Oscar Snubs: There Are Plenty of Oversights to Go Around

By GARY STRAUSS, USA TODAY
Jan. 25, 2008

Snubs and surprises underscore virtually all Hollywood awards races, and Tuesday's Oscar nominations proved no exception. Among the notable oversights: "Into the Wild" and "Atonement," each considered acting and directing showcases.

Kiera Knightly missed out on an Oscar nom for her starring role in "Atonement."



In the best-picture category, full of high-profile films, one that was thought to be a shoo-in apparently wasn't.

Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" was thought to be an Oscar shoo-in.

"The snubs were tremendous for 'Into the Wild,' says blogger Scott Feinberg of andthewinneris.blog.com. "At one time, this was considered a favorite."

Director Sean Penn and star Emile Hirsch also were not nominated.

"The academy had shown a penchant for nominating actors as directors," says Andy Scott of Everythingoscar.com. "And ('Into the Wild') was one movie everyone assumed would get in. That was the biggest surprise of the day."

One of the two nominations for the picture went to supporting actor Hal Holbrook, who called Hirsch's absence a "terrible disappointment."
Hal Holbrook lamented the abscene of Emile Hirsch, his "Into the Wild" co-star, among the nominees.



"The role he had demanded so much more of an actor than just about any other role I can think of," Holbrook says. "He did such a gorgeous job. He's a natural. Not to be recognized is very hard for me to understand. Not to mention the film itself. It's a daring and beautiful film."

"Atonement" picked up seven Oscar nominations, including best picture. Yet director Joe Wright and lead actors James McAvoy and Keira Knightley were overlooked.

The academy didn't recognize James McAvoy for his part in "Atonement."
"A Mighty Heart's" Angelina Jolie also was considered a contender in the actress category.

Despite going outside her usual scope of films to portray widow Marianne Pearl in "A Mighty Heart," Angelina Jolie didn't get an Oscar nomination.



The surprises who ousted them:

Jason Reitman's recognition for "Juno's" direction. A "shock," says David Poland of Movie City News.

Tommy Lee Jones' actor nomination for "In the Valley of Elah." "I'm totally confused about (Jones') nomination, but it's an interesting one nonetheless," Scott says. "Did anybody see it coming?"

Laura Linney, who was nominated in the actress category for her role in "The Savages." She "was completely off the radar," Scott says.

The dynamic in the actress category overall is intriguing, Feinberg says. "We knew Angelina was a fringe contender, and Keira wasn't nominated last year for a bigger role in "Pride & Prejudice." And now with "Juno's" Ellen Page, Cate Blanchett and Julie Christie contending, "this category is going to be the most fascinating."

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Scent Notes | Paestum Rose by l’Eau d’Italie

January 24th, 2008 11:19 AM
By CHANDLER BURR

One of the problems with classical beauty is, quite simply, that we know it too well. The eye can pass over a Caravaggio painting and not really see it, finding the image too familiar. It is much easier to attract with novelty and flash, but that burns off quickly and leaves a void. The real trick is to combine the two. If an artist can create new beauty with a classic form, he has done something marvelous because his creation is doubly fueled, by the exhilarating thrill of the new and by the visceral power of the old.

For classical beauty in perfume there is ultimately only one scent: rose. Yet the perfume industry (and its marketers) know that rose, like a slightly faded movie star, is a problematic sell to the public. We can smell rose yet, registering it as a known commodity, not really smell it.

The niche Italian house of Eau d’Italie has taken rose and made of it a revelation. Paestum Rose was creative directed by Marina Sersale and Sebastien Alvarez Murena, Eau d’Italie’s founders, and built by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour. Duchaufour is an expert in shadows (see his Dzongka, done for l’Artisan Parfumeur). He paints olfactory charcoals and grays and deep purples with the smells of smoke and worn wood, a living Old Master of scent, and Paestum Rose is not just perfectly calibrated on a technical level. It is better than that. It is a work of art.

The perfume unfolds with a scented crepuscular darkness, a twilight that is an exact balance of disappearing sunlight and incipient evening. Its rose aspect is ancient, blended with the smell of old stone — Paestum was a classical Roman city known for its roses — yet it also somehow (here’s the trick) smells utterly contemporary. There is no “green stem scent” detail here for a facile thrill, no smell of fresh flower — Duchaufour eschews such easy clichés. Nor is this a “floral” perfume in any obvious way, though it smells, in a sense, like the flower. One October in her apartment in Rome, Sersale showed me a large photograph of a Caravaggio she particularly loves, and I understood. Paestum Rose is a perfume that’s rich and filled with meaning like the intimate opalescent blacks Caravaggio painted, instantly known and strangely unfamiliar. In this perfume we smell ancient beauty made thrillingly new.

