The Lost Boys actor has been found dead at the age of 38 from a rumoured overdose in Los Angeles
The life and career of the former child star and 1980s teen idol Corey Haim might be seen as a succession of cliches. From the early, hugely promising screen appearances to the swift rise as a teen pin-up in movies such as The Lost Boys, he suffered the predictable dip into paparazzi fodder and later into anonymity when his pretty teenage looks faded. There were the inevitable battles with drugs and rehab and a career renaissance of sorts via reality TV.
And today it emerged that he had ticked off another tragic cliche when he was found dead at the age of 38 from a rumoured overdose in Los Angeles.
Haim, from Toronto, was very much a product of the 1980s, but he also suffered from that decade. Once his early potential and looks were spotted, he quickly became sucked into the trashy 1980s film factory that was more interested in quantity than quality. For every Ferris Bueller's Day Off, there were at least 10 Dream a Little Dreams and, unfortunately for Haim, he starred in the latter.
The shame of it is that Haim really could act, unlike his frequent co-star and best friend Corey Feldman, whose repertoire spanned "sullen" to "a little more sullen". He hit his high point at 14 with The Lost Boys, the movie that propelled him to stardom. However, it also propelled him straight into License to Drive, which is not what one would call an 80s classic, and this set the tone for the rest of his career.
In recent years Haim tried to find a new path in a reality show with Feldman called, inevitably, the Two Coreys, the premise of which was that unstable recovering addict Haim would stay with the now happily married Feldman, but the results were depressing and pathetic. As an ending, his death is as unsurprising as it is sad.
Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino have been accused by Dannez Hunter as using without credit ideas he submitted in a concept to Miramax in 1999
Quentin Tarantino is being sued for more than $1m by a man who claims the Oscar-winning film-maker's martial arts-themed double feature Kill Bill was partly based on his ideas, according to US reports.
Celebrity website TMZ.com says Dannez Hunter filed a suit on Monday, claiming he submitted a concept for a movie to studio Miramax, the company which produced Kill Bills 1 and 2. He says his 1999 story outline posited the idea of a character named Ren, who witnesses her mother's murder: 2003's Kill Bill Vol 1 features a character named O Ren Ishi, played by Lucy Liu, who suffers a similar fate as a young child.
Hunter goes on to claim he applied for a job at Miramax but "was never given a return phone call, as numerous similar situated less qualified Jewish and white people were bestowed job after job after job".
Miramax was run by siblings Harvey and Bob Weinstein until 2005, but the pair have since left to run new firm The Weinstein Company. It was speculated last month that they might be in the running to buy back the troubled film-making unit, which they founded in 1979, from Disney.
Tarantino has made no comment on the case filed against him, but he did say on the red carpet at Sunday's Oscars that he might have considered shooting parts of Kill Bill in 3D had the movies been made today.
"I liked Friday the 13th in 3D," he said. "Actually, one of my favourite movies of the year was My Bloody Valentine 3D. That was a great 3D movie! If I had to do Kill Bill all over again, I probably would do Volume 1 in 3D."
The director is likely to direct a new adventure featuring the knights of the round table, scripted by John Hodge, the man who took Trainspotting from page to screen
Guy Ritchie looks set to take on another great British icon, King Arthur, following the box office success of his all-action Sherlock Holmes movie. The film-maker is being tapped to direct a new reimagining of the dark ages tale of the Celtic leader who fought against Saxon invaders (and in many stories, marauding magical creatures).
According to Variety, the screenplay by Trainspotting's John Hodge will be based at least in part on Thomas Mallory's 1485 Le Morte d'Arthur, a compilation of French and English Arthurian romances which is one of the main sources of the famous myth. At one point Mallory has the king travelling to Rome, where he defeats Julius Caesar and takes the crown of emperor, though his book also features many traditional Arthurian stories and characters, such as Lancelot, Guinevere, Mordred, the quest for the Holy Grail and the knights of the round table.
The stories of Arthur have proved fertile ground for Hollywood over the years, with the most recent reimagining being Antoine Fuqua's 2004 tale King Arthur, starring Clive Owen as a Romano-British soldier during the last days of the Roman Empire in Britain. It departed significantly from the traditonal myth and was poorly received by the critics, despite taking a respectable $203.5m across the globe.
Other versions include the Disney animation The Sword in the Stone, from 1963, 1981's Excalibur, starring Nigel Terry and Helen Mirren, and Richard Thorpe's 1953 effort Knights of the Round Table.
