This week's podcast meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo AKA Swedish actor Noomi Rapace, talks LA and Tolstoy with Danny Huston, and reviews Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and Paul Greengrass's Green Zone.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Swedish author Stieg Larsson's literary sensation about a crack computer hacker who teams up with a disgraced journalist to solve a 40-year-old murder, has sold over 1m books in the UK alone. Now the film is set to make a star of Noomi Rapace, who plays its sultry, charismatic title character. The actor tells Jason Solomons about transforming herself physically for the role (Thai boxing came in handy) and discusses the new wave of Swedish films breaking out in the wake of Let the Right One In.

Xan Brooks then joins in to run the rule over the week's big releases: the pacy-despite-its-length Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Scorsese's overheated Hitchcockian pastiche Shutter Island; and Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, which stars Matt Damon on the hunt for WMDs in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

And finally, actor Danny Huston is on the line from Los Angeles to talk about The Kreutzer Sonata, his latest low-budget film with Ivansxtc director Bernard Rose and based on a novella by Tolstoy. The actor, son of John and brother of Anjelica Huston, shares why the novella works so well transposed to modern-day LA and how his legendary father would have really enjoyed low-budget digital film-making.

Schools must devise new ways to teach children the importance of intellectual property, says the FDA president

The Oscar-winning head of the body which distributes films in the UK today called for new methods to be employed in the battle to defeat internet piracy.

During a keynote speech as president of the Film Distributors' Association, Lord Puttnam said young people needed to be educated at an early age that it was wrong to illegally download copyrighted material.

"The concept of intellectual property and its value needs to be embedded inextricably into the school curriculum," he said. "We need to establish beyond doubt that if people want films on offer in a variety of ways and formats, as we hope and believe they do, then they are required to pay a fair price."

Puttnam, who won an Oscar for best film in 1982 as a producer on Chariots of Fire, highlighted a recent FDA project aimed at the vital "tween" generation of 8 to 11-year-olds, a teaching resource designed to stimulate classroom debate about why copyright existed.

"Today, it's encouraging to report that this resource has been supplied, free upon request, to almost one in five primary schools in the UK – that's 4,000 out of a little over 20,000 schools," he said.

Speaking afterwards to the Guardian, Puttnam said the film industry itself also needed to adopt new ideas, if internet downloading was to be defeated. In particular, it should follow the example of the music industry and make limited content such as film clips free to viewers, he said.

During his speech, Puttnam challenged TV producers to come up with a successful show to capture the imagination of the British moviegoing public, which he said had powered the UK and Ireland box office to an all-time high of £1.06bn last year, up 11% year-on-year despite a 4.8% shrinking of the European economy over the same period. He said broadcasters should not be put off by "the well-rehearsed arguments regarding clip clearances", when there was a genuine opportunity to capitalise on the UK's current love affair with movies.

"Where on earth are the edgy magazine shows or the contemporary panel shows or the audience participation shows themed to the movies?" Puttnam asked. "The mass public interest in films – enjoyed by millions of people every week – is all but ignored in the current output of our national broadcasters. Here's a gap crying out to be filled with a smart, modern format."

"When TV producers are having to negotiate a fee for the clips they want to show – that's barmy," Puttnam said, after his speech. "Either accept that there's not going to be a programme of this kind on TV, or give them the bloody clips and be thrilled that they're being seen by millions of people."

He agreed that the industry needed to follow the example of the music industry, which routinely makes some content free to bloggers and online audiences in order to attract music lovers to check out new acts."These are the nonsenses that this industry has always been susceptible to," he added. "You are building the next generation of audiences and they should be all over it like a rash. It's this inability to see the big picture, this narrowness of thinking, which has for many many years muddled matters."

Puttnam suggested that the government's new digital economy bill, which is partly aimed at reducing internet piracy, might not be capable of bringing a halt to illegal downloading in its present form.

"For me it's a staging post," he said. "One of the mistakes made is allowing the ISPs to pretend they are not part of a retail chain. If you or I wanted to open a chemist shop we would have to pay attention to health and safety and the nature of the products that we sold. We couldn't just serve anyone, for instance. Somehow or other we've allowed the ISPs to drift into a mindset that's allowed them to think that they are somehow inured to the forces of the law. Government has failed to get that message across."

Puttnam said he felt that one of the best ways to encourage film fans to make legal purchases was to ask popular film-makers to join the education campaign. "You've got to get Ken Loach out there, Mike Leigh out there so that people understand that this is a cycle of finance," he said. "If you cut off their ability to raise money there aren't going to be any movies. There's a generation of film-makers who audiences have respect for, that have got to come out and make this clear."

During his speech, Puttnam suggested a rather more direct approach, in the shape of a change in the law to make the use of camcorders in cinemas specifically illegal. He also said film content must be available legally online "in ways consumers want, and at prices they can afford" if people were to be dissuaded from using illegal download sites.

"I don't believe for a second – and see no evidence – that today's young generation of consumers is inherently evil and has no intention of ever paying for anything," he said. "But multi-channel broadcasting and the web have brought a massive proliferation in viewing options and an explosion of choice, and as we've learned to our cost, content in a digital form is relatively easy to transfer and copy."

The actor is making his film directorial debut with the Shakespeare tragedy about a brilliant Roman general, with himself in the lead role opposite Vanessa Redgrave and Gerard Butler

Ralph Fiennes is poised to make his directing debut with a contemporary retelling of Coriolanus, the Shakespeare tragedy about a disputatious Roman general who leads a rebellion against the empire. Production starts next week in Belgrade.

Not content with calling the shots from behind the camera, Fiennes will also star in the title role. Vanessa Redgrave plays his ambitious mother Volumnia, while Gerard Butler co-stars as Tullus Aufidius, the commander of an enemy army whom Coriolanus coaxes into an uneasy alliance. Brian Cox rounds out the cast as the Roman senator Menenius. John Logan, the screenwriter behind The Aviator and Gladiator, wrote the script.

The production was first announced at last year's Cannes film festival, where Fiennes was keen to present it as racy, exciting action thriller. "People who've read the script think it's a page-turner," he told Screen International. "I want it to be an edge-of-seat film."

Fiennes, 47, will next be seen in the Ricky Gervais comedy Cemetery Junction. Later this year he makes his final bow as Voldemort in the two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Martin Scorsese's new movie, Shutter Island, is full of references to Alfred Hitchcock. Play this new game and see if you can spot them

It's fair to say Martin Scorsese is king of the film nerds; every movie he has ever made is packed with references and allusions to earlier masterworks, everything from The Red Shoes to King of Kings. He has outdone himself with his new film, Shutter Island: he has taken the Hitchcockian atmosphere of murderous insanity and run with it, shoehorning in one Hitchcock bit after another.

Scorsese has form in this area: a couple of years ago, he shot a promo film for a Spanish cava-maker which took the shape of a very smart fake documentary; in it he claims to have discovered a "lost" Hitchcock script, which he then takes it upon himself to shoot. Have a look at it online at bit.ly/eEuz; it's almost a pitch document for Shutter Island on its own.

In the spirit of Hitchcock homage, here's a new game: when you watch Shutter Island – which is released tomorrow – every time you spot a Hitchcock reference, shout out the title of the film Marty pinched it from. Shutter Island could become the new Rocky Horror Picture Show if we put our minds to it. Trust me, you'll be the most popular person in the cinema. Try these as a starter:

• For no real reason, Scorsese sticks his camera right under a showerhead. Water streams either side of the camera, then gurgles down the drain. Fortunately, no one gets stabby. "Psycho!"

• Leonardo DiCaprio peers over a hair-raising clifftop drop and decides he has got to get down somehow. Cue him scrambling down to the shoreline and hanging off the rock face – just like Cary Grant on Mount Rushmore. "North by Northwest!"

• A gun follows its target, fixed to the bottom of the camera. It's kind of like a video game, you might think – if you were a 15 year old. But Leo Carroll did it first, threatening to shoot Ingrid Bergman before turning it on himself. "Spellbound!"

• Sometimes it feels like Shutter Island is one long thunderstorm. A hurricane's a-coming, rain batters down, lightning flashes across the sky. Fortunately, Hitchcock once made a film where the heroine – Tippi Hedren – had a pathological fear of the things. One bit, where a tree smashes through a wall, is a straight lift. "Marnie!"

• DiCaprio grabs a gun and trudges fearfully up a very, very tall building. In Shutter Island it's a lighthouse, rather than a Californian mission, and DiCaprio isn't overcome by acrophobia. But this is Jimmy Stewart Mk 2. "Vertigo!"

• Shutter Island has its own creepy Nazi-type figure; man-in-the-shadows Max von Sydow, whom we first see lurking mysteriously in Ben Kingsley's gracious living room. Scorsese got the idea for introducing him via the back of his head from Cary Grant moodily watching a couple dancing. "Notorious!"

There have got to be more. Hitchcock buffs all over the planet are presumably engaged in the internet equivalent of a nuclear arms race to identify every single reference. Time to stand back and let the real obsessives take over.

The Museum of Modern Art's show of the Alice in Wonderland film-maker's art overflows with his distinctive creations, but the organisers have wasted an opportunity to take him out of his rabbit hole

Gallery: Tim Burton at Moma

"That's the big deer from Edward Scissorhands," a woman in the sculpture garden of New York's Museum of Modern Art tells her friend, pointing at an outsized topiary stag based on the one in Tim Burton's 1990 film. "And I recognise this one from Beetlejuice, when the furniture tries to eat [the characters]," she adds, gesturing at a large, pointy, painted sheet-metal piece that bears a passing resemblance to something from Burton's 1988 movie but is in fact Alexander Calder's 1959 sculpture Black Widow.

The attribution might have been wide of the mark but at least a connection was made between Burton and a larger artworld. The peculiar thing about Moma's Tim Burton show, which has been running since November and continues to the end of April, is how little effort its curators have made to glance backward or sideways to place Burton's work within a broader context.

Burton has a distinctive sensibility, consistently expressed with wit, imagination and macabre charm, but he is not an obvious candidate for a blockbuster show at one of the world's most prestigious art museums. Part of the exhibition's job is surely to offer an argument about why he should be given a platform alongside the likes of Claude Monet and William Kentridge, both of whom also have shows at Moma at the moment, and how his work fits into and enhances a larger cultural narrative. This the exhibition does not do.

Instead, it gives us Burton, Burton and more Burton. You can see why: the man is plainly prodigious and each of the hundreds of pieces on show has its own reasons to be admired – from early Mad magazine-influenced cartoons and public-service posters created by Burton as a teenager in Burbank, California, to props and production work from his movies (Edward Scissorhands's leather-switchblade costume, The Nightmare Before Christmas's Jack Skellington figure with his two dozen spare heads). There are also nine new pieces created for the show, from a giant inflatable "Balloon Boy" in the main atrium to the monster's maw through which one enters the exhibition proper.

The bulk of the work on show consists of drawings, the vast majority offering individual vividness while remaining consistent with Burton's overall sensibility: there are monsters, aliens, fairgrounds and suburbia; creepy-sympathetic figures that are sharp-toothed, spindly-limbed, bristling with stalks and spirals but often bulbously top-heavy or buxomly dominatrixy. Stark black-and-white stripes alternate with splattered palettes of riotous, even fluorescent colour.

This consistency is striking and limiting. There's really not that much difference in sensibility and technique between Burton's latest works and the paintings of alien invasions or monstrous animations created during his adolescence. Impressive stuff for a teenager, no question, but it leaves the show feeling awfully samey. Even the novelty value of glimpses of early or uncompleted projects is qualified by a feeling that if we never saw Burton's Hansel and Gretel or Little Dead Riding Hood, we can probably imagine how they would look without much difficulty. Nor, a couple of installation pieces notwithstanding, does the show give you the feeling of being in Burton's world yourself in the way that, say, the unsettlingly immersive 2007 David Lynch exhibition at Paris's Fondation Cartier, with its disorienting red curtains and grinding industrial soundtrack, did.

All the more reason, then, for the exhibition to look beyond the contents of Burton's metaphorical garage. There are obvious connections to be made here: with other popular illustrators, such as Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman, Ronald Searle and Maurice Sendak; with ideas of childhood, sexuality and outsiderdom that could easily encompass the Grimms, Poe and Freud; and with cinematic movements such as German expressionism and classic monster movies. A Moma film season running in conjunction with the show, called The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, juxtaposes Burton's features with just these kinds of cinematic reference points (Nosferatu, The Brain That Wouldn't Die, Tex Avery cartoons, etc). But the response to the main exhibition is a bit like the response you might have to many of Burton's characters: have you thought about getting out a bit more?

