Quickly Entertainment News

Well, she’s not single anymore.

Actress Jodie Foster married her girlfriend, photographer Alexandra Hedison over the weekend, according to various news reports.

Foster acknowledged her sexuality in a large scale announcement for the first time in a 2013 Golden Globes acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille lifetime achievement award. She nervously built up to her big reveal: “I am, uh, single.” It was a wink and a nod to the fact that her sexuality was something of an open secret in Hollywood, if you could even call it that. She hadn’t actively tried to conceal it, but she didn’t flaunt it, either. Said Foster:

True to form, Foster, 51, declined to make a public statement about her nuptials. Her publicist would only confirm that the couple, who have been dating since last summer, had gotten married, E! reported. Hedison previously dated Ellen DeGeneres. They broke up in 2004.

Foster, who has been in show business for 48 years, has witnessed from the inside the transformation of a business where homosexuality was — and, in some cases, still is — something to be shushed and hidden away to the point of covering it up with fake marriages. Before she was a successful daytime television and Oscar host, DeGeneres was a cautionary tale. Leading the life of an openly gay actor, especially one headlining Hollywood blockbusters, meant you disclosed details about your personal life with friends and family, but didn’t necessarily show up at your premieres smooching your significant other.

Of course, that was also before TMZ. Now, 44 years after the Stonewall Riots, society expects its celebrities to be a little more forthcoming, a la Ellen Page, who recently came out in a speech at an LGBT youth conference in Las Vegas.

Foster’s move was similar to that of Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, who didn’t so much come out as publicly acknowledge her longtime partner, Amber Laign, in a Facebook post about her battle with cancer last year. Roberts didn’t actively conceal her orientation, either. She just didn’t shout about it.

But within the gay community, there has always been debate about how muchdisclosure is the “right” amount. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was criticized for years as being closeted, despite the fact that the highly recognizable anchor was spotted at New York gay bars and frequently photographed with his boyfriend, Ben Maisani, withwhom he owns a converted Manhattan firehouse. It was still a big deal when he formally came out in 2012. Cooper told Andrew Sullivan, “It’s become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something – something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true.”

In her speech, Foster also recognized Cydney Bernard, her former partner of 20 years, and their children together. The two ended their 20-year relationship in 2008.

Source:

www.washingtonpost.com

(CNN) -- After all the arrests, court appearances, trips to jail and rehab stays, Lindsay Lohan has turned to reality TV.

Like reboots of most anything, be it the Star Trek film franchise or the Hannibal television series, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (premiering Sunday, March 9 on Fox) does not require familiarity with its original incarnation to be appreciated and enjoyed. Yet comparing the two shows, and their first episodes, is instructive. The first Cosmos, broadcast on PBS in 1980, had a different subtitle: “A personal voyage.” The person implied was the viewer — all of humanity. It was also the creative intelligence behind the series, astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who died in 1996. His widely watched series explored all of creation, and expressed all of himself — his mind, his heart, his hopes, his fears. Sagan wanted to use popular culture to evangelize science, exploration, and a worldview that was infinitely bigger than the world itself.

Inspiration for the series sprung from disappointment. In 1976, Sagan, then a member of the Viking Lander Imaging Team at NASA surveying Mars with robots, was dismayed by the lack of attention given to their historic, important work by the news media. At the time, the cultural narratives about space focused on the question of alien life and hospitable planets, and Team Viking couldn’t support reductive storylines about little green men or interplanetary manifest destiny. But Sagan was convinced the public was hungrier for knowledge — and more capable of appreciating complexity — than the press assumed. In the companion book to Cosmos, Sagan wrote: ”I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics — the origin of life, the earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television.”

Cosmos was an artful education. The storytelling was hypnotic, if sometimes sleepy. The series had striking visuals — be they produced by special effects, recreations, location and nature photography — and a contemplative score by Vangelis (who also scored Chariots of Fire) that made memorable use of a Theremin. Best of all, it had Sagan — that open face, that friendly smile, that endearingly nerdy yet deeply humble air, that lyrical language, and that voice. He turned science into Romantic poetry.