Studio Warner Bros will be overseeing the new production. Ritchie also has two further projects lined up, historical action flick The Siege of Malta and action thriller The Gamekeeper. There is also the small matter of a sequel to his blockbusting Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, which took $470m globally. It is expected to hit cinemas in 2011.
Academy director Bruce Davis concedes decision may have caused upset, but maintains the actor's best work was on TV
The man in charge of the "in memoriam" sequence at Sunday night's Oscars has apologised for the hurt caused to friends and family of Farrah Fawcett by the exclusion of the actor. However, Bruce Davis said he stood by the decision, which was taken on the grounds that Fawcett's notable work had taken place mainly on the TV, rather than in movies.
Fawcett's family issued a statement following the snub declaring they were "deeply saddened" and "bereft with this exclusion of such an international icon who inspired so many for so many reasons".
Davis said the academy had considered including Fawcett, but ultimately felt her "remarkable television work" would be more appropriately honoured by the television academy at the Emmy Awards. He added that an unusual number of "extremely distinguished screenwriters" had died in the past year, and the academy had felt honour-bound to mention as many of these as possible in the short "in memoriam" sequence.
Davis said another exclusion, of actor Gene Barry, had also met with some protest. The star appeared in the original 1953 version of sci-fi classic War of the Worlds, but was probably best known for his TV appearances in shows such as Burke's Law.
Davis, who has overseen the "in memoriam" section since it began in 1993, defended the decision to mention Michael Jackson, best known for his contributions to the world of pop music, explaining that the singer had appeared in a popular theatrical film (presumably This Is It) recently. "Think of all the blogging we would have gotten if we had left him out," he added.
Film attempts to recreate the terror of the 1942 Rafle du Vel d'Hiv, in which 13,000 Jews were rounded up in Paris
When, in 1995, Joseph Weismann reflected on the chances of a film being made about the horrors he witnessed in the thick heat of a Parisian summer more than 50 years earlier, his answer was uttered through tears: "I don't think that anyone would ever dare."
Tomorrow, 15 years after his words were broadcast on television, and almost 70 years on from arguably the most terrible and taboo episode in modern French history, Weismann will be proved wrong. For the first time since 19 July 1942, when about 13,000 French Jews were rounded up by members of their own country's police force and locked inside a velodrome in western Paris, before being taken to concentration camps, a film director has attempted to recreate the terror of the Rafle du Vel d'Hiv.
A harrowing drama following the events of the Nazi-decreed raid through the eyes of a group of young children, La Rafle has been hailed as an important step in France's acknowledgment of its complicity in the crimes of the Occupation.
Its central character is Joseph Weismann, now 80, and one of the 4,051 children taken during the raids. Unlike almost all his compatriots, however, the 11-year-old managed to escape.
The director, Rose Bosch, whose husband's family were Jews in the same Parisian neighbourhood as Weismann, said she felt the film had to be made to shed light on one of the most sensitive chapters in wartime France. "Because it was so taboo and the story was so untold, I decided to do it," she said.
For Bosch, whose cast includes Mélanie Laurent, star of Inglourious Basterds, as a young Protestant nurse, appalled by what she witnesses in the velodrome, and later in a French-run transit camp, the shame lies not just in the scale of the killing and collaboration, but also from France's subsequent failure to confront it.
"[It is] the biggest stain in contemporary history and they have all been trying to scrub it out, all of them," she said, describing a photograph of a French transit camp, which Charles de Gaulle's government doctored to remove the clearly Gallic presence of a gendarme. "That's what [the round-up] represents: a big lie, something that was hidden, that people didn't known what to do about, like a hot potato in their hands."
After years of attempts by successive presidents of the republic to deny any French complicity in activities carried out during a period of foreign occupation, Jacques Chirac broke the silence in 1995, acknowledging the state's role in delivering "those it was protecting to their executioners" during the Rafle.
Writing in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper this week, Chirac said he had seen La Rafle, and that its powerful recreation of the round-up was a reminder that one of the chief principles of society had to be "the courage to declare ... that force should never prevail over law". While not the first film to touch on the round-up, La Rafle is the first to tackle it head-on.
It is not wholly damning of the French, with its focus alternating between eager collaborationists in the Paris police force and horrified members of the public and the authorities that attempted to resist orders.
Historians point out that while the scale was huge, it was barely half of the numbers requested by the Nazis, who wanted 25,000 Jews deported.
Weismann, who was urged by Simone Veil, the leading politician and Auschwitz survivor, to speak of his sufferings after years of silence, is now convinced of the need to pass on the experiences to future generations. "When I speak about it, it suffocates me, chokes me," he said. "It's important to tell this story to the youth of today. It is they who will write the story of tomorrow."