It was, of course, inevitable. But it's also dangerous. What might happen when singing rodents go stereoscopic?

Because Alvin and the Chipmunks and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel left so many questions unanswered – questions like "Why won't they make it stop?" and "Oh God, why won't they make it stop?' – a third Alvin & The Chipmunks film has just been announced for next year. And this time it's going to be in 3D.

But of course it is. Thanks to the success of Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and, to a lesser extent, The Final Destination, most upcoming films will be released in 3D. The final Harry Potter films will be in 3D. The next Toy Story will be in 3D. There's talk of producing a 3D sequel to The Last Station – provisionally entitled The Laster Station: Tolstoy's Comin' Atcha! – just so that people can experience Christopher Plummer's magnificent beard as if it was right there in front of them.

So let's not kid ourselves – Alvin and the Chipmunks 3D was always going to happen. But what's it going to be like? That's harder to say. Obviously all the classic moments from the last two films will have to be given a 3D makeover – like the poo-eating skit from the first film, the confusingly erotic performance of Beyonce's Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) by the three lady-chipmunks from The Squeakquel and the increasing look of desperation on David Cross's face as he slowly sails away from his little island of credibility from both films – but what else?

Well, there should at least be a nod to the Dramatic Chipmunk YouTube video. Imagine how amazing that would be – Alvin jolting his head around in three dimensions, threatening to take out the first seven rows of the cinema with his little furry snout. Or, failing that, some sort of horrible, needlessly graphic, three-dimensional extended orgy sequence between the chipmunks and the Chipettes. The technology's there, so it'd be a shame to waste it.

One thing that the Alvin and the Chipmunks producers should be wary of, however, is the manner in which they employ the 3D technology. The sensible thing to do would be to follow the example of Up and keep the effects as subtle as possible. You wouldn't want, say, Theodore to pop right out of the screen during one of the film's endless gratingly high-pitch song and dance numbers, for instance. Not only would it scare most of the children in the audience, but the parents – who by that point would be driven into a profound state of irritation by the film's constant shrill inanity – would begin to involuntarily lash out at it. Then they'd end up punching the person in front of them in the back of the head, and the next thing you know the cinema would have a riot on its hands. Three-dimensional discretion would save the producers a lot of bother, trust me.

And then there's the title to think of. You can't simply get away with calling it Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 or Alvin and the Chipmunks 3D, because the bar has already been set heroically high with The Squeakquel. Unless producers can invent a pun which can simultaneously convey that the film is a) about some chipmunks, b) the third part of a trilogy and c) being presented in 3D, then what's the point of even making it? It's tricky, too – try it. The best I could come up with after a full hour of head-scratching was Alvin and the Chipmunks Squee: Squee-Squee (Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: 3D), but that's clearly not very good. Can anyone do better than that? Can you?

Impish, irrepressible Canadian actor whose star reached its zenith with The Lost Boys

If the Artful Dodger had smartened himself up, dyed his hair, worn snazzy jackets with the sleeves rolled up, and sought an alternative career as a Jackie or My Guy cover star, he would have resembled Corey Haim at the peak of his career.

The Canadian actor, who has died unexpectedly aged 38, did not spend more than a few years in the limelight. Yet it was his chirpy, irrepressible personality, as much as the occasional high-profile film role between the mid-1980s and early 90s, that earned him the affectionate regard of mainstream audiences. Out of a meagre selection of movies, many of which went straight to video or DVD, it was the 1987 vampire romp The Lost Boys which earned him his teenybopper fanbase. The lopsided smile, impish eyes and jauntily spiked hair made him perfect pin-up fodder. The Lost Boys paired him with Corey Feldman, another rising young actor, who would become his close friend and frequent co-star. Viewers responded positively to the rapport between these young clowns who relished visibly the privileges of their fame.

Haim was born in Toronto to Bernie, a salesman, and Judy, who worked in computing. His parents separated when Haim was 11. By this time, he had already expressed an interest in acting after attending auditions with his older sister, Cari. He landed a regular part on the Canadian television series The Edison Twins, then travelled to Los Angeles to appear in his 1984 debut film, First Born. This drama starred Teri Garr as a divorced mother-of-two whose disreputable new boyfriend is rumbled by her offspring, including Haim as the younger lad. Haim was also cast as Sally Field's son in the romantic comedy Murphy's Romance (1985).

He started to attract positive notices, including one from Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, who singled him out in a review of Lucas (1986), the actor's first lead role. "Haim ... does not give one of those cute little boy performances that get on your nerves," wrote Ebert. "He creates one of the most three-dimensional, complicated, interesting characters of any age in any recent movie. If he can continue to act this well, he will never become a half-forgotten child star, but will continue to grow into an important actor. He is that good."

Joel Schumacher hired Haim to play the younger brother to a brooding vampire in The Lost Boys, in which the stylistic cues came from MTV rather than Hammer Horror. Many of the cast members (Jason Patric, Kiefer Sutherland) went on to greater success, but for Haim this was as good as it got. The goofiness that made him so appealing here – his bathtub rendition of Ain't Got No Home was a dotty highlight – would come to define him, and to inhibit any progress as an actor. In 2007, Feldman reflected explicitly on his friend's apparent unwillingness to stray far from his own persona: "I would love to see Corey find the greatest stretch, the hardest character, the most removed element from him ... I would just love to see anything that didn't represent him as Corey Haim, because I've seen enough of that."

Haim got by for a few years after The Lost Boys in a succession of undistinguished comedies, reuniting with Feldman in License to Drive (1988) and Dream a Little Dream (1989). He branched out into futuristic roller-blade science fiction in Prayer of the Rollerboys (1991). But his star was in decline, and an addiction to drugs led to spells in rehab, as well as bankruptcy and a dramatic weight gain that saw the diminutive performer hit nearly 300lb. His mother persuaded him to move away from the temptations of Hollywood and back with her to Toronto. In 2004, he was recalled in a popular single by the Thrills, Whatever Happened to Corey Haim? Despite its title, the song had little to do with Haim, though it did at least pose the question. (The actor's response was: "I'm clean, sober, humble and happy.")

The moderate revival of interest which the song provoked may in some small way have helped to get Haim and Feldman's reality TV show, The Two Coreys, off the ground. That series, which began in 2007, revolved around Haim moving in with Feldman and his wife. Despite the whiff of an extended publicity stunt, the show supplied the occasional instance of car-crash television, such as Haim coming to blows with Feldman after insulting his wife, or breaking down in tears upon discovering that his services were not required for a Lost Boys sequel.

At the time of his death, Haim had three films ready for release, including the thriller American Sunset, as he sought to recapture his 1980s success. "I want to be the guy they talk about when they talk about comebacks," he said three years ago. "I want people to learn from me, see I'm human, and understand that I make mistakes just like they do, but it doesn't have to consume you. You've got to walk through the raindrops, and that's totally what I am trying to do."

He is survived by his parents and sister.

• Corey Haim, actor, born 23 December 1971; died 10 March 2010

Sure, The Hurt Locker wasn't a box-office hit and Precious positioned itself as outside white-bread commercialism, but all the big Oscar winners were irredeemably Hollywood

The Academy may still be congratulating themselves on picking for their best picture award arguably the least commercially successful winner of all time (over the most successful). But if we step back a bit, we can see that this year was one of the safest ever. All the top awards went to American films, even if, as far as Precious was concerned, they tried to position themselves outside white-bread mainstream. But The Hurt Locker, Avatar, The Blind Side, Precious, Crazy Heart, Up and Inglourious Basterds represent traditional, conventional American cinema in all its various guises. Outsiders often get a look-in in the acting categories– not always Brits; sometimes there's someone from France or Spain too – but there was no Kate Winslet or Tilda Swinton, let alone a Marion Cotillard. Obviously, it helps if the foreigner in question is propping up an American film; the only chink of an outward glance came with Inglourious Basterds's Christoph Waltz, an Austrian playing the kind of role once reserved for ice-eyed Englishmen. That's progress, of a kind.

This may be a little ungenerous; the Academy could easily be a forum for rewarding commercial success, and it does its best to step away from it. The Hurt Locker has taken nearly $15m (£10m) at the US box office (with an opening weekend of $145,000); far less than the last recent best picture "weakie", Crash, which had taken $53m when it won in 2006. But just because hasn't been a monster box office hit doesn't mean The Hurt Locker is not thoroughly Hollywood: it was made by the same people who made Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Likewise, Precious may have all the attitude of an out-of-the-ghetto scrapper, but it was paid for by your classic film-production dilettante types: fashion entrepreneur Sarah Siegel-Magness and her husband, cable TV heir Gary Magness. And no one is going to question the Hollywood credentials of the other big films.

Does this mean that we are seeing American cinema going through one of its introspective phases? The Oscars have never been much of a guide to the state of Hollywood: they're customarily a parade of well-meaning wish-fulfilments. Is Jeff Bridges the best male actor in America right now? No; he should have won for The Big Lebowski, but outside Coen cultists, that film's virtues didn't emerge for a while. Is The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow's best film? No; it's just her best one since Point Break, way back in 1991. Can Sandra Bullock really hold a candle to any of her fellow nominees? Not by a long shot, but she's made a lot of money for a lot of people in the last decade. But with the world-destroying success of Avatar, and the excitement-momentum generated by 3D, Hollywood is briefly feeling like it's on the front foot.

But it is a shame when the Oscars gets over-American. One of Hollywood's great virtues is, like America, its ability to absorb outside influences and reconfigure them – not always successfully, it has to be said. But the hope is always there. (Anyone remember that great picture of Coppola and Kurosawa sitting in a garden together, looking at pictures?) But the film industry moves so quickly that this year's winners will soon be footnotes, and we can get behind next year's big British/Japanese/German hope.

The documentary-makers exposed an alleged whale-meat smuggling operation at the US sushi restaurant The Hump

The run-up to the Oscars are a heady time for nominees: a whirlwind of screenings, cocktails, celebrity encounters and, for the makers of this year's prize winning eco-documentary, secret meetings in the parking lot of a sushi restaurant with federal investigators.

In an action worthy of the eco-commandos of Greenpeace, the makers of The Cove, an Oscar-winning documentary on Japan's dolphin slaughter, helped break up an alleged whale meat smuggling operation at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant catering to "adventurous" eaters.

On offer at The Hump, aside from yellowtail tuna, live octopus and shrimp, and baby abalone, was what was said to be whale meat, despite a ban on the sale and possession of whales.

That went too far for Louie Psihoyos, the director of The Cove, who co-ordinated the sushi sting from the parking lot.

"These are endangered animals. They are protected species. It is one thing for the Japanese to be doing it in their own country, but I take it as a major affront that they are doing this on our shores," he told the Guardian. "When they are cut up in little hunks of sushi it's a tragedy."

A spokesman for the US attorney's office told the New York Times that the restaurant could be formally charged as early as this week. Anyone convicted could face prison or a fine of up to $20,000 (£13,340).

In the week before the Oscars, the crew from The Cove made two visits with police to the restaurant. Two women activists went inside and ordered while Psihoyos maintained audio surveillance outside.

Secretly filmed video from an earlier supper last October showed the two women ordering off the chef's special omakase menu, with a waitress bringing thick pink slices of what she said was whale meat.

The pair ate two slices of the meat, putting six others in a plastic bag so it could be sent for DNA testing. The samples were sent to an expert who established the slices were from a sei whale. The species is endangered but is still hunted in Japan under a controversial programme that allows the killing of up to 1,000 whales a year in the name of science.

The bust offered yet more positive buzz for The Cove after it took the Oscar for best documentary. The Cove is Psihoyos's first feature-length film though he says he has been doing undercover work for 20 years. It relied on remote-controlled cameras mounted in helicopters, helium balloons, and even fake rocks as well as night vision equipment to record the annual dolphin hunt in a small coastal village on Honshu island in Japan.

Fishermen, banging on the hulls of their boats to confuse the dolphins' sense of direction, head out to sea to trap the migrating shoals. They herd the dolphins back to shore, packing them into a small inlet as closely as sardines, and then stab them to death with long harpoons and clubs.

In the course of each fishing season, the fishermen kill 2,000 dolphins, selling the meat to local supermarkets for about $500 a dolphin. They can earn far more by taking somem dolphins alive and selling them to aquariums.

The film-makers have seen a surge of support for stopping the hunt since Oscar night when Psihoyos' collaborator, the former dolphin trainer and underwater stuntman Ric O'Barry, held a sign asking viewers to text in their support. The appeal led the Oscar Academy to cut off Psihoyo's acceptance speech for "activism".

