Men in black suits open the car doors. There sit 10 cardboard boxes carrying the show’s critical stars: Oscar No. 3453 and 51 of his fellow Oscar statuettes. Steve Miessner, the Keeper of the Oscars, rides along with them.

He and the security guards load the boxes onto two dollies, and each is sent up a backstage freight elevator accompanied by an armed guard.

Miessner leads them down a winding hallway and into an office in the bowels of the Kodak. Two guards stand at the door as he dons his trademark white gloves and begins unpacking the precious cargo: 50 foam containers, each with one Oscar inside.

No. 3453 is among the first he unpacks. Miessner examines it and notices a bit of packaging glue stuck to the statue. He pulls a blue velvet cloth from his toolbox, which also includes tiny wrenches and a pen light, and gently polishes.

One by one, Miessner opens the foam containers and places the golden men on a desk.

“I usually set them all out and put little medallions on them, because backstage you can’t see the serial numbers,” he says.

Miessner, 47, officially works as an assistant to the film academy president and executive director. But he’s also the only academy person who handles the Oscar trophies.

He’s responsible for tracking all 52 statuettes reserved for Sunday’s ceremony. He’ll stand backstage as the awards are presented, noting the serial number of each Oscar and its recipient. After the show, he’ll log the information into the academy’s Statuettes Database.

But today he’s making sure each trophy is accounted for and camera ready. He writes “3453″ on a white paper tag and ties it with string around the Oscar’s neck, like a little pendant. Miessner, who has served as Keeper of the Oscars for five years, says some nights he wakes in a panic, dreaming that an Oscar sent onstage during the show was still wearing it’s numbered necklace.

“In the back of my mind I start to have all these fantasies about what could be going wrong,” he says, noting that an entire shipment of Oscars was stolen — and eventually recovered — in 2002. (Hence all the armed guards.)

Just knowing the Oscars are safely at the Kodak brings Miessner some relief.

“They’re here. I know they’re protected,” he says. “They’re stationary. They’re not going anywhere.”

Until Sunday, when No. 3453 and his brothers will be sent off to their new homes.
Originally posted by Sandy Cohen.

Oscar trophy trend, fact or fiction?

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) – Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt almost certainly are strong contenders in the best actor award category — shining, word has it, in their respective upcoming movies, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Revolutionary Road.”
But they and others might be up against a subtle force they can do little about in the best actor race: Oscar award voters tend to favor actors playing real people.

In the past six best actor races, there were three years in which an actor playing a real person was nominated for an award alongside actors portraying fictional characters, and each time the actor playing a true-life person won the award. You have to go all the way back to the awards for 2001 to find a counter-example: Denzel Washington’s victory for playing Alonzo Harris in “Training Day,” which bested Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and Russell Crowe as John Nash. Otherwise, it was actors playing real-life figures — Ray Charles, Idi Amin, Truman Capote — who took the statue award.

This year that means if even one from among the stellar group that includes Frank Langella (as Richard Nixon), Sean Penn (as Harvey Milk) and Josh Brolin (as George W. Bush) lands a best actor award nomination, everyone else will have to weigh that added factor.

Best actress favors real personnages even more; the statuette award has gone to women playing real people six of the eight years this decade. But with frontrunners such as Meryl Steep, Nicole Kidman and Sally Hawkins taking on fictional roles this go-round, this year may break form.

It’s hard to pinpoint what makes Oscar trophy award voters tilt this way. But one likely factor is a frame of reference: Philip Seymour Hoffman acting and sounding like Capote probably will move the voter more than Terrence Howard’s acting and sounding like Djay from “Hustle & Flow,” a person the Academy Award member has never seen outside the movie (and hasn’t seen at all if they’ve never seen the movie).

Plus, there’s the impersonation factor: How could a voter not think Jamie Foxx is good; he even looks like Charles.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1990s, fictional characters bested real people in the best actor award category seven out of nine times they went up against one another. And an actress playing a real person won the award only twice in the 1990s.

So what’s changed?

For one thing, the rise of celebrity culture. The TMZs of the world have made it harder to separate actors from their roles since we now know them as real people — unless they’re playing other real people, in which case voters can identify with the person they’re playing.

Even if DiCaprio and Pitt are unable to buck the recent trend favoring real-life portrayals, they can take solace in the likelihood they’ll have other shots at the top prize award. But the seeming voter bias toward real-life bios could also impact a few once-in-a-lifetime performances. Those include the comeback for Mickey Rourke, whose Randy the Ram in “The Wrestler” is a tragic figure to rival Willy Loman; Richard Jenkins, whose understated Walter Vale in “The Visitor” is exquisitely subtle; and Christian Bale, whose Batman in “The Dark Knight” is so darkly evocative.

Originally written by Steven Zeitchik, The Hollywood Reporter

LOS ANGELES — The backstage trophy table was the place to be for serious celebrity watching at Sunday’s 60th annual Primetime Emmy Awards - never mind that it was in the basement of a parking garage.
At one point Conan O’Brien was chatting on his cellphone as Amy Poehler and her husband, Will Arnett, walked by on their way to the elevator that would take them to the press tent. Kiefer Sutherland strolled by the trophy table just ahead of Tom Selleck. Christian Slater paused to wave to a group of firefighters working the awards show.
Also walking by the table that contained some five dozen Emmy statuettes was Lily Tomlin, who joked, “I like these three.”
Emmy winner Jeremy Piven, best supporting actor in a comedy series, surveyed the table and joked, “It looks like Hanukkah!”
The Emmy each winner carries off stage is just a prop. Winners give it back and head to the table in the parking garage adjacent to the Nokia Theatre to collect the real one.
As winners were collecting their Emmys, eight limo drivers were seated nearby, embroiled in an intense poker game. The drivers were paying the celebrities absolutely no heed.