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A Chanel as Big as the Ritz

By CATHY HORYN
Published: January 24, 2008
Paris

FASHION designers excel at monument-building: witness the rise of towers in cities like Tokyo and Shanghai. These multistory shops sell clothes and sunglasses, but they also serve to remind people of the power of a brand in a noisy consumerist world.

Coco Chanel died before she had to worry about that. Besides, she left a real monument to modern dressing: the cardigan jacket. How many other designers have created a style that is a uniform as much as a symbol, its iconic value on par with the Coca-Cola bottle? It’s relatively easy to build a tower of glass.

Undeniably, the 75-foot model of the Chanel jacket that Karl Lagerfeld erected in the Grand Palais for the spring haute couture show on Tuesday smacks of kitsch. It would be a huckster’s dream dome. There are days when you think the world is almost at that point where you could picture such a monstrosity in place of the Arc de Triomphe or the pyramids in Egypt — and nobody would mind. Great! SHOP!

Mr. Lagerfeld’s motives, if not entirely innocent, were simple. Although the jacket is probably the best-known object that Chanel created, after Chanel No. 5, she made many other styles and often dominated a decade with her influence.

So the idea was to use the jacket as the symbolic hub from which other styles emerged and inevitably returned to. The model, made of wood and painted to resemble concrete, sat on an revolving platform, and the models entered the runway through a flap in the jacket.

The clothes had wit, too. Seashells were the inspiration, Mr. Lagerfeld said the night before, in the Chanel studio. In the hands of another designer, this might sound banal, but as Mr. Lagerfeld opened a book on his desk called “Coquillages,” featuring shells from the collection of Jacques and Rita Senders, it was amazing to see the variety of hues and textures: the spirals, ridges, folds, spurs and feathery edges.

All those natural shapes Mr. Lagerfeld represented in couture silks. There were black wool day jackets with a curving line shown with draped miniskirts, one shaped in spiraling circles. Some of the suits had blouses with Elizabethan collars, a style that Chanel liked in the 1930s. Among the prettiest evening looks was a strapless beige tunic with ridges of pleated tulle and chiffon that ended in a rounded hem. It was shown with sheer, embroidered French culottes.

The pinks were the pinks of shells. The tiny marabou feathers and silver beads embedded in a pleated chiffon and tulle dress with a crisscross back and flaring skirt were pure Paris.

High fashion at this level is largely impervious to economic recessions. That’s because the demand for $100,000 beaded dresses equals the supply. Last year, Dior had its largest annual sales gain in couture in its 60-year history, said Catherine Rivière, the couture director, adding that the biggest spenders come from Russia and the Persian Gulf states. One client, she said, spent about $500,000 for several garments.

So far as couture educates people about beauty and specialized hand crafts, a greater threat to its existence is the loss of know-how. Tonight, Valentino retires.

That John Galliano creates his Dior collections from historical references like the scandal-making Sargent portrait of “Madame X” or the story of Salome tends to confound the literal-minded. They expect to see these references, and when they get instead a ballooning sack dress in livid fuchsia silk mobbed with sequins, a pair of peacock-blue feather eyelashes and a gold lampshade hat, they complain that it’s visually confusing.

Much that is modern does precisely that, and some other sensory power is needed to understand it. The only thing that really impaired this subtle and dazzling show on Monday was the clunky footwear, which defied the inexperienced models to walk and throw a pose at the same time. None of the balance created by the volumes and rather strict lines would have been lost if he had ditched the platforms.

Two thoughts came to mind with these clothes. One was the new composition of the colors (often hand-painted on silk) and the embroideries, which were at once intense and abstract. The other thought was the relative simplicity of the shapes. As far as the body goes, they suggested control — and not. Pursuing that thought, it’s not unimaginable that Mr. Galliano was in the middle of a conversation between Balenciaga and Dior.

At 7:30 p.m., on Monday, Giorgio Armani had his couture show — a Privé sign put on the steps of the Palais de Chaillot to notify onlookers, the velvet ropes set out for celebrity and paparazzi alike.

Mr. Armani is a master at creating a scene. Inside, 10 men in crow’s-nests trained stage lights on the runway. Sophia Loren, dressed in a dark coat and trousers, sat in the front row. There was no need to smile because Sophia Loren had smiled so many times before. Mr. Armani’s niece, Roberta, sat next to Hilary Swank, who had on a black beaded cocktail dress. Ms. Armani never seemed to stop smiling.

