Bollywood beauty Priyanka Chopra has told Karan Johar that she will not wear a bikini for his next movie. Karan wanted the former Miss World to tone her body to perfection and wear a sizzling bikini in the movie Dostana. The scene was to be shot at the sex frilled Miami beach. The actress however declined the offer and said that she was not willing to take her clothes off for anyone.

Karan has signed in Priyanka to star alongside Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham in the movie. The film is expected to be a remake of a 70s classic. Priyanka is currently struggling with her figure and has put on a lot of weight. Recently there were rumours that Madhur Bhandarkar might drop her from the movie Fashion if she doesn’t tone up her body in time

Sir Paul and Heather battle on and Keira and Kylie in big in this week’s hottest celebrity stories.

In one of the most crucial slices of news to hit Tinseltown in recent months, the Hollywood writers voted to end their three-month strike this week, ending a hugely costly period of industrial action.

Movies and TV shows were cancelled, stars flip-flopped from project to project and with the 80th Academy awards lurching perilously close to suffering the same undignified press conference fate as the Golden Globes, Joan Rivers presumably grew intensely anxious at the thought of not being able to march brazenly up to celebrities on the red carpet and hassle them for information on their outfit.

But as one strike ends, the chance of another has arisen almost immediately. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) has not yet begun talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) before their current contract expires on June 30th and, fearful of another strike, top Hollywood stars including George Clooney have urged the union to begin talks immediately.

Movie studios have expressed their willingness to begin negotiations, but the SAG representatives are remaining reticent for the time being.

Could there really be another strike? Time will tell…

Liam Gallagher had a rather excellent week without any clashes with the paparazzi or arguments with his brother.Then again, it’s clear how much the Oasis frontman has matured by his decision to get married to Nicole Appleton on Valentine’s Day after nearly eight years together. Though getting married in the same spot in which he wed first wife Patsy Kensit does seem an odd decision…

He had some professional success as well, after Definitely, Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? were voted the two best British albums of all time. However, the fact that the poll placed Keane’s Under the Iron Sea above Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon shows it shouldn’t be taken entirely seriously.

By her standards, it was a fairly quiet week for Britney Spears, though we did learn that she apparently ‘doesn’t want custody’ of her kids, while her father was given increased control of her estate – probably for the best.

Avril Lavigne decided to steer clear of the recent scandal about her low pay for backing dancers and stuck her oar into the Britney mess, saying she feels bad for the Toxic star, while a man claiming to be Britney’s lawyer says granting her family control of her assets is a ‘civil rights violation’, though he undermined his case more than a little by bizarrely commenting: “In downtown Los Angeles I’m surrounded by people talking to themselves and having fits on the street.”

Why is he hanging around with crazy people?

Keira Knightley and Kylie Minogue were the big winners at the Elle Style awards while Hollywood great Mel Gibson had a slightly different success after completing a probation order for drunk-driving.

And finally, in a story that’s managed to make the news all week despite there being… well, little actual news at all, the divorce battle between Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills has rumbled on.

They arrived in court on Monday, with Heather’s father later saying she will leave the UK as soon as the case is completed.

However, there’s no telling when that will be, after the pair failed to reach a deal regarding a financial settlement, meaning that the judge ruling the case will now have the final say on the division of Sir Paul’s

 
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HOLLYWOOD — The golden guy known to the world as the Oscar, the real star of Sunday’s Academy Awards, has become a Hollywood icon over the past 80 years, but the origin of his name is lost in time.

The venerable statuette, officially named the Academy Award of Merit, is the child of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was created in 1927 as a small industry body to promote films.

Initially made up of 36 members with actor Douglas Fairbanks as its first president, the newly founded body created the golden trophy to honor performances by the industry’s leading actors, actresses and directors.

An art director from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, Cedric Gibbons, was selected to design the statuette — the figure of a knight standing on a reel of film, his hands gripping a sword.

From these humble beginnings was born an award that would become a global symbol of excellence.

The first Academy Awards were held on May 16, 1929 at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel.

They consisted of a simple dinner banquet attended by around 270 guests and Fairbanks handed out the 15 statuettes in just 15 minutes.