The premiere episode of the original Cosmos has a stream-of-consciousness quality to it, but there’s actually some provocative structure to it. (Because you can watch it online, and in the spirit of radical Radical relativity, I am going to talk about the Cosmos of yesterday in the present tense.) It begins on the coast of Northern California – beachhead for This Island Earth in the infinite ocean of the space. Here, on the cliffs, Sagan boards his ship of the imagination, shaped like a dandelion seed head, and takes us into deep space, about halfway across the universe. Sagan then wanders home, somewhere on the outer arm of the Milky Way, stopping a few times to observe an exploding sun, a strobing pulsar, and a planet with civilization visible from a space — a speculative vision, expressing Sagan’s belief that we can’t possibly be alone in the universe. He cruises past Pluto (still a planet back then), Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, and Jupiter. He stands to greet Mars as it fills the viewscreen. It’s an emotional moment, whether or not you know Sagan’s personal connection to the Red Planet. As his ship sails over the monolithic volcano that we’ve named Mount Olympus or through the trenches of theValles Marineris, you thrill to the point of tears from knowing that we, as a civilization, are even capable of seeing such sights and knowing such things. When Sagan reaches Earth, we see the planet, and ourselves, as he does: As an extraordinary yet infinitesimal part of the universe; as beings made of stardust, embedded with the secrets of creation. This re-orientation is both wondrous and terrifying. The word, actually, is awesome.

In the second episode, Sagan goes to Egypt and recounts how the ancient egghead Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy from his home-base at the legendary Library at Alexandria. Sagan portrays the place as a government-funded research institute devoted to an interdisciplinary study, for no other purpose than the accumulation and expansion of human knowledge — an “enlightened” bit of public policy “shared by few heads of state then and now.” The Library did not survive Antiquity, and its contents were lost. Sagan skips ahead centuries to the Renaissance, and summarizes much of the scientific discovery since then as the rediscovery of facts lost 2,000 years ago, made by men of reason in an era where “free inquiry was valued once again.” Sagan is tacitly referring to Christianity, but the underlying critique is Sagan’s own era: He’s using the example of the Library as ideal, and to critique, by implication, Cold War America, which kept the majority of the country’s best scientists focused on weapons of mass destruction, thus stunting research and advancement in other areas. All of Cosmos, in fact, is nervy about the threat of thermonuclear war. (Sagan’s widow and Cosmos collaborator Ann Druyan spells out the politics in her intro to the first episode of the original series here.) What kind of culture — world — might we have if those same brains weren’t owned by the business of making bombs?

The final minutes introduces the cosmic calendar. Sagan compresses the 13.8 billion year history of the universe into 12 months and shows how human beings didn’t show up until late on December 31.Cosmos wants us to better appreciate what rare and fragile creatures we humans happen to be, even at the risk of making us feel totally insignificant. Softening the blow is Sagan’s personhood, which just exudes a sincere care for human flourishing. He made Cosmos an appealing invitation to rethink everything we thought we knew about creation, and then learn anew.

Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was produced for a generation raised on manned space flight and heroic moon landings. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is produced for a culture that just mothballed its space shuttle program and struggles to see the practical purpose in leaving orbit, much less exploring other planets. The firstCosmos took as givens the intelligence and interest of its audience. The new Cosmos does not proceed with these assumptions. It all but states that the cultural conservation started by its predecessor has fizzled out. “A generation ago the astronomer Carl Sagan stood here and launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure – the exploration of the universe revealed by science,” says host Neal deGrasse Tyson, the renowned astrophysicist (and Gravity basher), opening the show from the same Northern California cliffs where Sagan intro’d Cosmos. “It’s time to get going again.” President Obama — who has filmed an introduction for the new series — would seem to agree.

