If Alfonso Cuarón’s film triumphs it will prompt some troubling questions for the Academy
If, as the bookies predict, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma triumphs at the Academy Awards, it will open a can of worms. No foreign-language film has ever won. Only two have been nominated for best picture this century (Amour and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). A win for Roma would make history. It would also bring up questions.
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Continue reading...I had to gain the confidence that always seemed to come naturally to my partner to release my inner handywoman
Last year my partner and I moved into a new house. The whole exercise was exhilarating – finally, a place we owned – but it also unearthed in me a desperation, a deep frustration. For a long time I’ve wanted to be someone who fixes things, builds things, someone who is capable in practical day-to-day tasks. I own tools, I have ideas and I tinker with my surroundings, but I’ve never felt completely at ease in the tasks that various men in my life seem to take on with no backward glance.
In our just-built house there were so many jobs to do with drills, hammers, caulking guns. My drive to learn by doing was offset by disorientation and self-doubt. I wanted to begin improving our house, but I didn’t know what sort of screws I needed for the curtain rod brackets, or whether I could just drill straight into the plasterboard. My partner, a man, didn’t have much more experience in these things than I did, but approached the situation with a confidence and bluster that only confused me more.
Continue reading...Computer game-themed event near Norwich underwhelming and understaffed, visitors say
Hundreds of people have demanded refunds after a Fortnite computer game-themed festival was branded a shambles.
The two-day Fortnite Live event at Norfolk showground near Norwich had visitors queueing for hours to enter the site and collect wristbands on Saturday. Attendees complained that the attractions were underwhelming and understaffed.
Continue reading...In 2015, James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker. His new novel is a hotly anticipated African fantasy epic and here he talks about loving the X-Men, coming out and writing about violence
It’s two days before the US release of Marlon James’s much-hyped fourth novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf and the prizewinning Jamaican author has an air of baffled, exhausted ebullience about him. He’s no stranger to critical success: he won the 2015 Man Booker prize for his violent, multi-voiced epic, A Brief History of Seven Killings. But it feels like this new book will propel James into a new galaxy of literary stardom.
We’ve arranged to have lunch – on a balmy Sunday in early February – at the Commodore, a carefully shabby Williamsburg diner near his Brooklyn apartment. Brawnily broad-shouldered, his dreadlocked hair tied back in a ponytail, James has arrived before me. We’re shown to seats at the bar where low winter sun slants through the blinds on to the bar top. James tells me it feels like summer to him – he spends much of his time teaching creative writing at Macalester College in Minnesota – and as if to prove it asks the waiter for an Aperol spritz.
Continue reading...Decision to relegate four awards, including best cinematography and best editing overturned following protests by Martin Scorsese, Brad Pitt and others
Bowing to a backlash that had threatened to engulf an already blunder-plagued Academy Awards, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ampas) reversed its decision to present four awards during the commercial breaks of this year’s Oscar broadcast.
Related: Who should win? Critic Peter Bradshaw's Oscars picks
Continue reading...Aparicio, the first indigenous woman to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, responds to Sergio Goyri’s ‘fucking Indian’ remark
The Oscar-nominated Mexican actor Yalitza Aparicio, who stars in the critically acclaimed film Roma, said on Saturday she was proud of her indigenous roots, after a soap opera star used a racial slur to describe her.
Related: Why Roma should win the best picture Oscar
Continue reading...The Atlanta-based rapper 21 Savage did not talk about his British citizenship before because he didn’t want to get deported.
Continue reading...Chugging through townships, maize fields and scrubland as the sun rises, Zimbabwe’s only commuter train is cheap and reliable – two qualities its passengers cherish in a downwards-spiralling economy
Each morning sleepy travellers walk to the tracks and clamber aboard Zimbabwe’s only commuter train as it prepares to leave the Cowdray Park settlement at 6am and embark on its 12-mile (20km) journey into Bulawayo, the country’s second city.
Continue reading...Collection of writings just released includes references to rape of then-wife Jackie Sturm, herself an acclaimed poet and author
A new collection of letters from one of New Zealand’s most significant poets, James K Baxter, that includes a blunt admission of marital rape is causing shockwaves through the literary community.
