Actress Natalie Portman said her babies are “good luck charms,” when asked about early Oscar speculation for her latest movie.
Jewish talent received a fair share of recognition and the Holocaust-themed “Son of Saul” beat entries from 80 countries to win the Oscar for best foreign-language film, but overall the Sunday evening Academy Awards show in Hollywood skipped the light touch and Jewish jokes in favor of some deep soul-searching.
Last week, two groups affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement took out a full-page ad in the L.A. Times excoriating the Israeli Government for offering an all-expenses-paid trip to the Holy Land for Oscar nominees.
On Wednesday morning, Feb. 24, The Los Angeles Times published a full-page ad sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation calling Israel an apartheid state and saying it distracts the public from human rights abuses; the same ad had been rejected by Variety.
Her camera has tracked inmates living on a former slave plantation turned prison farm, a Jewish fugitive who married a Nazi, the eccentric chess master Bobby Fischer, mothers with mental impairment and, most recently, chanteuse and civil rights activist Nina Simone.
A few days after receiving the Art Directors Guild award for his work on “The Martian,” production designer Arthur Max ruminated on the seven nominations and two wins he had received from the guild over the course of his 13-film career (his first award, in 2001, was for “Gladiator,” which, like “The Martian,” was directed by Ridley Scott, with whom Max works frequently).
A full-page ad that calls on Oscar nominees to refuse a free Israel trip worth $55,000 offered in their Academy Award swag bags was published in the Los Angeles Times.
When Evgeny Afineevsky began filming his Oscar-nominated documentary about Ukraine’s revolution, he thought he was in for a fun project full of song and dance, oddly enough.
Soon, Academy Award winners will be popping open some bubbly and the runners-up will be drowning their sorrows.
As couture-adorned A-list celebrities strut down the freshly laid red carpet at this year’s Academy Awards, designer Ashlee Nik will be tuned into the TV coverage and checking Getty Images to see which nominees are sporting her clutches.
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