And so the goal of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey:  To make science cool again. It has the brain-trust for it —  the exec producers include Ann Druyan, irreverent animator/filmmaker/Oscar host Seth McFarlane, and longtimeStar Trek producer and sci-fi vet Brannon Braga. Their Cosmos is very Hollywood, from the subtitle (evoking the grandest of speculative sci-fi sagas, 2001: A Space Odyssey), to the digital special effects and eclectic range of storytelling devices, to the music (bye-bye moody-Moogy Vangelis; hello bombastic Alan Silvestri, whose filmography includes Back To The Future and The Avengers), to the spaceship of the imagination. Where Sagan chose a dandelion to represent his mind, Tyson is less metaphorical: He blasts off in a sleek, silvery retro-modern vessel that reminded me of other forms, like the iconic Trylon-and-Perisphere structures of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which tried to ferment futurism in the Depression-era masses, and Boba Fett’s turned-upright spacecraft from The Empire Strikes Back. Call this a mercenary mission to capture our imagination anew. Cosmos – Episode II: Revenge of the Saganites.

Providing the human face is Tyson. Sagan mirrored the brainy-meek leading man archetype of his time. (Think: Alan Alda; Woody Allen.) Tyson reflects his own era. He’s a proud geek who has inherited the culture. He is a worthy successor to Sagan, but he’s a slightly colder presence, and he points to the biggest disappointment of this Cosmos, one that exacerbates its (very few) other alienating qualities: It is a most impersonal voyage.

The structure of the premiere mirrors the structure of Sagan’s first episode, but with some notable, meaningful differences in aesthetic and purpose. Eschewing the artful meander of the original, the reboot is more muscular and blunt, leaner and mean, and sometimes, just mean. There’s poetry, but it’s Pulp, not Romantic.

Tyson immediately goes into space after his Northern California intro, just as Sagan did in the original. But instead of beginning the journey half the distance across the universe and working his way back,  Tyson begins his expedition on Earth and moves outward to establish our “cosmic address.” Where Sagan stopped to admire the desolate beauty of Mars, which then seemed to be our next destination as a spacefaring people, Tyson gives the same consideration — but with more doleful eyes — to a very real man-made object exiting the solar system: Voyager 1, carrying a salutation to alien races in the form of a golden record, its contents chosen by a committee chaired by Sagan himself, and boldly going where no man has ever gone, and may never go. The melancholy moment reminds us that to some degree, and hopefully only for now, our species has given up on its spacefaring destiny. This survey of space is very gee-whiz and feel-good; future episodes will hopefully do a better job explaining — and selling — what we might gain from a more aggressive exploration of our celestial neighbors.

When Sagan returned to Earth in his premiere, he told a legend about a society that once actively cultivated scientific investigation – an aspirational allegory for the kind of society Sagan wanted — and framed the history of science as that of a lost-and-found legacy. Similarly, Tyson tells a politically charged tale about the past, one that also puts the history of science in a selective context. It’s an animated sequence, narrated by Tyson, chronicling the life of a curious man of god from the 16th century named Giordano Bruno who dared to read scientific texts banned by the church, bought into the then-heretical notion that Earth revolved around the sun, and proposed that the Earth and the sun were among an infinite number of heavenly objects in infinite space. He was ultimately tried by the Inquisition and burned at the stake.