The documentary-makers exposed an alleged whale-meat smuggling operation at the US sushi restaurant The Hump
The run-up to the Oscars are a heady time for nominees: a whirlwind of screenings, cocktails, celebrity encounters and, for the makers of this year's prize winning eco-documentary, secret meetings in the parking lot of a sushi restaurant with federal investigators.
In an action worthy of the eco-commandos of Greenpeace, the makers of The Cove, an Oscar-winning documentary on Japan's dolphin slaughter, helped break up an alleged whale meat smuggling operation at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant catering to "adventurous" eaters.
On offer at The Hump, aside from yellowtail tuna, live octopus and shrimp, and baby abalone, was what was said to be whale meat, despite a ban on the sale and possession of whales.
That went too far for Louie Psihoyos, the director of The Cove, who co-ordinated the sushi sting from the parking lot.
"These are endangered animals. They are protected species. It is one thing for the Japanese to be doing it in their own country, but I take it as a major affront that they are doing this on our shores," he told the Guardian. "When they are cut up in little hunks of sushi it's a tragedy."
A spokesman for the US attorney's office told the New York Times that the restaurant could be formally charged as early as this week. Anyone convicted could face prison or a fine of up to $20,000 (£13,340).
In the week before the Oscars, the crew from The Cove made two visits with police to the restaurant. Two women activists went inside and ordered while Psihoyos maintained audio surveillance outside.
Secretly filmed video from an earlier supper last October showed the two women ordering off the chef's special omakase menu, with a waitress bringing thick pink slices of what she said was whale meat.
The pair ate two slices of the meat, putting six others in a plastic bag so it could be sent for DNA testing. The samples were sent to an expert who established the slices were from a sei whale. The species is endangered but is still hunted in Japan under a controversial programme that allows the killing of up to 1,000 whales a year in the name of science.
The bust offered yet more positive buzz for The Cove after it took the Oscar for best documentary. The Cove is Psihoyos's first feature-length film though he says he has been doing undercover work for 20 years. It relied on remote-controlled cameras mounted in helicopters, helium balloons, and even fake rocks as well as night vision equipment to record the annual dolphin hunt in a small coastal village on Honshu island in Japan.
Fishermen, banging on the hulls of their boats to confuse the dolphins' sense of direction, head out to sea to trap the migrating shoals. They herd the dolphins back to shore, packing them into a small inlet as closely as sardines, and then stab them to death with long harpoons and clubs.
In the course of each fishing season, the fishermen kill 2,000 dolphins, selling the meat to local supermarkets for about $500 a dolphin. They can earn far more by taking somem dolphins alive and selling them to aquariums.
The film-makers have seen a surge of support for stopping the hunt since Oscar night when Psihoyos' collaborator, the former dolphin trainer and underwater stuntman Ric O'Barry, held a sign asking viewers to text in their support. The appeal led the Oscar Academy to cut off Psihoyo's acceptance speech for "activism".
Psihoyos is already at work on his next film about the widespread extinctions that will come about because of the changing chemistry of the oceans brought by global warming. The Cove is due to be released in Japan, where the government has responded coolly to the film's success. "There are different food traditions within Japan and around the world," an official statement said. "It is important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories."
The 2010 Oscars were watched by 41 million people in the US, the best audience for the awards since 2005
Approximately 41.3 million people in the US watched the 2010 Oscars on Sunday, up 14% on last year and the best audience for the awards show in five years.
Sunday night's surge in viewing for the 82nd Academy Awards, broadcast on ABC, is likely to be attributed to the nine nominations garnered by Avatar even though it only won three awards, losing out in the best picture and best director categories to The Hurt Locker.
The uncertain outcome of the contest between Avatar's director, James Cameron, and his ex-wife, The Hurt Locker's director, Kathryn Bigelow, meant the three-and-a-half-hour-long ceremony was more popular than last year's Oscars, when Slumdog Millionaire dominated the awards.
It is also the biggest audience for the Oscars since 2005, when Million Dollar Baby took home the best picture trophy.
The Deadline blog, quoting figures from the ratings company Nielsen, said the broadcast was the most watched Oscars – and best rating entertainment show on US TV – since 2005 and was nearly 10 million more than the 32 million viewers who watched No Country for Old Men win best picture in 2008.
Advertisers paid ABC an average of $1.4m (£935,000) for a 30-second slot, up from $990,000 that commercials were sold for in the 2009 awards, the Los Angles Times reported.
