ICG Publicists Name Denzel Washington Motion Picture Showman Of The Year

Denzel Washington (photo credit: John Russo)

Oscar winner Denzel Washington will be named Motion Picture Showman of the Year at the 54th Annual International Cinematographers Guild Publicists Awards (ICG, IATSE Local 600) in recognition of his remarkable career achievements, including producing, directing and starring in Fences, a major contender in this year's Oscar race. The awards will be held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Friday, February 24.

"Denzel continues to excel as a major creative force in filmmaking while also recognizing the key role that publicity and promotion play in the success of filmmaking," said awards committee chairman Henri Bollinger. "His understanding of what it takes to attract movie audiences supports his exceptional talents as an actor and filmmaker."

ICG National President Steven Poster, ASC, said, "Denzel Washington brings a unique reality and a dignity to every character he portrays, be they actual or imagined people, good guys or bad. I always look forward to seeing him on screen."

Denzel's unforgettable performances have garnered him two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, and countless other awards.

He received his first Academy Award for the historical war drama Glory (1989) and his second for his portrayal of the corrupt cop in the crime thriller, Training Day (2001). Denzel won a Tony Award for his performance in Fences, during his return to Broadway in 2010.

Denzel's current project is the critically acclaimed film adaptation of August Wilson's Fences, released Christmas 2016. In addition to producing and directing the adaptation, Denzel reprises his original Tony Award-winning role alongside Viola Davis.

Denzel's professional acting career began in New York, where he performed in theatre productions such as Ceremonies in Dark Old Men and Othello. He rose to fame when he landed the role as Dr. Philip Chandler on the NBC long-running hit television series, St. Elsewhere. His other television credits include The George McKenna Story, License to Kill, and Wilma.

As Denzel crossed over into the world of film, he garnered critical acclaim for his portrayal of real life figures. He earned his first Oscar nomination for Cry Freedom (1987), as South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. From there, he went on to portray Muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X in Malcolm X (1992), boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter in The Hurricane (1999), football coach Herman Boone in Remember the Titans (2000), poet and educator Melvin B. Tolson in The Great Debaters (2007), and drug kingpin Frank Lucas in American Gangster (2007). A few of his other beloved credits are: Much Ado About Nothing (1993), A Soldier's Story (1984), Crimson Tide (1995), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and Inside Man (2006).

Denzel's most recent credits include Unstoppable (2010) where he reunited with director Tony Scott for the fifth time, 2 Guns (2013) where he starred alongside Mark Wahlberg, and The Equalizer (2014) an action thriller film directed by Antoine Fuqua. In 2016, Denzel teamed up with Antoine Fuqua again for a remake of The Magnificent Seven, which also starred Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke.

In 2016, he was selected as the recipient for the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards, cementing his legacy in Hollywood.

Washington is a native of Mt. Vernon, NY, and graduated from Fordham University, where he majored in drama. He spent a year at San Francisco's prestigious American Conservatory Theatre before beginning his professional acting career.

As previously announced, the Publicists Awards Luncheon will also honor Jeffrey Katzenberg with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Ryan Murphy will receive the Television Showmanship Award and Nanci Ryder will be awarded with the President's Award.

Annual International Cinematographers Guild (ICG, IATSE Local 600)

SOURCE: Annual International Cinematographers Guild (ICG, IATSE Local 600)

NAFSA Opposes Jeff Sessions for Attorney General

Jeff Sessions (via Gage Skidmore)

In written testimony to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, Esther D. Brimmer, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators expressed the organization's strong opposition to the appointment of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions to attorney general. NAFSA stands with 144 civil and human rights organizations against Sessions' appointment.

Opposing any presidential cabinet nominee is an extremely rare move for NAFSA. As Brimmer noted in her statement to the Judiciary committee, "NAFSA does not take this step lightly. As a matter of practice, NAFSA believes it is preferable to reserve judgment on cabinet level nominees until after they have had a chance to testify in the confirmation hearing process. However, in the case of Senator Sessions, his long track record provides sufficient evidence for us to determine he is not qualified to enforce laws pertaining to immigration and civil rights that are vital to NAFSA's mission."