Psihoyos is already at work on his next film about the widespread extinctions that will come about because of the changing chemistry of the oceans brought by global warming. The Cove is due to be released in Japan, where the government has responded coolly to the film's success. "There are different food traditions within Japan and around the world," an official statement said. "It is important to respect and understand regional food cultures, which are based on traditions with long histories."

Film attempts to recreate the terror of the 1942 Rafle du Vel d'Hiv, in which 13,000 Jews were rounded up in Paris

When, in 1995, Joseph Weismann reflected on the chances of a film being made about the horrors he witnessed in the thick heat of a Parisian summer more than 50 years earlier, his answer was uttered through tears: "I don't think that anyone would ever dare."

Tomorrow, 15 years after his words were broadcast on television, and almost 70 years on from arguably the most terrible and taboo episode in modern French history, Weismann will be proved wrong. For the first time since 19 July 1942, when about 13,000 French Jews were rounded up by members of their own country's police force and locked inside a velodrome in western Paris, before being taken to concentration camps, a film director has attempted to recreate the terror of the Rafle du Vel d'Hiv.

A harrowing drama following the events of the Nazi-decreed raid through the eyes of a group of young children, La Rafle has been hailed as an important step in France's acknowledgment of its complicity in the crimes of the Occupation.

Its central character is Joseph Weismann, now 80, and one of the 4,051 children taken during the raids. Unlike almost all his compatriots, however, the 11-year-old managed to escape.

The director, Rose Bosch, whose husband's family were Jews in the same Parisian neighbourhood as Weismann, said she felt the film had to be made to shed light on one of the most sensitive chapters in wartime France. "Because it was so taboo and the story was so untold, I decided to do it," she said.

For Bosch, whose cast includes Mélanie Laurent, star of Inglourious Basterds, as a young Protestant nurse, appalled by what she witnesses in the velodrome, and later in a French-run transit camp, the shame lies not just in the scale of the killing and collaboration, but also from France's subsequent failure to confront it.

"[It is] the biggest stain in contemporary history and they have all been trying to scrub it out, all of them," she said, describing a photograph of a French transit camp, which Charles de Gaulle's government doctored to remove the clearly Gallic presence of a gendarme. "That's what [the round-up] represents: a big lie, something that was hidden, that people didn't known what to do about, like a hot potato in their hands."

After years of attempts by successive presidents of the republic to deny any French complicity in activities carried out during a period of foreign occupation, Jacques Chirac broke the silence in 1995, acknowledging the state's role in delivering "those it was protecting to their executioners" during the Rafle.

Writing in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper this week, Chirac said he had seen La Rafle, and that its powerful recreation of the round-up was a reminder that one of the chief principles of society had to be "the courage to declare ... that force should never prevail over law". While not the first film to touch on the round-up, La Rafle is the first to tackle it head-on.

It is not wholly damning of the French, with its focus alternating between eager collaborationists in the Paris police force and horrified members of the public and the authorities that attempted to resist orders.

Historians point out that while the scale was huge, it was barely half of the numbers requested by the Nazis, who wanted 25,000 Jews deported.

Weismann, who was urged by Simone Veil, the leading politician and Auschwitz survivor, to speak of his sufferings after years of silence, is now convinced of the need to pass on the experiences to future generations. "When I speak about it, it suffocates me, chokes me," he said. "It's important to tell this story to the youth of today. It is they who will write the story of tomorrow."

Kathryn Bigelow and co gave him a loving shout-out on Sunday evening as they picked up the Academy Award for best picture; Chartier delivered his own acceptance speech from Malibu yesterday. But who is the man Oscar stopped at the door?

Nicolas Chartier, the Academy Award-winning producer of The Hurt Locker, was a 20-year-old janitor at Disneyland in Paris when he sold his first screenplay to a US film producer. It didn't get made, but it paid enough to buy a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. He scraped a living writing soft-core porn for cable TV, then become a foreign sales agent.

Fast-forward 16 years. On Sunday night, Chartier should have completed his unlikely ascent into the Hollywood aristocracy by climbing onstage to accept his Oscar alongside Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal and Greg Shapiro.

Except the Frenchman wasn't allowed in the building. Instead he was watching on TV at party in Malibu, barred from the ceremony for a minor infraction of campaign rules. His crime was to send a mass email asking Academy members to vote for Hurt Locker rather than "a $500 million movie".

Bigger names have got away with much worse over the years. But in Hollywood's heavily stratified class system, Chartier comes from the wrong side of the tracks. He's a graduate from the grubby school of foreign sales, the lifeblood of independent film which most Hollywood heavyweights regard with barely concealed distaste.

He had to battle to get his name on the nomination in the first place, after the Academy initially ruled him ineligible. When the email scandal broke, Bigelow and Boal, with whom he clashed during the shoot, didn't exactly rush to his defence.

Chartier learned his trade from the schlock merchants who crowd the corridors of film markets, selling straight-to-video movies directed by nobody you've ever heard of and starring someone who briefly used to be someone 20 years ago. His first mentor was Emmanuelle producer Alain Siritzky.

Chartier's company Voltage Pictures deals in TV movies starring the likes of Steven Seagal, Wesley Snipes and Val Kilmer. He mortgaged his house to finance The Hurt Locker, which was his first proper theatrical film. It certainly didn't seem like a surefire winner – a $15 million Iraq war drama with no stars and a director whose previous career highlight was Point Break in 1991. Chartier's foreign buyers were dubious.

"You make TV movies with Seagal, Snipes and Kilmer, and that enables you to take risks on something like Hurt Locker," Chartier explains. "I definitely want to stay connected with the meat and potatoes business because those are movies that the buyers make money on, so when I bring them something like Hurt Locker that they are not so sure about, they will take the risk with me."

Chartier is now making Robert Redford's The Company You Keep and The Whistleblower, a political thriller starring Rachel Weisz by Canadian first-timer Larysa Kondraki.

"I want to finance and produce movies that the studios were doing in the 70s and 80s, but aren''t making any more," he says. "Films like Salvador, Midnight Express, Three Days of the Condor. The studios are making stupid sequels and movies for kids, so there are a lot of great filmmakers and actors that aren't working for them."

There's a reason for that. Hurt Locker may have won six Oscars, but it has grossed only $23 million worldwide. It's the least seen best picture winner in Oscar history. Yet what's remarkable is that its victory over Avatar, a film that grossed 100 times more, wasn't an upset. Hurt Locker swept all the key forerunner awards. In fact, Chartier's stumble in the final lap provided some much needed drama in what had become an otherwise dull and predictable race.

In years to come, Hurt Locker will be a textbook study in the mysterious dynamics of Oscar momentum. When it premiered at the Venice Film Festival way back in 2008, it was overshadowed by The Wrestler, which plunged straight into that year's Oscar race while Hurt Locker had to wait until the following summer to get released.

Variety's reliable critic Derek Elley summed up the general reaction when he wrote at the time, "War may be hell, but watching war movies can also be hell, especially when they don't get to the point." "Modest biz looks likeliest," Elley predicted correctly.

But somehow Hurt Locker became the flag around which the anti-Avatar resistance could rally. The fact that it was directed by James Cameron's ex-wife didn't hurt. Chartier may have breached Oscar etiquette by asking to people to vote for Hurt Locker in order to stop Avatar, but he was only saying in public what many were thinking in private.

Hadley Freeman sees the stars strike a serene pose on Academy Awards red carpet – while the reporters lose the plot

"I'm loving the colour! I'm loving life! Let's talk beauty!" Those of an innocent nature might assume this to be the final line of a pre-Raphaelite poem, or the chorus of a 1960s folk song. Those of a more seasoned bent will identify this as your average exhortation from a TV presenter on the Oscars red carpet.

What had just happened? I think someone had spotted that Maggie Gyllenhaal was wearing a blue dress. Hey, I'm loving life! It was a funny old Oscars night. If the nominees seemed like an awkward balance between the small (The Hurt Locker, An Education, A Single Man) and the bloated (Avatar, Avatar, Avatar), then the red carpet was an enjoyable imbalance between the hysterical presenters and the decidedly blase celebrities.

"Were you FREAKING OUT all day?" the hyperbolic AP presenter asked Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner, looking as if she might need cardiac assistance soon. "Nah, I just had a sandwich," he shrugged. The AP woman tried again with Up in the Air's Vera Farmiga. "I'm zen," replied the fabulously cool Farmiga. Lenny Kravitz had spent the day eating takeaway chicken.

Poor AP woman. Where's Mariah Carey when you need her, right? The most telling disjunct was apparent long before the presenters had re-whitened their teeth and mic'd up. There were so many suggestions of behind the scenes scandals (Kathryn Bigelow versus her ex-husband James Cameron for best director being the big one, a fight that upset the media much more than it seemed to Bigelow and Cameron) that it didn't take an Avatar-sized imagination to wonder if all this media hoo-hah wasn't just a distraction from the ho-humness of the nominees.

But let's not be cynical and instead focus on the question of the night: would Mo'Nique shave her legs for the event? "Of course not," shrieked Mo'Nique, best supporting actress nominee and, more importantly in TabloidLand, razor phobe. "I haven't even shaved my arms!"

Inside the Kodak Theater it was down to Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to get the party started, a pairing that began uncomfortably. And in the early minutes, stilted seemed to be a running theme. This being a British paper, one is obliged to focus on the British nominees. All countries do this to their own, of course. This weekend the Toronto Sun bemoaned the unlikelihood of any of the Canadian nominees wearing something that reflected their nationality to the ceremony. "Not that they should wear fitted Mountie or hockey uniforms," the paper conceded. Just "a small strategic maple leaf pin." Ah, Canada. Good to see that the Olympics haven't dented your inferiority complex a jot. And speaking of the Canadians, Cameron may have made himself a candidate for the stupidest comment of the night when he compared his nominations to his children. But which of your children is the best director nomination, James, and which is the best visual effects?

Anyway, to the obligatory Brits who were adorably normal. Carey Mulligan said her Prada dress let her get away without wearing Spanx; Helen Mirren, as beautiful as a Gainsborough portrait, compared the Oscars with Disney World's Magic Mountain (Magic Mountain is scarier.)

It's easy to bemoan the stupidity of the celebrity world but, actually, it's not the celebrities that have become dumber, it's the celebrity presenters. And for that, I blame the E! channel, the entertainment network that is presumably named after the product one needs to take in order to watch this channel without weeping for the future.

After you've watched presenter Ryan Seacrest talk to Mariah Carey about her diamonds, and then turn to High School Musical's Zac Efron to find out where his suit was from, you'll have a newfound empathy for the recently lobotomised.

As for the presenter on the AP network who said best actress nominee Gabourey Sidibe would "have to have her dress specially made" and how "hard it is for people like her", he will come back in his next life as a dung beetle. And for the record, Sidibe looked completely gorgeous in her blue dress. I'm loving the colour – let's talk beauty.

Brazilian bad karma derailed James Cameron, Londoners weren't thinking big, and Roger Ebert gave a Twitter masterclass - social media held the key to navigating this year's Oscars

Film buffs from across the world gathered around their television sets last night to drink/practise yoga (depending on the time zone) and watch this year's Oscars ceremony. Along the way they blogged, tweeted and – even – reported on the event, and in the process revealed that Brazil doesn't like James Cameron much.

That the South Americans are antipathetic to the Avatar man is certainly the impression you'd get from looking at the trending topics on Twitter this morning. The social networking site was churning through thousands of posts a minute during the height of the Oscars ceremony, and many of those that originated from Brazil were followed by the tag #chupajamescameron. A piece of local slang, chupa means "suck it!", suggesting either that either Brazilians were glad the Avatar director lost to his ex-wife's The Hurt Locker, or he's being offered a giant caipirinha complete with straw.

In other locations, topics trended differently. Londoners, being a bunch of poncey so-and-sos, were talking about Logorama, the winner in the animated short category. Also trending there were Christoph Waltz, the Austrian who won best supporting actor for his role in Inglourious Basterds, and Molly Ringwald, who delivered a tribute to the departed John Hughes and looked a lot older than people remembered her being in 1985.

Meanwhile in the States, the coasts were posting about Kathryn Bigelow (the Hurt Locker director's name trending well in LA and New York), whereas the chart for the US as a whole had another woman entirely, Catherine Bigalow, as the name of the moment.

When everyone and their dog is tweeting about the Oscars, there are some voices that are worth listening to a little more attentively than others. Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) is a case in point: the Chicago Sun-Times film critic is a dab hand at the 140-character format and was tweeting with aplomb throughout the night.