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Argentina's victory for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards for The Secret in Their Eyes has reportedly sent the South American country into raptures
The Oscars, broadcast there in the early hours of Monday morning, was yesterday's most-watched television programme, and newspapers scurried to print second editions carrying the country's win on their front pages. Throughout the day, news programmes continued to report on the victory and the reaction to it.
Juan José Campanella's thriller, based on a novel by Eduardo Sacheri, is set in Buenos Aires in 1999. It centres on a retired investigator trying to solve the 1974 rape and murder of a woman, and highlights the turbulent nature of Argentina in the 1970s, a period in which the country was controlled mainly by military dictatorships.
The Secret in Their Eyes emerged as victor despite the high-profile nature of some of its competitors. Audiard's gangster flick had taken the Grand Prix at Cannes, as well as a foreign language Bafta, while Haneke's austere black-and-white drama took the Palme D'Or at Cannes and the foreign language Golden Globe.
"This is a historic moment," veteran actor Guillermo Francella, a member of the film's cast, said following the victory. "The people felt it personally, which is why there is so much joy in Argentina."
"It was really miraculous because the films they were competing against were excellent," said Ricardo Darín, who plays the lead role of detective Benjamín Esposito.
Earlier this year The Secret in Their Eyes became the second most successful film in the history of its country at the box office, surpassed only by Leonardo Favio's 1975 classic, Nazareno Cruz y el lobo (Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf). It had already taken the best Hispanic-American film prize at the Goyas, ahead of Peruvian rival The Milk of Sorrow, which also lost out at the Oscars.
"We're happy because we won ... It was a fantastic film I saw twice and which had an impact on me," said the Argentinian president, Cristina Kirchner. "With Campanella's talent and the huge public success in Argentina, we showed that this film could win the Oscar."
Campanella himself is relatively well-known in Hollywood, having directed episodes of House and Law & Order, among other series. His film Son of the Bride (El Hijo de la Novia), which also starred Darín, was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film in 2002.
The Oklahoma oddballs are currently begging the SexyBack singer to star in the forthcoming follow-up to Christmas On Mars
The Flaming Lips are once again making a movie, but this time they are leaving out the spaceships. As the group plan their follow-up to 2008's Christmas On Mars their sights are set on er, Justin Timberlake.
"I'm in the process of begging [him]," frontman Wayne Coyne told Billboard, referring to the SexyBack singer. "If I'm lucky I'll be able to wear him down in another year." Although the Flaming Lips haven't revealed their new movie's title, plot, or whether Coyne will once again be painted green, the group are determined to nab "real actors" for certain roles, alongside family, friends and, we suppose, bassists. "[I want] celebrities to show up and have fun with us for a couple of nights."
Like Christmas On Mars, the movie will be shot on a shoestring budget in Coyne's hometown of Oklahoma City. But whereas the band's first film was stuffed with rocket-ships and alien antennae, the new one will be earthbound. "My only goal was that I didn't have to build space station-looking sets every time I wanted to have someone say something," Coyne said. "This one is set in someone's house, a backyard and a slaughterhouse; all those are available to me right here."
Not that this will necessarily accelerate the film-making process. "I think everybody would be relieved if it all got done in six weeks and we could say, 'Look at that!'" Coyne said. "But because I get to do it with people I love and it's my art, I don't care how long it takes." He's not kidding: Christmas On Mars took seven years.
Hadley Freeman sees the stars strike a serene pose on Academy Awards red carpet – while the reporters lose the plot
"I'm loving the colour! I'm loving life! Let's talk beauty!" Those of an innocent nature might assume this to be the final line of a pre-Raphaelite poem, or the chorus of a 1960s folk song. Those of a more seasoned bent will identify this as your average exhortation from a TV presenter on the Oscars red carpet.
What had just happened? I think someone had spotted that Maggie Gyllenhaal was wearing a blue dress. Hey, I'm loving life! It was a funny old Oscars night. If the nominees seemed like an awkward balance between the small (The Hurt Locker, An Education, A Single Man) and the bloated (Avatar, Avatar, Avatar), then the red carpet was an enjoyable imbalance between the hysterical presenters and the decidedly blase celebrities.
"Were you FREAKING OUT all day?" the hyperbolic AP presenter asked Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner, looking as if she might need cardiac assistance soon. "Nah, I just had a sandwich," he shrugged. The AP woman tried again with Up in the Air's Vera Farmiga. "I'm zen," replied the fabulously cool Farmiga. Lenny Kravitz had spent the day eating takeaway chicken.