The flat, crude 2-D cartoon befits a tale of an intellectually immature society denying itself a proper 3-D (and more!) understanding of reality. But it also has the feel of cheap propaganda, all caricature, no nuance or rebuttal. (I suppose we have Mark Burnett’s The Bible — an equally shallow product — to thank for that.) Tied at the stake, a cross is raised to his lips to kiss; Bruno spurns it. And yet, even here, Tyson can’t resist taking a dig at this martyr of science, because after all, he was not man of reason, but a man of faith, albeit one blessed with great instincts and imagination. “Bruno was no scientist,” says Tyson, adding that his “vision of the cosmos” was a “lucky guess,” and as such, can’t be fully respected, because “he had no evidence to support it.” Better minds would later prove Bruno right, and so the victory belongs to them. It’s in this way, with carefully chosen words and an incessant insistence on the Scientific Method as the means of understanding all that is seen and unseen, that Cosmos prosecutes a complaint against Creationist dogma, and by extension, agitates for atheism. Which is perfectly fine. How about doing it in a way that doesn’t make anyone who holds to religious cosmology feel like a pitiless closed-minded Inquisition psycho? (Way to be the voice of reason in the culture,Cosmos.) Sagan was skeptical about religion, too, but his Cosmos represents a more civil and gracious way of participating in the cultural conversation (and fighting the culture war). This new Cosmos seems even more aware that Cosmos-centric thinking is as deflating as it is breathtaking. When he intros the section on proto-punk science hero Bruno, Tyson tries to assuage by pumping us up. “Feeling a little small? Well, in the context of the universe, we are small. We might just be little guys growing on a speck of dust afloat in a staggering immensity, but we don’t think small.” By asking us to connect with “natural-born rebel” Bruno, and by framing the search for scientific truth into a fight-the-power revolt, Cosmos tries to mitigate the chill of adopting a “cosmic perspective” by thinking of ourselves as counter-culture superheroes. It doesn’t really work. But this might be an impossible ambition, anyway. Even Sagan couldn’t quite pull the punch.

The premiere of Cosmos 2.0 concludes as Cosmos 1.0 did, with a section introducing “the cosmic calendar.” More time is given to the scientific rejoinder to Creationism, the theory of the Big Bang. In a bit of business too cheeky for Sagan, Tyson puts on a pair of glasses and allows himself to bear witness to the explosive event, to be blown away by its spectacle and its meaning. “I know that sounds crazy” Tyson says of the whole idea of the Big Bang, “but there is strong observational evidence that supports the theory,” and he goes on to cite the glow of radiation waves and the amount of helium in the universe. Translation: You don’t have to believe in this, but you should, because look. Proof.

The most powerful moment in the premiere has nothing to do with explosive acts of creation or exploding unprovable creation myths. It comes at the very end, when Tyson returns to Northern California and reveals his personal connection to Sagan, how the late legend dazzled him not only with his brain, but his compassion. I look forward to where Tyson and his ship of the imagination takes us in the episodes to come, and seeing how they might resemble and differ from the rest of original series. But I hope we will see more of Sagan in both its host and the storytelling. The truths, the ideas, the speculations, the passions Cosmos can share are important and expanding. Not a single one of them will register unless we feel that the show actually gives a hoot about us. The new Cosmos has smarts and spectacle. Now, more heart.

News Source: popwatch.ew.com

For all of you wondering what it's really like to go to the Oscars, wonder no more as Jennifer Lawrence's BFF has written a hilarious - and honest - account of what it was like to be the American Hustle star's date, and it seems that while it has its pros it certainly has its cons too!

Model Laura Simpson posted an insightful account of her time at the Oscars on her MySpace page over the weekend in which she dished the dirt on Brad Pitt, Bill Murray and the behind the scenes antics of the biggest awards ceremony of the year.

Speaking about J-Law's awkward fall as they arrived at the ceremony, Simpson wrote: “We finally arrive at the red carpet and as we exit the car, my date eats s**t and uses my freshly done Lauren Conrad up do to break her fall. The crowd goes wild. There are flashbulbs and people circling yet no one asks if I need any help because unless you are famous at the Oscars, you are completely invisible. … The only time anyone talks to you is if you are in the way of his or her photo.”

Laura revealed that the only time anyone talks to the non-famous is if you're "in the way of their shot" (MySpace/LauraSimpson)

The model then goes on to reveal what happens when the categories are shown inside the ceremony and it seems it isn't quite as exciting as we hoped, in fact it's so dull that Laura went to sit at the bar instead!

She explained: “Basically everyone in the theater is just sitting in complete darkness during the categories. It’s hot and you feel like you’re going to pass out. After waiting for my date’s category, her dad and I decide to hit the bar and just watch from the monitor behind the bar and slam a few drinks to make this tolerable. The Academy really needs to spring for more hors d’oeuvres options because now everyone is hammered.”