Examples included:

"WTF? Cinematography for "Avatar" and all that CGI and green screen? Not for Basterds or White Ribbon?"

And, when Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodóvar appeared to introduce the best foreign film category:

"Almodóvar intros a category in which his Broken Embraces absolutely should have been nominated."

And, finally, after Jeff Bridges collected his best actor gong:

"The Dude Aboded."

Away from social networking, and most of the big online film sites were running live blogs of the event. Some offered nothing much more than endless sniping about dresses; others, like the one at Entertainment Weekly, were hosted by staffers as keen to share details of their private lives than talk about the nominations (Missy: "From the French husband: 'This is a cool format.'" Missy: "Il s'appelle Julien"; Missy: "We watched The Big Lebowski together on the night we were married").

Nikki Finke delivered a "Live Snark" on her Deadline Hollywood Daily pages that definitely lived up to the title. This, for example, was her take on The Hurt Locker best picture win: "So David slew Goliath. Or, to put it another way, Academy voters rewarded a tiny film that made no money just because almost everyone in Hollywood really dislikes James Cameron. This shows how out of touch the Oscars are with moviegoers around the world, who loved Avatar. And people wonder why I have nothing but contempt for the Academy?"

Finke's was an opinion almost entirely contrary to that of AO Scott, who was liveblogging at the New York Times. "No great surprises in the end," Scott wrote, "but a reminder that 2009 was a pretty good year for movies ... sometimes even in Hollywood money and hype and spin are not entirely decisive. The Hurt Locker is an honest, tough, well-made movie. The Academy got it right: not something I'm used to saying."

Finally, if you were after something other than the printed word, there were other ways of consuming Oscar commentary. The Movie blog, for example, chose to do its Oscars coverage via Ustream; a live unedited video feed. This was all marvellous and modern, in principle, at least. In practice, it was more than four hours of watching a man peer at his laptop reading other people's comments.

The Hurt Locker was the big winner at this year's Oscars, emerging with six, including Kathryn Bigelow's history-making award for best director as well as best picture. Here's how Xan Brooks liveblogged the night

11.45pm: The 82nd annual Academy Awards begin with a carpet. This carpet is richly red and freshly laundered. It is guarded by security goons and bathed in spotlights.

Up the carpet come the early arrivals: the nominated and the not nominated and the milling dignitaries who don't seem quite sure where they are going. Some simple compass points: the street is behind them and the Kodak theatre is up ahead. After that you're on your own.

Few of these arrivals are as early as Mariah Carey, who breezily explains that she is on "Mariah Time". This presumably means that she can come and go as she pleases, and may well decide to take a nap in the middle of the ceremony if the mood takes her.

As for us, we are (as the time-stamp suggests) working on Greenwich Mean Time. This is on account of us sitting in a deserted office in nocturnal London as opposed to, say, living it up in sun-drenched LA. One day, God willing, we shall all be living on Mariah Time too. But sadly not this year.

0.05am: It transpires that the route up the carpet is fraught with danger. In order to access their seats inside the Kodak theatre, the millionaire guests must first run the gauntlet of the neon-bright presenters from Sky and E!. These presenters lie in wait and then ambush them, knee-capping the talent with brazen flattery and well-oiled platitudes. It's like a celebrity version of British Bulldog.

Out in the sunshine, the likes of James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino and Carey Mulligan are subjected to a potent charm offensive. When the Roman emperors made their triumphant entrance, they were escorted by a slave whose job it was to whisper "Remember, you are mortal" into their ears. This, supposedly, ensured that they kept their feet on the ground.

The guests at the 82nd Academy Awards, by contrast, are greeted by presenters such as Angela Griffin, who tells Mulligan that she is "very lovely", Nick Park that he is "amazing" and Cameron that his wife is "a goddess". In this way they are wafted into the Kodak theatre with their egos swollen to the size of Texas, perfectly primed for prime-time humiliation.

"It's your night tonight," Griffin confesses to Sandra Bullock, who is up for the best actress award. "It's everybody's night," shoots back canny Bullock, unwilling to be lured.

"Ha ha ha!" says Griffin. "Ha ha ha!"

0.20am: You want celebrities on this red carpet? By God, you shall have them. Here we see Penélope Cruz and Sarah Jessica Parker, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. Griffin duly buttonholes Parker (who kindly explains that she is wearing a dress by Chanel), while Christopher Plummer (Oscar-nominated for The Last Station) stands obediently to one side. One day, perhaps, some smart producer will cast these two in some kind of rom-com. They look so good together.

A moment later, Griffin moves on to talk to Precious director Lee Daniels, who has shown up with his daughter. I was half hoping that Griffin would tell Daniels to remember that he is mortal. Instead, she tells him that he is the best father in the whole wide world. Daniels beams happily at that.

"Ha ha ha!" says Griffin, who then goes on to explain that she "keeps screaming". Surely this is cause for concern. My fear is that she may well be suffering a nervous breakdown, right there beneath the floodlights.

0.40am: Alarming news. Fresh from confiding that she "keeps on screaming", the excitable Ms Griffin has just announced that she "can't hear myself think, what with all the screaming going on". What does she mean by this? That the demons in her own head have now grown so loud and insistent that they are drowning out everything else? Or that her own nervous collapse is somehow contagious and has infected all those around her? The second option, I think, is probably the more terrifying. It suggests that this whole impeccably mounted event may be on the brink of pitching into outright chaos.

Soldiering gamely on, Griffin accosts George Clooney who is thankfully not screaming yet. Clooney is nominated for best actor for Up in the Air, but promptly confesses that "Jeff Bridges is going to win".

Seconds later and here's the man himself. Bridges has been nominated four times before but is this year's heavy favourite to take the award for his turn as a broken-down country singer in Crazy Heart. "I'm not counting any chickens," he says, like the polished old pro that he is.

0.55am: The ceremony has yet to begin and we already have a bona fide British success story. This story goes by the name of Hamish Hamilton, who looks like Chris Evans's wholesome younger brother and is apparently "the director of this year's Oscars". He explains what an honour it is to be here. "Ha ha ha," says Griffin.

Thanks for your comments so far, even the ones that seem to be accusing me of living on Mariah Time and not posting regularly enough. Mercurey suggests that George Clooney is wearing a wig. In the immortal, eloquent words of Angela Griffin: "Ha ha ha!"

Right, it seems that the carpet is emptying out, which means that the Kodak theatre must be filling up. Are we to take this to mean that the 82nd Academy Awards are about to start?

1.05am: More alarming news: it seems I spoke too soon. The 82nd Academy Awards are not beginning just yet, perhaps because the guests are still assembling behind closed doors, fighting over their seats and firing air kisses across the aisle.

Just time for a swift preamble. This year's best picture shortlist runs to 10 films for the first time since 1943 (when Casablanca took the prize). Even so, the event comes billed as a straight contest between David and Goliath, aka Avatar and The Hurt Locker, which lead the field with nine nominations apiece. Lagging just a nose behind is Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds with eight nominations. Tarantino's reinvented second world war history lesson would dearly love to play the role of spoiler and looks set for at least one major award, with German actor Christoph Waltz the firm favourite to win best supporting actor.

Our hosts for the event are Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, who were last seen together in It's Complicated, a teeth-grinding, reputed comedy by Nancy Meyers. The only way is up for Steve and Alec.

1.20am: "It's time for a break," says Claudia Winkleman, reclining on a Barbarella space-pod chair inside the Sky television studio. But a break from what, exactly? A break from the break, I suppose. Time to make like Mariah and grab a quick 40 winks.

Interesting thoughts, in the meantime, from DanAshcroft on why The Hurt Locker will win and Avatar won't. Elsewhere AnthonyFarrantHeel speculates that Morgan Freeman is drunk. I truly hope this is so, if only to liven up the ceremony. What kind of drunk do you think Freeman would be? A violent marauder, or the maudlin, tactile type who keeps asking everyone to go on holiday with him?

For the record, Angela Griffin is back to tell us her "absolute highlight" of the night so far. Her highlight, it transpires, was Sarah Jessica Parker, because she is "so in love with her".

Griffin refrains from telling us what her lowlight was, though I think we all know what it was. The screaming, of course. The constant, horrible screaming. There was a moment back there when she very nearly lost it.

1.35am: At long last, "it's the Oscars". And it begins, bizarrely enough, with a musical preamble, in which the nominees for best actor and best actress stand motionless on the stage, grinning sheepishly into the cameras like contestants on some debased Blind Date spin-off.

After what feels like an eternity, various men and women run up on stage to claim them. At first I think that these are the "dates" and that they will all be back next week to tell us how it's gone. "Meryl was a lovely girl but, I don't know, there wasn't really any spark. I'd like to see her again, but only as a friend." But no – it turns out that these are just "helpers", on hand to escort the stars back to their allocated seats.

As soon as that's over, Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser) steps up to sing a song. All at once, the Blind Date spin-off doesn't look so bad after all.

1.45am: It's official. Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are a hell of a lot funnier here than they were in It's Complicated. Their routine pokes amiable, irreverent fun at the nominated films and star contenders. They drip faint praise on the likes of The Last Station and Invictus. Baldwin points out that Martin is a huge fan of Invictus because "it combines his two biggest passions – rugby and tensions between blacks and whites".

Then they move on to the nominees.

Martin: "There's that damn Helen Mirren."
Baldwin: "Steve, that's Dame Helen Mirren."

From here, they turn to Meryl Streep. When people talk of Meryl Streep, says Martin, they all say the exact same thing: "Can that woman act! And what's the deal with all that Hitler memorabilia?"

1.50am: So here we have it, the first award of the night. It's the best supporting actor award – unofficially known this year as the No Shit, Sherlock award.

It goes, as pretty much everyone said it would, to Christoph Waltz for his flamboyant, lip-smacking turn as the "Jew hunter" Nazi colonel in Inglourious Basterds.

A fortnight ago at the Baftas, Waltz gave a lengthy and eloquent speech about how he was a "supported actor" as opposed to a supporting one. Here, he appears pinched by the 45-second curfew and rattles through a hasty thanks. Then off he goes, clutching the final award of his glittering awards season; his crowning moment over almost before it begun.

2.05am: Time now for the Oscar for best animated feature, another of those awards that seemed to have been decided sometime last November. Suffice to say it does not go to The Secret of Kells.

Instead it goes to Up, Pixar's buoyant, beautifully made yarn about a curmudgeonly old widower who floats off in search of adventure. Director Pete Docter steps up to collect this one and duly pays tribute to his wife and kids who are, he says, "his best adventure". Is this a diplomatic way of saying that the kids are a bit of a handful? Ah well, that's Hollywood offspring for you.

2.10am: The red carpet is a distant memory, shrieking Angela Griffin has been left with her demons and the Oscars are coming thick and fast right now. The gong for best original song goes to The Weary Kind from Crazy Heart.

It is collected by writers T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham, who gives thanks to his wife and says: "I love you more than rainbows, baby." This strikes me as a little harsh on the rainbows and makes me wonder just how many rainbows he has actually witnessed, because some of them are truly, deeply wonderful and all that. The colours, man. The colours. Still, we'll let it go for now.

Incidentally, isn't "Ryan Bingham" the name of the character that George Clooney plays in Up in the Air? All of a sudden these Oscars are starting to blur; the line between fiction and reality warping and breaking down. Next I'll be wondering if T-Bone Burnett was actually the name of the seductive, lingerie-wearing muse that Penélope Cruz played in Nine. Already I'm starting to believe that it was. The best bit of that entire film was the scene in which T-Bone Burnett writhed on that four-poster bed and stuck his bum in the air.

2.20am: Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr swing their way through a sharp, funny routine before handing the best original screenplay Oscar to Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker. It's the first award of the night for Kathryn Bigelow's superbly tense and bruising Iraq war drama. But we're betting it won't be the last.

At the podium, Boal dedicates the prize to the troops still stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan and to his father, who passed away a month ago. His voice quavers a bit at this point, but the 45-second rule comes to his aid and he is whisked safely off the stage. Who knows: this may well be the first entirely tear-free Academy Awards – and all on account of that pesky time constraint.

2.35am: "Right now, we would like to introduce two beautiful actresses," says Steve Martin. "Because frankly, we are sick of bringing out all these ugly actresses."

These particular actresses, for the record, are Carey Mulligan out of An Education and Zoe Saldana, who looks much shorter than she did in Avatar, and is also less blue, and doesn't appear to have a tail either, although it's obviously hard to tell under that dress she is wearing. They are here to announce the winner of the award for best animated short. The winner is Logorama, by the Frenchman Nicholas Schmerkin. He explains that a lot of work went into making Logorama and adds that he hopes to return with a full-length animated feature in about 36 years.