Ironically, the birthplace of the Oscars is just a short stroll from the Kodak Theatre, where more than 3,300 stars and Hollywood powerbrokers will gather for Sunday’s 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony.

Around 50 Oscars will be handed out during the glittering three-hour show, which over the years has expanded into a global spectacle with a red-carpet arrivals line that has become the world’s most glamorous fashion show.

Since the first awards ceremony, around 2,500 of the trophies have been handed out in an awards ceremony that has become bigger, glitzier and more glamorous over the years, with the exception of wartime shows.

The early editions of the statues were bronze, but during the World War II metals shortage, the trophies were made of plaster. Those were later redeemed for the now gold-plated ones.

The trophy, standing 34 centimeters (13.5 inches) tall and weighing 3.85 kilos (8.5 pounds), wasn’t always called an Oscar, but his form has not changed since his birth, except when his pedestal was raised 1945.

But the origin of the statuette’s nickname is unclear.

One legend has it that Academy librarian and eventual executive director Margaret Herrick thought it resembled her uncle Oscar and said so. Her staff began referring to it as Oscar.

Oscar-winner Bette Davis claimed she thought of the name because the nude statuette had a rear end that reminded her of the derriere of her husband Harmon Oscar Nelson.

Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky used the name in a 1934 column in referring to Katharine Hepburn’s first best actress win, but the Academy itself did not use the nickname officially until 1939.

Carried initially by radio, the Academy Awards were first televised in 1953 in black and white, making the jump to color in 1966.

In the early days, there was little suspense, as the results had been given to newspapers in advance for publication after the ceremony.

The invitation-only awards ceremony, which is now watched by up to one billion television viewers in more than 150 countries, has never been cancelled, though on rare occasion, the show was postponed.

Ceremonies were delayed in 1938 because of heavy flooding in Los Angeles, in 1968 after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, and in 1981 after the assassination attempt on one-time actor and then-president Ronald Reagan.

But just four days after the US-led war in Iraq erupted in 2003, the 75th anniversary edition of the show went ahead as scheduled, with only one nod to the circumstances — a smaller, more somber red carpet show.

Oscar has moved frequently over three-quarters of a century, shifting from hotels to venues such as the Dorothy Chandler Music Pavilion and the Shrine auditorium.

But in 2002, the Academy moved Hollywood’s biggest event into the new custom-built Kodak Theatre, a state-of-the-art auditorium in the heart of Hollywood, where Oscar was born

The troubled singer apparently phoned her ex-husband and threatened to plunge from the steep drop below LA’s Mulholland Drive.

She is said to have exclaimed: “I’m going to drive off the cliff! It’s going to be your fault that I killed myself.”

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A source explained to the News of the World: “Britney blows hot and cold. No one knows what’s going through her mind – especially her.”

A court recently awarded primary custody of their children Sean Preston and Jayden James to Federline. It came amid rumours that Spears has a drink problem.

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The ‘Mean Girls’ actress, who recently checked out of a rehab facility, allegedly spent $1 million on clothes, as well as $500,000 on nights out, a personal chauffeur and on a hotel suite at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood.

Between 2006 and 2007, Lohan also paid $137,000 for her treatment at the Cirque Lodge facility in Utah and $350,000 on legal fees for her two arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol.

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A source told UK newspaper the News of the World that she has now been forced to move back to Hollywood so that she can earn some of the money back, saying: “Lindsay doesn’t have much choice as she is totally broke. The only reason she’s coming back to LA is to earn some hard money, fast.

“She still thinks nothing of blowing thousands of dollars on a single night of partying.”

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Leadership (Abuja)

14 October 2007
Posted to the web 15 October 2007

The annual African Film and Arts Awards, otherwise known as the Afro-hollywood Awards, will celebrate its 12th edition on Saturday October 27 in London’s Hilton Metropole. The theme for this year’s ceremony, which will kick off with a conference to give the ceremony an intellectual content, according to the Founder and Chief Executive, Mr. Mike Abiola, is Globalisation of Nollywood: Opportunities for the Diaspora.

With the event being used as a platform to explore opportunities between Nollywood, its promoters and the African Diaspora in the UK, Abiola said that Afro-hollywood is expected to use this year’s event to attract more investors and further encourage British – Nigerian collaboration.

