Category Archives: Oscars

Oscar-winning director Asghar Farhadi faces plagiarism trial in Iranian court

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Director and grand prix winner at last year’s Cannes festival for A Hero was sued by former student for using story from her documentary without credit

Asghar Farhadi, the Oscar winning director of A Separation and The Salesman, has been indicted in a plagiarism case brought by one of his former students, who had claimed he took the idea for his 2021 film A Hero from a documentary she had made for a film class.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Azadeh Masihzadeh brought the case after Farhadi had earlier sued her for defamation; in both cases the courts ruled in Masihzadeh’s favour. The case will now pass to a second judge whose ruling will decide whether or not Farhadi will be convicted. This can then be appealed.

This article was amended on 5 April 2022. It had been originally stated that Asghar Farhadi was convicted of the crime, following widespread misinformation, but has now been changed to reflect that he has been indicted and a trial will decide the outcome.

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Will Smith resigns from Academy, saying he betrayed its trust

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Actor will accept ‘any further consequences’ the body’s board considers appropriate after Oscars slap

Will Smith has resigned from Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars ceremony, saying that he “betrayed the trust of the Academy” and will accept “any further consequences”.

In a statement released on Friday afternoon, the actor described his actions at the 94th Academy Awards as “shocking, painful, and inexcusable”.

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Not just ‘cocaine and war’: Colombian pride at Oscar-winning Encanto’s positive portrayal

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Animated film, influenced heavily by magical realism, breaks frequent representation as country beset by drugs and violence

When Encanto was announced the winner of the Oscar for best animated film on Sunday night, Martín Anzellini – the Colombian architect who helped develop the film’s representation of his home country – had little idea. Instead, he was watching Encanto at home with his twin toddler daughters, who had yet to see it.

“Once we finished watching the film, I checked my phone and saw my WhatsApp was going wow!” Anzellini said. “It was so exciting, I almost cried. And I hugged my daughters, as my work on the film was for them.”

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Will Smith apologizes to Chris Rock, Academy and viewers for onstage slap

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Actor says attacking the comedian was ‘out of line’ and calls violence of all kinds ‘poisonous and destructive’

Will Smith has issued an apology to Chris Rock, the Academy and viewers after slapping the comedian on stage at the 94th Academy Awards, saying he was “out of line” and that his actions were “not indicative of the man I want to be”.

The fallout from Sunday’s show continued on Monday as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences condemned Smith’s onstage assault and said it would launch an inquiry. Smith apologised to the Academy during his best actor acceptance speech, which notably didn’t include an apology to Rock.

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Oscars 2022: Coda triumphs while Will Smith attacks Chris Rock onstage

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The drama picked up three major awards, including best picture, while best actor winner Will Smith had a viral confrontation

Coda has been named this year’s best picture at an Oscars ceremony that featured an unusual confrontation between Will Smith and Chris Rock.

The Apple TV+ drama, bought from 2021’s Sundance film festival for a record-breaking $25m, became the first film from a streamer to win the award. It’s a remake of French film La Famille Bélier, focusing on the only hearing member of a deaf family.

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‘This is going to be cherished’: Samuel L Jackson and Elaine May receive honorary Oscars

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Liv Ullmann and Danny Glover also honoured at Governors Awards, on night when Hollywood lavishes praise on beloved stars for lifetime achievements

Samuel L Jackson grew up watching movies on Saturdays at the Liberty and the Grand, segregated movie theatres in Tennessee. Some of the early roles he got in Hollywood didn’t even have names: he was cast, he said, as “gang member number two’, ‘bum’, ‘hold-up man’, and, unforgettable, ‘Black guy’.” But over fifty years and 152 films later, Jackson has made himself one of America’s most enduring film stars, as well as the actor whose movies have earned “more than any other actor in history,” his friend and fellow star Denzel Washington said. Jackson’s box office total is estimated at $27bn.

Despite this, Jackson, 73, had never won a single Oscar, not even for his celebrated performance as a hit man in Pulp Fiction. The Academy finally awarded him an honorary Oscar on Friday, as part of the annual Governors Awards, which mark lifetime achievement in film and in humanitarian efforts.

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Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes to host the Oscars

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The comedic trio are expected to be formally announced as hosts, the show’s first since 2018, on Good Morning America on Tuesday

Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes will host the 94th Academy Awards this year, Variety reported on Monday. The trio of female comedic actors, who are expected to be formally announced on Good Morning America on Tuesday, will be the struggling show’s first hosts since 2018.

Schumer, Hall and Sykes are tasked with providing some zest for a program whose ratings have flagged in recent years. Viewership for last year’s scaled-backed ceremony, held in Los Angeles’s Union Station, fell by more than half from the previous year, which itself was a record-breaking low.

