Archives for April 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will make the case before United Nations members on Monday that now is the time for global leaders to begin putting the serious work into how they will respond to the next global pandemic.

The virtual address, Harris’ second to a U.N. body since her inauguration, will come as the United States makes progress on vaccinating the public and much of the world struggles to acquire vaccines.

“At the same time that the world works to get through this pandemic, we also know that we must prepare for the next,” Harris will say, according to excerpts of the speech obtained by The Associated Press. The speech will be co-hosted by U.N. permanent representatives of Argentina, Japan, Norway and South Africa.

The Biden administration will mark its first 100 days in office this week. President Joe Biden is scheduled to address Congress on Wednesday and is certain to highlight the headway his administration has made in responding to the worst public health crisis in the U.S. in more than a century.

Harris, according to the excerpts, will broadly outline how the administration thinks the U.S. and other nations should consider focusing their attention. The steps include improving accessibility to health systems, investing in science, health workers and the well-being of women, and surging capacity for personal protective equipment and vaccine and test manufacturing.

Harris says much has been learned over the last year about pandemic preparedness and response but that it would be unwise to rest easy

“We have been reminded that the status quo is not nearly good enough, and that innovation is indeed the path forward,” Harris says.

Biden’s ambassador to the U.N., Linda Thomas-Greenfield, is also scheduled to deliver remarks at Monday’s virtual event and intends to call on nations to “build the pandemic preparedness architecture for the future.”

“The takeaway from this past year is clear: The world barely withstood this pandemic,” Thomas-Greenfield says in excerpts of her prepared remarks. “We must be ready for the next.”

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Associated Press writer Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Red carpet glam was back Sunday at the Oscars with Andra Day and Carey Mulligan shimmering in award-worthy gold and Maria Bakalova among several stars in bright white princess gowns during the pandemic era’s first big parade of fashion.

There was a strong showing of reds as well, along with belly-baring midriffs, the latter including Zendaya in standout yellow by Valentino and more than 183 carats of Bulgari diamonds from ears and neck to her fingers at the Los Angeles ceremony.

“Andra Day and Zendaya have set the tone for spring and we are showing midriff all season,” said Nandi Howard, associate fashion editor for Essence. “Both ladies arrived in beautiful gowns on the carpet with cutouts and slits that were a breath of fresh air for red-carpet attire.”

Day dressed all the way up in a sexy look cut to the thigh on one side with a cutout at the waist. It was custom Vera Wang made of actual metal, paired with a dainty pair of drop earrings tipped with yellow diamonds from Tiffany & Co. Mulligan stunned in gold Valentino couture, a midriff look with a tiny metallic top and a huge ball skirt.

With nominees scattered around the world, the red carpet was far less hectic.

“Calm. If people were here they would know how absolutely groundbreaking calm is,” said Viola Davis, dressed in a stunning white custom look with intricate cutouts in a snug bodice that fell to a princess skirt.

The designer? “Alexander McQueen, baby,” Davis told E!.

Bakalova, the breakout star of “Borat: Subsequent Movie Film,” also brought princess, also in white, with a bit of subdued sparkle and a plunging neckline that fell to a tulle skirt, thanks to Louis Vuitton. She snagged a pair of stunning chandelier diamond earrings for the evening.

Regina King, who opened the show, went for light blue Louis Vuitton with winged shoulders and silver stripe embellishments.

“Regina King delivered the red carpet fantasy that award season viewers have been missing when she showed up in a sculptural, custom-made masterpiece from Louis Vuitton. While the baby blue color and the wing-like shoulders gave off an ethereal vibe, the modern neckline screamed high fashion,” said Irina Grechko, senior fashion editor for the millennial-focused lifestyle site Refinery29.com.

Riz Ahmed, Leslie Odom Jr. and Daniel Kaluuya, in a Bottega Veneta tux, were among many of the guys who went without ties. Ahmed was in Prada and Odom in Brioni.

Travon Free, who co-directed the short live-action winner “Two Distant Strangers,” mixed Hollywood fantasy with real life. He wore a black-and-yellow Dolce & Gabbana tux lined with names of Black victims killed by police in the United States.

Reese Witherspoon got the red memo, in Dior, along with Angela Bassett in a red look with statement poofy shoulders and Chopard rubies and diamonds. Bassett’s train gown was by Alberta Ferretti.

Presenter Laura Dern wore a look with a white feathered skirt and a black, long-sleeve mock turtleneck top, while Margo Robbie went full Hollywood in body hugging silvery Chanel.

Chloe Zhao made history as the second woman and first woman of color to win best director wearing Hermes and a pair of bright white sneakers, her hair in two long braids. Her ankle-length dress was a neutral tone ruched and adorned with small beads and a latticework design.

