awards
sue.steward
“We all come from the same DNA, as Desmond Tutu is always reminding us, and we shouldn’t be surprised that these musical collaborations take place - and work so well.” That was Peter Gabriel's comment on the music at WOMAD last weekend, a festival he co-founded in 1981, now crammed with more and more bands revealing obvious genetic connections.“Gabriel could have been talking about the entire programme but was, in fact, standing on the Siam stage to present the Songlines Award for Cross-Cultural Collaborations to Justin Adams (UK) and Juldeh Camara (Gambia/UK, pictured below). They had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Giuseppe Tornatore is known overwhelmingly for one international hit. There have been sundry other films from him in the 21 years since Cinema Paradiso won the Best Foreign Language Oscar, but none which have sold such a seductive vision of Italian village life. Though damned to backwardness, stymied by introspection, Tornatore’s evocation of Sicily in 1950s was awash with vitality and colour. In Baarìa he finally goes home. Could he have another bittersweet blockbuster on his hands?It’s a very different film, despite a wholesale overlap in tone, provided not least by Ennio Morricone's Read more ...
theartsdesk
One of theartsdesk's founder-writers, Mark Hudson, has been shortlisted in the biography category of the annual Spear’s Book Awards, for his book Titian, the Last Days. Hudson did not intend to write a conventional biography of the Venetian artist, but took Titian’s mysterious final paintings as its starting point – works so baffling in their subject matter and background that they involved him in far more factual research than he had originally anticipated when he began work in 2005."If you write about the art of the past, people assume you must be an art historian," says Hudson. "But an art Read more ...
fisun.guner
Last month, the National Portrait Gallery unveiled a huge, new portrait of Anna Wintour. Painted by Alex Katz, the celebrated New York Pop portraitist, American Vogue’s scary editor-in-chief is shown with famous helmet bob intact, but minus her trademark dark glasses. The picture depicts Wintour, whose icy blue stare could run a chill through you (she's known as Nuclear Wintour), against a sunny yellow backdrop – which looks like an attempt to raise the temperature of that icicle glare. You pass it as you enter this year’s BP Portrait Award. I’m thinking of that picture because, in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Melvyn Bragg last night won this year’s Bafta TV fellowship for his long championing of ITV’s arts with the now mothballed flagship The South Bank Show, which itself has been nominated for more than 30 Baftas and won nine. Ironically Simon Cowell was another winner at the London Palladium, with a special award for an outstanding contribution to entertainment and for furthering new talent in reality talent shows such as The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. The political satire The Thick of It won three awards, Julie Walters's win for Best Actress as Mo Mowlam beat herself in the euthanasia Read more ...
sheila.johnston
At last, some good news for this beleaguered country: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, by the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, took the Palme D'Or in Cannes tonight. Hailed as one of the most striking and unusual films in competition - and also the entry most in tune with the maverick spirit of the Jury President, Tim Burton - Uncle Boonmee is the story of a dying man who revisits scenes from his previous lives, as, inter alia, a buffalo and a princess and sets the seal on what was widely perceived to be a lacklustre year. Weerasethakul may not be a household name Read more ...
joe.muggs
Great excitement at the Artes Mundi Awards in Cardiff’s National Museum last night as the UK’s largest cash prize for the winner of any UK contemporary art competition - a staggering £40,000 - was presented to the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. Two hours before the announcement, the judges were still undecided but the white smoke moment saw Bartana’s two films (part of an ongoing trilogy) land the cheque.Like many of the 500 contenders, Bartana works with documentary film. She applies it to interesting challenges to the meaning of Zionism today and plays with the idea of returning Polish Jews Read more ...
neil.smith
This slot is always one of the trickiest to fill satisfactorily, though last year’s choice – Pixar’s delightful animation Up – was inspired. Coming on the same day as the film’s release date, alas, Robin’s rain-lashed, Ridley-less premiere felt like a non-event from the get-go, putting the festival on the back foot before it had even begun. Ground was made up the following day thanks to an out of competition showing of Oliver Stone’s belated Wall Street sequel, Money Never Sleeps, a film that, while rather undermined by its perverse determination to de-fang Michael Douglas’s rapacious Gordon Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Who cares about the Classical Brits? Should we be carrying you the news? Should the seriously serious conductor Antonio Pappano and his Accademia di Santa Cecilia be trumpeting their double win yesterday for his Verdi Requiem (Critics' Choice - the top "serious" award) and his Madama Butterfly, for which the soprano Angela Gheorghiu won Female Artist of the Year?These are moot points and tricky questions, since the Classical Brits were established in 2000 by the record labels' trade association the British Phonographic Industry to boost CD sales rather than live performance, and its Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The announcement by the Royal Philharmonic Society's keynote speaker Grayson Perry that the Queen had sent for David Cameron last night was met with audible groans from the great and the good of the classical music world at their Awards ceremony. Speaker after speaker made it perfectly clear that the Lib Dems (though almost certainly not the economically liberal, pro-nuclear, immigration-capping, Tory-serving Lib Dems that they have now woken up to) were the choice of the majority here and one after the other they pleaded that the Government ring-fence arts funding.None of this is Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman didn't make the cut; Denzel Washington and Broadway neophyte Douglas Hodge did. And so the race is on for the 2010 Tony Awards, heralding the best of the 39 shows that opened on Broadway across the past season. As always, the British presence is formidable, and this year ranges from Catherine Zeta-Jones (A Little Night Music, pictured above) to Alfred Molina (Red) and on to composer and sound designer Adam Cork, who snared an astonishing three nominations, including one for Enron's original score. (Huh?)But while the Donmar is doubtless celebrating its nine Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Furthering their reputation as the least predictable prize-giving organisation out there, the Laurence Olivier Awards last night gave their top prizes to a host of productions that have long departed London, starting with Best Play for Tennessee-born writer Katori Hall's The Mountaintop. You were thinking Enron or (my personal best) Jerusalem? You'd be wrong.And so it went throughout an evening that dangled an odd carrot in the direction of some of the West End's reigning hits, giving Enron yet another directing trophy for Rupert Goold and Jerusalem the prizes for set design (Ultz's epic Read more ...