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Jane Campion: the uncompromising New Zealander kicking down doors in Hollywood

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The film-maker is the first woman to be nominated twice for the best director Oscar – but thanks to her example, others will surely follow soon

The nomination of Jane Campion for best director at the 2022 Academy Awards – her second, following her 1994 nomination for The Piano – is more noteworthy for what it says about the institution than for its validation of the 67-year-old director, absent from feature film-making for more than a decade.

To date, only two women – Kathryn Bigelow and Chloé Zhao – have ever won best director. If that sounds unreasonable, consider this: in 93 years, just seven women have even been nominated for the award – Lina Wertmüller in 1977 (for Seven Beauties), Campion in 1994, Sofia Coppola in 2003 (for Lost in Translation), Bigelow in 2010 (for The Hurt Locker), Greta Gerwig in 2018 (for Lady Bird), Emerald Fennell in 2021 (for Promising Young Woman) and Zhao that same year, victorious with Nomadland. For the first half-century of the awards, double-X chromosomes and the ability to successfully oversee a motion picture were apparently believed to be irreconcilable. (Something to consider the next time the rightwing media complains about Hollywood’s liberal bias.)

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My award goes to… our film critics reveal their personal Oscars shortlists

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Ahead of the official Academy nominations on Tuesday, Observer film critics pick their own favourites

Amid the hype over her acclaimed performance as Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer, Kristen Stewart briefly stopped awards pundits dead in their tracks when, upon being asked about her Oscar buzz, she drily admitted, “I don’t give a shit.” Sacrilege! Some of the best films and performances of all time haven’t been considered by the Academy, she continued. “There’s five spots. What the fuck are you going to do?”

Nobody disagrees with Stewart on any of this: just ask our critics, whose ideal Oscar ballots below are knowingly far from the expected reality of next week’s nominations. That the actor’s comments made showbiz headlines anyway speaks to the strange aura the Oscars maintain as a gold standard of cinematic achievement: for several months a year, people fret and discuss and strategise about them, while companies expensively campaign for them, only to spend the rest of the year complaining that they don’t mean anything anyway. Even Stewart’s scepticism emerged while on the campaign trail, being interviewed on a Variety podcast named Awards Circuit. Should she win for Spencer, she’ll doubtless turn up and give a humbly grateful speech anyway. That’s the game. Nobody gives a shit about the Oscars, after all, except when everyone does.

Here, then, are our critics’ picks of who and what should be on those Oscars shortlists. Guy Lodge

PETITE MAMAN

Summer of Soul

The Green Knight

Titane

Censor

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Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi: ‘Global recognition is double-edged’

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He has been detained at airports and told never to return to Iran. But the director, who could be about to win his third Oscar, refuses to be silenced about outrages in his own country – and in the west

Withdrawing your film from the Oscars would be career suicide for most directors, but in November Asghar Farhadi appeared to do precisely that. Shortly after Iran’s state-controlled film board put his movie, A Hero, up for the best international feature Oscar, Farhadi released a statement on Instagram saying he was “fed up” with suggestions in Iranian media that he was sympathetic to the country’s hardline government. “If your introduction of my film for the Oscars has led you to the conclusion that I am in your debt,” he wrote, “I am explicitly declaring now that I have no problem with you reversing this decision.”

Farhadi, it could be argued, can afford to make such a gesture. He has already won two international feature Oscars – for A Separation in 2012 and The Salesman in 2017 – and many more awards besides (A Hero won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year). Such achievements inevitably convey national hero status. At the same time, he seems to have trodden a careful line when it comes to his country’s oppressive regime. Other Iranian film-makers, such as Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, have paid a heavy price for criticising aspects of Iranian society, from prison sentences and house arrests to travel bans. Farhadi seems to have been spared similar treatment. Hence the accusations that he was “pro- government”.

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Need a warped, tortured or evil character for a Hollywood film? Cast a British actor

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UK stars Olivia Colman, Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch are all in demand with US directors. We look at why

A sensitive, geeky youth, stuck on a lonely cattle ranch, might understandably yearn for a kindly uncle figure; someone to confide in, or be mentored by. But the companionship actor Benedict Cumberbatch offers his brother’s stepson, Peter, in the widely Oscar-tipped western Power of the Dog is a very long, precarious horse ride away from anything avuncular.

In fact, Cumberbatch’s portrayal of the emotionally thwarted Phil Burbank is a study in twisted misery. In one early scene, Burbank notices some fragile paper flowers the teenager has made to decorate a dinner table at his mother’s canteen. But, instead of praising them, “Uncle Phil” is driven to publicly sneer.

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Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung: ‘I’m very strange-looking, in a good way’

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As the London Korean film festival kicks off, Youn Yuh-jung, talks about how her portrayals of racy grannies and scheming maids scandalised the nation

In her Oscar-winning turn in last year’s Minari, Youn Yuh-jung played the mischievous granny you wished you’d had: the one who ignores your fun-sucking parents, takes you on wild adventures and teaches you to do your own thing. “You’re not a real grandma,” her Americanised grandson tells her. “They bake cookies! They don’t swear! They don’t wear men’s underwear!” In real life, Youn is pretty similar: lively, funny, unpretentious, and, she admits, not all that good at cooking. The 74-year-old actor has had an unconventional life and career, and most of us in the west know only a tiny fraction of it.