2.40am: The Oscars are coming at a mile a minute. Music for Prudence scoops best documentary short and its makers joust briefly at the microphone before the music swells up and drowns them out.

Seconds later, The New Tenants takes the Oscar for best "live action" short. Again, two makers step up to accept the prize but this time there is no jousting. One man hogs the mic and makes his speech. Finally, the other chap gets his chance and hoves up to the podium just as the music starts playing. His mouth is moving but his sound has been cut. He had a message for the world, but the world will now never know what it was. Was it something important? He looked as though it might have been important.

Hey ho, too late now. He's bundled off the stage and we're on to the award for best makeup. Ben Stiller is here and he is dressed as a Na'vi! The makeup Oscar goes to Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow for Star Trek! They have something to say! It is not particularly important!

2.55am: "Who's that?" demands my esteemed colleague Jason Solomons of the lissome presenter of this year's best adapted screenplay award. We think that it is Rachel McAdams, and she is indeed looking glorious. Coincidentally, this is the exact same question that Rachel McAdams asks whenever she sees Jason reviewing the movies on telly. "Who's that?" she demands, sitting bolt upright in her jacuzzi. "Who's that?" Exact same question.

The Oscar goes to Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious. This is a surprise for most of the onlookers. It also seems to be a surprise for Fletcher himself, who chokes up charmingly at the podium. "I'm drying up right now," he croaks. He can barely get the words out and the 45-second limit yawns like an eternity before him.

"I wrote that script for him," boasts Steve Martin afterwards.

3.05am: Time now for the best supporting actress Oscar. It goes (as it did at the Globes and then again at the Baftas) to Mo'Nique for her tour-de-force in Precious.

Glad to see that Mo'Nique has decided to show up tonight. At the Baftas she sent director Lee Daniels to collect the award on her behalf. This, surely, is just one step up from requesting that they simply Fed-Ex the thing to her agent.

On stage, Mo'Nique gives thanks to Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American performer to ever win an Academy Award (for Gone With the Wind, back in 1939). Didn't George Clooney also reference McDaniel at this event a few years back? Maybe there should be a posthumous award for the most cited former Oscar winner. McDaniel, on recent evidence, would walk it.

3.10am: Two whole hours into the Oscar telecast and here it is: the first award for Avatar. It's for art direction and is read out by Sigourney Weaver, which might lead some to smell a rat. Wasn't Weaver, like, in Avatar? Now here she is assuring us that, yes, it did really win this Oscar. That's like asking David Cameron to call the upcoming election, live on the BBC.

My advice to the rival nominees: make sure you check the envelope. We could have the first big scandal of this year's event, playing out right under Weaver's nose.

Moving swiftly on, British designer Sandy Powell picks up the costume award for her work on The Young Victoria. Some winners are overcome by emotion and others, it seems, could barely give a stuff.

"I've already got two of these," says Powell with a shrug. She's like an unimpressed kid who's just unwrapped her third flower-press on Christmas morning. Yes, she's prepared to thank Auntie Margaret, but her heart's not really in it.

3.25am: Now up come Twilight stars Taylor Lautner and and Kristen Stewart to introduce a montage of American horror movies (of which Twilight is apparently one). Surely this is the first time that Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have appeared on an Oscar telecast – and it's about time too.

Some colleagues in the office seem purely flummoxed by it. "Why is this going on?" asks Paul MacInnes, who is sitting opposite. I'm guessing he means the horror montage as opposed to, you know, the whole shebang. The endless parade of Oscars. The endless telecast. The endless entrances and exits.

Why is it going on? Is there any point to any of it?

Oh, hang on: just remembered. Woo-hoo! It's all about the epic battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker. And right here, right now, The Hurt Locker appears to be edging ahead. Bigelow's film has just picked up its second award of the night – for sound editing.

And then, seconds later, it's three gongs for The Hurt Locker as it wins in the sister category of sound mixing. And look, here's Ray Beckett back again to collect this one too. "This is a bit embarrassing," he admits. At this rate, he'll be back up to claim this year's best actress Oscar too.

3.40am: Hisses of dissatisfaction in the Guardian office as Mauro Fiore scoops the cinematography Oscar for his work on Avatar. The general hope was that Barry Ackroyd would get this for The Hurt Locker (and, by implication, all the other great films he's shot). Sadly it was not to be.

Next up it's Demi Moore. "Now it is the time when we celebrate life," she says. I figured that's what we'd been doing all night, but that just shows how much I know. Instead, it's time for the annual Oscar obituary montage, which this year comes serenaded by James Taylor. The recently deceased flick past in a blur. Behind Taylor's vocals, it is just possible to pick out the applause for certain favoured souls; for Budd Schulberg and Karl Malden, for Brittany Murphy and Natasha Richardson. Others, meanwhile, take their final bow to a stony silence, which seems a little harsh. Thank heavens they're not around to witness it.

So far as I can work out, the biggest burst of applause goes to Michael Jackson. Back in the studio, the Sky pundits appear quite enamoured of the obituary montage. "It's a great career move," says one. "You will shift units."

3.50am: Dance routines. What would Oscar night be without a big, razzle-dazzle dance routine? Probably 10 minutes shorter and immeasurably more satisfying. But never mind, here comes this year's edition. Let's accentuate the positive. Some of the numbers are quite acrobatic. We see a girl in a spinning skirt and a man jumping about in a grandad cardigan. In the tribute to Pixar's Up, the pace slows down and the performers stand about and twitch their heads, like androids trying to pass themselves off as village idiots. The dance wraps up with a standing ovation. At least I think it's a standing ovation. It may well be another bit of the dance.

Then whoops, we're back to the actual awards. Michael Giacchino wins best original score for Up. Fortunately he does not stand stock-still and make like a robot.

4am: Top of the hour and the main contestants are neck and neck. The Hurt Locker has three awards and now Avatar has three awards, having just taken the gong for best visual effects. So they swing into the final stretch, locked dead level. This, surely, is the sort of finish the Oscar organisers could only have dreamed of.

4.05am: Here comes Matt Damon ("Maaat Daay-man") to present the award for best documentary feature. This looks a particularly strong category this year, but then maybe it is every year. We've got Burma VJ, The Cove, Food Inc, Which Way Home and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

In the event, the Oscar goes to the gripping eco-documentary The Cove. You'd have to be employed by the Japanese fishing industry to have a problem with that.

4.10am: The deadlock is broken as The Hurt Locker takes the editing award and squeaks ahead, four Oscars to three. The acceptance speeches are over in the blink of an eye.

"Please welcome Keanu Reeves," pleads a disembodied voice on the PA as the Matrix star trots forward to run us through another best picture montage. Why did they feel the need to do this? Did they worry that we wouldn't (welcome him, that is)? Was there perhaps a time a few years back when Keanu bounded on stage, all excited and happy to be there, only to be left reeling from a tornado of catcalls, boos and hisses. So now the organisers are taking no chances. "Please welcome Keanu," entreats the voice. "Have mercy. Give him a chance." Happily they do. They indulgently welcome Keanu Reeves.

4.20am: What is it with the Academy voters and the best foreign language film Oscar? Every year they buck the trend and go for the warmest, lightest, most non-threatening film they can find. Last year's contest was billed as a straight fight between The Class and Waltz with Bashir, only for the voters to give the prize to the wry Japanese comedy Departures.

This year's battle was surely between Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard's A Prophet - both of which seem to have cleaned up everywhere else over the past 10 months or so. Sure enough, it goes to an Argentinean film called The Secret in Her Eyes. "I want to thank the Academy for not considering Na'Vi a foreign language," quips the director. OK, so I have yet to see The Secret in Her Eyes and maybe it's brilliant. Until then, this result strikes me as more than a little perverse.

4.35am: A quintet of celebrity guests line up to heap praise on this year's best actor nominees. Michelle Pfeiffer loves Jeff Bridges and Vera Farmiga lobbies for George Clooney. Julianne Moore just adores Colin Firth it is left to Tim Robbins to puncture the reverential mood, recalling his first meeting with Morgan Freeman, when the great man turned to him and spoke these words of wisdom: "The secret of being a good friend is fetching a good cup of coffee. Will you do that for me, Ted?"

Oh, and Colin Farrell really likes Jeremy Renner, who starred in The Hurt Locker.

Then up comes Kate Winslet to read out the winning name. And the winning name is .... Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart.

It is fifth time lucky for the veteran actor, a man who has been so good for so long that we have sometimes risked taking him for granted. He bounds up like Baloo the Bear and then starts whooping at the rafters. Bridges offers genial thanks to his late parents, and to the cast and crew on his film. He also thanks T-Bone Burnett, who is of course best remembered for his saucy supporting role in the musical Nine, where he wriggled about on a bed in his underwear and stuck his bum in the air. At least I think I have that right.

And then, finally it's a big Bridges thank-you to the wife and the kids. His speech wildly overruns the 45-second running time, but that's OK. He's taken his sweet time getting there and more than deserves his moment in the sun. If they'd given him an hour, it would have been fine by me.

4.50am: Another quintet of celebrities; another quintet of acting nominees. Forest Whitaker plays the role of hushed supplicant to Sandra Bullock. Michael Sheen lobs flirty, twinkling compliments at Helen Mirren. Peter Saarsgard seems to quite like Carey Mulligan (not too much; just enough) and Oprah Winfrey proceeds to sell Gabourey Sidibe ("a true American Cinderella!") to the public like so much soap powder.

Last but not least, Stanley Tucci professes his undying love for Meryl Streep, but admits that he is pushing for the number of nominations for each actor to be henceforth capped at 16, just to keep her off the stage and give someone else a chance.

After that, a curiously diffident Sean Penn sidles out from the wings and peels open the envelope.

And the winner is ... Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side.

"Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?" asks Bullock. I'm guessing that this is a rhetorical question, but there's no time to answer it anyway, because she's off – thanking her fellow nominees, thanking the moms who never get any thanks but ought to because they're great, and then breaking down as this leads her inevitably on to her own mom. It's actually a pretty good speech: warm and fluid, and clearly from the heart. She even thanks those who have been "mean to her in the past" – including George Clooney who she claims to have once pushed her into a swimming pool.

4.55am: It's time for the best director Oscar. Barbra Streisand is on stage and she opens the envelope. A second passes and then history is made. Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to ever take the award for best direction. "It's the moment of a lifetime," she declares.

5am: Right, so Kathryn Bigelow has made history and busted the glass ceiling and all that. But there is no time to digest that, no time to mull over the implications of this mountainous achievement. Because all at once, it's over.

Scuttling out from the wings comes Tom Hanks. He tears open an envelope, says something about Casablanca winning the best picture Oscar back in 1943 and then, without further ado, announces this year's winner.

The crowning prize of this year's Academy Awards goes to ... The Hurt Locker.

5.10am: So that's that. The 82nd annual Academy Awards crawled on its belly through however many hours and then abruptly broke into a sprint. It was past me before I knew it. The Hurt Locker finishes the night with six awards. Avatar limps in some way behind with a final tally of three.

The stage is crammed with producers of The Hurt Locker – all except the unfortunate Nicolas Chartier, who was barred from attending the event (something about a series of impolitic emails) and has presumably been watching events in some downtown sports bar bellowing at the TV and being shushed by the barman. The winners give a shout-out to Chartier, though, so I suppose he is there in spirit.

And with that the 82nd Academy Awards come to an end. It's left to Steve Martin to say the official farewells, looking back over a lengthy night that began with Angela Griffin screaming on the red carpet and ended up with Kathryn Bigelow clutching the statuette and re-writing the record books. "This show was so long that Avatar now takes place in the past," says Martin.

And that sounds about right. This was the night in which a record-breaking $500m behemoth was comprehensively shot down by a low-budget war movie, and when a film that points the way to the future of cinema was (at least momentarily) consigned to history.

Thanks for sticking with me. Apologies as usual for the typos and the errors, the laughing and the screaming. And that's us done and dusted. Is it Mariah Time already? If so, I'm straight off to bed. Roll carpet, roll credits. And please God, no booing. It has an annoying tendency to disturb the deepest slumber.

As Scorsese's new film, Shutter Island, opens, our critic picks the great man's 10 best scenes

Mean Streets (1973) 'What's a mook?'