Baxter died in Auckland in 1972 but remains one of New Zealand’s literary giants. He achieved international attention in the late 1950s after Oxford University Press published his poetry collection, In Fires Of No Return.
Continue reading...So-called alternative musicians pride themselves on being more enlightened than their rock counterparts, but in my years of writing about them, I have found no end of ‘beta male misogyny’
I wish I could say I was surprised by the New York Times report detailing allegations that the singer-songwriter Ryan Adams offered to mentor young women, before pursuing them sexually and turning nasty after they turned him down. His ex-wife, the musician and actor Mandy Moore, described him as “psychologically abusive”. When the musician Phoebe Bridgers began a relationship with Adams after he offered to mentor her – at the time he was 40, she 20 – she said he quickly became emotionally abusive and manipulative, “threatening suicide” if she didn’t reply to his texts immediately.
Stories like these are eminently familiar to me and many other women who work in the music industry. Surely to men, too, although if they talk about them, it’s rarely to us women. The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms, partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure – but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core. The male genius is the norm from which everyone else deviates. He sells records, concert tickets and magazines. And because he resembles most of the men who run the industry, few of them are in any hurry to act when he is accused of heinous behaviour, lest their own actions come into question.
Continue reading...Mythological hunter is depicted enraptured by his own reflection
Archaeologists working in a richly decorated house in ancient Pompeii have discovered a stunningly preserved fresco depicting the mythological hunter Narcissus enraptured by his own reflection in a pool of water.
The figure of Narcissus, who according to the myth fell in love with his own image to the point that he melted from the fire of passion burning inside him, was a fairly common theme in the first-century Roman city.
Continue reading...Installation will transform cathedral floor to mark 50 years since Apollo 11 moon landing
It’s hard to imagine anything less like a lunar landscape than the medieval glories of Lichfield Cathedral. But this summer, an artist will transform its magnificent tiled floor into a representation of the moon’s surface to mark half a century since Neil Armstrong took “one small step for [a] man and one giant leap for mankind”.
The three-spired cathedral in Staffordshire has commissioned the art installation as part of its annual summer show, which this year is called Space, God, the Universe and Everything. Peter Walker, the cathedral’s artist-in-residence, will also use light and sound installations inspired by space and the planets.
Continue reading...Street artist Mr June brings facades to life with his abstract, colourful designs
The Dutch artist David Louf, who goes by Mr June, is the person behind these striking 3D hexagon murals, which have appeared on walls from Berlin to the Bronx.
Louf grew up in Amsterdam immersed in hip-hop and graffiti, and turned to graphic design as an adult. Eight years ago he moved back to street art and now combines his skills to create vibrant, abstract murals on buildings across the world.
Continue reading...After 27 years in the movies, the X-Men and True Blood star is sick of having to work extra hard and be extra nice simply because she is a woman
Anna Paquin is supposed to be having a day off. She has been working for two weeks straight, with no break at the weekend, and she has six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. “So I’m a wee bit tired. But good, really good,” she says. She is dipping into her free time to talk about her new TV series, Flack, because she is not only starring in it, but executive-producing it, too, and it is co-produced through her own company, Casm. She has spent five years trying to get it off the ground, in stops and starts, and they finished filming it just four days before we meet. Hence the tiredness? She nods. “It’s not a name-only credit. I’m a huge control freak. I’m involved in every single aspect of every single decision.”
In person, Paquin is brisk, earnest and articulate, and careful with her words. She was born in Canada in 1982, but grew up in New Zealand, then moved to the US as a teenager for work. She has been in front of the camera since she was nine, when she was cast in Jane Campion’s film The Piano. “I entered this industry in a very backwards sort of way,” she says. “I did one job, won an Oscar, and then people said: ‘Ooh, you have a career now.’” She points out, though, that there is a wealth of talented women in her age group, which means she will “still have to audition my arse off for stuff I really want”, but it does mean that she can generally work on things that she wants to. “I do have the luxury of being a little more choosy because of the circumstances of my career.”
Continue reading...Wandering Earth on track to be one of highest-grossing films in country’s history
China has entered the cinematic space race. Wandering Earth, the country’s first blockbuster sci-fi film, is on track to be one of the highest-grossing films in China’s history.
