Oscars

There are vanity films ("Gigli") and there are vanity films ("Boom!," "Battlefield Earth"), and then there are Prince's vanity films. Granted, he directed only two (not counting the concert film "Sign O' the Times") -- "Cherry Moon" and 1990's "Graffiti Bridge," a picture so willfully viewer-proof that only cult movie critic Michael J. Weldon's term " psychotronic " can adequately define it -- but both are so aggressively self-absorbed and dismissive of even the most basic elements of film structure ...  

In chatting with "Up" director Pete Docter I stumbled onto an interesting change just adopted in the Oscars voting process that affects writing, directing and acting hyphenates. The way it has normally worked is members of a branch such as acting who may also have been nominated previously in another category such as writing or directing were still only allowed to nominate people in their specific branch (and of course in the best picture category, where all members are eligible to vote). Beginning ...  

Despite having only two previous, supporting feature film roles to her name ( 'Pride & Predjudice' and 'When Did You Last See Your Father?' ) before landing the lead in the coming-of-age drama 'An Education,' the spry 24-yr-old Carey Mulligan has become an odds-on favorite to pick up an Oscar nod in the Best Actress category when the nominations are announced on the morning of Feb 2. After making a splash at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival with her astute portrayal of the naively precocious schoolgirl ...  

If a color photograph existed showing reporters gathered around Barbra Streisand in the press room of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after she'd won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1969, you'd see a young man in a brown suit sandwiched among a crowd in black tuxedos and elegant gowns. That misfit would be me. I was a sportswriter for a suburban southern California newspaper then, but if there was one thing I knew I would enjoy more than watching an athlete set a world record, it would be seeing a movie star receive an Academy Award.  

Ex-Gucci designer Tom Ford, 49, has David Geffen to thank not only for his old office complex on Sunset, but for advising him to invest in himself. That he did, with his remarkably assured $7-million film debut, A Single Man. It's not surprising that the film has style to spare. But it also boasts the strongest performance of Colin Firth's career.  

A producer of documentary films, Corinna Sager likens her work to the films of Michael Moore or Ken Burns, but only to say she is not in their league. Perhaps she is a little too modest. Her name may not be as well known as theirs, but one of her films, "Ferry Tales," earned her an Academy Award nomination in 2004, and work she has done at her "bread-and-butter" job as pres¬ident of a company that pro¬duces corporate TV and video communications has won awards including the Gold Hermes Media Award, the Sil¬ver Golden Reel Award, and the Bronze Telly.  

Well, not the real awards but rather a new black-tie event dubbed the Governors Awards. The Oscar folks were nervous about their new ceremony -- they're not big on innovation -- but their show turned out to be a big hit. So much so that it raised an off-putting question: If the Governors Awards can be spirited and entertaining, why must Oscar night itself be such a stiff?  

Ever since this grim, gritty, urban drama won kudos at the Sundance, Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals and the endorsement of Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, it's been generating industry hype and Oscar buzz, building on its themes of prejudice, incest, poverty and AIDS. Poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, African-American 16 year-old Claireece 'Precious' Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) has been raped by her father since she was a toddler, already bearing one Downs Syndrome child, named Morgan, and pregnant ...  

Gene Tierney was born in Brooklyn to wealthy parents on Nov. 20, 1920. Her father was a prosperous stockbroker. She was educated in private schools in Connecticut and Switzerland.