Taylor Swift makes Grammy history as female musicians sweep top gongs

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Written by northsouth

Category: Art&Entertainment

Published: 05 February 2024

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LOS ANGELES, USA - Taylor Swift has made Grammy history as the first person to win album of the year four times.

The US megastar, 34, secured the top gong of the night with her tenth studio album, Midnights, shortly after announcing she would be releasing a new album titled The Tortured Poets Department, on April 19.

The 66th annual ceremony, hosted by comedian Trevor Noah, saw female musicians dominate in the major categories at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles, with US singer Billie Eilish taking home song of the year for her Barbie hit What Was I Made For?, and pop star Miley Cyrus landing record of the year for her viral summer sensation Flowers.

Canadian singer Celine Dion, 55, made a surprise appearance at the show to present album of the year to Swift, amid her battle with rare neurological condition Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS).

A visibly shocked Swift previously won the award for album Fearless in 2009, again six years later for 1989, and most recently for Folklore in 2020.

The singer-songwriter praised her friend and long-term collaborator Jack Antonoff as a “once in a generation” producer and her fellow nominee Lana Del Rey, who makes a guest appearance on the Midnights track Snow On The Beach, as a “legacy artist” and a “legend in her prime right now” after bringing them on stage with her.

She added: “I would love to tell you that this is the best moment of my life, but I feel this happy when I finish a song or when I crack the code to a bridge that I love or when I’m shot-listing a music video, or when I’m rehearsing with my dancers or my band or getting ready to go to Tokyo to play a show.

“For me, the award is the work. All I want to do is keep being able to do this. I love it so much. It makes me so happy.

“It makes me unbelievably blown away that it makes some people happy who voted for this award too. All I want to do is keep doing this. So thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do what I love so much – mind blown”.

The pop megastar was previously the first and only female solo artist to win the award three times, tied with Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon and Stevie Wonder.

Swift made waves earlier in the ceremony when she announced she would be releasing a new album while picking up the gong for best pop vocal album for Midnights.

The historic win tops off a mega 12 months for the artist after she embarked on the highest-grossing tour of all time, was named Time’s Person of the Year, re-released her blockbuster album 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and kept the gossip industry afloat with her new relationship with Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce.

The star NFL player, 34, was not in attendance at the show because of training for the Super Bowl after the Chiefs beat the Baltimore Ravens last Sunday.

Elsewhere during the show, Eilish used her award speech for song of the year to praise Barbie director Greta Gerwig for creating the “best movie of the year”.

Her hit song features in the end credits of the film.

Taking to the stage alongside her brother, collaborator and “best friend in the world” Finneas O’Connell, the 22-year-old also hailed her fellow nominees as “incredible artists”.

Eilish and O’Connell also took home the best song written for visual media for the same track, with Eilish saying she is “just in awe” and “grateful every second of my life” for the recognition they have received over the years.

O’Connell thanked their father, who worked as a construction worker at Mattel Corporation, “to keep food on the table” for most of their childhood.

Eilish also performed the track during the ceremony dressed as the 1965 Barbie Poodle Parade doll, donning black sunglasses and a pink head scarf, while O’Connell played the piano.

The ceremony saw US star Cyrus collect the record of the year prize, hailing it as “amazing” before adding: “But I really hope that it doesn’t change anything because my life was beautiful yesterday.

“Not everyone in the world will get a Grammy, but everyone in this world is spectacular.”

Cyrus secured her first Grammy award earlier in the night when she won best pop solo performance for Flowers, which she performed during the show in a silver sparkly dress featuring a bedazzled bra and stomach cut-out.

During her performance she celebrated her win, changing the lyrics to “Then I remember, I just won my first Grammy.”

US singer SZA, who had been the most nominated artist of the night with nine nods, picked up three awards.

The 34-year-old won best R&B song for Snooze, best progressive R&B album for SOS and the best pop duo prize with Phoebe Bridgers for their track Ghost In The Machine.

SZA, real name Solana Rowe, was emotional as she ran on to the stage to hug fellow singer Lizzo, who presented the award.