Poor AP woman. Where's Mariah Carey when you need her, right? The most telling disjunct was apparent long before the presenters had re-whitened their teeth and mic'd up. There were so many suggestions of behind the scenes scandals (Kathryn Bigelow versus her ex-husband James Cameron for best director being the big one, a fight that upset the media much more than it seemed to Bigelow and Cameron) that it didn't take an Avatar-sized imagination to wonder if all this media hoo-hah wasn't just a distraction from the ho-humness of the nominees.
But let's not be cynical and instead focus on the question of the night: would Mo'Nique shave her legs for the event? "Of course not," shrieked Mo'Nique, best supporting actress nominee and, more importantly in TabloidLand, razor phobe. "I haven't even shaved my arms!"
Inside the Kodak Theater it was down to Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to get the party started, a pairing that began uncomfortably. And in the early minutes, stilted seemed to be a running theme. This being a British paper, one is obliged to focus on the British nominees. All countries do this to their own, of course. This weekend the Toronto Sun bemoaned the unlikelihood of any of the Canadian nominees wearing something that reflected their nationality to the ceremony. "Not that they should wear fitted Mountie or hockey uniforms," the paper conceded. Just "a small strategic maple leaf pin." Ah, Canada. Good to see that the Olympics haven't dented your inferiority complex a jot. And speaking of the Canadians, Cameron may have made himself a candidate for the stupidest comment of the night when he compared his nominations to his children. But which of your children is the best director nomination, James, and which is the best visual effects?
Anyway, to the obligatory Brits who were adorably normal. Carey Mulligan said her Prada dress let her get away without wearing Spanx; Helen Mirren, as beautiful as a Gainsborough portrait, compared the Oscars with Disney World's Magic Mountain (Magic Mountain is scarier.)
It's easy to bemoan the stupidity of the celebrity world but, actually, it's not the celebrities that have become dumber, it's the celebrity presenters. And for that, I blame the E! channel, the entertainment network that is presumably named after the product one needs to take in order to watch this channel without weeping for the future.
After you've watched presenter Ryan Seacrest talk to Mariah Carey about her diamonds, and then turn to High School Musical's Zac Efron to find out where his suit was from, you'll have a newfound empathy for the recently lobotomised.
As for the presenter on the AP network who said best actress nominee Gabourey Sidibe would "have to have her dress specially made" and how "hard it is for people like her", he will come back in his next life as a dung beetle. And for the record, Sidibe looked completely gorgeous in her blue dress. I'm loving the colour – let's talk beauty.
Brand makes TV debut with campaign claimed to be 'David Lynch meets Desperate Housewives'
The pudding brand Gü has drawn inspiration from David Lynch's cult 1990s series Twin Peaks in an unsettling ad campaign that marks the brand's debut on TV.
The TV campaign, described by ad agency Mother as also having a touch of the ABC hit series Desperate Housewives, features a well-dressed middle-aged woman "drawn into a dark world of sensual abandon", and can be seen for the first time here.
The woman is drawn into a room of a house where a stranger seems to be entertaining a number of woman with the promise of food and the bizarre question "Gü you Ganache?", which has echoes of the backward speaking dwarf in a red suit from Twin Peaks.
However it is not a delicious slice of cherry pie, the favourite of Kyle McLachlan's special agent Dale Cooper in the series, that is the food obsession in the ad but a decadent Gü pudding.
The campaign breaks tonight and will be supported by press ads and a digital campaign.
"We wanted to give the audience a glimpse into the world of 'Ganaching', a dark and sensual place where normal women submit to their desires and indulge in Gü," said Stephen Butler of Mother London. "It is intriguing and indulgent while all the time feeling a little uneasy – David Lynch meets Desperate Housewives."
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Taiji mayor's office says dolphin hunt is part of a long cultural tradition
The Japanese fishing village featured in The Cove, which won an Oscar for best documentary, today defended its practice of hunting dolphins as a part of a long tradition.
The movie, which mixes stunning underwater shots of gliding dolphins with covertly filmed grisly footage of their slaughter, also claims that dolphin meat is laden with toxic mercury.
Taiji, a quiet fishing village on the rocky coast of south-western Japan, kills only a small fraction of the dolphins hunted by the country each year. But it has long been a target of environmentalists and animal lovers because it uses a method called "oikomi", in which the dolphins are chased in to shore, making the hunt more visible.
Though few residents said they had seen the film, there was universal disgust at its portrayal of the town. Taiji proudly bills itself as "Whale Town" and a main bridge is adorned with dolphin statues, but after years of what locals see as unfair treatment by the foreign press, few are willing to talk on the record. One young dolphin trainer turned and ran away when asked for her opinion.
"This is a close-knit group of fishermen. The more they feel squeezed, the more they will close off to outsiders. They won't stop this hunt because of such pressure," said Hisato Ryono, a local councillor who appears in the film.