The burlesque star Dita Von Teese, who had changed from a Dior in the afternoon to an Armani, its portrait neckline now framing her bosom, sat very still, her hands folded on her lap, the picture of a lady in drag.

The models performed their roles, too. Not the top girls, they struck poses and occasionally found a spot in the middle distance to fix a hard, blank gaze. The first outfits were in a fine gray bias-cut pinstripe, the jackets or bodices cut close to the body and the full skirts turned in sharply at the hem, like the edge of a paper lantern. Another motif of the collection was horizontal pleating, sometimes with a ladder of black plastic pieces inset into a tight bodice.

There was nothing lurid or in bad taste about Mr. Armani’s clothes, but neither was there anything subtle or particularly surprising about them. Ruffled organdy dresses in citrus and gray tones looked light and feminine, and some tops and dresses were scattered with overlapping disks.

Everything looked impeccable. But despite his incredible design range over the years, irony and self-reference are not within his imagination, so there will never be a jewel of a dress coming out from a huge beige hub of an Armani jacket. The great thing about watching a Lagerfeld couture show, and to an extent a Galliano, is that each dress and jacket is not only unique but also conveys with wit the history of the house. You get that much less with Mr. Armani.

By contrast, Christian Lacroix made every choice count. His show on Tuesday was sensational. From the first outfits, like a deep blue coat dress with whirls of black embroidery, he commanded your attention. This was a rare Lacroix show. For one thing, the shapes were light and contemporary. For another, the collage effects made sense.

Among the prettiest looks was a quartet of draped chiffon dresses in colors like ruby and emerald. A black embroidered jacket appeared over a white lace T-shirt and wide creamy trousers. And there were surprises everywhere, like an embroidered sheer-white apron tied to the front of a silk-print dress, and a short-sleeve jacket with hand-knitted gold and burnt-red arm warmers. The collection seemed to exalt the eccentric modern dresser.

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Bending, Posing and Teaching Beyond the Mat

By KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: January 24, 2008
BOSTON

LIVING in a spartan cottage for eight days during a boot camp for aspiring yoga teachers in Hawaii, Sue Jones practiced from 7 a.m. to midnight, silently watched the rhythms of the Pacific Ocean from a bluff and, she said, gained the confidence to return to Boston and mend her marriage.

But Ms. Jones made another discovery that gnawed at her.

“Everyone had enough money to pay $4,000 to get to Hawaii,” she said, “and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, there are 100 people here and thousands of trainings every year, and I don’t hear anyone talking about teaching yoga to people who can’t afford it.’ ”

After returning to Boston, Ms. Jones started teaching yoga at a substance-abuse treatment center. She asked fellow teachers to help and received a flood of responses.

In May 2006, Ms. Jones started YogaHope, an organization that teaches yoga at eight Boston-area women’s homeless shelters, substance-abuse treatment programs and domestic-violence safe houses, as well as two programs in Seattle. The focus is on teaching restorative yoga, and though many teachers have completed at least 200 hours of training, it is not a requirement.

Driven by a sometimes missionary zeal and a sense that yoga has become an exclusive pursuit, a small but growing number of yoga practitioners are forming organizations that teach yoga in prisons and juvenile detention centers in Oakland, Calif.; Los Angeles, Seattle and Indianapolis. They are working with the addicted and the homeless in Portland, Ore., and with public-school students in New York City.

Though concern about the cost of yoga is an issue (studio classes can cost $20 for a drop-in session, though some offer free or low-cost classes taught by less experienced teachers), most of the practitioners are motived by a desire to introduce yoga to those who might need it most, but wouldn’t think to do it on their own.

Ms. Jones of YogaHope said she saw a change in the first women she taught after only one class: they held their heads higher, amazed at what their bodies could do. At that moment, she decided to spread yoga to other women. “We’re like Christian missionaries,” said Ms. Jones, a petite blonde whose green eyes flash with emotion as she speaks. “We really want to offer it to people who don’t know better or can’t access it.”

Those who teach or do research on yoga say these programs have increased in recent years as more yoga devotees decide to spread its gospel.

“You can’t do all those prostrations without it doing something to you,” said James Wvinner, the founder and director of yoga, tribe and culture films for Acacia Lifestyle, a distributor of mind, body and spirit DVDs.

Mr. Wvinner, who taught yoga at a federal prison and fondly recalls the sociopath who never missed a class, said more yogis are working in prisons and social-service centers.

Others believe bringing yoga to such places harkens to the ancient practice of karma yoga, or the yoga of action and selfless service. “What it speaks to,” said Kaitlin Quistgaard, the editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal, “is that social activism is becoming more and more a part of mainstream American yoga. People are realizing it’s almost a requirement to give back.”

