Features
Adam Sweeting
He may not be a household name, but Michael Emerson became a household face by virtue of his role as the sinister Benjamin Linus in Lost, the leader of the group called the Others on the show’s hallucinatory South Pacific island. Emerson, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1954, was already a theatre veteran with a string of intermittent TV performances to his credit. Now his ascent became rocket-assisted as he appeared in all of Lost's six seasons except the first, winning an Outstanding Supporting Actor Emmy in 2009. Lost ended in 2010, leaving even faithful viewers bewildered by Read more ...
mark.hudson
In March 1973, John Lennon was 33. Elvis was 38. There was barely a musician, in the sense we understand it, over 40. No one with a mortgage – or hardly anyone – was into rock’n’roll. The Dark Side of the Moon changed all that. It made rock middle-aged. Not because of its creators’ ages – the members of Pink Floyd were still, just, in their twenties – but because the success of its easy listening, suburban philosophising announced that the Babyboomer Generation had reached the pipe-and-slippers phase.Us-us-us and them...I remember going round to a friend’s after school to hear the long- Read more ...
james.woodall
In 1973 certain world events carved themselves, a bit like the faces on Mount Rushmore, deep into the landscape of the late 20th century. No sooner had Richard Nixon begun to end the Vietnam War than Watergate broke. In the autumn Allende was overthrown by Pinochet in Chile; Egypt and Syria’s attack on Israel ignited the Yom Kippur war. A global oil crisis was to leave western economies strapped.In Britain industrial unrest forced a tottering Heath government towards the Three Day Week. The IRA began bombing London. It wasn’t, really, a happy epoch; but young, mainly male, slightly self- Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Given the quantity of uncertain outcomes, this year's Academy Awards guarantee excitement, and there's nothing better than an Oscars ceremony filled with surprises. Furthermore, the selection of films nominated this year are of a rare vintage. Today we turn our attention to the remaining major awards, with only one looking possible to confidently predict. These three categories are as remarkable for their omissions as they are their inclusions: the Best Actress category features both the oldest and youngest ever acting nominees and discussion of the Directing category has thus far focussed on Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Time is drawing nigh to mark those Oscar ballots, but what movie should one vote for as the year's best? While odds-makers have been busily touting one title over another, the less-vaunted fact about this year's shortlist is that relatively few stinkers have made the cut. Last year, for instance, saw the head-scratching inclusion of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close among the Best Picture candidates, while admirers of Martin Scorsese are still wondering how it is that a minor effort of his like The Departed went the distance in 2007 when such benchmark Scorsese offerings from a previous era Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whenever the words English and whimsy come together in relation to rock, writes Mark Hudson, the name Kevin Ayers is invariably invoked – not least by Ayers himself. The notably erratic, but gifted singer-songwriter and Soft Machine founder was hardly on the face of it notably English, having spent much of his childhood in Malaysia and most of his adult life lounging by the Mediterranean. But he consciously incorporated the gently surreal nonsense tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear into his own brand of moon-gazing, slacker cool.The fact that the fetchingly tousled, psychedelic beat- Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
Frank Capra called the Oscars “the most valuable, but least expensive, item of world-wide public relations ever invented by any industry”. They are, like it or not, the film awards against which all others are judged - even to the point that other countries’ film awards are scheduled in relation to the ceremony. Despite being the accepted mark of excellence, the Oscars are not a meritocracy. The choice of one art work/film product over another is, necessarily, irrational and Oscars' critics often say AMPAS members are too old and out of touch to cast such important votes.Whatever its flaws, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether Lincoln can pip frontrunner Argo to this year's Best Picture gong is in the hands of the Academy, but its 12 nominations are a notable achievement in director Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career. It's sometimes been easy to dismiss Spielberg as a sentimentalist, an entertainer first and an artist second but his films are pure cinema, and for every work of groundbreaking spectacle he's delivered something equally as thought-provoking.Over the years Spielberg's films have secured a not-to-be-balked-at nine Best Picture nominations, and his sterling stewardship has been rewarded with Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
An intriguing aspect of this year’s battle for Oscar was the early assurance with which pundits placed Lincoln as their favourite for best film. Steven Spielberg's frontrunner merits recognition; what surprises is that no one has noted the significance if it were actually to win. For despite Hollywood’s long history of fine political films, in over 80 years only one has ever won the prize.That exception was All The King’s Men, in 1950. Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Robert Rossen’s drama chronicled the rise and fall of Willie Stark, a once idealistic Southern lawyer turned Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There's grand larceny afoot in the Royal Opera House. Two of today's stars are stealing Fonteyn and Nureyev's signature ballet, and they're leaving some spectators' cherished beliefs shattered in pieces around them. On Thursday, for the last time, Marguerite and Armand will be danced as a farewell to the Royal Ballet by its departed favourites, Tamara Rojo and Sergei Polunin, whose interpretations of the dying courtesan and her tragically hotheaded young lover have shown the heights that ballet can reach in deceiving spectators with purple romance.The ballet was created by Sir Frederick Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A week from now he could be the all-time Oscar king. If Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Lincoln wins him a third Best Actor award, it will send him clear of a thoroughbred field of nine past double-winners, Jack Nicholson, Spencer Tracy and Dustin Hoffman among them. Those other nine were all American. Uniquely for an Englishman, Day-Lewis isn’t politely respected in Hollywood for his theatrical technique, but matches the screen intensity and exhaustive Method of Brando and De Niro. Ever since his first Oscar as the cerebral palsy-afflicted Irish writer Christy Brown in My Left Foot (1989 Read more ...
Sophie Sarin
Timbuktu, the legendary "End of the World", does actually exist, and as everyone now knows, it's in Mali. It has just been thrust into the world’s focus after its recent liberation from the Al Qaeda-linked extremists who have occupied the north of Mali during the last 10 months. Timbuktu’s ancient mosques are protected by their UNESCO World Heritage status. It is the "city of the 300 saints", which is one detail that did not please its recent jihadist occupiers who did not agree with the worship of saints as practised by Timbuktu's population. Many of the town’s mausoleums were therefore Read more ...