“My problem is, I don’t plan anything!” Youn laughs over Zoom from Los Angeles. Unlike her character in Minari, she speaks fluent English, although she apologises for it not being good enough.

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‘I wanted this film to be 100% Somali’: the fight to make The Gravedigger’s Wife

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Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, who directed the acclaimed drama, reveals the struggle to portray his community ‘with dignity and compassion’

“I am Somali and I made this film for Somali people to watch a film in their mother tongue without needing subtitles,” says film director Khadar Ayderus Ahmed. Ahmed made his feature debut with The Gravedigger’s Wife, and after premiering in May at the Cannes film festival’s Critics’ Week, it made headlines as the first film from Somalia to be put forward for the Oscars.

“As a film-maker, I felt a sense of responsibility to tell the story of how I view my Somali community and to tell this story with dignity, tenderness and compassion – all the qualities I’ve been raised with,” says Ahmed, who was born in Somalia before moving to Finland as a teenager.

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Where does the Oscar race stand after this year’s big festivals?

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With a more normal awards season on the way, it’s time to sift through what’s been loved and hated and look forward to what performances could make an impact

As we all edge slowly closer to something vaguely sorta kinda resembling a loose idea of normality, so too does Hollywood, its relatively fixed annual schedule going from blurry to a bit less blurry. After an almost normal summer, the fall festivals followed and while they weren’t quite back up to snuff (some had a semi-virtual element, some big films were notably missing), there was a dramatic improvement from 2020 and, importantly, they were pulled off with very few infections.

Related: ‘We want people to freak out’: inside Hollywood’s Museum of Motion Pictures

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‘We want people to freak out’: inside Hollywood’s Museum of Motion Pictures

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Boasting the shark from Jaws, the robe from the Big Lebowski, and the slippers from Oz, the Academy museum is finally open. But the real story is its exposé of Hollywood’s racist, sexist past

In 1939, the Academy of Motion Pictures published its first “players directory”, which grouped actors into categories such as “leading women” and “comediennes”, but set aside separate sections for “coloured” and “oriental” performers. The Academy removed the segregated categories a few years later, but many of the actors of colour weren’t integrated into other sections. They were eliminated.

These racist directories are on display at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which celebrates some of the most important film-makers in history while also attempting to confront head-on the dark legacy of exclusion and discrimination in the industry. The hope is to tell a much more complicated, and accurate, story of Hollywood through the years.

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‘Deaf is not a costume’: Marlee Matlin on surviving abuse and casting authentically

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The only deaf actor to win an Academy Award discusses going to rehab, speaking out about William Hurt and starring in deaf drama Coda

When early financial backers of Marlee Matlin’s new film, Coda, expressed their preference for hiring big-name actors to play the roles of two major deaf characters – her onscreen husband and son – she threatened to quit. She told them that deaf actors should play characters written as deaf. “I said: time out. This is not right. It’s not authentic and it’s not going to work. If you go down that route, I’m out, because I don’t want to be part of that effort of faking deaf. I’m glad they listened.”

I can’t imagine anyone not listening to Matlin. Speaking from her home in Los Angeles, she is funny and warm, but there is something intense about her, almost intimidating. She sits straight-backed, her focus sharp. She is not a woman to mince her words – which are translated from American Sign Language (ASL) by her longtime interpreter and producing partner, Jack Jason, who is also on the call from his front room. The pair have been working together since 1985, just before she won the best actress Oscar at 21 for her first film role, playing a young deaf woman in the 1986 drama Children of a Lesser God – beating Sigourney Weaver (who was up for Aliens), Jane Fonda, Kathleen Turner and Sissy Spacek.

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Oscars 2022: who might triumph at next year’s ceremony?

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After a year of delays, the next 12 months offers a wealth of big, awards-aiming movies from intimate dramas to historical epics

It’s not often that the word unusual gets attached to the Oscars, one of the most staid and predictable nights of the year, as sober as the Golden Globes is drunk. But after an unusual year, the awards season followed suit, extended by two months, films dropping in and out of the race and some that might otherwise have been ignored instead taking centre stage.

Related: And this year’s Oscar for inclusivity goes to … the Academy!

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Glenn Close’s magnificent Da Butt and superb flirting: key Oscars moments

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An impromptu dance masterclass became an instant highlight, but Steven Soderbergh’s directorial shakeup delivered a ceremony with few highs and frequent depressions

In a skewiff ceremony of overlong speeches, quiet applause and a downsized red carpet, one moment effortlessly stole the show: Glenn Close doing the dance to the 1988 funk hit Da Butt.

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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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