The mayor's office handed out a statement that said Taiji's dolphin hunt is lawful and argued that the movie contained statements that were not based on science. Otherwise, most town officials refused to talk.
"There are different food traditions within Japan and around the world," the statement read. "It is important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories."
Director Louie Psihoyos said The Cove was not meant to attack Japan but that it was "a love letter to the Japanese people".
"Our hope is the Japanese people will see this film and decide themselves whether animals should be used for meat and for entertainment," Psihoyos said backstage after receiving the Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.
The town of Taiji kills about 2,000 dolphins every year for their meat. Some are captured and sold to aquariums.
The Japanese government, which allows about 19,000 dolphins to be killed each year, acknowledges that dolphin meat is contaminated with mercury, but says it is not dangerous unless consumed in huge quantities.
In September, amid an international outcry following the screening of The Cove abroad, villagers released several dozen dolphins that had been caught. But locals say they will continue with the hunt.
The film will be shown in Japan from June at 20 to 30 theatres nationwide. It was screened at the Tokyo International film festival in October.
Psihoyos was unable to get permission to enter the cove where the dolphins are killed. Fishermen blocked it with barbed wire and fences. So he and his film team secretly broke into the restricted area – which is in a national park – at night to set up cameras that capture the slaughter.
Japanese government officials have defended the fishermen's right to hunt dolphins and called the film unbalanced.
"There are some countries that eat cows, and there are other countries that eat whales or dolphins," said Yutaka Aoki, fisheries division director at the foreign ministry. "A film about slaughtering cows or pigs might also be unwelcome to workers in that industry."
The rock boffin is to return to movie soundtracks, writing music for an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood
Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood will reportedly return to film scoring, writing music for an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. The score will be based on a composition Greenwood wrote for the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Greenwood's last foray into feature films was his Grammy-nominated soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Just as that score was derived from an earlier work, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, Greenwood's composition expands upon an orchestral piece called Dogwood, which debuted last month.
The maverick musician announced the project at BBC's Maida Vale studios, following Dogwood's premiere. "I wrote [the] piece mostly in hotels and dressing rooms while touring with Radiohead," he told TwentyFourBit. "This was more practical than glamorous – lots of time sitting indoors, lots of instruments about – and aside from picking up a few geographical working titles, I [don't] think that it had any effect where, on tour, it was written." Greenwood is also listed on the film's Imdb page.
Murakami's 1987 novel, translated into English in 2000, follows Toru Watanabe's nostalgic recollections of the late 60s. These memories are spurred by the sitar-strung sound of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood. The film version is directed by Anh Hung Tran, and will be released in Japan in December.
In the meantime, the Maida Vale performance of Dogwood will be re-broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 19 March. Greenwood's first movie score, for the 2003 documentary Bodysong, will also soon see an encore: it will be released on DVD on 22 March.
• Kathryn Bigelow is first woman to win best director Oscar • Avatar gets only three out of nine nominations • Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz and Mo'Nique win acting honours
For once, the Oscars were a genuine nail-biter. Right through to the final reel, it was too close to call between the David and Goliath of this year's contenders: Avatar, James Cameron's 3D space opera, and The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's low-budget drama about a squad of US bomb disposal experts working in Iraq. That Bigelow and Cameron were once married merely heightened the drama – quietly exploited by the ceremony producers who sat them directly behind each other – as did the huge disparity in their box-office takes (with over $2.6bn, Avatar is the biggest film of all time; The Hurt Locker has just topped $21m).
But, in the end, the underdog momentum gathered by The Hurt Locker was just too much for even the mighty Avatar to withstand, despite 11th hour upsets such as the banning of co-producer Nicolas Chartier from the ceremony, and a possible lawsuit in the offing over the film's authorship. The film took six awards, including both best director – making Bigelow the first woman ever to win the award – and best picture, collecting them in such swift succession that Bigelow was left literally breathless.
"It's the moment of a lifetime," she said after being handed the best director prize by Barbra Streisand, who had herself been the first woman to win a directing Golden Globe, for Yentl in 1984. Bigelow dedicated the award to the people of Jordan, where the film was shot, and to the "women and men in the military who risk their lives on a daily basis – may they come home safe". In her speech accepting the best picture award, presented by Tom Hanks, Bigelow extended this to all servicemen and women around the world. The film also took Oscars for Mark Boal's original screenplay, best film editing, sound editing and sound mixing.