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“As the fastest growing Nigerian industry that has united the Diaspora community through the quality of entertainment and the popularity of their cast and crew, Nollywood serves very well as an effective marketing tool for companies seeking to deepen relations and gain greater exposure for their products with the African Diaspora,” he stated.

He said some high-flying professionals in events packaging, both in the UK and Nigeria, such as Aneka Johnson of Miss Black Britain and Christian Udechukwu of Business in Africa Events, have thrown their weights behind this year’s event to ensure that it meets the needs of the corporate sponsors. He added that this year’s event would be supported by the British Film Institute, the Nigerian Film Corporation and the National Film and Video Censors Board. And for the third consecutive year, Virgin Nigeria will be flying the Nollywood stars to receive their awards.

He explained that enormous media blitz has been accorded the previous editions of the event with a 30-minute airtime on Ben TV, London, every Sunday afternoon to show highlights from the previous ceremonies.

Meanwhile, the scramble for nomination among film professionals has commenced. Abiola said a list of Nollywood stars and some of the best African cinema actors from South Africa, Ghana, as well as a host of other celebrities that have attended in the past, would also be attending the event .

Abiola, who is the publisher of African Voice Newspapers, Britain’s leading newspaper for Africans, announced that 48 professionals in different areas of the movie industry had been nominated for this year’s awards. The list also includes culture administrators and art patrons across the continent.

However, it is only 18 out of those nominated that will be flown to London for the ceremony on October 27

Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman in A Mighty Heart.

Once branded a siren, Angelina Jolie is now known as a peace activist. She tells Ivor Davis about playing Mariane Pearl, whose husband was murdered by terrorists.

Not so long ago, Angelina Jolie was cast as Hollywood’s scarlet woman.

The headline-hugging actress had stolen Billy Bob Thornton from the arms of his actress fiancee Laura Dern. Jolie and Thornton then married, spoke endlessly about their choice of jewellery – vials of each other’s blood as a token of undying love – and then swiftly divorced.

Soon after, she ran off with her Mr And Mrs Smith co-star Brad Pitt, leaving his wife, Jennifer Aniston, bitter. Thereafter, Jolie was portrayed as a man-eating seductress with all the morals of an alley cat.

What a difference a few years and a ton of good publicity can make. The 32-year-old star with legendary pouting lips has turned it all around. She’s more likely to be seen on a list of the world’s most admired women than vamping it up with a new lover. She’s Hollywood’s No.1 female superstar but also a much-publicised humanitarian.

And Jolie has also managed to turn Pitt from another handsome Hollywood leading man into father-of-the-year material as they travel the globe with their four children – three adopted and their biological daughter, Shiloh.

It was a romance many predicted would quickly combust. On the contrary, it seems to go from strength to strength, as does Jolie’s respectability. She donates a third of her income to charity, she is goodwill ambassador of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and is undertaking philanthropic work all over the world.

As if this were not enough, Jolie is tipped to win her second Oscar when the little gold men are handed out next year. Jolie won a best supporting actress Academy Award in Girl, Interrupted and is a contender for another trip to the podium, this time for best actress, for her new drama A Mighty Heart, based on the book by Mariane Pearl.

In the movie, produced by Pitt and directed by Englishman Michael Winterbottom, Jolie plays Mariane, wife of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. In 2002 Daniel Pearl was on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan, with his wife. He was investigating the case of Richard Reid, the British shoe bomber, and alleged links between al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s intelligence services. He went off to interview a source and never returned. He had been kidnapped by Islamic militants and, despite worldwide efforts to have him released, he was executed by his captors who circulated a video of the killing.

Five years later and thousands of kilometres away, Jolie settles back in a suite at a luxury Beverly Hills hotel to discuss Daniel Pearl’s fate and the impact it had on Mariane, who was expecting the couple’s child at the time of the kidnapping. Toys are littered on the suite’s floor, although Jolie’s children, Maddox, 6, Pax, 3, Zahara, 2, and Shiloh, 16 months, are nowhere in sight.

Jolie admits that being a mother helped her understand some of the pain Mariane must have endured after Daniel’s kidnapping and the birth of their son, Adam, three months after her husband’s death.