Oscar performer H.E.R. made a red carpet appearance in cobalt blue custom Dundas. It included a hooded cape and a flared jumpsuit. Her round signature shades were by Bonnie Clyde.

Diane Warren and Odom kicked off the carpet in two trend colors: white and gold, Warren in a Valentino tuxedo white with a sequin turtleneck and Odom in a glistening gold double-breasted tux — gold shirt included.

“I’ve never been dressed by a designer before,” Warren told E!. “How cool is that?” A small Swarovski frog adorned her collar.

Odom walked the carpet with spouse Nicolette Robinson. They recently welcomed a second child.

“I am a lucky, lucky man,” he said, while Robinson was grateful for no baby spit up.

Amanda Seyfried chose vibrant red from Armani Prive, her hair in an Old Hollywood side-swept updo. It was among a slew of classic princess cuts, hers a strapless look with a plunging neckline. Halle Berry was a loner in mauve, unfurling her light-as-air train on the carpet with her hair in a short crop.

New mom Emerald Fennell, best director nominee for “Promising Young Woman,” smiled bright in a flowing spring green and lilac gown. Lately, she’s been making up personas to match her outfits. She topped off the look with sparkly lilac eye shadow. Her look included all-over sequin embroidery and ruffle details.

“So tonight I am Susan your pottery teacher who has a business opportunity for you which is absolutely not a pyramid scheme,” she said.

This pottery teacher wore Gucci.

The 9-year-old star of “Minari,” Alan Kim, vamped on the carpet in his black shorts suit with high black socks, including one with horizontal white stripes. He just had a birthday and got the bike he wa s hoping for. Another “Minari” star, Yuh-Jung Youn, smiled on the carpet in a Marmar Halim midnight blue brocade gown with a velvet belt, a wide diamond Chopard bracelet on her wrist.

Glenn Close, nominated for “Hillbilly Elegy,” paired a jewel-tone blue embellished caftan from Armani Prive with dark slacks and gloves. And she, like so many others on hand, was back in heels.

“I’m feeling great. My shoes are comfortable. It’s not two miles long so that’s lovely,” she said.

Other stars chose elegant black for the pandemic-era Oscars. Some were in bright oranges and pinks.

Nominee LaKeith Stanfield chose a custom black jumpsuit with a belt and wide-lapeled button-down underneath by Saint Laurent. Another statement maker among the men: Colman Domingo of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” in a hot pink suit by Versace.

All told, Grechko said, Hollywood was due for the final and splashiest carpet of the Zoom-heavy, leisurewear-accented pandemic awards season.

“After a year of virtual red carpet shows, it’s clear that celebrities were ready to bring their A-game to the red carpet, with high-on-glamour looks dominating the night. From Maria Bakalova’s Grace Kelly-esque look, made with 100 meters of tulle, to Carey Mulligan’s oversized, liquid gold-like skirt train, celebrities understood the assignment and brought back fashion in a big way,” she said.

There were some big beauty moments, too.

Of Zendaya’s look, Refinery29 Beauty Director Sara Tan said: “Zendaya looked like she emerged from the pages of a magazine. It was elegant, yet effortless, a balance that Zendaya always achieves with ease. I loved that she kept her beauty look glam, but simple — waist-grazing hair, dewy skin, full brows, a simple wash of color on her lid, and a barely-there lip — so as not to compete with the collection of Bulgari jewels around her neck!”

Seyfried’s smoky red eye “gave her old school Hollywood glam a modern twist,” Tan said.

Bold lips ruled the carpet, from Seyfried’s deep plum pout to H.E.R.’s pinky-purple lip, she added.

Tan called Berry’s hair a “very edgy, Amelie-esque microbob,” noting Robbie’s new bangs and darker “bronde” hair color.

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For complete coverage of this year’s Oscars, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/academy-awards

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

TOKYO (AP) — Tokyo Olympic organizers and the IOC are to unveil new plans this week to explain how 15,400 Olympic and Paralympic athletes can compete in Japan when the games open in three months in the midst of a pandemic.

The rollout of the second edition of the so-called “Playbooks” — an IOC guidebook explaining how the games can be pulled off — comes as Tokyo, Osaka and several other areas have been placed under a third state of emergency as coronavirus cases surge.

Japan, which has attributed about 10,000 deaths to COVID-19, has also been slow with local vaccination with about 1% so far getting shots.

Organizers are expected to announce daily testing for athletes. They are also expected to drop a 14-day quarantine requirement, allowing athletes to train when they arrive. Athletes will be required to stay within a “bubble” consisting of the Olympic Village on Tokyo Bay, and venues and training areas.