NAFSA, the world's largest professional association dedicated to the promotion and advancement of international education and exchange, specified objections to Sen. Sessions' appointment on the basis of three components: Senator Sessions' anti-immigrant stance, alarming record on voting rights and fight to continue the unconstitutional ruling in Alabama for separate and unequal education for minority students.

Brimmer's statement explained that NAFSA's commitment to fostering peace and security through international education relies upon leadership that embraces openness, equality and justice. The statement also noted that NAFSA believes that Senator Sessions' hostile positions on immigration, voting rights and education disqualify him from leading the United States Department of Justice, and his record on these issues indicates that if confirmed, he will champion policies that are neither just nor inclusive.

Read Brimmer's complete Congressional testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Sample Tweet: In a rare decision, @NAFSA opposes Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. #intled @senjudiciary http://bit.ly/2i9fC6t

NAFSA Logo www.nafsa.org/ (PRNewsFoto/NAFSA) 

SOURCE: NAFSA: Association of International Educators

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Stop The Pregnant Horse Blood Trade! [Petition]

Image via Avaaz.org

Dear friends,

It’s straight out of a horror movie: hundreds of pregnant horses hooked up to blood-draining machines, some so weak they collapse and die. But we can stop this right now. 

The industrial horse torture is driven by European pharmaceutical companies who use the blood to speed up factory farming! The EU has said it’s considering action, but so far nothing has happened. 

No more horses need to die! Ministers are meeting in just 2 weeks -- let’s light a fire under the EU with a massive million person petition demanding they ban the abusive pregnant horse blood trade. 

Add your name to the petition below *with one click* and tell everyone:  

>> Click to sign the petition

To the EU Parliament, Commission, and Council:

We call on you to ban the import to Europe of any goods produced using techniques which are cruel and cause suffering to animals. As a world leader in animal welfare, Europe should apply its own standards to products it imports. 

>> Click to sign the petition

Death is far from the only horror: so much blood is taken that it can lead to shock and anaemia. And because only the blood of pregnant horses is valuable, they’re often forced into repeat pregnancies and abortions. 

Demand is driven by pharmaceutical companies who sell the hormone found in pregnant horse blood to factory farmers to get pigs and other animals in “heat” on demand -- another layer of abuse in this sorry story.  

If we shine a light on this horror by raising a massive global outcry now, we can help get a ban of all products made from the suffering of animals -- making it difficult for companies all over the world to make big profits from this disturbing industry. 

Add your name to the petition above with one click on the link, then forward this to friends and family -- let's build pressure on the EU to act!  

>> Click to sign the petition

Horses are full of beauty, grace and majesty -- it's hard to understand how people could be so cruel. But when we come together in massive numbers to protect animals from the horrors they face every day, we can do incredible things. Let's do it now for these horses who need us to be their voice more than ever.

With hope,

Loup Dargent

On behalf of Oli, Rewan, Bert, Ari, Camille, Nataliya, Ricken and the entire Avaaz team

More information: 

• The cruel trade with pregnant mare blood (Animals' Angels USA)
• Blood farms investigation (Animal Welfare Foundation)
• Turning horse blood into profits (The Dodo) 
• Why is the world out for horses’ blood? (The Guardian)

Brexit, Comedy And 'Britishness' – What To Do When Parody Becomes Real

A local shop, for local people. BBC

By Neil Archer, Keele University

If as it is said comedy is tragedy plus the benefit of time, sometimes time allows things to come full circle. When in 1999 Edward and Tubbs, characters from the BBC’s The League of Gentlemen, declared their Royston Vasey village store “a local shop for local people” I laughed because their narrow-minded localist zeal seemed so grotesquely out of step with the UK’s global and multicultural attitudes. But in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, where not being “local” became a figurative, legal or literal stick with which to beat others, Edward and Tubbs have lost some comic lustre and gained an eerie relevance.