“I think it just made me that much more aware of the great loss that she suffered at a time when she was pregnant,” Jolie says. “And then having that son. And thank God she was pregnant and she had Adam, which made everything deeper.

“Knowing there’s a little boy – that makes me think of my son – and knowing that one day he would see this film made us all work that much harder.”

However, she says it was by no means easy for her to play Mariane, a Paris-based journalist of Dutch-Jewish, Afro-Latino-Cuban-Chinese ancestry.

Even before filming, Jolie and Mariane had become friends after Pitt introduced them when he bought the rights to Mariane’s book.

There was a furore when it was announced that Jolie would play the part because earlier stories had suggested Pitt had bought the book so Aniston could play the part of Mariane. It seemed the Friends star, who divorced Pitt in 2005, had not just lost her husband but had been cheated out of a role that might have helped her campaign to be taken seriously as an actress.

Pitt now says: “I always thought Angelina would be perfect to play Mariane but even as the producer I knew it might be tricky to make it happen.”

Jolie says she, too, was very apprehensive about stepping into the role.

“The pressure was so much that I didn’t sleep the night before we began filming,” she says. “I questioned myself through the entire shooting. I respected Mariane before I met her, particularly the way she handled things in TV interviews. And when I met her I discovered what a lovely, gracious woman she is and what a great mother she is.”

Jolie was impressed by the way Mariane responded to her husband’s death, even going on television shortly after he had been murdered to say she knew that the families of 10 other Pakistanis killed were also suffering.

“I couldn’t understand how she was able to come to that place so quickly,” says Jolie, who lost her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, to ovarian cancer this year. “But when I got to know her I understood how she was able to cope.”

As a result, the actress felt she had an obligation to portray her friend correctly.

“She’s the last person I would want to disappoint in any way and it was a huge responsibility to not just try to be her in the film, but to be her during the most difficult time in her life and to try and interpret her pain and love for her husband.

“She had faith in me that I would be the right person to do it and I think without that I would never have ever taken the role.”

Jolie says she learnt a lot about herself from playing Mariane.

“I learnt to be even more tolerant. I think of myself as quite an open and tolerant person but I’m quick to anger and with situations like this I don’t know if I would have had the strength to do what she did.”

With her full schedule and her large brood, Jolie says she and Pitt know how important it is to have their priorities in order.

She insists that their youngsters have adjusted to their jet-set lifestyle and their multiple homes in different continents.

“The children seem to like travelling,” she says. “And we try to never leave them with too many things. Here we have video games but we don’t have video games in any of these other places. This hotel has a pool and that’s nice. And we make sure that they spend chunks of time with us.”

She says she often jokes about their lifestyle with Maddox .

“We’ll go somewhere like Cambodia,” she says. “We’ll take our shoes off and walk across the rocks. There was a time when he was starting to whine about little things like that. And I’ll tell him, ‘Everybody in Cambodia can walk like that. They get tough Cambodian feet, so we’ll take our shoes off and walk across the rocks and go eat a cricket.’

“With young kids you can make the differences of the world not uncomfortable and not weird but really exciting and really tough, cool and fun. So they seem to have a real joy. When we were preparing for this film we were in Namibia and they went to the bushmen’s school for a while and loved it.”

But despite her over-subscribed life, her ceaseless globe-trotting, her movie career and her other roles as a partner and mother, she claims she is firm about her goals.

“I like to take time off and try to do the things I want to do,” she says. “Like right now learn to speak French properly.”

And she wants a bigger family: “I want to have more kids and I want to get to know them and spend time with them and be home and make a lot of school lunches.”

But a busy lifestyle has its drawbacks, a fact Jolie acknowledges.

“I have lots of goals,” she says. “But at the end of the day I just want to keep going … I tend to make my life very crowded and I don’t give the things that matter as much time as they need sometimes. I try to do too much. That’s something I need to conquer.”

The rise and rise of Angelina

The daughter of Oscar winner Jon Voight, Angelina Jolie was destined for stardom at an early age.

She made her screen debut opposite her father in the 1982 comedy Lookin’ To Get Out, before taking acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Los Angeles.

After two years of studying “the method”, she dropped out to pursue a modelling career, which proved less than successful.

She returned to acting, hitting the big time in the 1997 telemovie George Wallace, which earned her a Golden Globe Award.

