Category Archives: Culture

Historic wins for Nomadland – and surprise victory for Anthony Hopkins – at odd Oscars

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Chloé Zhao made history as the first woman of colour to win best director with her drama about van-dwellers as Hopkins and Frances McDormand won top acting honours

During an unusual Oscars ceremony, on-the-road drama Nomadland triumphed with a win for best picture, best actress and a historic victory for Chloé Zhao, becoming the first woman of colour to be named best director and only the second woman ever.

The film, starring Frances McDormand as a woman living out of her van and interacting with real-life nomads, took home the top trophy near the end of a delayed night and a delayed season amid the pandemic. The ceremony played out in person but with safety precautions and a modest guest list.

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Oscars 2021 live: Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung wins best supporting actress

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At the 93rd Academy Awards, Chloé Zhao wins best director for Nomadland and Daniel Kaluuya wins best supporting actor for Judas and the Black Messiah

Oscar winners 2021: the full list – updating live!

Oscars 2021: predictions, timetable and what to expect

Angela Bassett is here to introduce the In Memoriam segment. This has been a genuinely miserable year, and the faces of people we lost are speeding through at a genuinely unprecedented rate, which only really serves to make the whole thing even sadder.

The culmination of the pub station is Glenn Close twerking. Glenn Close twerking during a pub quiz in a train station. And to think people probably aren’t watching this.

GLENN CLOSE DOING "DA BUTT" #Oscars pic.twitter.com/AwhR46pmWX

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Youn Yuh-jung wins best supporting actress Oscar for Minari

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South Korean follows her Bafta win with an Academy Award for Minari, in which she played a ‘grandma’ living on a farm in Arkansas

South Korean performer Youn Yuh-jung has won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role in Minari at the 93rd Academy Awards, which are taking place in Los Angeles.

In Minari, Youn plays Soon-ja, “grandma” to young David, who comes from Korea to stay with the family on their farm in Arkansas. She brings with her the “minari” seeds that gives the film its title.

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Guardian film Colette wins Oscar for best documentary short

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Film about a former resistance fighter travelling to visit the concentration camp where her brother died wins prize at the 93rd Academy Awards

• Watch the Guardian’s Oscar winning film, Colette

Colette, a film released by the Guardian, has won the Oscar for best documentary short at the 93rd Academy Awards in Los Angeles.

Written and directed by Anthony Giacchino, and produced by Alice Doyard, Annie Small and Aaron Matthews, Colette tells the story of 90-year-old former French resistance member Colette Marin-Catherine, who visits the concentration camp where her brother was murdered during the war with a young history student, Lucie Fouble.

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Alber Elbaz, a fashion designer who made women feel happy and confident

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Elbaz redefined the party dress, showing how glamour could be sensual rather than overtly sexy

Alber Elbaz will be remembered for his heart. Emotion was at the core of every dress he designed. The signature that ran through every one of his catwalk shows was not a hemline or a logo, but a feeling of joyfulness. His jewel-coloured, goddess-draped dresses made women feel happy and confident – and because they felt happy and confident, they looked beautiful.

Elbaz, who has died from Covid-19 aged 59, was at the centre of the fashion industry for over three decades, riding both its highs and its lows as he transformed the fortunes of the dormant house of Lanvin before being unceremoniously dropped in 2015.

Through three turbulent decades, no one in the industry had a bad word to say about him – quite an achievement in the fickle world of thousand-pound frocks. Warm and funny with a shy, neurotic charm, he was a confidant and therapist to his movie-star clients and his loyal seamstresses alike. When he appeared at the end of a catwalk for his brief bow, looking like a bespectacled teddy bear in a bow tie, the applause was always thunderous. His death has sent shockwaves through the industry, not just for being sudden and unexpected, but because Elbaz was loved.

