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Ismene Brown
The Artist was showered with awards by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts last night in an elegant occasion at the Royal Opera House, London, hosted by Stephen Fry. Director Michel Hazanavicius won for Best Film, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Music, Cinematography and Costume Design, while Jean Dujardin's extraordinary silent performance was judged Best Actor. Meryl Streep won Best Actress for her Maggie Thatcher - quipping that as half her ancestry is from Lincolnshire, she had every right to have been cast in the role.The much-nominated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Peter Gabriel announced WOMAD’s 2012 festival in Sicily this afternoon. It’s a year of anniversaries for the annual showcase of world music, with 2012 also marking the 30th year for Britain’s big brother festival. On a wintry afternoon, sharply contrasting with Sicily’s climate, Gabriel was joined at London's Italian Cultural Institute by Carlo Presenti, the institute's director, and Roy Paci (pictured below right), Sicily’s cultural polymath and musician whose past collaborators have included Manu Chao and the Netherlands' The Ex.Presenti said this year’s festival, to be held on 5–8 July at Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When a young Charles Dickens visited New York in 1842 with his wife, he strolled down Broadway, happened upon an unusual dance and naturally checked out theatreland. As his bicentenary is celebrated, here, from his journal, American Notes For General Circulation, are some of his observations on the arts and culture of this foreign city, intervals of refreshment between the widespread social ills that he was principally reporting upon. Dickens on Broadway Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway!The beautiful metropolis of America is by no means so clean a city as Boston, Read more ...
judith.flanders
Why? The question really needs to be asked. Why all the hoopla, the adaptations, reprints, books, comics, tweets, no doubt Facebook pages too. Did we do this for Thackeray last year? Will we do it for Wilkie Collins? Or even George Eliot? A deafening silence brings the answer. Dickens is, as he so facetiously named himself, The Inimitable. And today, at Westminster Abbey, it was clear how much he mattered to how many.Of course there were the professionals there: the descendants, the museum curators, and those who write about him (myself included in that group). But there were lots to whom Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's updated Upstairs Downstairs is not a lucky show. Its three-night debut in December 2010 brought unflattering comparisons to Downton Abbey, a fate also likely to greet the imminent series two thanks to Downton's booming national-treasure status. Worse, Upstairs... is reeling from the double blow of losing Eileen Atkins's Lady Maud and Jean Marsh as Rose Buck.Marsh, who suffered a stroke last October, was eventually able to appear in two of the six new episodes, but Atkins apparently wasn't happy with the direction the series was taking and baled out altogether. Screenwriter Heidi Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Pallant House in Chichester has just inaugurated the series of Lucian Freud exhibitions this season which have have now become memorial commemorations since the artist’s death last July. Freud’s life and studio have taken on a mythic quality, here reinforced by the photographs taken by his long-term studio assistant, David Dawson (see gallery below).Dawson (b 1960) is a Royal College of Art-trained painter, whose first job after graduating was to work for James Kirkman, then Freud’s dealer; he metamorphosed not only into Freud’s assistant, but his most consistent model (often Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The young Royal Ballet star Sergei Polunin, Covent Garden's most remarkable male discovery for years, has quit the company in a stunning shock that today sent consternation throughout the ballet world from the USA to Japan. But tonight Royal Opera House chief executive Lord Hall said that he believed the company should support the dancer in "thinking about his life - the pressures on him are enormous", indicating that Polunin was undergoing a crisis and the door to his company remains open.The Ukrainian, still only 21, rose rapidly through ranks within two years of joining the Royal Ballet Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It’s not out until 8 June but fan excitement levels are already feverish. Ridley Scott, who directed the original, groundbreaking science-fiction-horror-classic Alien back in 1979, has said that his new film Prometheus – only his third ever sci-fi outing (the other was Bladerunner) - is not part of the Alien series and won’t feature the snap-jawed xenomorph, last seen battling fellow monster franchise Predator in a series of dismal B-movies. Prometheus, however, does clearly inhabit the same universe, as the latest trailer clearly shows, with Alien designer H R Giger advising and aspects from Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Michael Fassbender (Shame) got blanked (maybe Hollywood was put off by his manhood?), as did We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Tilda Swinton, for my money the year’s best performance by an actress, notwithstanding the marvellous Meryl. Gary Oldman, meanwhile, is in as Best Actor for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – his first-ever Oscar nod, incredibly - whereas Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar) is out.Those are just a few of the surprises unveiled at today’s announcement from Los Angeles of the nominees for the 84th annual Academy Awards; the winners will be named on 26 February. In an eclectic and Read more ...
theartsdesk
When the London theatre critics gathered to hand out their annual awards at lunchtime today in person, a notable percentage of the gongs were carried off by the National Theatre. There was no surprise, for example, that the best new play was One Man, Two Guvnors by former winner Richard Bean; in a thin year for blockbuster musicals, it was perhaps no surprise either that the best new musical was London Road, a rare foray for the genre into seriousness which dramatised in song the murder of five sex workers in Ipswich.The National also prospered with Frankenstein, which divided critics when it Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although the title of this new DVD box set was a given considering the nature of the films included, all six films collected are – whatever their reputation, levels of nudity and explicitness – sober-minded, hardly measuring up to any standard of what normally constitutes erotica. Three are dry sex education films, presented by real-life psychologists, while the other three are bizarre examinations of an alienated young women in relationships that involve power play, subjugation and abuse. Like nightmare, no-budget counterparts of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage.Swedish cinema Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, put her down a mine. Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics for weekly earnings to 2011 paint a stark earnings picture for those working in the arts and entertainment industry. The weekly average earnings for last year in this most life-enhancing of sectors is just £320 - while the average weekly in the “Mining and Quarrying” industry is a whopping £1,082, including substantial monthly bonuses. That translates to an average £16,600 gross salary in the arts field and £56,000+ in the petroleum, coal and quarrying industries Read more ...