Japan’s Kyodo news, citing unnamed sources, said athletes and staff will have to be tested twice within 96 hours before leaving home. They will also be tested upon arrival in Japan.

The Playbook for athletes is to be updated on Wednesday, with Playbooks for media and others unveiled on Friday. A final edition of all Playbooks will be published in June.

Resistance to the Olympics in Japan is still running high with 70-80% opposed in recent polls. Fans from abroad have already been barred, and organizers have put off until as late a June a decision on having any fans at all at Olympic venues.

Taro Kono, the minister in charge of vaccination in Japan, suggested earlier this month that empty venues was a probable option.

IOC President Thomas Bach last week said his plans to meet the torch relay in Hiroshima on May 17-18 are still not confirmed. Bach’s arrival would be just days after the latest state of emergency ends on May 11.

Opposition lawmakers in Japan’s national legislature have suggested Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga scheduled the state of emergency to accommodate Bach.

The government and the International Olympic Committee have said the precautions are in place specifically for Japan’s “Golden Week” holiday, which begins on Thursday.

The torch relay, which began on March 25 in Fukushima in northeastern Japan, has been detoured several times this month and was forced to run in an empty city park in Osaka. It was also rerouted in Matsuyama City Ehime prefecture.

It will be banned altogether this weekend on the Okinawa island of Miyakojima. The small island has only one hospital. The relay will run through other locations on Okinawa.

The heavily sponsored relay is a caravan of more than a dozen cars and other vehicles festooned with advertising from major sponsors like Coca-Cola and Toyota. Torch runners — there are 10,000 in total — typically bring up the rear amid blaring music and banter from DJs.

The relay is scheduled to end at the National Stadium on July 23 for the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Games.

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More AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/olympic-games and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

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Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland,” a wistful portrait of itinerant lives on open roads across the American West, won best picture Sunday at the 93rd Academy Awards, where the China-born Zhao also became just the second woman to win best director, and the first woman of color.

The “Nomadland” victory, while widely expected, nevertheless capped the extraordinary rise of Zhao, a lyrical filmmaker whose winning film is just her third, and which — with a budget less than $5 million and featuring a cast populated by non-professional actors — ranks as one of the most modest-sized movies to win Hollywood’s top honor. Zhao’s next film, Marvel’s “Eternals,” has a budget approximately 40 times that of “Nomadland.” Only Kathryn Bigelow, 11 years ago for “The Hurt Locker,” had previously won best director.

But “Nomadland,” as a plain-spoken meditation on solitude, grief and grit, stuck a chord in a pandemic-ravaged year. It made for an unlikely Oscar champ: A film about people who gravitate to the margins took center stage.

“I have always found goodness in the people I’ve met everywhere I went in the world,” said Zhao when accepting best director. “This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on the goodness in other no matter how difficult it is to do that.”

With a howl, “Nomadland” star Frances McDormand implored people to seek out her film and others on the big screen. Released by the Disney-owned Searchlight Pictures, “Nomadland” premiered at a drive in and debuted in theaters, but found its largest audience on Hulu.

“Please watch our movie on the largest screen possible and one day very, very soon, take everyone you know into a theater, shoulder to shoulder in that dark space, and watch every film that’s represented here tonight,” McDormand said.

Soon after, McDormand won best actress, too. The win puts McDormand (previously a winner for “Fargo” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) in rare company as a three-time acting winner. Only Katherine Hepburn (a four-time winner) has won best actress more times.

In the night’s biggest surprise, best actor went to Anthony Hopkins for the dementia drama “The Father.” The award had been widely expected to go to Chadwick Boseman for his final performance in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Hopkins was not in attendance.

The most ambitious award show held during the pandemic, the Oscars rolled out a red carpet and restored some glamour to the nearly century-old movie institution, but with a much transformed — and in some ways downsized — telecast. It was a year when, to paraphrase Norma Desmond, the pictures got smaller were overwhelmingly seen in the home, not in the big screen, during a pandemic year that forced theaters close and prompted radical change in Hollywood.

It was also perhaps the diverse Academy Awards ever, with more women and more actors of color nominated than ever before — and Sunday brought a litany of records and firsts across many categories, spanning everything from hairstyling to composing to acting. It was, some observers said, a sea change for an awards harshly criticized as “OscarsSoWhite” in recent years, leading the film academy to greatly expand membership.

The ceremony — fashioned as a movie of its own and styled as a laidback party — kicked off with opening credits and a slinky Regina King entrance, as the camera followed the actress and “One Night in Miami” director in one take as she strode with an Oscar in hand into Los Angeles’ Union Station and onto the stage. Inside the transit hub (trains kept running), nominees sat at cozy, lamp-lit tables around an intimate amphitheater. Some moments — like Glenn Close getting down to “Da Butt” — were more relaxed, but the ceremony couldn’t just shake off the past 14 months.