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Meet the miniaturist whose tiny homes are a delight

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Carmen Mazarrasa builds exquisite doll’s houses where she can control everything – except when the mice decide to move in…

At moments of unrest I open Instagram and scroll impatiently until I see what I need to see, and then I exhale, a gleeful loosening. What I am looking for is something recognisable – a plant, a pencil, a chair, a bowl of dumplings – shrunk to a fraction of its size. How to describe the pleasure, the sweet, squealy pleasure of studying a miniature iPhone, suitable only for a busy mouse, or smoked salmon bagel that would fit on the head of a pin, or a set of tools balanced on a fingernail? My favourites are the miniatures that are truly banal – a plug extension lead on @DailyMini recently thrilled me, as did a rack of postcards showing scenes from holidays appropriate only for ants. In those moments of tightening stress, when the world feels far too large, I have plenty to choose from.

The world of tiny things is growing. Artists sculpting miniature objects have found new audiences on Instagram and clients on Etsy – a recent purchase of mine on eBay was a gutted fish on a plate, at 1/12th its real size. I am also watching a pack of crumpets. Once the stuff of elderly hobbyists, over the past decade miniature making among millennials has seen a boom. The queen of the miniacs is Carmen Mazarrasa, whose tiny rooms, filled with covetable things, make the viewer feel wobbly, both at the scale and their desire. Because it’s not just that the rooms of rugs or ceramics or beds look real, it’s that they look like rooms you might see in Architectural Digest, filled with artful paintings and replicas of iconic chairs.

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Graham Norton: ‘I’m always aware my mother will read the sex scenes’

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The chatshow host on his new novel, his pride in appearing on RuPaul’s Drag Race and why Ireland is in a sweet spot right now

Broadcaster and author Graham Norton, 58, grew up in County Cork. He moved to London to go to drama school, before becoming a standup comedian. His TV breakthrough was in the sitcom Father Ted. His BBC chatshow began in 2007 and has won five Baftas, while his Virgin Radio show is broadcast on weekend mornings. Norton has commentated on the Eurovision song contest since 2009 and is a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. His third novel, Home Stretch, is out in paperback this week.

Home Stretch traces the fallout from a car crash. Was it based on a real-life incident?
It’s based on a whole phenomenon. Every summer in Ireland, there are these crashes of cars with too many young people in them. Sometimes, there might be drink involved, but often it’s just reckless driving and the confidence of youth. Because it’s a much smaller country, these stories make the national news and what I noticed was that often the driver survived. That was my starting point – I thought, what happens to that life? It’s hardly begun but it’s blighted by this awful tragedy.

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‘They’re stealing our customers and we’ve had enough’: is Deliveroo killing restaurant culture?

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The takeaway service may have felt like a lifeline during lockdown, but its ambitious vision will dramatically change the way we eat

Shukran Best Kebab – the finest Turkish restaurant in the Seven Sisters area of north London, according to some people (although it is surrounded by fierce rivals to the throne) – joined Deliveroo two years ago, and back then it seemed like a no-brainer. “Life as a small, independent restaurant is hard and the profit margins are slim,” says Hüseyin Kurt, Shukran’s owner. “We wanted more customers and money coming in and Deliveroo seemed to offer that. I didn’t think there was a downside.” Within a few days of signing a contract with the company, a shiny new tablet computer arrived on which orders placed via Deliveroo appeared out of the ether with a satisfying ping.

The sense that something was wrong dawned gradually. Kurt, a gregarious, bearded man in his early 40s, who left his central Anatolian home town in 1995 and used his love of food to build a new life in the UK, ran the numbers: with Deliveroo’s commission amounting to 35% plus VAT on every order, he was forced to increase his prices to avoid losing money on each sale. It meant anyone buying his huge adana kofte or mixed shish kebabs through the Deliveroo app was in effect paying three surcharges for the convenience, as Deliveroo was also charging them a delivery and service fee. That went down badly with previously loyal customers who were presented with a vast number of often heavily discounted competitors when using the app.