But it was not until the following year that she gained wide recognition for her portrayal of doomed, drug-addicted model Gia Carangi in the mini-series Gia.

Typically, the quixotic actress decided to quit acting after her breakthrough role, moving to New York to study writing and filmmaking and “collect” herself.

However, it was not long before casting directors were beating a path to her door and she took a role in Pushing Tin, opposite Cate Blanchett and Billy Bob Thornton, who was to become husband No.2 after her split with her Hackers co-star Jonny Lee Miller.

Then came her scene-stealing role as the psychotic Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted, which won her the Oscar for best supporting actress.

But the part that earned her international success and a permanent place on the bedroom walls of teenage boys the world over was the video game heroine Lara Croft. The two films in the series made millions at the box office and catapulted Jolie to becoming one of Hollywood’s highest-earning actresses, commanding $10 million to $15million a film.

A Mighty Heart opens on October 18.

Source: The Sun-Herald

	ایران در مراسم اسکار تا کنون موفقیتی نداشته است

کمیته معرفی نماینده سینمای ایران در اسکار امسال، نام هشت فیلمی را اعلام کرده که قرار است یکی از آنها به اسکار معرفی شود.

هر ساله در ایران برای معرفی نماینده سینمای ایران برای حضور در بخش فیلم های غیر انگلیسی زبان اسکار، کمیته ای تشکیل می شود.

در سال های گذشته خانه سینما به عنوان نهاد صنفی سینماگران در انتخاب اعضای این کمیته نقش مهمی داشت، اما طبق گزارش ها، امسال این نهاد، نقشی در انتخاب فیلم ها و اعضای کمیته انتخاب فیلم ها نداشته است.

علی معلم چندی پیش در حالی که مدیر روابط عمومی بنیاد فارابی خبر از تشکیل کمیته اسکار داده بود، از تشکیل این کمیته اظهار بی اطلاعی کرده بود و اکنون نیز که امیر اسفندیاری به عنوان سخنگوی این کمیته خبر های اولیه این کمیته را به صورت رسمی منتشر کرده است، نامی از خانه سینما در آن نیست .

به گزارش بنیاد سینمایی فارابی، امیر اسفندیاری سخنگوی کمیته اسکار اعضای کمیته را امیر اسفندیاری، محمد بزرگ نیا، کمال تبریزی، مجتبی راعی، محمدرضا سکوت، علیرضا شجاع نوری، رسول صدرعاملی، تقی علی قلی زاده و اکبر نبوی معرفی کرده است.

بر اساس این گزارش فیلم های “تقاطع” ساخته ابوالحسن داوودی، “پاداش سکوت” ساخته مازیار میری، “جایی در دوردست” ساخته خسرو معصومی، “خون بازی” ساخته رخشان بنی اعتماد و محسن عبدالوهاب، “زمستان است” ساخته رفیع پیتز، “شب به خیر فرمانده” ساخته انسیه شاه حسینی، “میم مثل مادر” ساخته رسول ملاقلی پور و “وقتی همه خواب بودند” ساخته فریدون حسن پور در مرحله نخست برگزیده شده و یکی از این فیلم ها برای اسکار انتخاب خواهد شد.

گفتنی است که فیلم هایی در بررسی اولیه حضور داشته اند که در فاصله شهریور سال گذشته تا امسال در سینماهای ایران به نمایش در آمده اند.

پیش از این برخی از مطبوعات خبر داده بودند که شانس فیلم خون بازی در این انتخاب بیش از بقیه فیلم هاست.

اسفندیاری درباره معیارهای انتخاب گفته است: “در نشست این کمیته محورهایی چون معیارها و نگاه های لازم در جریان انتخاب، بررسی فیلم های معرفی شده از سوی دیگر کشورها و قرائت فهرست فیلم های ایرانی به نمایش درآمده در فاصله زمانی نهم مهرماه ۸۵ تا هشتم مهرماه ۸۶ با توجه به قوانین و مقررات آن رویداد سینمایی مطرح و بررسی شد.

اسفندیاری تصریح کرد که طی چند روز آینده نتایج کار کمیته انتخاب فیلم ایرانی برای اسکار از سوی روابط عمومی بنیاد اعلام خواهد شد.

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