Best actor went, predictably, to Jeff Bridges for his role as a washed-up, strung-out country singer in Crazy Heart. The star looked as comfortable ambling onstage as only one raised in the bosom of Hollywood could. His standing ovation was affectionate and deserved.
That accorded to Sandra Bullock, who won the best actress award for her role as a tough-talking woman who takes a troubled football prodigy under her wing in The Blind Side, felt slightly less so. Despite British presence in the category, including rising star Carey Mulligan for An Education and Helen Mirren for her role as Sofia Tolstoy in The Last Station, it was a relatively weak year. But Bullock is a much-loved Hollywood personality, admired as much for her gameness as her acting talents. On Saturday night she had taken to the stage at the Razzies to receive the award for worst actress of the year, for All About Steve, in which she plays a cruciverbalist-turned-stalker.
As expected, the best supporting actor award went to Christoph Waltz, who has so far won every award going in the category for his masterly turn as a sadistic "Jew-hunter" in Inglourious Basterds. But it must have been a blow to Quentin Tarantino that this was the only one of the film's eight nominations that bore fruit (James Cameron's Avatar – nominated in nine categories – did at least go home with three: for art direction, cinematography and visual effects).
Also unsurprisingly, the best supporting actress award went to Mo'Nique, who plays an abusive mother in Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire. On the red carpet outside the Kodak theatre, she had been as laissez-faire about the possibility of a victory as only one so heavily-tipped could be: "A win is when someone says [their] life is different because of Precious," she said.
It wasn't the harrowing film's only honour of the evening – there was a surprise in the best adapted screenplay category when Geoffrey Fletcher snatched it from the teeth of An Education's Nick Hornby and Armando Iannucci's In the Loop team. No one was more surprised, it seemed, than Fletcher himself, who struggled through his 45-second address, choked with emotion. "I wrote that speech for him," boasted host Steve Martin directly afterwards – one of many big laughs he and co-host Alec Baldwin received during the evening.
It was a disappointing night for the Brits, especially in the light of last year's Slumdog Millionaire sweep. There was nothing for Colin Firth, Mulligan, Mirren, Hornby or Iannucci. Nothing, even, for Nick Park – usually something of a sure thing at the Oscars, with five already. But in this instance his latest Wallace and Grommit was pipped to the post for best animated short by Nicolas Schmerkin's Logorama.
Also snubbed were the critics' favourites The White Ribbon and A Prophet, which lost out to the Argentinian film The Secret in Their Eyes. But then, when it comes to best foreign language film, the Academy has a history of singing to its own tune.
And, while the ceremony itself began with a full-throttle song-and-dance number, courtesy of TV's Neil Patrick Harris – splendid in a sequinned blazer and accompanied by a bevy of be-feathered dancers – that turned out to be the only song on offer in a ceremony that, though long on glitz, was short on bona fide razzmatazz.
Though winners' acceptance speeches were limited to 45 seconds, it was still a long evening, perhaps a product of the Academy's decision to – after a 67-year hiatus – increase the number of best picture nominees from five to 10. This meant much of the ceremony's running time was devoted to stars introducing clips from the runners and riders and, after their opening routine was complete, surprisingly little time was left to the two hosts. Martin and Baldwin began the night with a healthy dose of celebrity scepticism, dishing out insults of refreshing frankness to the assembled mob. But, as the evening wore on, the poking-of-fun descended into a Mexican wave of genuflection as they, plus guest presenters, succumbed to the pull of actor flattery.
In awarding the first ever best director Oscar to a woman, and the first screenwriting award to an African-American, this was a night of genuine progress and optimism for Hollywood. But the revolution has rarely felt so predictable.
Rightwingers have championed Sandra Bullock's portrayal of a Sarah Palin-esque woman transforming a youth's life, but liberals want Gabourey Sidibe's gritty debut rewarded tonight
One film celebrates the courage and generosity of a white middle-class "soccer mom" who transforms the life of a disadvantaged and illiterate teenager from Memphis. The other tells the bleak but uplifting tale of the troubled teenage years of an obese, pregnant black girl living in Harlem, New York.
So far, so different. But the leading actresses in both The Blind Side and Precious – two of the most powerful hits of the year – are in strong contention for the Academy award for best actress in Los Angeles tonight.
Sandra Bullock, who plays the Christian heroine of The Blind Side, has been widely praised for her convincing portrayal of a well-off woman who is determined to do good for teenager Michael Oher. Newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, on the other hand, has been hailed as a subtle new talent in the taxing lead role of Precious, a girl who only just manages to pull herself clear of her underclass roots.