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Real-life plot twists leave Oscars struggling to adapt to new reality

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Lockdowns, the rise of streaming and demands for diversity are forcing change on the 93rd Academy Awards

No full-blown red carpet, no outfit questions, no after-parties – many involved in Sunday’s Oscars are happy to take a break from a four-hour seated ceremony that, some argue, has long put the movie industry’s in-house favourites, the promotion of luxury lifestyles and virtue-signalling ahead of peer-reviewed creative recognition.

The event has been under reconstruction since the #OscarsSoWhite campaign forced an expansion of the voting body’s membership and drafting of inclusivity requirements that will come into effect next year.

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Secrets of a tree whisperer: ‘They get along, they listen – they’re attuned’

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Suzanne Simard revolutionised the way we think about plants and fungi with the discovery of the woodwide web. The ecologist’s new book shares the wisdom of a life of listening to the forest

When Suzanne Simard made her extraordinary discovery – that trees could communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi – the scientific establishment underreacted. Even though her doctoral research was published in the Nature journal in 1997 – a coup for any scientist – the finding that trees are more altruistic than competitive was dismissed by many as if it were the delusion of an anthropomorphising hippy.

Today, at 60, she is professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia and her research of more than three decades as a “forest detective” is recognised worldwide. In her new book, Finding the Mother Tree – a scientific memoir as gripping as any HBO drama series – she wants it understood that her work has been no brief encounter: “I want people to know that what I’ve discovered has been about my whole life.” Her moment has come: research into forest ecosystems and mycorrhizal networks (those built of connections between plants and fungi) is now mainstream and there is a hunger for books related to the subject: Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life – about the hidden life of fungi – extend her thinking about the “woodwide web”, while the heroine of Richard Powers’s Pulitzer prize-winning 2018 novel The Overstory is said to have been inspired by Simard.

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Joanna Lumley: ‘I love Patsy because we’re such polar opposites…’

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The actor, 74, on Ab Fab, recycling, President Clinton and why you can’t be happy all the time

The nuns at convent school wore black stockings under their long habits and wimples. They were part of the Blue Stockings teaching community, and more concerned with turning us into interesting, strong women than anything holy.

We followed my father’s regiment in the Gurkhas from India to Hong Kong and Malaysia. My memories are of a bungalow that looked out over a little air strip where biplanes would land and the spotlight from a prison camp that flicked through my bedroom windows.

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Rudy Giuliani wins a Razzie for his role in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

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Singer-songwriter Sia picks up three Golden Raspberry Awards for her controversial film on autism

The former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, has been awarded a Razzie for one of the year’s worst performances for his unwitting appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen’s sequel to Borat.

The Golden Raspberry Awards, colloquially known as Razzies, are an annual prize for Hollywood’s lowlights, taking place the day before the lavish Oscars ceremony.

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‘In the game, I knew myself as Hannah’: the trans gamers finding freedom on Roblox

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37m people use the gaming platform every day in search of adventure – and for teenagers exploring their gender identity, it is also a place of liberation

When she was a child, Hannah discovered two portals to other worlds. The first was her Nintendo 64, which could transport her to the dark dungeons of Zelda and the chaotic battlefields of Super Smash Bros. The second was her mother’s wardrobe in their Devon home, full of clothes she longed to try on, even though this was forbidden. Hannah had been assigned male at birth and raised as a boy; she feared her mother would not approve of her son trying on dresses. It wasn’t until a decade later that Hannah would come out as transgender, identify as female, and adopt her current name.

She vividly remembers the first time she explored that wardrobe, at the age of nine. Her mother was at work, her father asleep downstairs in his chair. Hannah crept into their bedroom and tentatively opened a drawer. She took out a silky nightgown and shrugged it on, feeling the instant, giddy rush of something she would later learn to call “gender euphoria”, though it was tempered by fear that someone would walk in. As if on cue, her mother returned from work unexpectedly and caught Hannah in the act.

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‘Like losing a hand’: musicians on the crisis in hearing loss

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Oscar-nominated film Sound of Metal depicts a drummer battling hearing loss. As rock stars like Myles Kennedy explain, it’s a debilitating and worryingly widespread problem

The Bafta-winning film Sound of Metal dramatises every musician’s worst nightmare. Ruben Stone, played by Riz Ahmed – who is up for a best actor Oscar this weekend – is a metal drummer who loses his hearing, and the film depicts Ruben’s loss exactly as he hears it, where the world around him and the intense music he plays suddenly fade to a muted and distorted drone.