In much film and television comedy of the New Labour years – such as the Simon Pegg film Hot Fuzz (2007), where civic pride concealed satanic rituals of local “cleansing”, or Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), where the threat to local produce instills villagers with a mob mentality – it is an inclusive, plural, playful sense of “Britishness” that is the implied alternative to these excesses. When I recognised the Britishness of these films and how I identified with it, I realised that, to a large extent, this Britishness did not really exist – or at least, it only existed as an ironic gesture or parody. The alternative, of course, was to assert the sort of cultural and racial essentialism that has long been among the unpalatable myths used by nationalists the world over.

In laughing along, I feel that Britishness is here defined by not taking the concept of Britishness at all seriously. This isn’t itself an innately British quality, but it could be thought of as a certain post-imperial tendency in the comedy that has shaped a prevalent part of British culture since the 1960s. The sort of comedy that is as much obsessed by historical myths of Britishness as it is derisive of them: Beyond the Fringe, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Ripping Yarns, Blackadder, and The League of Gentlemen.

This comic playfulness regarding Britishness has become a key vehicle for promoting British culture abroad through hugely successful rom-coms such as Notting Hill or Love Actually. That the UK tops recent indexes of global soft power owes much to the self-effacing and metropolitan charms of films such as these. It is also apt that Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean persona, Britain’s most exportable comedy brand, should have found a central role in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.

The inspired choice to have Atkinson’s weary keyboardist daydream his way through a travesty of Chariots of Fire’s opening scene – a film more often associated with flag-waving jingoism – helped rework the ceremony’s traditional cultural remit towards less aggressively nationalistic or historically essentialist terrain. Recall also that the show began with Her Majesty jumping from a helicopter strapped to a Union Jack parachute. Yet this same send-up of British iconography also served in the context of the ceremony as a form of soft patriotism: one that while drawing a line under Britain’s imperial past, was no less assertive even through parody of its new cultural standing in the world.

But that was 2012. The events of 2016 point towards political isolationism and more tightly prescribed notions of national identity, with significant repercussions for British comedy. How do we reconcile, for example, the divergent comedic impulses to leave or remain? The League’s village of Royston Vasey is taken from the birth name of Roy “Chubby” Brown, a foul-mouthed and anarchic British comedian who has mined cultural and ethnic prejudices to perennially popular effect. The uncomfortable potency of the League’s dark comedy comes from their willingness to flirt with sentiments that have clearly not been banished to the past, but which still churn away just under the surface.

The lessons of “Chubby” Brown and a whole other tradition of British comedy dating from the 1970s (oddly enough, the decade that Britain entered the European Economic Community), such as the Carry On films, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, and Mind Your Language, are that comedy can as easily reinforce exclusive and culturally fixed notions of national identity as it can dispel them. Nor can we simply laugh away such comedy’s potent appeal, however much it might make us squirm.

The role of comedy in negotiating not only a hard or soft Brexit, but hard and soft conceptions of Britishness, will be a pressing concern both for comedy producers and those who write about it. It was perhaps fitting that this of all summers should see the BBC attempting, in an evidently nostalgic gesture, to revive popular sitcoms from the 1970s, and just as apt that the week after the EU referendum saw the release of Absolutely Fabulous – a very knowing comedy portrayal of national self-denial. The wider impact of the events of 2016 on the cultural and comedic tendencies to come remains to be seen.


About Today's Contributor:
Neil Archer, Lecturer in Film Studies, Keele University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

UK: Where Press Regulation Is Concerned, We're Already Being Fed 'Post-Truth' Journalism

SamJonah

By Brian Cathcart, Kingston University

The Times newspaper greeted the start of 2017 by warning: “The freedom of the press is under direct and immediate threat.” Its Murdoch stablemate, The Sun, went further by identifying the “sinister zealots behind regulators [who] want to destroy the popular press”. The Daily Mail, meanwhile, urged its readers to: “Act NOW if you want to help defend the right to read a website like MailOnline.”

Free speech in Britain – which has been a beacon of human rights since 1689 – is clearly under threat. Or is it? It depends who you believe.