Laura even answers the question we've all been dying to know the answer to in her honest article - What does Brad Pitt smell like?

She recalls of meeting the superstar backstage: "Brad Pitt smells amazing, like nothing I’ve ever smelled. Eventually we ask what cologne he’s wearing and he tells us, ‘I don’t wear cologne, it’s just my musk I guess.’ I have to choose not to believe him because it would just be unfair to mankind.” Jealous!

Jennifer took her best pal Laura and boyfriend Nicholas Hoult to last weekend's Oscars (WENN)

The BFF of J-Law even admits exchanging some hilarious eye contact with Hollywood royalty Bill Murray, a moment that even involved the serenading sounds of Rod Stewart!

“I … decide to follow Bill Murray around the party. At one point he looks in my direction and winks at me while dancing to ‘If You Want My Body and You Think I’m Sexy’ by Rod Stewart — a moment, I now realize, my whole life had been leading up to," the model writes.

Catch the rest of Laura's hilarious account on her MySpace here.

Hollywood flick “Noah” has been banned in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates on religious grounds, a representative of Paramount Pictures told Reuters on Saturday.

Sending shockwaves across the Arab world, the $125 million film - starring Oscar-winners Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins - was officially banned by censors in the three Gulf countries this week.

"Censors for Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) officially confirmed this week that the film will not release in their countries," a representative of Paramount Pictures, which produced the film starring, told Reuters.

The religious argument returns to one particular Islamic ruling which forbids artistic portrayals of the prophets.

Earlier this week, the Egypt-based Al-Azhar authority ruled that screening the biblical production is prohibited in Islam.

“Al-Azhar prohibits the screening of a film that characterizes Noah,” reads the title of a statement ‘issued on Thursday by the top Muslim institution.

More Arab states are expected to ban the film.

"The official statement they offered in confirming this news is because ‘it contradicts the teachings of Islam’," the Paramount Pictures representative said, adding that the studio expected a similar ban in Jordan and Kuwait.

The film will premiere in the United States on March 28.

Noah, who in the Bible’s Book of Genesis built the ark that saved his family and many pairs of animals from a great flood, is revered by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. An entire chapter in the Quran is devoted to him.

The controversy surrounding Noah has emerged just days after “Son of God,” another biblical big-screen production, had a blockbuster opening last week.

It remains unknown, however when and where the film will be shown in cinemas across the Middle East.

“Son of God” is perhaps comparable to the 2004 release of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ,” which was lauded by some in the region, but banned by more conservative Arab states.

(With Reuters)

News Source: english.alarabiya.net

Lupita Nyong'o has made the startling revelation that she yearned for lighter skin when she was younger after being “taunted” over her dark complexion, despite Hollywood fawning over her gorgeous flawless skin.

The 30-year-old, who is hoping to win an Oscar for her role in 12 Years A Slave this Sunday, reveals her ordeal of bullying while growing up over her dark complexion and says that it got so bad it made her wish for lighter skin.

 

Lupita admits she was bullied over her dark complexion (Mario Mitsis/WENN.com)

Speaking to the Associated Press at the Essence Black Women in Hollywood luncheon yesterday, Lupita said: “I got teased and taunted about my skin. My one prayer to God was that I would wake up lighter skinned.

“The morning would come and I would be so excited about seeing my new skin that I would refuse to look down at myself until I was in front of the mirror because I wanted to see my face first. Every day I would feel the disappointment of being just as dark as the day before.”

Lupita went on to reveal that it wasn't until she spotted stunning supermodel Alex Wek, who also has dark skin, in magazines and realised that she should be proud of her beautiful complexion.

“She was dark as night and was in all the magazines and on runways,” Lupita explained.

The actress has been complimented multiple times on her flawless skin (Brian To/WENN)

“My complexion had always been an obstacle to overcome. I couldn’t believe that people were embracing a woman who looked so much like me as beautiful. It was perplexing and I wanted to reject it because I had begun to enjoy the seduction of inadequacy. But a flower couldn’t help but bloom inside of me.”