The film has brought in more than 2bn yuan (£232m) in the six days since its release on 5 February, lunar new year. So far, it is the highest-grossing film released over the holiday season, a peak time for the Chinese box office.
Continue reading...Kacey Musgraves, Childish Gambino, Lady Gaga and Cardi B took home major prizes in a ceremony that provided some landmark victories
There was no clear sweep at the Grammys on Sunday night, fitting for a show that has publicly struggled to address its issues with diversity. The 61st Grammys, held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, handed awards to a range of genre-bending musical, logging several notable firsts in the process.
Related: Grammy awards 2019: full list of winners
Continue reading...As the British comedian’s show returns, he discusses fighting fake news, why Brexit is worse than Trump’s presidency – and his attempt to convert his kids to Marmite
The Donald Trump presidency, John Oliver observed in 2017, is a marathon. “It’s painful, it’s pointless and the majority of you didn’t even agree to run it; you were just signed up by your dumbest friend,” he told viewers. “And though you’re exhausted and your whole body is screaming for you to give up and your nipples are chafing for some reason, the stakes are too high for any of us to stop.”
Activists, politicians, judges, journalists and concerned citizens are all running the race. Some have embraced the challenge and now, past the halfway point, are finding hope as they see the 2020 election on the horizon. Others have wobbled, legs buckling, consumed by the anxiety that they will never make it. Oliver, a cheerful and charming presence in a conference room at HBO’s headquarters in New York, is surely one of those runners wearing a wacky costume, pointing out the absurdity of the exercise while embodying the stamina and stoicism required to reach the finish line.
Continue reading...Criminal undercurrents in a sleepy Greek backwater provide the pretext for a disquieting spectacle of strangeness
A drumbeat of anxiety and impending violence thuds insistently from this opaque, disquieting spectacle from Greek film-maker Syllas Tzoumerkas – who has previously directed challenging films such as Homeland (2010) and A Blast (2014) and was screenwriter on the excellent male-midlife breakdown satire Suntan (2016).
Tzoumerkas’s movie goes out on a creaking limb of weirdness. It’s a bizarre, occasionally almost Lynchian film, alienated and alienating, interspersed – initially, at any rate – with dream-visions of biblical scenes in the burning sun. Its borderline preposterous narrative may simply be the pretext for its tableau of strangeness and bacchanal of dysfunction.
Continue reading...It’s a thrilling time to be in movies, says the Oscar-winning director of If Beale Street Could Talk. He talks to playwright Roy Williams about his sky-high hopes for the next generation
“So, you saw the film?” Barry Jenkins is eager to ask the minute we are introduced. He gives good eye contact through those stylish thick-rimmed glasses – not the big-time, Oscar-winning writer-director speaking, but a nervous artist, anxious about the new work he is starting to screen. I love it, I tell him. If Beale Street Could Talk may be only Jenkins’ third feature-length film, but it has already been nominated for three Oscars (best adapted screenplay, best supporting actress, best score), just two years after his Moonlight walked away with the Academy Award for best film. A passionate film about race and love, it’s an added pleasure to see black characters of such complexity on the big screen. British film industry, kindly take note.
Adapted from James Baldwin’s 1974 novel, Beale Street tells the story of a young black couple in 1970s Harlem. When Tish (KiKi Layne) becomes pregnant, they plan to marry – until her fiance Fonny (Stephan James) is set up by a racist police officer for a rape he did not commit. The film explores the different reactions of their siblings and parents, led by Regina King in a standout performance as Tish’s mother, as they fight for Fonny’s freedom.
Continue reading...Celebrated actor who rose to fame in the ‘kitchen sink’ era before evolving into one of the screen greats of the postwar period, has died
• Albert Finney – a life in pictures
Albert Finney, who forged his reputation as one of the leading actors of Britain’s early 60s new wave cinema, has died aged 82 after a short illness, his family have announced. In 2011, he disclosed he had been suffering from kidney cancer.
A publicist told the Guardian that Finney died of a chest infection at the Royal Marsden hospital, which specialises in cancer treatment, just outside London. His wife, Pene, and son, Simon, were by his side.
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