She said: “I’m just really overwhelmed, you don’t really understand I came really, really far and I can’t believe this is happening and it feels really fake – hi Taylor, I love you,” she said, calling out Swift.

The artist also delivered a theatrical performance of her hit songs Snooze and Kill Bill during the ceremony, which saw her transition from being alone on an elaborate set featuring burning bins and constructed rooms, to a large-scale dance routine with backing dancers.

Victoria Monet, 34, became emotional after she was declared the winner of best new artist, saying during her speech: “I just want to say to everybody who has a dream, I want you to look at this as an example.”

Among the other notable performances of the night was Joni Mitchell, who sang at the award show for the first time at the age of 80.

The Canadian-American singer-songwriter delivered an emotional rendition of Both Sides Now from an armchair alongside Brandi Carlile on the guitar, after she won in the best folk category for her 2023 live album, Joni Mitchell At Newport (Live).

Mitchell, who picked up a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2002, graced the stage on the heels of a gradual return to live appearances after suffering a brain aneurysm in March 2015.

US singer Tracy Chapman, 59, also stunned the audience with a rendition of her hit song Fast Car, which she performed with US country singer Luke Combs, whose cover of the track went viral last year.

US singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder led an emotional in-memoriam segment, duetting For Once In My Life alongside a video of the late Tony Bennett, who appeared on-screen.

Wonder said: “What’s amazing, I was able to sing the song with someone I’ve admired for so long – his love for art, his love for peace, his love for unity, his love for civil rights. Tony, I’m going to miss you forever.”

Other artists remembered included Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Buffett, Shane MacGowan, Burt Bacharach and Andy Rourke, while an emotional Annie Lennox sang Nothing Compares 2 U in memory of Irish singer Sinead O’Connor.

Among the untelevised awards ahead of the main show, indie singer Bridgers also landed Grammy Awards with her supergroup boygenius.

The trio – comprising Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus – sported matching white suits as they picked up best rock song and best rock performance for their hit Not Strong Enough, and best alternative music album for their debut The Record.

Meanwhile, Australian singer-songwriter Kylie Minogue was honoured with the inaugural best pop dance recording for hit Padam Padam, which went viral last summer and marks her second Grammy award.

The best music video Grammy was awarded to a project created for The Beatles song I’m Only Sleeping, which featured 1,300 oil paintings by British filmmaker and animator Em Cooper, while a documentary on the late David Bowie, titled Moonage Daydream, took home the best music film prize.

What striking actors fear about tech replacing roles

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Written by northsouth

Category: Art&Entertainment

Published: 14 July 2023

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LONDON - The cast of Oppenheimer left a London premiere prematurely to “go and write their picket signs” in preparation for the “imminent” strike by the actors’ union.

On Thursday (13 July), lead actors of Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated war biographic, including Cillian Murphy, Florence Pugh, Matt Damon, Emily Blunt and Ramy Malek, walked out of the film’s UK premiere in solidarity with Sag-aftra.

“You’ve seen them here earlier on the red carpet,” Nolan announced to the cinema’s audience.

“Unfortunately, they’re off to write their picket signs for what we believe to be an imminent strike by Sag, joining one of my guilds, the Writers Guild, in the struggle for fair wages for working members of the unions, and we support them.”

Ahead of the screening, the actors had been walking the red carpet, posing for pictures, interacting with fans and speaking to press.

In a red-carpet interview with Variety, Damon revealed that “once the strike is officially called”, the cast is “going to walk obviously in solidarity”.

Hollywood’s actors and writers have both gone on strike for the first time since 1960, as they protest against a potentially unsettling future for the industry.

On Thursday (13 July), the leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, went on strike.

In doing so, they join the Writers Guild of America, who represent the industry’s screenwriters and have already been picketing for over 70 days.

Both unions are striking in protest against a number of decisions by major studios that include not just job cuts but also how generative artificial intelligence tools could replace their roles in the industry.

This is the first strike since 1980.

Over the last decade, AI has found several uses in the movie and television industry, from de-aging actors, analysing patterns and behaviours of viewers on streaming platforms, bringing back the voices of late actors and even helping stitch together entire movie trailers.

