
“It’s important to everybody,” DiCaprio stresses. “I think that the environmental movement is the biggest people movement in the world.”
DiCaprio also brings his environmental activism into the workplace, requiring his film projects to adopt “green” practices to prevent wasting resources.
A comic book super hero whose exploits began in the 1940′s is back as one of this year’s big action movies. Here’s a look at Captain America: The First Avenger.
“General Patton has said that wars are fought with weapons, but they are won by men. Our goal is to create the greatest army in history, but every army begins with one man. He will be the first in a new breed of super soldier.”
The year is 1941. As storm clouds of war gather, American scientists secretly inoculate a scrawny young man – a weakling too sickly for military service – with a serum that, they hope, will give him great strength:
PEGGY “Shut it down!”
PROF. ERSKINE “Kill the reactor, Mr. Stark! Turn it off. Kill the reactor!”
STEVE ROGERS “No! Don’t! I can do this.”
The experiment succeeds, turning skinny Steve Rogers into muscular and powerful “Captain America”.
PEGGY “How do you feel?”
STEVE ROGERS “Taller.”
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It turns out that Nazi German scientists, led by the villain known as “Red Skull,” have developed their own super-soldier serum and it is up to Captain America to stop their evil plot that could change the course of the war.
Chris Evans stars as the title character and his toned, muscular physique would be the envy of any bodybuilder. However, instead of using a skinny actor as a “body double,” thanks to digital special effects, Evans also plays the ’90-pound weakling’ version of his character.
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“If you’ve seen pictures of me as a child, it’s not to dissimilar to the way I looked in the film. Everyone asks if it’s strange seeing myself as a weakling: no, that’s what I looked like until I was 17, so understanding what it feels like to be small and slight wasn’t too difficult,” explains Evans.
STEVE ROGERS “Why me?”
PROF. ERSKINE “Because a weak man knows the value of strength (and) the value of power.”
“The early stuff – the skinny stuff – is when the audience hopefully will fall in love with the character,” notes Evans. “If you like the guy then, you hope in the last frame in the film you still see the skinny guy. So I really felt adamant about making sure that this was my performance. This wasn’t something I wanted to share.”
RED SKULL “What made you so special?”
CAPTAIN AMERICA “Nothing. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn.”
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Captain America is directed by Joe Johnston, who insists that despite the title and patriotic origins, the movie is not about politics or nationalism. He says it’s the story of an individual finding his own path to success – on and off the battlefield.
“I think that Steve Rogers has an innocence about him and determination that is probably the most American thing about him,” insists Johnston. ” It is not a propaganda tool. We’re not waving the flag or anything. It’s about this guy who just wants to do the right thing and I think that runs throughout the tone of the picture.”
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In something of a tradition for a comic book superhero, “Captain America” is also trying to win the heart of a beautiful woman. She is British intelligence agent Peggy Carter, played by Hayley Atwell.
“She is a completely capable woman and it meant that her relationship with Steve was based on equality,” explains Atwell. ” I think they were kindred spirits. She had her own struggles getting to where she was being a woman and he obviously had his own struggles as well.”
PEGGY “Do you have something against running away?”
STEVE ROGERS “If you start running they’ll never let you stop.”
The title Captain America: The First Avenger gives a clue where the character is heading. Next year, he joins up with a team of fellow Marvel Comics superheroes for a sequel – an action-adventure titled The Avengers.