Tag Archives: Steven Spielberg

February 25, 2013 · 7:22 AM

Michelle Obama’s Oscar surprise

Michelle Obama dress: Michelle Obama stuns in Naeem Khan at the 2013 Oscars

I didn’t get to see the Oscars® but I’m pretty certain the FLOTUS’ surprise visit was well received…

Politico

First lady Michelle Obama announced the best picture category in a surprise appearance live from the White House at Sunday’s Academy Awards, crowning political drama “Argo” as the best picture.

In a year where several of the nominated films had political connections — from “Lincoln” to “Zero Dark Thirty” — “Argo” came out on top among the Washington crowd, winning three of the seven awards it was nominated for, including best picture. The film is about a CIA plan to rescue Americans trapped in Iran during the Carter-era hostage crisis.

After being introduced by legendary actor Jack Nicholson, Obama spoke by satellite from inside the White House, where she thanked the Hollywood community for their “vitally important work” before announcing “Argo” the winner.

“Welcome to the White House, everyone,” Obama said, wearing a silver Naeem Khan gown. These movies “took us back in time and all around the world. They made us laugh. They made us weep and made us grip our armrests just a little tighter. They taught us that love can endure against all odds and transform our minds in the most surprising ways. And they reminded us that we can overcome any obstacle if we dig deep enough and fight hard enough and find the courage to believe in ourselves.”

(PHOTOS: Politics at the Oscars)

Affleck — who wasn’t nominated in the best director category for “Argo” — seemed thankful and nervous when he took the microphone after the film won.

“I want to thank our friends in Iran living in a terrible circumstance right now,” he said. “I want to thank my wife [actress Jennifer Garner], who I don’t normally associate with Iran, but I want to thank you for working on our marriage. … It is work, but it’s the best kind of work and there’s no one I’d rather work with.”

“Argo” also won for best adapted screenplay and film editing, rounding out its three Oscars. “Lincoln” scored two awards — best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and best production design.

“Zero Dark Thirty,” about the U.S. government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, won its only award of the night for sound editing, a category in which it tied with “Skyfall,” the latest James Bond installment. (Surprisingly enough, ties for Oscars aren’t all that uncommon, as ABC News noted.)

(Also on POLITICO: Politicians, media tweet Oscar picks)

Meanwhile, Day-Lewis won best actor for his portrayal of Abraham Lincoln in the presidential biopic “Lincoln.” It was his third best actor award.

Day-Lewis showed his comedic chops during his acceptance speech, thanking director Steven Spielberg for not making  “Lincoln” a musical.

“And Steven didn’t have to persuade me to play Lincoln, but I had to persuade him that if I was going to do it – it shouldn’t be a musical,” he said.

He also joked with his presenter Meryl Streep, who won best actress last year for her portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in “Iron Lady.”

“It’s a strange thing because three years ago before we decided to do a straight swap, I had actually been committed to play Margaret Thatcher – and Meryl was Steven’s first choice for ‘Lincoln.’ And I’d like to see that version,” Day-Lewis said.

All kidding aside, Day-Lewis then thanked “the mysteriously beautiful mind, body and spirit of Abraham Lincoln.”

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January 6, 2013 · 4:14 AM

Welcome to the new Civil War

Welcome to the new Civil War

In a recent discussion with a friend, I mentioned how news pundits constantly use the phrase: “Our country has not been so ideologically divided since the Civil War.”

My friend’s question was “why the Civil War analogy…?  The following piece tends to address this question.

Salon

Lincoln’s unfinished war rages on, as the neo-Confederacy tries to turn back the clock on women, gays, God and guns

On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.

If only it had been so. What an affluent slave owner like Stephens feared most, no doubt, was the utopian vision of “radical Reconstruction” imagined by legendary abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones in the movie), in an earlier conversation with Lincoln in the White House kitchen. Stevens envisioned a future in which all the land and property of the Southern aristocracy would be dispossessed and divided among the emancipated slaves, building a new society of free soil and free labor amid the ruins of tyranny. To put it in contemporary social-studies terms, Stevens hoped that by uprooting and destroying the South’s slave economy, one could also replace its culture.

It didn’t quite work out that way. You can’t boil one of the most tumultuous periods of American history down to one paragraph, but here goes: Lincoln was assassinated by a domestic terrorist and replaced by Andrew Johnson, who was an incompetent hothead and an unapologetic racist. Within a few years the ambitious project of Reconstruction  fell victim to a sustained insurgency led by the Ku Klux Klan and similar white militia groups. By the late 1870s white supremacist “Redeemers” controlled most local and state governments in the South, and by the 1890s Southern blacks had been disenfranchised and thrust into subservience positions by Jim Crow laws that were only slightly preferable to slavery.

So even though it’s a truism of American public discourse that the Civil War never ended, it’s also literally true. We’re still reaping the whirlwind from that long-ago conflict, and now we face a new Civil War, one focused on divisive political issues of the 21st century – most notably the rights and liberties of women and LGBT people – but rooted in toxic rhetoric and ideas inherited from the 19th century.

Edit Note:  Emphasis are mine

Continue reading here…

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