Word: oscars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...astute, rich performances over her 60-year career; in Lenox, Mass. She got her break in 1951 as a passionate Italian-American widow in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, for which she won a Tony. Later she created roles in Neil Simon plays like Plaza Suite and won an Oscar for her portrayal of anarchist Emma Goldman in the 1981 film Reds...
...need to see the blood!" shouts Mel Gibson. "Your character is going to die soon!" He picks up a bullhorn: "Attention! We are all dying here! We are all dying!" The Oscar-winning director is standing in a rock quarry near Veracruz, Mexico, shooting a hellish scene for Apocalypto, his action epic about the ancient Maya. Hundreds of local extras--many of whom have never seen a movie, let alone acted in one--are pounding fake limestone to build a temple used for human sacrifices. Gibson wants one of the extras, covered in white lime dust, to visibly cough...
...decline will be a wake-up call. "The parallels between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what's happening to our own civilization are eerie," says Safinia. Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of "penitential hardship" like his Oscar-winning Braveheart, puts it more bluntly: "The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys...
Gibson is betting the chase will feel even hairier thanks to a new digital camera system, Panavision's Genesis, that yields a "tremendous sensation of velocity," says cinematographer Dean Semler, who won an Oscar for Dances with Wolves. All the doom and zoom sound fun, but the ancient Maya are also called the Greeks of the New World--they invented the concept of zero, built astonishing cities and used a more complex calendar than ours. Gibson insists the glory gets its close-ups too. Says Richard Hansen, a Maya scholar at Idaho State University, head of the Mirador Basin Project...
...Oscar for Refusal to Kiss Up goes to ANNIE PROULX, 70, on whose 1997 short story Brokeback Mountain was based. After Brokeback lost the Best Picture Oscar to Crash, Proulx wrote a vituperative column in the Guardian, attacking the winning film (which she refers to as Trash), Hollywood types ("somewhat dim"), the awards event ("reminiscent of a small-town talent show" with "an atmosphere of insufferable self-importance") and even innocent bystanders Three 6 Mafia ("an atrocious act"), who won the Oscar for Best Song. She also lays into the Academy ("conservative heffalumps"). Yep, she used the H word. This...