“It has been quite a year and we are still smack dab in the middle of it,” King said.

Daniel Kaluuya won best supporting actor for “Judas and the Black Messiah.” The win for the 32-year-old British actor who was previously nominated for “Get Out,” was widely expected. Kaluuya won for his fiery performance as the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, whom Kaluuya thanked for showing him “how to love myself.”

“You’ve got to celebrate life, man. We’re breathing. We’re walking. It’s incredible. My mum met my dad, they had sex. It’s amazing. I’m here. I’m so happy to be alive,” said Kaluuya while cameras caught his mother’s confused reaction.

With the awards capping a year of national reckoning on race and coming days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for killing George Floyd, police brutality was on the minds of many attendees. King said that if the verdict had been different, she might have traded her heels for marching boots.

Travon Free, co-director of the live-action short winner “Two Perfect Strangers,” wore a suit jacket lined with the names of those killed by police. His film dramatizes police brutality as an inescapable time loop like a tragic “Groundhog’s Day” for Black Americans.

“Today, the police will kill three people. And tomorrow, the police will kill three people. And the day after that, the police will kill three people because on average, the police in America everyday kill three people, which amounts to about a thousand people a year,” said Free. “Those people happen to disproportionately be Black people.”

Best supporting actress went to Yuh-Jung Youn for the matriarch of Lee Isaac Chung’s tender Korean-American family drama “Minari.” The 72-year-old Youn, a well-known actress in her native South Korea, is the first Asian actress to win an Oscar since 1957 and the second in history. She accepted the award from Brad Pitt, an executive producer on “Minari.” “Mr. Brad Pitt, finally,” said Youn. “Nice to meet you.”

Hairstylists Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” became the first Black women to win in makeup and hairstyling. Ann Roth, at 89 one of the oldest Oscar winners ever, also won for the film’s costume design.

The night’s first award went to Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of the provocative revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” for best screenplay. Fennell, winning for her feature debut, is the first woman win solo in the category since Diablo Cody (“Juno”) in 2007.

The broadcast instantly looked different. It’s being shot in 24 frames-per-second and in more widescreen format. In a more intimate show without an audience beyond nominees, winners were given wider latitude in their speeches.

The telecast, produced by a team led by filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, moved out of the awards’ usual home, the Dolby Theatre, for Union Station. With Zoom ruled out for nominees, the telecast included satellite feeds from around the world. Performances of the song nominees were pre-taped and aired during the preshow. “Husavik (My Hometown)” from “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.,” was preformed from the Iceland town’s harbor. Others were sung from atop of the academy’s new $500 million film museum.

Pixar notched its 11th best animated feature Oscar with “Soul,” the studio’s first feature with a Black protagonist. Peter Docter’s film, about a about middle-school music teacher (Jamie Foxx), was one of the few big-budget movies in the running at the Academy Awards. (It also won best score, making Jon Batiste the second Black composer win the award, which he shared with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.) Another was Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which last September attempted to resuscitate moviegoing during the pandemic, took best visual effects.

David Fincher’s “Mank,” a lavishly crafted drama of 1940s Hollywood made for Netflix, came in the lead nominee with 10 nods and went home with award for cinematography and for production design.

Best adapted screenplay went to the dementia drama “The Father.” “My Octopus Teacher,” a film that found a passionate following on Netflix, won best documentary. Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round” won best international film, an award he dedicated to his daughter, Ida, who in 2019 was killed in a car crash at age 19.

The red carpet was back Sunday, minus the throngs of onlookers and with socially distanced interviews. Only a handful of media outlets were allowed on site, behind a velvet rope and some distance from the nominees. Casual wear, the academy warned nominees early on, was a no-no. Stars, limited to a plus-one, went without their usual battalions of publicists.

But even good show may not be enough to save the Oscars from an expected ratings slide. Award show ratings have cratered during the pandemic, and this year’s nominees — many of them smaller, lower-budget dramas — won’t come close to the drawing power of past Oscar heavyweights like “Titanic” or “Black Panther.” Last year’s Oscars, when Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” became the first non-English language film to win best picture, was watched by 23.6 million, an all-time low.

Sunday’s pandemic-delayed Oscars bring to a close the longest awards season ever — one that turned the season’s industrial complex of cocktail parties and screenings virtual. Eligibility was extended into February of this year, and for the first time, a theatrical run wasn’t a requirement of nominees. Some films — like “Sound of Metal” — premiered all the way back in September 2019. The biggest ticket-seller of the best picture nominees is “Promising Young Woman,” with $6.4 million in box office.

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For complete coverage of this year’s Oscars, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/academy-awards

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.