One of the proposals, as explained by SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, feels like it is straight out of dystopian science fiction series Black Mirror. In fact, a very similar scene

During a press conference on Thursday, Crabtree-Ireland alleged that a proposal from Hollywood studios was to use “groundbreaking AI” to scan background performers and only offer them a day’s pay while the companies get to own the scans and use them for any project they want.

“This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation,” he said.

A statement from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that represents the studios claimed the “groundbreaking” proposal “protects actors’ digital likenesses for SAG-AFTRA members”.

Writers who have already been protesting since May have also sought assurances from studios that their jobs would not be threatened by AI.

With the steady rise of online streaming services looking to rack up user subscriptions by churning out endless amounts of digital content, writers on strike have sought new pay structures, guaranteed periods of work as well as better discussions on the limits of AI use.

Members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) shared concerns that producers may seek to use AI to write scripts or at least use the technology to complete unfinished screenplays, and have also urged production houses to agree to safeguards around its usage.

Screenwriters fear AI could be used to churn out a rough first draft with a few simple prompts and writers may then be hired after this initial step to punch such drafts up – albeit at a lower pay rate.

Without further dialogue with studios, writers have raised concerns there could be a number of new ways that AI could be used to craft outlines for stories, fill in scenes and even come up with mock-up drafts.

In “The Blue Caftan,” Moroccan film director tackles LGBTQ+ love

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Written by northsouth

Category: Art&Entertainment

Published: 08 June 2023

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By MARIAM FAM

RABAT - Director Maryam Touzani stands for a portrait during the 76th international film festival in Cannes, southern France, on Monday, May 22, 2023. In her latest film, “The Blue Caftan,” Touzani, from Morocco, delicately weaves intricate, overlapping tales of love, both traditional and largely taboo for many in her country and its region as she tells the story of a woman and her secretly gay husband who together run a shop making caftans. The marriage grows more complicated when the couple hires a male apprentice. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

As Mina gets increasingly sick, her body withering away, her husband dotes on her: He washes her hair, helps her change, brings the sweetness of a fruit to her lips. But underneath the genuinely tender moments shared by this on-screen Moroccan couple simmers a longing — of a forbidden kind.

In her latest film, “The Blue Caftan,” Moroccan director Maryam Touzani delicately weaves intricate, overlapping tales of love, both traditional and largely taboo for many in her country and its region as she tells the story of a woman and her secretly gay husband who together run a shop making caftans. The marriage grows more complicated when the couple hires a male apprentice.

Wading into socially sensitive subjects is not unfamiliar terrain for Touzani who has won accolades at international film festivals and, just recently, was a jury member at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “The Blue Caftan,” which had been shortlisted in the international feature film category for the 95th Academy Awards, is scheduled for release Wednesday in Morocco, where gay sex is illegal.

“I’m really hoping that it would be able to trigger a debate about the LGBT community and its place …, things that we don’t generally talk about because they are sensitive subjects,” Touzani told The Associated Press. “For a healthy society, it’s important to be able to talk about everything.”

Some disagree.

In Rabat, 27-year-old Laila Sahraoui argued some topics are best left behind closed doors.

“Moroccans … worry that their kids could imitate such ideas,” she said, adding that she wouldn’t watch the film. “Because of our Islam, we don’t like such things in Morocco. … It’s absolutely not appropriate for our society.”

But Touzani, 42, said others shared with her how important it was to portray characters like Halim, the husband.

“Morocco is a very complex country where there are very different points of view coexisting,” she said. “It’s about being able to just push certain boundaries and just to question certain things. ... That’s what art can help us do as well, cinema especially.”

Filmmaker Nabil Ayouch, Touzani’s husband who co-wrote “The Blue Caftan” with her and is its main producer, said he is curious about moviegoers’ reactions, but feels confident.

“There’s a younger and younger audience and they want to see new type of movies, new type of cinemas in the Arab world,” he said. “The more conservative audience will probably not e very pleased.”

Part of art’s role, Ayouch said, is to disturb, to stir debate.

While he welcomes the recognition their movies garner abroad, he said it’s important for films like “The Blue Caftan” also to be experienced by audiences at home and in the Arab world.