She added: “I hope that my presence on your screen and my face in magazines may lead you, young girls, on a beautiful journey. That you will feel the validation of your external beauty, but also get to the deeper business of being beautiful inside.”

If you haven’t heard of Lupita Nyong’o, then where have you been? She’s the totally beautiful, totally stylish Mexican-born Kenyan whose stellar performance as Patsey in “12 Years A Slave” has skyrocketed her into Hollywood fame. And this Sunday, the world awaits her divine ascendance onto the red carpet at the Oscars. What will she wear? Will she beat Jennifer Lawrence and win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress? WHAT. WILL. SHE. WEAR?!

Notice anything strange about my treatment of Nyong’o? I treated her like an image. No worries about who she really is. Instead let’s focus on her beauty and her clothes. Since Lupita first burst onto the scene, the media has been obsessively consuming her in a way that I find problematic. Media outlets have fixated on her beauty in a way that Dr. Yaba Blay, a professor at Drexel University, says makes her the “exception and not the rule.” The best way to understand this point is by understanding the media’s past treatment of black female actresses.

Halle Berry. Gabrielle Union. Kerry Washington. What do these three black women have in common? The fact that they can never coexist. The media has a tendency of elevating one black actress over any others. There seems to be room for only one black Hollywood “it girl” at a time. Now that we’re hearing more about Lupita Nyong’o, Kerry Washington’s stardom has died down and we hear about her less.

Coming back to the “exception and not the rule” idea, the media has constantly shown one dimension of black female beauty, à la Beyoncé and Halle Berry. But what if you’re a black woman and don’t look like that? Further, what if you’re a dark-skinned black woman? Where can you look in the media to see someone who looks vaguely similar to you? For a long time, nowhere. In an age where the skin-bleaching epidemic is overtaking Africa and here in the United States where colorism and the light skin vs. dark skin debates are ever so present, dark skin is seen as pathological, morally incorrect. Many dark skinned black girls suffer from intensely low self-esteem because it seems like everywhere they turn, hip-hop music videos, fashion magazines, television, and even their families, there is an underlying and everlasting principle: light is right and black is bad. However with the release of the film, “12 Years A Slave,” something wicked this way comes.

Enter Lupita Nyong’o.

Dark skin. Short natural hair. Out of this world beauty. Every time I see a photo or read an interview about Nyong’o, I can’t help but notice the air that surrounds her. In one way or another, she is always exoticized. Not only is her African-ness emphasized but so is the fact that she was born in Mexico. Not only is her education at Yale School of Drama emphasized but so is the fact that “12 Years A Slave” was her first acting job before she even graduated. The media is so interested in deconstructing her into every article of clothing she wears. In interviews her beauty or fashion sense is usually commented on first, or interviewers ask to go shopping with her. Being beautiful is not a bad thing, but when it becomes everyone’s primary fixation and it starts to subsume an entire career and achievements, well then it’s a beast of its own.

Further — Lupita being a dark-skinned black woman whose beauty has been universally acclaimed — her beauty is set up as the exception for black women instead of the rule. For her to be beautiful and black is unheard of, against the norm, something that we don’t see often, so it must be an exception. This idea totally disregards the millions of beautiful black women who are beautiful simply because they are. Also, being a dark-skinned woman myself, I look somewhat similar to Lupita but I am not her. I dislike the media’s idea that somehow, some way, through Lupita’s beauty, I can be redeemed and seen as beautiful too, and that all dark-skinned women will be saved and redeemed by its exceptionally beautiful sisters.

This is not the truth, and it will never be the truth. While we sit back and relax this Sunday watching the Oscars, I hope that we can all question the way the media is causing us to consume Lupita, and that we can genuinely like her not solely because she’s beautiful but because of her talents and who she is, all the while seeing the beauty in ourselves.

Kemi Layeni is a first-year in the College.

News Source: www.cavalierdaily.com