Scorsese's uncanny ear for dialogue was evident from his first masterpiece, Mean Streets, which is set in the heart of Little Italy among debt collectors and small-time hoods. Characters were called by names such as Johnny Boy, Joey Clams and Giovanni Cappa. In one classic pool-hall scene, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel and David Proval start a fight - over the jukebox sounds of Please Mr Postman - after a barman calls one of them "a mook".

Goodfellas (1990) Tracking shot entrance to the Copacabana

Ray Liotta's Henry Hill takes new girlfriend Karen (Lorraine Bracco) to dinner. They enter the Copa via the back door, go through the kitchen and are led onto the dancefloor and to the best table in the house. In one unbroken three-and-a-half minutes' shot, the camera (operated by several times Oscar-nominated Michael Ballhaus) glides with them. "What do you do?" she asks as they sit. "I'm in construction," shrugs Henry, and the shot ends.

Raging Bull (1980) 'I coulda been a contender'

Marty loves a mirror. Travis Bickle asked himself: "You talkin' to me?" in Taxi Driver (1976), and De Niro's bloated washed-up boxer Jake La Motta goes in front of the looking-glass to perform his one-man show, reciting from the works of "Shakespeare, Budd Schulberg and Tennessee Williams". We see the Oscar-winning De Niro, rehearsing his lines, doing Marlon Brando's speech to his brother, from On The Waterfront, and psyching himself up to go on stage, still calling himself "champ".

The Big Shave (1967) The shaving scene

Shot for a class at NYU film school, Scorsese's six-minute short features actor Peter Bernuth, yet again in front of a mirror, at a sink, shaving himself closer and closer until he bleeds and blood drips down the plughole recalling the shower scene in Psycho. It's played out over the jazz standard "I Can't Get Started" and has been seen as a metaphor for American involvement in Vietnam, probably because the asthmatic young Scorsese also dubbed it Viet '67.

Round Midnight (1986) Scorsese's cameo

Marty contributes a brilliantly oleaginous cameo as corrupt nightclub owner RW Goodley in Bertrand Tavernier's jazz movie. Goodley greets Dexter Gordon and François Cluzet at JFK and talks incessantly during the cab ride into the city. "New York, for me, the music's better, because it's tougher, the people are tougher," he riffs as they cross the Williamsburg Bridge, framed by Manhattan's skyline. "SOS," says Dexter when Marty finally leaves them. "Same old shit."

Casino (1995) Sharon Stone throwing chips

One of the director's least appreciated movies, this is the story of Sam "Ace" Rothstein (De Niro) running the mob-owned Tangiers' casino in Las Vegas with his childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) as an enforcer.

Sam is eventually brought low in this tale of greed and violence by his obsessive love for Sharon Stone's table hustler, Ginger. The film is Stone's finest performance and contains a number of breathtaking shots and sequences. The overhead of her rapturously throwing her chips in the air has become one of the most imitated Vegas scenes.

Academy Awards 2007 Winning an Oscar for The Departed (2006)

At the 2007 Academy Awards, Scorsese finally won an Oscar for best director, for his take on the Hong Kong corrupt cop drama, Infernal Affairs. Scorsese's remake is set in Boston. The Departed also won best picture, as well as best adapted screenplay and editing.

Marty had lost out on five previous occasions and it was widely thought Hollywood didn't like him.

To a rousing standing ovation, he received the award from his contemporaries, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola.

The King of Comedy (1983) Rupert Pupkin's routine

Having kidnapped Jerry Lewis's TV host Jerry Langford, obsessive stand-up wannabe Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) finally takes to the TV stage as part of his ransom demand, believing his big break has come.

His feeble, miserable, tragic routine - delivered in red trousers, shiny jacket and bow tie - goes down quite well, even when he confesses how he actually got the gig. The audience thinks it's part of the act.

'I figure it this way: better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime,' he closes.

The Red Shoes (2009) Scorsese's restoration work

Scorsese's respect for film heritage has led to him overseeing numerous resoration projects, these include founding the World Cinema Foundation to help countries preserve their cinematic treasures and so rediscovering films such as Senegal's Touki Bouki and Morocco's Transes.

Last year at Cannes, he presented a sparkling new print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes.

Scorsese introduced Powell to his editor Thelma Schoonmaker in New York, and the pair were soon married.

Bad (1987) The Michael Jackson video

Scorsese's love of music - he edited Woodstock in 1970 - has resulted in concert films with the Rolling Stones (Shine A Light) and the Band (The Last Waltz) as well as documentaries about Bob Dylan (No Direction Home) and a series called The Blues.

In 1987 he recreated the choreography from Cool in West Side Story in the video for the title track of Jackson's new album. The dance sequence, set in an underground car park, forms part of an 18-minute short film. It's about expensively educated Daryl (played awkwardly by Jackson) doing a dance to show his old friends 'who's bad'.

Film-makers, beware of islands, warns John Patterson. Many an ambitious movie has foundered on their shores. Could Scorsese's be next?

Next week at the movies it's islands, islands, islands, all the livelong day. Don't they know that islands make for terrible movies? That islands are where great scripts go to get shipwrecked? Have they never seen Peter Benchley's The Island? Or Michael Bay's? Has anyone else noticed how dejected they suddenly feel whenever Lost cuts back to the island once again? (Am I the only one sickened by all that livid green foliage?) And have the calamitous production history of The Island Of Dr Moreau and the dread lessons it should have taught us already faded from the folk memory of filmland? Chappaquiddick? Okinawa? Krakatoa? The Camp On Blood Island? Nothing good ever came from an island. Give me an isthmus or a peninsula any day.

Apparently it's true: there really are only seven plots in the world. Shutter Island is set on an offshore mental hospital, and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo takes place on a Swedish coastal island, and each is at its core a variation on the locked-room thriller, just like every other island movie. In the first, the inmates and the sane people are equally hemmed in together on the isolated rock; in the second, a murder took place on an island while it was cut off from the mainland (so how did the corpse vanish without trace, and which of a finite number of suspects actually dunnit?) Naturally Scorsese wants us to know he knows this fine old generic staple inside out, and lards his imagery with lavish quotes from locked-room/island movies as varied as The Old Dark House, And Then There Were None and The Hounds Of Zaroff, not to mention Val Lewton's Isle of The Dead and the Arnold Böcklin painting that inspired it. Sadly, the scariest thing about Shutter Island is that you can't get voted off it, no matter how much you want it to happen. My kingdom for a ferry. A canoe … A log?

Perhaps, as the man said of California, the most interesting islands are on the land. This makes Paul Greengrass's Green Zone potentially the most promising of the three island movies out this Friday, because it addresses the literal insularity of Baghdad's Emerald City enclave. The best island movies are about the destructive effects of extreme isolation, extreme inwardness, on the human psyche – like Castaway, Hell In The Pacific and Lord Of The Flies – and one hopes Greengrass lingers a while on this imperial variant of island living.

Thirty years ago, Scorsese or one of his generational peers might have been making movies more like Greengrass's and a lot less like Shutter Island. Not any more. Now they all live on private islands of their own, just like Marlon "Dr Moreau" Brando (and look at the state he left his in). Scorsese's island is called Manhattan, and like Woody Allen, he should go back to living on it and making proper Martin Scorsese movies about it.

Joe Queenan on why the US treats film stars like gods who have popped down to earth for a gambol among the ordinary folk

Things were looking pretty bleak here in Tarrytown, New York, back in January. Stores were closing left and right, people were losing their homes, nobody could find work, and out in the street it was colder than a penguin's flippers. Truly, this was the winter of our discontent. And then Keanu came to town.

Keanu Reeves, the first male movie star I ever interviewed, was in town to make a comedy called Henry's Crime, which he both produced and starred in. It was shot in a funky 19th-century music hall that sits right in back of my office building. The music hall has been used in films as varied as The Good Shepherd, The Preacher's Wife and The Purple Rose of Cairo, partly because it is photogenic and partly because it lies within a 25-mile radius of New York City, so film producers don't have to pay the crew extra travelling expenses. The shoot lasted three weeks: three weeks of sheer bliss for residents of the community. Before Keanu, all was darkness. After Keanu, all was light.

Oh yes, Keanu's visit was a phenomenally uplifting event, primarily because he made himself so very, very available. He was in the grocery store, the convenience store, the delicatessen, always more than happy to sign an autograph or have his picture taken with some prodigiously unattractive local. He was in the post office, standing in line just like everybody else, as if he were not in fact the luminous star of The Matrix, Point Break, Speed, My Own Private Idaho visiting a pleasant but non-luminous suburb. Here was a certifiable immortal, a star of stage and screen, a legend in his own time and a rather good-looking one, yet for the three weeks he was here, he walked among us, breaking bread with the common man, sipping coffee with the hoi polloi, lifting our spirits. He also spent about $170,000 on the shoot. He made people so happy that, for a while there, I was worried that on the day he left they might have to close the Tappan Zee Bridge, to prevent crestfallen locals from jumping into that river. He made that much of an impression.

Keanu's visit to Tarrytown, and the public's reaction to that visit, drives home an important point. Movie stars are the closest thing Americans have to royalty. Even if, as in the case of Keanu Reeves, the royals have drifted down from Canada. Movie stars are objects of veneration, admiration and envy, creatures that inhabit some amorphous netherworld that is anchored in reality, but is not quite in it. It is a world that the rest of us may glimpse, but can never really be a part of. This is primarily because we are not especially good-looking, short on talent, and in any case, lacking in connections.

Movie stars, like authentic royals, understand their role in society. They bring sunshine into our lives, however briefly, and in return we bring money into their lives. Lots and lots and lots of money. Mostly, they bring sunshine into our lives through their efforts on screen, but sometimes, as in the case of Keanu Reeves, they physically make the clouds go away. They are a vital part of daily life in America, and everybody knows it. When they appear on the carpet at the Oscars, it is as if Hera, Zeus and Athena have wafted down from Mount Olympus.

Veneration of movie stars, in theory, flies in the face of America's tenaciously held beliefs about itself. Americans reflexively spit on their politicians, despise their captains of industry, deride athletes as spoiled prima donnas who wouldn't make it through the first day on the assembly line, ridicule religious leaders and sneer at intellectuals. They also have a hard time taking rock stars seriously, especially when they open their mouths about politics. Even when a political figure approaches divine status, as Barack Obama did in 2008, this aura of beatification quickly vaporises, because politicians are hired to solve problems, and once it becomes apparent that they can't solve the problems – at least not overnight – nobody cares how cool they are.

Americans, routinely making a fetish out of the democratic impulse, will go out of their way to show that they are quiet loners and mavericks, brash heirs to the mob who threw all that British tea into Boston harbour back in 1775. They insist that they will not kowtow to Washington, Wall Street or the media. They will not cave in to Big Brother. They will not lay down for The Man. But as soon as a movie star enters the room, they go all weak in the knees and start gushing like schoolchildren.

This may be because deep down inside, Americans know the score. The average American, no matter how dumb, no matter how ugly, no matter how bereft of charisma, truly believes that if things had broken right, he too could have been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the Most Valuable Player in the Superbowl, or Muhammad Ali, or maybe even Paul McCartney. But not for a minute does he ever beguile himself into thinking that he could be Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. Much less Angelina Jolie. As Clint Eastwood once expressed it: "A man's gotta know his limitations." Women, too.

Movie stars in this sense have an unfair advantage over politicians and athletes and rock stars. They can age gracefully, they are not expected to do any of society's heavy lifting, and they are almost always placed in situations that they can control, situations that position them in the most attractive light. They are exactly like Britain's royals. They exist to have their pictures taken. They are meant to be seen and not heard. They are entirely ornamental. (This is something Prince Charles may not fully understand.)

People sometimes say that the Kennedy family are royalty, but that is not true. Literally half the country – the Republicans – despise the Kennedys and all that they stand for. And when I say despise, I mean despise. Some people may wish the royals would go away. But by and large people don't hate them. This is not true of the Kennedys. To this day, when rightwingers assemble, their cars are adorned with bumper stickers reminding people that Ted Kennedy once allowed a young woman to drown at the bottom of a lake in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. That would never happen to Russell Crowe, no matter how many hotel desk clerks he punched out.

Movie stars enjoy another huge advantage over luminaries in other fields. Political figures, no matter what their original appeal, eventually go out of fashion. They fail to bring their promises to fruition. They lie. They compromise their principles. They become depressing reminders of unfulfilled dreams, promises that were not kept. And then they are forgotten.