For those having to “live their sexuality secretly,” he said, “films like this one can give them some courage to face who they are more publicly.”

In “The Blue Caftan,” Mina, the wife, has a sense of humour and a feisty side that she uses to protect her husband, who considers her his “rock.” She’s an observant Muslim; viewers repeatedly watch her pray.

Halim is a man torn. He has a gentle soul and takes pride in his craft — correcting a customer on a fabric’s exact shade of blue — while catering to shoppers in a changing world, with little patience for the time he takes to embroider by hand. He loves his wife, even as he slips into a cabin at a public bathhouse for secret sexual encounters with men.

Sexual tension builds up between him and the male apprentice, Youssef. As Mina’s health falters, Youssef increasingly helps the couple and a love triangle of sorts ensues.

Ultimately, Touzani said, it’s a movie about “love in its many forms.”

That includes love for the traditional craft of caftan embroidery, with sensual scenes of fabrics and stitches.

“One of the things I wanted to show in this film is the beauty of certain traditions,” she said. “There are other traditions that … need to be questioned,” she added, citing scenes when Halim challenges some burial rituals.

In one scene, Halim asks for Mina’s forgiveness, telling her that all his life he has tried in vain to get rid of “this thing.” She tells him she’s proud to have been his wife, then rests her head on his shoulder.

Being a woman of faith didn’t stop Mina from understanding her husband, Touzani said.

“We have the tendency of saying, ‘Well, if you are religious, then you cannot be this or you cannot be that.’ I believe that we can be many things at the same time because we are such complex beings.”

Speaking in Rabat, Hanane Boarfaoui, 38, said she was against storylines about homosexuality. “This must not be watched by our children, mothers and parents,” she said. “We are conservative people; we don’t accept this.”

Ahmed Benchemsi, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, said that while the number of those prosecuted for gay sex in Morocco “is relatively low” and the topic of homosexuality is less of a taboo there than what it used to be, “the law is still there and it hangs over the heads of everybody.”

Online, before the Morocco release of “The Blue Caftan,” some praised Touzani’s work as powerful and moving; others accused her of courting the West and catering to its sensibilities over issues more relevant to Moroccans.

“I don’t make cinema to please anybody,” Touzani said. “I just want to be as truthful as possible to my characters and to the stories I want to tell.”

Touzani’s feature-film directing debut, “Adam,” tells the story of two women whose lives intersect when one takes in the other, an unmarried stranger who’s looking for a place to stay until she gives birth after getting pregnant. She talks about plans to give away her baby to shield him from the stigma that would otherwise mar his future.

It was inspired by Touzani’s parents hosting a woman who showed up at their doorstep under similar circumstances. When Touzani was pregnant with her son, she felt “the violence” that the woman endured in having to relinquish her baby because “socially she couldn’t do otherwise.”

Broaching topics “unspoken of in Arab and Islamic societies” is one common thread between “Adam” and “The Blue Caftan,” said film critic Cherqui Ameur.

“We hope to have fewer taboos in our society through discussing all issues,” he said.

In 2015, “Much Loved,” a movie directed and written by Ayouch, in which Touzani worked in various capacities, was barred from release in the country. Authorities at the time charged that the movie, portraying female sex workers, was offensive to Moroccan women and values. The movie, excerpts from which appeared online, sparked uproar; it was defended by some on freedom of expression and human-interest grounds and criticized by others who said its language was crude and scenes too explicit.

Touzani said that while that was a complicated period, she felt the film pushed boundaries, and “there was something that opened up” following it.

Born in Tangier to a Moroccan father and Moroccan-Spanish mother, Touzani said they encouraged her to stand up for her beliefs. At one point, while a child, she wanted to become a lawyer like her father.

An avid reader, she ended up studying journalism in London but eventually turned to filmmaking.

She said she gravitates toward telling stories of people on the margins. On the screen, she wants to give them the voice they may not have and the possibilities that may not exist in real life.

“These are the people that inspire me, that touch me, that haunt me,” Touzani said. “These are the people that really make their way inside my heart and stay there naturally without me looking for it.” - (ANA) -