Sound the trumpets, the Oscar nods have arrived! Announced early Tuesday morning by actress Anne Hathaway and Academy President Tom Sherak, very few of the nominations this year came as much of a shock. The new Best Picture category—which has been bumped up from 5 to 10 nominees—is so large that it allows space for nearly every buzzed about film of the year, from Precious to Up in the Air, An Education to Up, Hurt Locker to Avatar. Nothing if not inclusive! A category that provided a little surprise was Best Actress, where the standard-bearers (Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep), will be facing off with two newcomers (Carey Mulligan, Gabourey Sidibe), and most shocking, Sandra Bullock, who before The Blind Side was not really seen as Oscar material. In the Best Director category, James Cameron will be up against his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow (more on their fabled past and current friendship here, and as the latter is favored to win after her big night at the Director’s Guild Awards last week, the gender politics could get pretty interesting come March 7.
Dan Steinberg / AP Photo; Frazer Harrison / Getty Images; Jennifer Graylock / AP Photo
Anyone who has seen a dramatic movie in the last five years admires Laura Linney, who tends to pop up in a killer film role at least once a year ( The Squid and the Whale, Kinsey, John Adams, The Savages), but she has earned more glowing press than usual for her current role, happening now on the New York stage. Linney stars in Time Stands Still at the Manhattan Theater Club, a new work by veteran playwright Donald Margulies. She plays a war photographer who has come home, ravaged by injuries but more afraid to face her normal domestic life than the Baghdad bombs. Add in a dash of Alicia Silverstone as Linney’s editor’s girlfriend, a lot of moral ambiguity and harrowing backstory, and you’ve got one of the best plays of 2010 so far.
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This week, a whopping 12.1 million viewers tuned in for the premiere episode of Lost’s final season, which promises to explain everything but so far has just provoked more questions. Here’s what we know: The gang detonated the nuclear Jughead back in 1977 on the island, which essentially caused two time periods to begin working at once—the post-bomb, still-lost storyline, and then another plotline in which the characters never crashed and are living their lives as they might have before Oceanic 815 plunged into the mystic. But with telling changes! So there are now two (or maybe three?) realities all moving at once, and yet they are all interconnected—we just don’t know how. But at least we now know who the smoke monster is! It’s all very confusing, but the Lost producers know what they are doing—we have to keep watching just to find closure. Allow us to point you toward the best recap of the episode we read all week, over at EW.
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The art market continues its rebound. This week, a huge sale offered new hope to the industry. At a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday, a Giacometti bronze sculpture sold over the phone for $104.3 million (or $92.5 million with fees), breaking the previous record of $104.2 million for Picasso’s 1905 Boy With a Pipe at a Sotheby's New York auction in 2004. Ten bidders were warring over the statue, and the buyer, who paid more that $70 million above what Sotheby's was expecting for it, is still a mystery. The New York Times has more on what may be the biggest sale of the decade, here.
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It turns out that the Grammys do count for something—the winners for best country group, Lady Antebellum, debuted their new album, Need You Now, on Tuesday to record sales and a No. 1 spot. This makes the album the biggest country debut since Taylor Swift's Fearless and the highest-grossing first week of sales for any album since Susan Boyle hit the charts back in December. The return of Nashville's dominance is upon us.
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This week, San Francisco’s D.A. Powell won what is basically the Publisher’s Clearing House of poetry prizes, the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award of Claremont University (one of the nation's premier poetry prizes). The award acknowledges a mid-career poet; in this case, Powell, 46, teaches at USF and has published four books. As The New York Times’ John Freeman wrote of Powell last year, “His language is infiltrated by songs, phrases from movies, the treacle-sweet soundtracks of so many musicals. 'Love,' he writes in one poem, 'is the chorus waiting to be born.' " Look for more coverage of the poetry windfall, over at the LA Times.
Shawn G. Henry
Sadly, the WB isn’t getting into the microbrew business—instead, as Billboard reports, the label will start an experiment of releasing a longer album in two installments of six songs, six months apart. The guinea pig for the project is country singer Blake Shelton, whose first “Six-Pak” will come out in March. This is not a major development, but for a major corporation with so much red tape, this is at least a step toward the future (albeit not a great one—we couldn’t agree more with the Onion’s take:"Congrats, major labels, you've discovered what EPs are again”).
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Painter and mixed-media artist Chris Ofili of Great Britain is perhaps best known for his controversial 1999 work, The Holy Virgin Mary, which depicted a black Virgin Mary with close-ups of genitalia from naughty magazines and generous heaps of elephant dung. Ring a bell? Yes, this was the fated work that caused New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to single-handedly lead a crusade to have the work removed from the Brooklyn Museum, despite Ofili’s noble status as the Turner Prize winner a year before. But Ofili soldiered on, representing the U.K. at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and now, he has a new exhibition on view at the Tate Britain through May 16. The show is a mid-career retrospective (with more than 45 works on display), including samples of Ofili’s obscure early watercolors, but it also showcases his current work, inspired by his 2005 move to Trinidad. The new paintings explore Trini mythology in addition to his favorite themes of Biblical lore and the African Diaspora, but things haven’t changed too much—there will still be plenty of dung. Read Olivia Cole on Ofili show on Art Beast.
Tate / © Chris Ofili
It was only a matter of time. This week, Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie reunited to begin recording an all-star remake of "We Are the World," this time to benefit the Haiti crisis. In lieu of saying anything else about it, we'll just present the mega-watt list of singers and collaborators. Here goes: Pink, Jamie Foxx, Justin Bieber, Celine Dion, Snoop Dogg, Miley Cyrus, The Jonas Brothers, Nicole Richie, Earth, Wind & Fire, Lil Wayne, Julianne Hough, Gladys Knight, Wyclef Jean, Kanye West, Randy Jackson, Faith Evans, Vince Vaughn, Nicole Scherzinger of the Pussycat Dolls, Mary Mary, Musiq Soulchild, Sugarland, Mya, Josh Groban, Kid Cudi, Jeff Bridges, Usher, Natalie Cole, Jennifer Hudson, Toni Braxton, Busta Rhymes, Akon, will.i.am, Keri Hilson, Robin Thicke, Brandy, Harry Connick, Jr., Tyrese, Trey Songz, Jordin Sparks, Rob Thomas, The Wilson sisters from Heart, Fonzworth Bentley, Tony Bennett, Janet Jackson, and Al Jardine and BrIan Wilson of The Beach Boys.
Chris Pizzello / AP Photo; Larry Busacca / Getty Images; Sipa / AP Photo