Research in the United States on yoga’s effectiveness in helping treat drug addiction or mental illness is limited. Most studies have been done on a small scale in India, and the findings aren’t universally accepted.

But yoga’s function as a stress reliever is not in dispute. “Yoga and meditation do several things, and perhaps one of the most important is that they allow individuals to cope with stress better,” said Sat Bir Khalsa, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies the medical effects of yoga. “At the core of a lot of addiction is a search for that kind of relief from the stressful world.”

Patricia Gerbarg, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College, in Valhalla, N.Y., taught yogic breathing to survivors of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, and found that tests scores that measure post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression dropped dramatically.

One recent night at the Volunteers of America Hello House, a residential substance-abuse treatment center for women in Boston, about 15 women lunged on their mats, which were squeezed into a common area.

“Tap into your breath to deal with the unknown,” said Amanda Richter, a YogaHope teacher. As they moved into the downward dog position, deep breathing filled the room. “Whatever hurts, whatever bad energy you have in your life, you can let it go here,” she said.

The women said yoga enabled them to do something that was frightening at first: focus inward. “The teacher always says how you’re a good person and to love yourself,” said Katey Sullivan, 39. “That makes you feel good about yourself, and you want to stay clean.”

That lesson was initially hard for Nikki Meyers. She dabbled with yoga in the 1970s, but soon “men and drugs and sex took priority,” she said. In the early 1990s, she got off drugs with the help of a 12-step program and yoga, which she started teaching to children in Boston.

Ms. Meyers moved to Indianapolis and opened Cityoga, a studio and health center. Certified under a 500-hour teacher-training program, she also teaches at the Hamilton County Juvenile Services Center outside Indianapolis. “I tell them that they did movement, breath, and a little sitting still for an hour,” she said, “and went from irritated and angry to calm and relaxed without taking a drug, without taking a drink, without having alienated your family.”

Bidyut Bose, who grew up in India and learned yoga from his father, started teaching it to seniors in 1998 at the Downtown Berkeley Y.M.C.A. in California. As he saw the students gaining in strength and self-esteem, he started to wonder about others who could benefit. Mr. Bose began contacting treatment centers, hospitals and homeless shelters. “If millions of Americans are doing yoga, then there are millions who are not getting it, not coming to a studio, not able to afford classes,” he said.

Mr. Bose later founded Niroga, an organization in Oakland, Calif., that teaches yoga to people in drug rehabilitation programs and juvenile detention centers, formerly homeless veterans and victims of domestic abuse. He is also training black youths to become yoga teachers throughout Oakland.

Alex Briscoe, assistant director at the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency, which pays for the yoga classes taught by Niroga and another agency, said that yoga for children has allowed psychiatrists to better treat them.

One hurdle in teaching yoga, especially to teenagers, is debunking ideas that it is a wacky, new-age practice. “There’s resistance, shyness, embarrassment,” said Anne Desmond, who taught yoga at New York City schools and formed Bent on Learning in 2001. The organization, which offers yoga instruction to students and youth centers, teaches at nine schools.

“There’s such a transformation,” she said, “from this not knowing about yoga and resisting it to really loving it.”

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Loud and Dumb Never Looked Better

By MIKE ALBO
Published: January 24, 2008
IN the summer of 1989, I finally had a fake ID and went out at least five nights a week. (My name was Robert Bruce Macartey, and my birthday was June 4, 1965.) For my new club life, I shelved my floppy teenage knock-arounds and bought mock turtlenecks, striped vests and black rayon tapered-leg trousers from stores like the Le Château, Merry-Go-Round and Oak Tree. I wore these clothes while fake-smoking menthols, throwing attitude and dancing to Ofra Haza and Soul II Soul.

As dumb as I probably looked, this was a necessary but widely unacknowledged phase that occurs in most every guy’s life: those awkward first attempts to look dressy, usually experienced while going out to big, loud, stupid and smoky clubs with people you will later despise.

The new Marc Ecko Cut & Sew store in Chelsea, stuffed to the gills with trendy garments, brought me back to those days and the half-classy mass-market mall stores of my past. Here, it seems, is where today’s young and clubby guy can find relatively inexpensive fancy clothes that will make him feel upscale while he barfs in a bathroom stall after 10 White Russians.

We need more stores like this one: a safe space where a dude who dresses like Turtle from “Entourage” can try on some clothes that step up his style without going too far and freaking him out.

