LOS ANGELES: “Argo” stormed to Best Picture victory at the Oscars on Sunday on a night of surprises that ended in disappointment for frontrunner “Lincoln” and handed the most overall wins — four — to “Life of Pi.”
It was the first time since “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1990 that a film won the top prize at the Oscars without its director also being nominated.
The honors for the Iran hostage drama marked a triumphant comeback into Hollywood’s mainstream for director Ben Affleck, who failed to get a nomination in the directing category six weeks ago, and who struggled for years to rebuild his reputation after tabloid ridicule over his 2002-2004 romance with Jennifer Lopez.
“Argo” also won best film editing and best adapted screenplay for its gripping and often comedic tale of the CIA mission to rescue six US diplomats from Tehran shortly after the Islamic Revolution.
“So many wonderful people extended their help to me when they had nothing to benefit from it ... you can’t hold grudges. It’s hard, but you can’t hold grudges. It doesn’t matter how you get knocked down in life, because it happens. All that matters is that you get up,” the 40-year-old Affleck, who also produced the film, said in an emotional acceptance speech.
Ang Lee was an upset choice for Best Director for his lavish shipwreck tale “Life of Pi,” beating the respected Steven Spielberg, whose presidential drama “Lincoln” took home just two Oscars from a leading 12 nominations.
The other three wins for “Life of Pi” came for original score, visual effects and cinematography.”
The Best Picture Oscar for “Argo” was announced in one of the best kept secrets in the history of Oscar telecasts when first lady Michelle Obama made an unprecedented video appearance from the White House to open the winning envelope.
Daniel Day-Lewis, as expected, made Oscar history and won a long standing ovation on becoming the first man to win three Best Actor Oscars. He collected the golden statuette for his intense performance as US President Abraham Lincoln battling to abolish slavery and end the US civil war in “Lincoln.”
“I really don’t know how any of this happened,” said Day-Lewis, who has dual Anglo-Irish citizenship.
Jennifer Lawrence was named Best Actress for playing a feisty young widow in comedy “Silver Linings Playbook,” tripping up on her Dior dress while was going up on the stage.
BAD NIGHT FOR ‘ZERO DARK THIRTY’
She beat “Zero Dark Thirty” actress Jessica Chastain and France’s Emmanuelle Riva, 86, the star of Austrian foreign-language winner “Amour,” in one of the closest Oscar contests this year.
The 5,800 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who chose the Oscar winners in secret ballots, dealt a stinging blow to “Zero Dark Thirty.”
The movie about the 10-year-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, which has been attacked by Washington politicians and some human rights groups for its depiction of torture, came away with just one Academy Award out of five nominations.
Even that Oscar — for sound editing — had to be shared as it was a tie with James Bond blockbuster “Skyfall.”
Sunday’s show will also be remembered for the provocative performance given by Seth MacFarlane, creator of animated television series “Family Guy,” in his debut as Oscars host.
MacFarlane, 39, pushed the envelope with cheeky songs like “We Saw Your Boobs” about actresses who have stripped down for movie roles, and jokes about Hollywood’s large Jewish and gay communities.
He also turned the telecast into a running joke about whether he would be deemed the worst Oscar host ever by the media on Monday.
Anne Hathaway was a popular first time Oscar winner for her supporting turn in musical “Les Miserables.”
“It came true,” she said, cradling the golden statuette. Hathaway starved herself and chopped off her long brown locks to play the musical’s tragic heroine Fantine in “Les Miserables” where she showed off hitherto little known talents as a singer.
Austrian, Christoph Waltz, seemed shocked to win the closest contest going into the ceremony. He took Best Supporting Actor honors for his turn as an eccentric dentist turned bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery revenge fantasy “Django Unchained.”
It was Waltz’s second Oscar, after winning for the Tarantino movie “Inglourious Basterds” in 2010.
A jubilant Tarantino also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and credited the actors who brought the characters in all his films to life. “And boy this time, did I do it!,” he said.
“Brave,” the Pixar movie about a feisty Scottish princess, took home the golden statuette for Best Animated Feature.
‘Argo’ storms to Oscar victory on night of surprises
‘Argo’ storms to Oscar victory on night of surprises
Lina Gazzaz traces growth, memory and resilience at Art Basel Qatar
- The Saudi artist presents ‘Tracing Lines of Growth’ at the fair’s inaugural edition
DUBAI: Saudi artist Lina Gazzaz will present a major solo exhibition via Hafez Gallery at the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, which runs Feb. 3 to 7. “Tracing Lines of Growth” is a body of work that transmutes botanical fragments into meditations on resilience, memory and becoming.
Hafez Gallery, which was founded in Jeddah, frames the show as part of its mission to elevate underrepresented regional practices within global conversations. Gazzaz’s biography reinforces that reach. Based in Jeddah and trained in the United States, she works across sculpture, installation, painting and video, and has exhibited in Saudi Arabia, the US, Lebanon, the UK, Germany, the UAEand Brazil. Her experimental practice bridges organic material and conceptual inquiry to probe ecological kinship, cultural memory and temporal rhythm.
“Tracing Lines of Growth” is a collection rooted in long-term inquiry. “I started to think about it in 2014,” Gazzaz told Arab News, describing a project that has evolved from her initial simple line drawings through research, experimentation and material interrogation.
What began as tracing the lines of Royal Palm crown shafts became an extended engagement with the palm’s physiology, its cultural significance and its symbolic afterlives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she went deeper into that exploration, translating weathered crown shafts into “lyrical instruments of time.”
Each fragment of “Tracing Lines of Growth” is treated as a cache of human and ecological narratives. Gazzaz describes a feeling of working with materials that “have witnessed civilization,”attributing to them a deep collective memory.
Hafez Gallery’s presentation text frames the palm as a cipher — its vascular routes once pulsing with sap transformed into calligraphic marks that summon the bodies of ouds, desert dunes and scripted traces rooted in Qur’anic and biblical lore.
“Today, the palm has evolved into a symbol of the land and its people. Throughout the Arabian Peninsula, it is still one of the few agricultural exports; and plays an integral role in the livelihood of agrarian communities,” said Gazzaz.
The sculptures’ rippling ribs and vaulted folds, stitched with red thread, evoke what the artist hears and sees in the wood. “Each individual line represents a story, and it’s narrating humanity’s story,” she said.
The works’ stitching is described in the gallery’s materials as “meticulous.” It emphasizes linear pathways and punctuates the sculptures with the “suggestion of life’s energy moving through the dormant material.”
“(I used) fine red thread — the color of life and energy — to narrate the longevity of growth, embodying themes of balance, fragility, music, transformation and movement. The collection is about the continuous existence in different forms and interaction; within the concept of time,” Gazzaz explained.
Hand-stitching, in Gazzaz’s practice, highlights her insistence on care and repair, and the human labor that converts cast-off organic forms into carriers of narratives.
Gazzaz describes her practice as a marriage between rigorous research and intuitive making. “I am a search-based artist... Sometimes I cannot stop searching,” she said. “During the search and finding more and more, and diving more and more, the subconscious starts to collaborate with you too, because of your intention. After all the research, I go with the flow. I don’t plan... I go with the flow, and I listen to it.”
The artist is far from done with this particular project. “I am now beginning to explore the piece with glass,” she noted.
Art Basel Qatar’s curatorial theme for its inaugural year is “Becoming.” For Gazzaz, ‘becoming’ is evident in the material and conceptual transformations she stages: discarded palm fragments reconstituted into scores of lived time, stitched lines reactivated as narratives.
“It’s about balance. It’s about fragility. It’s about resilience,” she said.