Movie stars, by contrast, have an appeal that stretches across party lines, ethnic lines, religious lines, racial lines. This is partly because they are so very glamorous, but also because the very work they do keeps them above the fray. The public has almost nothing but good feelings about movie stars, because they connect us with a time and a place when we were happy. Americans are always happy on Oscar night; even if this year's movies were nothing special, last year's movies were great. The scene toward the end of the Oscars when the gigantic photographs of recently deceased movie stars appear on the television screen is almost biblical in proportion. Like the royals, movie stars exist in a kind of fairyland that they occasionally allow the public to peer into, without actually visiting. Like the royals, you cannot stop being a star once you are a movie star. The light from your star may be subdued or eclipsed but it can never be fully extinguished. Just look at Mickey Rourke.

Like the royals, movie stars lead lives the rest of cannot imagine leading. They are rich, glamorous, powerful, inhabit fantastic homes and do not have to worry about their mortgages or getting their kids into the best schools. They have very nice cars, great clothes, fabulous teeth. Like the royals, they elicit an oddly craven reaction from ordinary mortals. Perhaps this is because the average person knows that he has no chance at achieving immortality so he'd better enjoy the company of the immortals while they're there. Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain. And celluloid heroes never really die.

With the 82nd annual Academy Awards almost upon us, let the set pieces of the 1989 edition be a solemn warning to this year's producers

Only a few days to go before the Oscars, and once again I am compelled to make a YouTube journey back in time, to encounter the ghost of Oscar ceremonies past. Columnist Christopher Hitchens famously said that it is impossible to have a nourishing conversation about last year's Oscar results, but it is possible to have a necrophiliac thrill.

Inspired by a recent blog from Variety columnist Peter Bart, I have found myself going back to the now horribly notorious 1989 ceremony, which became reviled for its extraordinarily embarrassing and overblown set-piece routines. Today's nominees may find themselves chafing at the new rules about keeping the ceremony manageable and the speeches short, but the awful lesson of 1989 should be enough to keep everyone in line.

Bart refers to a new book, Party Animals, by fellow Variety writer Robert Hofler, which tells the story of Allan Carr, the somewhat crazed showman and party-giver who was the producer of the 1989 show, and who had vowed to glitz up the ceremony with these ambitious Broadway-style innovations. He brought in a song-and-dance ensemble of young performers doing a number called, heartbreakingly, I Want to Win an Oscar. It is pure, unmitigated horror, as you can see above.

The sheer plutonium-strength embarrassment is hardly to be believed. And what is incredible is just how long this went on. The ceremony in those days went on for hour after buttock-annihilating hour, unendurably protracted by this sort of self-admiring fantasia, when all everybody wanted was to get on with the awards. Bart himself, discussing the ill-starred routine, says that "none of them could sing or dance". Actually, that isn't quite true. As you can see, a lithe, big-haired young Patrick Dempsey showed himself to be pretty useful little hoofer and even gave us a neat pratfall. But his talents were occluded by the vision of Ricki Lake's hat, Chad Lowe's rib-tickling "I am a thespian!" bit and Corey Feldman's Jacko moves.

Then there was the mind-boggling extravaganza featuring the young Rob Lowe, still controversial from his 1988 sex-tape scandal, doing a romantic routine with, erm, Snow White, played by Eileen Bowman. Watch it, as long as you haven't recently eaten.

Again, this is X-certificate horror. Bart reports that the Disney Corporation promptly sued and a clutch of Hollywood notables, including Billy Wilder, wrote to complain. And yet even now, in fairness to Allan Carr, one has to point out that Lily Tomlin's gag, as she comes on, is about how she would only host the show if they gave her a proper buildup. So the Rob Lowe/Snow White routine is comically supposed to be madly over-the-top, but perhaps not that over-the-top. It should also be pointed out that it was Carr's idea to replace the phrase "And the winner is … " with the less triumphalist, collegial: "And the Oscar goes to … "

Perhaps, one day, the Academy will give Allan Carr a special posthumous revisionist lifetime achievement Oscar for this ceremony (Carr died in 1999): a special statuette showing the gold mannikin's toes curling in embarrassment.

Television network denies claims that Until Nothing Remains depicts group as totalitarian and unethical

Germany's state broadcaster is locked in a row with the Church of Scientology which wants to block an upcoming feature film that depicts the controversial organisation as totalitarian and unethical.

Bis Nichts Mehr Bleibt, or Until Nothing Remains, dramatises the account of a German family torn apart by its associations with Scientology. A young married couple joins the organisation but as the wife gets sucked ever more deeply into the group, her husband, who has donated much of his money to it, decides to leave. In the process he loses contact with his young daughter who, like his wife, is being educated by Scientology instructors.

Scientology leaders have accused Germany's primary public TV network, ARD, of creating in top secret a piece of propaganda that sets out to undermine the group, and have demanded to see it before it is broadcast.

The 90-minute film reflects an unease in Germany about the organisation, which boasts several thousand members across the country and has its headquarters in central Berlin. The church is considered anti-constitutional by its critics.

Tension reached its peak during the making of Valkyrie, the 2008 film about the plot to assassinate Hitler, when opponents said Scientology leaders had engineered the placing of Tom Cruise, its most prominent member, in the role as Nazi resistance fighter Claus von Stauffenberg, in order to win German supporters. The organisation dismissed the claim.

The filming of Valkyrie sparked numerous clashes between the filmmakers and the government, which initially prevented them from filming on several historical sites, including the Bendler Block where Stauffenberg was hanged, due in part to Cruise's association with Scientology. The ban was eventually lifted.

According to the makers of Until Nothing Remains, the €2.5m (£2.3 m) drama, which is due to air in a prime-time slot at the end of March, is based on the true story of Heiner von Rönns, who left Scientology and suffered the subsequent break-up of his family.

Scientology officials have said the film is false and intolerant. At a preview screening in Hamburg members distributed flyers in which the filmmakers were accused of seeking to "create a mood of intolerance and discrimination against a religious community".

Jürg Stettler, a spokesman for Scientology in Germany said: "The truth is precisely the opposite of that which the ARD is showing." The organisation is investigating legal means to prevent the programme from being broadcast.

Stettler said the organisation was planning its own film to "spread our own side of the story".

ARD's programme director Volker Herres has dismissed the accusations, saying the aim of the drama is to reveal the truth about the organisation.

"We're not dealing here with a religion, rather with an organisation that has completely different motives," he said. "Scientology is about power, business, and building up a network. Its lessons are pure science fiction, it's no religion, no church, no sect."

The film team said it had been "bombarded" with phone calls and emails from the organisation during production. The head of the Southwest German broadcasting organisation, Carl Bergengruen who was involved in the project, said Scientology had "tried via various means to discover details about the film" and that the film crew was even tailed by a Scientology representative.

"We are fearful that the organisation will try to use all legal means to try to stop the film being shown," he said.

While she was head of English at Cardinal Griffin school, Poplar, in east London, in the 1950s, my grandmother Maria Kerigan, who has died aged 95, developed an interest in drama and broadcasting. When she retired from teaching in 1968, she decided to volunteer for Mary Whitehouse's National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, and in 1970 became its first national secretary. However, her approach to censorship and broadcasting standards was quite different from Whitehouse's.

Films such as Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange were then testing the limits of the British Board of Film Censors (later Classification, BBFC). While denouncing Kubrick's most controversial work, Maria was careful to differentiate between a film depicting violence for its own sake and one where it could be contextualised. Where Whitehouse's approach was absolute, Maria believed instead in providing information to viewers and listeners. Indeed, she felt that the violence in films such as The Godfather (which became one of her favourites) could be fully justified by the story.

Whitehouse regularly appeared on television, arguing for taste and decency. Maria, however, quietly operated the machinery of the association, engaging in effective diplomacy with figures in the BBFC, BBC and government, and making the case for greater provision of information and education about film and television productions.

Her pragmatism may have produced an unspoken tension with Whitehouse. They parted company as campaigners shortly after The Romans in Britain trial of 1982. Whitehouse's autobiography, Quite Contrary (1993), omitted all mention of Maria, despite her years as a dedicated volunteer.

Born near Leigh, in Lancashire, Maria won a scholarship to Mount St Joseph grammar school in Bolton, then read English at Manchester University, and became headteacher at St Edmund's primary school in Little Hulton, aged 26. She and her husband, Carl, moved to London in 1952, where Maria joined Cardinal Griffin school. After her retirement, she continued to coach children in English. She was involved with the Catholic church and was a fundraiser for the aid agency Cafod.

Carl died in 1998. Maria is survived by their two sons, Anthony and Shaun, two daughters, Pat and Cecelia, 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

The Infernal Comedy, based on true story of Austrian serial killer, among highlights of Barbican's plans for coming year

It might not be the cheeriest night out, watching John Malkovich as a resurrected Austrian serial killer on stage with a baroque orchestra and two sopranos singing arias about murder and abandonment, but it will, the Barbican's artistic director cheerfully suggests, be one of his personal highlights.

"It's a kind of 21st-century version of an 18th-century melodrama," said Graham Sheffield. "Absolutely brilliant and completely unique."

The Malkovich piece, The Infernal Comedy – part drama, part concert – is based on the true story of Jack Unterweger, who killed at least 11 prostitutes. "Probably not a thing to take a person on a first date," Sheffield conceded.

The show was announced today as part of the Barbican's plans for the coming year, along with the return of big-name regulars such as Peter Brook, with The Magic Flute; Michael Clark, with the next instalment of his production come, been and gone; and Robert Lepage, with a new multimedia production called Blue Dragon.

The centre's managing director, Sir Nicholas Kenyon, painted a rosy picture of the Barbican's last 12 months. "We are building on success because last year the Barbican had its best year ever with 1.2m tickets sold and attendances 13% up, and that is continuing this year. People are buying tickets through the recession. We are in a period of remarkable success across the arts."

Other highlights announced today include screening the latest Nasa outer space footage for the Houston Symphony's performance of The Planets; the Dutch theatre group Toneelgroep Amsterdam restaging three Antonioni films; a new version of Peter Pan from the National Theatre of Scotland; and Peter Sellars directing his version of György Kurtág's Kafka Fragments.

The Barbican's move into east London will continue: for example, when the jazz legend Wynton Marsalis arrives with the Jazz at Lincoln Centre orchestra from New York there will be jam sessions at Dalston's Vortex and a family concert in Hackney.

"We are creating a new model for the future of what an arts centre can be," said Kenyon. "It depends on the interaction of excellent names with as diverse an audience as possible."

In visual arts, the Barbican art gallery's big summer show will be an exploration of the relationship between surrealism and architecture, with the architects Carmody Groarke designing a "house" in which there will be the work of artists from Man Ray to Dalí to Louise Bourgeois. Then in the autumn the gallery will host the first European exhibition devoted to avant-garde Japanese fashion from the early 1900s to the present.

The Barbican's main resident orchestra, the London Symphony orchestra, will see the principal conductor, Valery Gergiev, take on Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich as well as a less familiar name, the living Russian composer Rodion Schedrin.

Sir Colin Davis will continue his series of Nielsen symphonies, Bernard Haitink will conduct Schumann, André Previn will conduct Strauss and Vaughan Williams and Sir Simon Rattle will conduct the LSO for the first time since 2000.

Danny Huston stars in another intelligent film transposing Tolstoy to LA. By Peter Bradshaw

British-born director Bernard Rose, known as a horror specialist for his 1992 shocker Candyman, is showing some stunning form with his modern adaptations of Tolstoy. After a conventional account of Anna Karenina, Rose brought off a brilliant version of The Death Of Ivan Ilych in 2000; set in modern Hollywood, and entitled Ivansxtc, it starred Danny Huston as Ivan, the agent and Tinseltown power-player, confronting the awful truth about his approaching death. Now Rose has adapted Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata, again starring Huston, again set in contemporary Los Angeles. The result is bold, brilliant and exhilarating: an intimately horrible, sexually explicit and black-comic portrait of a toxic marriage that is closer to the spirit of the original than any number of costume dramas. It is not merely a study of jealousy and obsession, but a profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic rejection of romantic love and sex itself – which, in a world without God, is the ultimate blasphemy.

Huston plays Edgar, a very rich man in early middle age, whose worldly charm and sensuality attract a woman he meets at a party: this is Abby (Elizabeth Röhm), a beautiful and talented classical pianist, who is already in a relationship. Their passionate, clandestine affair leads years later to marriage, but Abby is discontented, having now given up music for children. To appease her, Edgar induces his private charitable foundation to host a benefit concert, so his wife will play Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata to a moneyed private audience, but she must therefore practise long hours with a handsome violinist: Aiden (Matthew Yang King).