Being clubby-spiffy these days looks far different from the Technotronic monochrome of my youth. It involves a lot of prints and imagery. Most every garment here is embroidered or silk-screened with leafy brocades and swirling filigree — the same aesthetic that pervades animated interstitials on MTV. A green thermal is printed with a design reminiscent of Victorian endpaper; a corduroy blazer is covered with a pattern of vines. A short-sleeve guayabera-style shirt is stitched with floral patterns ($44). A blue button-front, with embroidered flowers on one breast and the shirttail has a lovable “Night Out in Fort Lee, N.J.” look to it ($64). A black track jacket with a purple chevron stripe across the chest seemed shockingly plain until I noticed that it had a faint curlicue design embossed on the surface ($68).

The store is large, the music is emo, the headless mannequins wear blazers over their hoodies; and as you would expect, there is a pubescent fixation with the ladies. The door handle is in the shape of a topless woman, as is the frame around a mirror by the dressing area. A painting of a nude woman-creature with textured skin hangs between the dressing rooms. Huge photo books by David LaChapelle and others are opened on tables. One was opened to a posing, pouty Pink while another displayed a photograph of Hillary Clinton, a presence in a red pantsuit, who single-handedly kept the door handle, painting and mirror frame from seeming misogynistic.

The Cut & Sew line was introduced in 2004, and the Chelsea store opened its doors in September, making it one of the newest additions to the gargantuan urban fashion empire of Marc Ecko Enterprises, which also includes G-Unit, a joint venture with the rapper 50 Cent; Zoo York, a line of action sports-inspired clothing; Complex magazine; and Red, a line for women.

In the mid-’80s, Marc Ecko airbrushed T-shirts and sold them in his parents’ garage in New Jersey; he introduced his first men’s line in 1993. Now he is so preposterously successful, he has become a kind of hip-hop Willy Wonka. Like the mythical chocolatier, he makes grand, generous, sometimes nutty gestures. He raises money for the International Rhino Federation, backed a 2006 lawsuit against antigraffiti legislation in New York City and created Sweat Equity Enterprises, “a nonprofit creative learning program” for underserved high school teenagers.

He is also obsessed with “Star Wars” and somehow wrangled a licensing deal with the franchise. A white T-shirt has a storm trooper head rendered beautifully in little appliquéd crystals, while a likeness of Yoda in green dots on a brown T-shirt looks warty and nauseating. Mr. Ecko lovingly explains his fetish in a long paragraph printed on the back inside collar: “It’s no secret I am a fan of all things Star Wars,” it reads. “Just when I am getting pop culture fatigue, I watch Star Wars.”

As far away as I am from the desired demographic for this store, I found some interesting clothes. One standout, a lined M65 military jacket in a simple, embellishment-free herringbone, was only $115.

A lot of prices are reasonable, in fact. I found an army coat with a shearling hood for $175 and a velvet blazer that was almost on par with one I have from Kenneth Cole, for $135. A lamb’s wool hoodie with polyester lining ($88) felt squishy and synthetic, but it looked good enough to be a gift for your nephew or younger brother.

It may strike the passer-by as odd that an “urban fashion” store has set up shop here, in the middle of one of the gayest blocks in Chelsea, next door to Food Bar and other establishments with rainbow flag decals in their windows. But Chelsea is evolving from being an exclusive “gayberhood” into more of a cultural and sexual mixing bowl, which could give this store some interesting vibrancy.

Unfortunately, the two times I visited the store, no one was there. It is surprising to me that the Ecko empire, which seems so enmeshed in the hip-hop, graffiti and skateboard scenes, has a store lacking youthful bustle. But maybe that is part of maturity: to try on clothes in a lame, decaffeinated environment.

On the N train, coming home from the store, I saw a group of teenage guys with their girlfriends and skateboards, just a couple years away from their own awkward dressy phases. They slumped in their seats, sharing iPod earphones, wearing grubby camouflage hoodies and bedraggled jeans. They did look comfortable, though.

Marc Ecko Cut & Sew | The Merch

147 Eighth Avenue (between 17th and 18th Streets); (212) 206-8351

THE THREADS Snappy hip-hop flavored duds — printed tees, decorated jackets and emblazoned blazers — for trendy guys a few years above or below 20 who are just starting to step up their style.

THE SPACE The store is long and deep with product. Emo music wails out of speakers, and workers, sweetly aloof because of their youth, quietly fold garments and give each other relationship advice.

THE NABE Cut & Sew’s new digs exemplify the changing face of Chelsea from predominantly gay to urban shopping mall. With its lady-shaped door handle, printed hoodies and rap star swagger, the store is bringing a little ’hood to the gayberhood.

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