Anyone attempting to follow the progress of press regulation in the UK can be forgiven some bewilderment – and also some impatience. Matters generally thought to have been sorted out after the Leveson Inquiry seem suddenly to be surfacing again, and the public is being asked to take an urgent interest in something called Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act. This provides for costs in defamation cases and mandates that judges can direct newspapers to pay both sides’ costs even if they win a libel case.

Make no mistake: the bewilderment and impatience have been deliberately engineered by the corporate press – by which I mean the Murdoch, Mail, Mirror, Express and Telegraph papers – whose objective is to sabotage all change, including changes already passed into law by parliament. With this objective in mind, these newspapers have engaged in a rampage of misinformation.

“MPs are considering forcing newspapers to pay celebs and politicians who sue – even if cases are thrown out”, declared a recent editorial in The Sun, beneath a headline about protecting the free press and keeping investigative journalism alive. Similar messages have even been rammed home to the employees of these companies in internal emails.

Sinister zealots behind press regulator would willingly destroy popular press. But you can stop them https://t.co/e14QfNPGF1

— Tony Gallagher (@tonygallagher) December 30, 2016

These publications are desperate to give a veneer of legitimacy to the work of their political allies who are trying to bury the Leveson reforms and with them the second part of the Leveson Inquiry (which deals with criminality rather than regulation). Having stalled both of these measures at the behest of the press, ministers have launched a consultation about the next step – the implementation of Section 40 – and the papers are going all out for the option of complete abandonment.

Blurring the truth
Despite The Sun’s rhetoric, MPs are not actually involved in implementing Section 40 for the good reason that the Crime and Courts Act was passed into law with the support of every party in 2013. Section 40 is not about celebrities and politicians – on the contrary, what it chiefly does is to give every citizen a historic new right of access to affordable justice in cases of libel and unjustified intrusion.

If the government will only put Section 40 into operation, we will see the end of the age-old British scandal by which only the very rich or the very lucky get to uphold their rights against libellers and those who violate our privacy rights.

But it is precisely because it gives us all that right that the corporate papers and their friends are fighting it. They are terrified by the idea that ordinary people might suddenly be able to sue them and get damages.

As with most post-truth news, there is a germ of truth in what The Sun claims and it is this: if someone wants to exercise the right to affordable justice through arbitration and a newspaper refuses to cooperate, so forcing them to take the far more expensive route of court proceedings, then the judge will have the option of making the newspaper pay both sides’ costs even if the paper wins.

Far from being outrageous, as The Sun and others suggest, this is absolutely fair. What would be unfair would be to leave editors with the power to pick and choose which claimants can use cheap arbitration. All experience tells us that they would push the rich into arbitration, thus saving money, and push the rest of us towards the courts knowing we can’t afford it and so would abandon our cases.

This has nothing to do with rich celebs – who have long been among the privileged few able to afford to sue. Instead it is about empowering people who, in the absence of Section 40, are left powerless.

No state control
The Sun’s comments are self-serving. By banging on about “state-backed regulation”, corporate papers aim to smear “recognised regulation” as set out under the Royal Charter of 2013 with the taint of censorship.

Powerful voices. Lenscap Photography

Recognised regulation is regulation that meets the basic standards of independence and effectiveness set out in the Leveson Report as necessary to uphold standards and protect the public from abuse.

The test is applied by the Press Recognition Panel, which although a public body enjoys unprecedented and unique independence from ministerial or political influence – and one of the criteria it applies is that a regulator must have no power “to prevent the publication of any material, by anyone, at any time”.

So far from representing a step towards state control, the charter system has freedom of expression at its heart – and no one has been able to show any way in which it could inhibit public interest journalism. There are no rational grounds for any responsible news publisher to object to regulation under the charter.

Yet the propaganda continues. The papers that hold the megaphone of mass communication are all shouting the same words together and, at the same time, refusing even a hint of balance in their reporting.

Despite all of this, there is something you can do. Hacked Off is helping coordinate responses to the government consultation, which closes on January 10. There at least you cannot be drowned out by the megaphone.


About Today's Contributor:
Brian Cathcart, Professor of Journalism, Kingston University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.