Whoever claims the prize, the victory will be about much more than acting skill: the two films have gained acclaim from two very different political constituencies. Since its release in America last year, in time for Thanksgiving celebrations, The Blind Side has been championed by many of the same rightwing activists who took Sarah Palin to their hearts during the presidential election campaign a year and a half ago.
In fact, Bullock's characterisation of the pencil-skirted, prosperous Leigh Anne Tuohy, an emblem of the religiously principled backbone of America, has been repeatedly likened to Palin, particularly as rumours of a new presidential push for the former governor of Alaska gain credence.
Liberal critics have taken a rather different view, describing the film as patronising and condescending towards black youth. Some have dubbed the movie an exercise "in white guilt", while the New York Times has pointed out how little screen time is afforded to Oher's deprived background, going on to suggest the film makers are "interested only in that world as an occasion for selective charity".
Instead they champion director Lee Daniels' portrayal of Claireece Precious Jones as a triumph of gritty social realism. According to the distinctly Democratic-leaning Rolling Stone magazine, the film "tunnels inside your head, leaves you moved like no film in years and then lifts you up in ways you don't see coming. Despite the pain at the story's core, the movie has a spirit that soars. Gabourey Sidibe's astounding debut brims with grit and amazing grace, digs aspiration out of buried dreams. I don't know how director Lee Daniels works his magic. But once Precious gets its hooks into you, no way is it letting go."
Bullock's film, which is released here on 26 March and was directed by John Lee Hancock, is based on the fairy-tale, true-life account of the journey taken by the young American Football player Oher. Born into a dysfunctional family in Hurt Village in Memphis, the third poorest district in the country, Oher is offered a lifeline up into the middle classes by Tuohy. She welcomes him into her family home and then supports and guides him towards a career as a highly-paid sports professional.
For Oher, whose father and maternal grandfather were both murdered and whose uncle was on death row for killing his wife, to have gained entry to this privileged world with the help of the Tuohy family is seen as the ultimate blessing. At school Oher had repeatedly played truant and was originally assessed as having an IQ of only 80. He had not only never touched a football, he did not understand the concept of the ocean. Once Tuohy had persuaded her wealthy husband, Sean, to take him into their home to live alongside their cheerleader daughter, Collins, and their son, Sean Jnr, he was promptly groomed both as a sportsman and as a student, eventually becoming one of the most sought-after high school football talents of his year.
Precious, on the other hand, is a slice of grimness served up specifically to reveal the gaping holes in the American system. Based on the 1996 novel Push by Sapphire, it follows the teenager through incestuous rape and HIV infection as she scrambles her way towards self-improvement against all the odds.
The political interests vested in the fight for the best actress award are just one layer of anxiety in the fraught night ahead. To plagiarise Johnny Carson's famous remark about the length of the ceremony, the Oscars offer television viewers two hours of intense nervous tension, cruelly spread out over four hours of coverage (although the broadcasters are hoping for only three hours this year).
Comperes Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin will have to work hard maintaining pace and the sense of fun as the winners are encouraged to speak for just 45 seconds in a year when the shortlist for best film has been lengthened to 10 for the first time, and when campaign strategies have been more controversial than ever before. Earlier this year, Nicolas Chartier – one of the producers of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's screen treatment of the work of bomb disposal teams in Iraq – was banned from attending tonight's ceremony because he had misguidedly texted friends in the Academy – in other words, other voting members – encouraging them to cast their ballot for his film rather than that of the other favourite for best film, James Cameron's record-grossing Avatar.
Sensitivities abound in this most prestigious category because Cameron is Bigelow's ex-husband and because the two films have become symbols of two very different brands of Hollywood product. Cameron's film is pure spectacle, inventive but escapist and very expensive. Bigelow's war film, in contrast, makes deliberately uncomfortable viewing, will have more limited box office appeal and was made for a smaller budget (although one which still dwarfs most British productions).
Proof of the efforts made to strike exactly the right tone, on a night which will lay bare the divisions in the Los Angeles entertainment community, has come in the last-minute decision to ditch a comic sketch that targeted the fantastical content of Cameron's sci-fi epic.
The British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen was to have appeared in a short sequence alongside the American comedian Ben Stiller but the plug was inexplicably pulled this month, with the explanation that there had been "artistic differences". Cameron, who won a slew of Oscars for Titanic, may have pulled off another box office coup, but it appears the Hollywood blockbuster machine is in defensive mode tonight.
If Bigelow does win best director for The Hurt Locker, however, her most important achievement will not have been to have triumphed over a former husband or over a cinematic juggernaut, but to have become the first female director to take the statuette. She is already one of only four women to be shortlisted for the best director award in the Academy's 81-year history.