Originated from The Canadian Press

Tony Kushner, the award-winning playwright who has spent much of his time in recent years writing Hollywood scripts, is the first recipient of a newly created $200,000 prize for playwriting, by far the largest theater award in the nation, and one of the biggest cash awards in any of the arts.

Times Topics: Tony KushnerThe unusually generous prize, named the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, will be formally presented on Wednesday. It was created with an eye toward attracting talented playwrights and bolstering the status of their profession.

“We wanted to make a splash,” said William Zabel, who is on the board of the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, which is issuing the award. “We want people to realize the theater is important, and that a playwright who gets the award is important to our society and our culture. We wanted to create something that was really significant, like the Pritzker Prize in architecture or the Pulitzer in journalism.”

The Pritzker carries a $100,000 cash prize; a Pulitzer is worth $10,000.

Mr. Kushner already has a Pulitzer, which he won for his two-part epic, “Angels in America,” as well as two Tony Awards, an Emmy and an Olivier Award (the British version of the Tony) for best musical. His works include “A Bright Room Called Day,” “Slavs!” and “Homebody/Kabul,” and the musical “Caroline, or Change,” written with the composer Jeanine Tesori.

Surprised and thrilled to be the first recipient of the new prize, Mr. Kushner said, “Playwriting is in a lot of trouble now,” adding that even someone who has “a string of successful plays cannot make a living at it.”

Mr. Kushner pointed to himself as a case in point, since he now divides his time between New York and Hollywood, working on a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln for Steven Spielberg, and another about Woody Guthrie. The screenplay for Mr. Spielberg’s “Munich,” written by Mr. Kushner and Eric Roth, was nominated for an Oscar.

Mr. Kushner said that he planned to put the money away “to buy me time to work on plays,” which he hopes to do full time when he finishes the two films.

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater and one of the judges, said that while there were many extremely qualified candidates, the committee wanted to pick a person who would be “universally recognized in the theater community as the right choice.” Mr. Kushner’s talent, seriousness and status as a public intellectual quickly made him the consensus choice, Mr. Eustis said.

Mr. Eustis originally commissioned “Angels” at the Eureka Theater Company in San Francisco and directed both parts when they had their debut in 1992 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

In addition to his own work, Mr. Kushner has adapted and translated classics, including Pierre Corneille’s “Illusion,” S. Y. Ansky’s “Dybbuk” and Bertolt Brecht’s “Good Person of Setzuan” and “Mother Courage and Her Children,” which was performed in Central Park in 2006 with Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. He also wrote the English-language libretto for the opera “Brundibar” by Hans Krasa.

The trust, which was created in 1986 with part of the fortune Mr. Steinberg made from real estate, has donated more than $40 million to support regional theaters, leadership courses, scholarships, playwriting commissions, producing and more, said James Steinberg, a son of Harold and Mimi’s.

“Theater ought to be at the center of American culture,” he said, adding that the award was a way to honor playwrights and raise the visibility of theater.

Mr. Steinberg said his parents always loved the theater, and took him and his two siblings often. Even as a child, he sat through O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Now he said he sees at least 100 productions a year.

The Mimi, as the trophy is nicknamed, was designed by David Rockwell and will be awarded every two years. In the alternating years the trust will issue two $50,000 awards for playwrights who are just starting out; the first is to be presented next year.

Originally written by Patricia Cohen

Trophy News From Venice, Italy

A year late, but Brad Pitt finally received the best actor award he won from the Venice Film Festival in 2007 for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”

Now back as star of the Coen brothers’ “Burn After Reading,” which opened the festival, Brad Pitt was handed the prize at last.

“I guess you forgot something here years ago,” said the mistress of ceremonies, handing him the gold cup trophy.

“You can run but you can’t hide,” Pitt said accepting it. “It was an honor to receive this last year and it’s an honor to receive it this year. Thank you very much.”

It’s common for stars not to be present to accept the Venice Film Festival awards. The trophies are bestowed on the fest’s final night at which point most celebs have gone home. Sometimes winners turn around and hurry back to reap the trophy, but often they can’t. That’s what happened to Ben Affleck. Two years ago he found out that he won best actor for “Hollywoodland” soon after he landed in Los Angeles after returning from Venice. Affleck scrambled to try to arrange flights to get back before the fest officially closed, but without success.

It’s strange, however, that the Venice Film Festival didn’t ship the trophy to Pitt after he won. That’s how Affleck eventually caught up with his golden cup.

Pitt did not end up reaping an Oscar nomination for “Jesse James,” but that’s not unusual. Over the last 20 years, only two stars who won best actor at the Venice Film Festival were nommed by the academy: David Strathairn (“Good Night, and Good Luck”) and Javier Bardem (“Before Night Falls”). Neither won the trophy.

Originally Written by the Los Angeles Times Staff

He has been involved in the festival in previous years and said: “It feels good to win these awards but I don’t do this for the trophies.”

Andrew won in the categories for solo acting, dialogue, verse speaking, Shakespeare and best overall performance.

He said: “I came joint first with someone else for the solo acting and we are sharing the trophy.”

Andrew still attends youth drama at Tolethorpe and is working towards achieving a gold drama award from LAMDA.

Trophies for drama, music, and all activities