These scary and involving scenes have highlighted a crisis in hearing damage right across the music industry, be it through deafness or tinnitus (a constant ringing in the ears). In a report published last month by the British Tinnitus Association (BTA), over half of the 74 tinnitus-suffering musicians surveyed said they developed the condition due to noise exposure, but nearly a quarter said they never wore hearing protection.

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Did art peak 30,000 years ago? How cave paintings became my lockdown obsession

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Portraiture, perspective, impressionism, movement, mythology: cave artists could do the lot. And I have spent the past year on a virtual odyssey of their primordial wonders

I was recently awoken in the night by lions, their eyes glaring in the dark from blunt rectangular faces as they stalked bison through an ancient, arid grassland. As I came to, however, I realised I was not about to be eaten alive. This was simply one of the perils of spending too much time looking at images of cave art on the web.

Cave artists could do it all. The faces of the animals they painted are exquisite portraits, while their bodies are rendered in perfect perspective. But wait – weren’t these supposed to be the great achievements of European art? After all, in his classic study The Story of Art, EH Gombrich tells how western art took off when the ancient Greeks learned how to show movement, that the perspective was discovered in 15th-century Europe, and that the communication of sensation rather than the seen was the gift of the impressionists. Gombrich had probably not seen much cave art. Lascaux, a series of caves in the French Dordogne, was a recent discovery when he published his book in 1950 – and Chauvet, also in France, wouldn’t be found until 1994.

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Mona Eltahawy: ‘Feminism is not a T-shirt or a 9 to 5 job. It’s my existence’

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One of the fiercest voices of Middle Eastern feminism, the author of The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls explains her mission to ‘destroy patriarchy’

Every morning, Mona Eltahawy carefully lines her eyes in thick kohl. “It’s a ritual I gift to myself every morning,” explains the 53-year-old Egyptian author, journalist and feminist activist. “Holding that brush is like being a calligrapher, and I consider lining my eyes as a way of writing a love letter to myself. It’s a form of adornment, but it also connects me to my Egyptian heritage, because in ancient Egypt, men and women of all social classes wore eyeliner. It has become a kind of self-care for me since the pandemic began.”

We are speaking via Zoom, with Eltahawy in Montreal, where she lives with her partner. Behind her is a framed portrait of the Egyptian blogger and women’s rights activist Aliaa Mahdy, by the Canadian artist Nadine Faraj. Eltahawy speaks fast, beaded earrings swinging from her ears, often pausing to run her hand through her close-cropped hair; she shaved her long red hair in May. “Red was my power before,” she says, “but to signal power now, I wanted to shave it all off, to say, ‘This is the pandemic me that is emerging.’” Eltahawy is not one for the unexamined life. She is likable, earnest and sincere.

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And the winner should be … Peter Bradshaw’s predictions for the 2021 Oscars

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Will Nomadland clean up this year? Will Anthony Hopkins get best actor? Our film critic gives the low down on the contenders for the Academy Awards

Will win: Nomadland
Should win: Nomadland
Shoulda been a contender: Quo Vadis, Aida?

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‘Damn! This is a Caravaggio!’: the inside story of an old master found in Spain

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Art dealer Giancarlo Ciaroni attempted to buy painting listed at €1,500 for €500,000 – but discovered bewildered owners already had two offers of €3m

It took all of six minutes for Massimo Pulini to realise that the small oil painting due to go under the hammer in Madrid earlier this month with a guide price of €1,500 (£1,300) could be worth millions.

At 9.48pm on 24 March, Pulini, a 63-year-old professor at the Bologna Fine Arts Academy, received an email request for an evaluation. Sent by an antiques dealer and friend of Pulini’s, it included a photo of a luminous oil painting of the scourged Christ.

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