Instantly, Edgar conceives a fanatical jealousy – after all, did Abby not once cheat on that former boyfriend to be with him? Yet he is neurotically compelled to let Abby be alone with the handsome newcomer, to prove to himself that he is not threatened, and so creates the scab he's picking at. Abby is entirely innocent, but exasperated and sexually disaffected with Edgar, and also insists on maintaining her affectionate friendship with Aiden, just to prove to herself that she is a free agent. And so this neurotic, poisoned situation metastises in Edgar's mind.

In his novella, Tolstoy has a line about the supposed joys of the honeymoon and conjugal bliss being like a fairground con-trick whose victims are too ashamed to admit they've been duped and so too ashamed to warn others – and thus the scam continues for eternity. In Rose's movie, it is monogamous intimacy itself that is vilified through Edgar's crazed worldview. His wife's essential unknowability – in fact, the unknowability and uncontrollability of everything outside his head – drives  him mad.

The despair and contempt also includes Beethoven and all classical music, which Edgar secretly loathes: the famous duet, so far from being a sublime meeting of spirits, is a clenched, ritualistic confrontation in tune with the violence and pornography of Edgar's private hell. Rose's Kreutzer Sonata looks a little like Haneke's The Piano Teacher, and bears comparison with Chantal Akerman's version of Proust's The Captive – but is freer and more uninhibited. My only reservation is with Rose's use of voiceover narration, which is, perhaps, a little pedantic. But it doesn't stop this from being a superbly creative adaptation.

Rating: 4/5

Actor accuses US media of smearing Venezuelan president

Sean Penn has defended Hugo Chávez as a model democrat and said those who call him a dictator should be jailed.

The Oscar-winning actor and political activist accused the US media of smearing Venezuela's socialist president and called for journalists to be punished.

"Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies."

Penn, who has visited Chávez in Caracas, said Venezuela's poor majority had willingly embraced his leftist revolution, but that this view was concealed from Americans.

"We are hypnotised by the media. Who do you know here who's gone through 14 of the most transparent elections on the globe, and has been elected democratically, as Hugo Chávez?"

Penn, speaking on Bill Maher's HBO chatshow, is part of a small but vocal pro-Chávez Hollywood group which includes Oliver Stone and Danny Glover.

They have remained steadfast even as Venezuela's leader has lost fans at home and abroad. Inflation, crime and water and electricity shortages have hit his popularity and led to defections from his socialist party.

The Organisation of American States recently accused Chávez of intolerance and authoritarianism, and a Spanish judge accused Venezuela of cosseting Farc and Eta terrorists, sparking a diplomatic spat with Madrid.

Chávez thanked Penn for his support in what he said was a daily battle for public opinion.

"I was reading the declarations from our friend Sean Penn, the famous American actor," he told a televised rally in Caracas. "Penn defended what he considers to be the truth."

The Hollywood star was an ally in the effort to counter a campaign to "confuse" Venezuelans, said the president, who has been in power for 11 years. "From here I thank you very much."

Other celebrity endorsements have come from the linguist and writer Noam Chomsky and model Naomi Campbell.

A new interview suggests that the Dark Knight's next outing will be his last. How will that play with cash-conscious studio execs?

Despite the fevered speculation about the future of Batman in the wake of the spectacular success of The Dark Knight two years ago, we've been given very little in the way of hard facts about the future of the series. That is, until now. A new interview with director Christopher Nolan, in which he talks about his plans for the third film, as well as his overseeing role on Superman, appears to outline where the man who brought Batman back from the horrors of the Joel Schumacher years sees the character going. And it may not make comfortable reading for execs at studio Warner Brothers.

Nolan, while characteristically tight-lipped, confirms that the third episode of his Batman series will be the final instalment, and will mostly feature the characters and actors who appeared in the first two films. "We have a great ensemble, that's one of the attractions of doing another film, since we've been having a great time for years," he told the LA Times.

"Without getting into specifics, the key thing that makes the third film a great possibility for us is that we want to finish our story," the film-maker added. "And in viewing it as the finishing of a story rather than infinitely blowing up the balloon and expanding the story."

Nolan refused to confirm whether there would be another main villain for the third film, saying only that Mr Freeze would not be appearing. But his comments over the returning cast make me wonder whether he and screenwriting brother Jonathan Nolan might have plumped for a scenario in which the story continues straight on from the end of The Dark Knight, in which Batman was left running for his life with the forces of Gotham at his heels, rather than a distinct new episode with a new bad guy to be outwitted.

"I'm very excited about the end of the film, the conclusion, and what we've done with the characters," Nolan said. "My brother has come up with some pretty exciting stuff. Unlike the comics, these things don't go on forever in film and viewing it as a story with an end is useful. Viewing it as an ending, that sets you very much on the right track about the appropriate conclusion and the essence of what tale we're telling. And it harkens back to that priority of trying to find the reality in these fantastic stories. That's what we do."

Ending it at the trilogy point will certainly help give the series a cohesive form (provided the film-makers get the final episode right). But one wonders what the reaction will be at Warner Bros, where that could presumably be read as shutting down a successful franchise just as it has got going. One can only assume that the movie would end with Batman either dead (unlikely, even in Nolan's dark universe) or retired. But even if Nolan does bring his tale to a satisfactory conclusion, who's to say that the studio won't attempt to revive the character in some form of continuation of the story, with a new director at the reins? It happened with Terminator, after all, though Warner has shown itself to be a careful (perhaps too careful) steward of its DC properties over the last 10 years, so there's a good chance the studio might do the decent thing and wait until it is genuinely time for a new reboot with a different vision.

At least Warner has a little time to play with when it comes to Batman. The rights to Superman, on the other hand, may well revert to the heirs of Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, the original comic-book creators, if a new series doesn't start filming soon. Nolan revealed that the studio handed him the job of overseeing the Man of Steel's revival after another Batman screenwriter, David Goyer, pitched him a reboot concept during a break from planning the sequel to The Dark Knight.

"He basically told me, 'I have this thought about how you would approach Superman,'" Nolan recalled. "I immediately got it, loved it and thought: That is a way of approaching the story I've never seen before that makes it incredibly exciting. I wanted to get [producer] Emma [Thomas] and I involved in shepherding the project right away and getting it to the studio and getting it going in an exciting way."

Which doesn't tell us a whole lot about the project itself, although we know that Goyer will pen the screenplay, with Nolan overseeing the work of an unnamed director. There will be no cross-pollination with Batman, as Nolan plans to continue the concept of each superhero existing only in their own universes in the new franchise.

"Each serves to the internal logic of the story. They have nothing to do with each other," said Nolan, adding: "A lot of people have approached Superman in a lot of different ways. I only know the way that has worked for us that's what I know how to do."

Is Nolan right to bring the story arc of his Batman series to a conclusion following the next film, rather than leaving the series open-ended? And how do you feel about his plans for Superman? As always, I'd love to get your opinions.

To say Bigelow makes films to fit in with the male establishment is to crudely generalise about what subjects interest women

When Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for best director last weekend it was, somewhat shockingly, the first time a woman has done so in the entire history of the awards. While this fact has been rightly celebrated, there have also been many, including Richard Adams on this site, who have been quick to point out that she has made a "man's film". While Adams does not go so far as to suggest this is the reason for her success, there have been others who have done so. Critic Martha P Nochimson even responded to Bigelow's Bafta win by saying she was "masquerading as the baddest boy on the block" in order to win respect in a male-dominated industry.

There are a number of problems with this perspective, not least with the idea of Bigelow "masquerading" as something other than her genuine self. She has a history of making action films with male-dominated casts, such as K-19: The Widowmaker and Point Break. To say that she makes these films to fit in with the establishment, rather than because they are the films she wants to make, is to make a staggeringly crude generalisation about what subjects women find interesting. Her Oscar is a cinematic milestone. To greet it with complaints that this female director is somehow not female enough is like saying Obama is not black enough – insulting and beside the point.

Leaving aside Bigelow's personal motives, there is also the question of whether the Academy chooses to reward "masculine" films over "feminine" ones. It is certainly possible, given that the lack of high-profile female directors suggests that Hollywood is still very much a boys' club. A recent study of the top 100 films of 2007 showed that 83% of the directors, writers and producers were male, with only three female directors in the list. In addition, less than 30% of the speaking roles were for women, and I would be the first to argue that there is a dearth of decent female characters who are something more than victims, or eye-candy, or both.

But how meaningful is it to talk about a "woman's film", and what would such a thing even look like? The phrase "chick flick" is a derogatory one, used to refer to trashy romantic comedies, not Oscar contenders. Female directors who have been held up in contrast to Bigelow this year include Jane Campion for Bright Star, Lone Scherfig for An Education, and Nora Ephron for Julie and Julia, none of whom were nominated in the best director category, although An Education was for best picture. While this is a diverse selection of films, they all share an emphasis on relationships rather than action, which could arguably make them more typically female.

Even The Hurt Locker, despite its hyper-masculine subject matter and characters, resisted the epic narratives normally associated with war films. Instead it is a claustrophobic, psychological piece, with action sequences strung out at haphazard intervals, rather than building to a conventional climax. Its presentation of masculinity is certainly thoughtful, even if it offers no overt critique of its characters. In this respect, perhaps it could be said to offer a female perspective on masculinity.

In the end, however, such questions do not really do female directors any favours. Perpetuating the idea that male and female film-making fall into separate categories will only hold back women's progress in Hollywood. There is already a perception that women's films are somehow a niche category. Nia Vardalos, who wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, blogged last year about a studio executive who told her to change the female lead in her latest script to a male because "women don't go to movies". Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post has argued that Hollywood shies away from strong female characters, fearing that they will not be a big box office draw. The fear may well be based on the belief that men do not want to see films made by, or focusing on, women, while women will happily tag along to the latest Transformers film.

Going on and on about how Bigelow has made a "man's film" will only emphasise this view, by ensuring that she is seen as the exception, rather than the rule.

The trend of increasingly more recording artists coloring the full spectrum of gay music and the mainstream success they are receiving illustrated by black gay music artist Nhojj, recently # 1 on MTV Music Top 100 chart. (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/gaymusic/nhojj/prweb3699914.htm

Exclusive Precious content provided by Lionsgate (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/REELZCHANNEL/Precious/prweb3705704.htm

VIZ Media, LLC (VIZ Media), one of the entertainment industry’s most innovative and comprehensive publishing, animation and licensing companies, will publish manga creator, Q Hayashida’s gritty urban sci-fi/horror series, DOROHEDORO on March 16th. The new series under the company’s VIZ Signature imprint, is rated ‘M’ for Mature Audiences and will carry and MSRP of $12.99 U.S. / $16.99 CAN. (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/viz-media/Dorohedoro/prweb3705834.htm

Air times: Wednesday, March 10 at 7pm and 10pm ET/PT (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/Leonard_Maltin/Richard_Roeper/prweb3706284.htm

Full Sail University (www.fullsail.edu), an award- winning entertainment institution located near Orlando, FL, is proud to return as primary sponsor of the 19th Annual Florida Film Festival, (www.floridafilmfestival.com) being held April 9 through April 18, which will present the theme “Film Sweet Film.” This year marks the return of Full Sail University’s sixth year as the primary sponsor and thirteenth year with the Festival. (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/floridafilmfestival/fullsail/prweb3707944.htm

The stars were out at the Oscars donning their best diamond earrings and bracelets, so how can the look be achieved without the price tag? Purely Diamonds new range of diamond earrings might be just the thing. (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/diamond_earrings/diamond_stud_earrings/prweb3705764.htm

Stars such as “Twilight’s” Kristen Stewart and Virginia Madsen made their red carpet appearance at the Oscars® in gowns by graduates of FIDM/The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3706204.htm

It's the urban Highlander as The Primordials chronicles the tales of black immortals dwelling in Post Katrina New Orleans. Join Shannon Bechet, Otis Armstrong, and Yolanda Jackson aka Shango, Ogun and Oya as they battle in the Big Easy against angry Gods, corrupt politicians, scorned voodoo queens, undead vampires and even fanatical terrorists! (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3707034.htm

Optelec will gather with industry professionals to display the latest technology for persons with disabilities and reveal new nationwide movement to promote ocular health awareness (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3708614.htm

Cassandra Hepburn, 33, who recently returned from 12 days on the Scientology Disaster Relief Response Team in Haiti, has joined staff at the new Church of Scientology and Celebrity Centre in Las Vegas. The actress, who appeared in the Quentin Tarantino film "Hellride" and the daytime dramas "The Young and the Restless" and “As the World Turns,” is eager to assume her new position at the Church to serve the Las Vegas community. (PRWeb Mar 10, 2010)

Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/03/prweb3712524.htm