The fight to keep tiny pollutants from reaching the dinner plate might start in the laundry room.

Innovators are coming up with tools to keep tiny pieces of thread that are discharged with washing machine effluent from reaching marine life. Such “microfibers” are too small to be caught in conventional filters, so they eventually pass through sewage plants, wash out to waterways, and can be eaten or absorbed by marine animals, some later served up as seafood.

So far there are at least four products, with names such as Guppyfriend and Cora Ball, aimed at curbing microfibers.

The developers are taking the war on pollution to a microscopic level after the fight against microbeads — tiny plastic beads found in some beauty products that were banned nationally in 2015.

“Blaming industry or government won’t solve the problems,” said Alexander Nolte, co-founder of Guppyfriend, a polyamide washing bag designed to prevent tiny threads from escaping. “Buy less and better; wash less and better.”

How harmful are they?

The issue has become an increasing focus of environmental scientists seeking to find out just how harmful microfibers are to coastal ecosystems, oceans and marine life and whether they affect human health. One study from 2011, led by Australian ecotoxicologist Mark Browne, found that microfibers made up 85 percent of man-caused shoreline debris.

Exactly how much microfiber pollution exists in the environment is a subject of research and debate. The United Nations has identified microfiber pollution as a key outgrowth of the 300 million tons of plastic produced annually. And a 2016 study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that more than a gram of microfibers is released every time synthetic jackets are washed and that as much as 40 percent of those microfibers eventually enter waterways. 

While there’s no question microfibers are escaping into the environment, it’s unclear how harmful they are, said Chelsea Rochman, an ecology professor at the University of Toronto who plans a study at the end of the year.

One of the questions, she said, is whether the problem is the fibers themselves or dyes in them, and whether natural microfibers such as wool and cotton are less harmful than plastic microfibers.

The microfiber trappers take various forms.

Guppyfriend, the laundry bag, is sold by clothing company Patagonia for $29.75. Cora Ball retails at $29.99 and is a multicolored ball designed to bounce around the washing machine, trapping microfibers in appendages that resemble coral. Lint LUV-R costs $140 or more and is a filter that attaches to a laundry water discharge hose.

New items

While the U.S. Census has found more than 85 percent of U.S. households have a washing machine, the items are new to the market and not familiar to most consumers. About 50,000 households use the Guppyfriend bag, Nolte said, and it might be the best known of the bunch.

Exactly how much these nascent products can help reduce microfiber pollution is not yet known, experts say, and it’s important to find out which products best succeed in reducing emissions of microfibers, Rochman said.

The inventor of the Cora Ball is the nonprofit environmental group Rozalia Project, headquartered in Granville, Vermont. Its co-founder says it had its product independently studied and found it can cut the amount of microfibers released through the wash by more than 25 percent. An independent review by a German research institute found that Guppyfriend caused textiles to shed 75 to 86 percent fewer fibers. 

“This is a consumer solution for people to be part of by throwing it in their washing machine,” said Rachael Miller, co-founder of Rozalia Project. 

The products serve to bring attention to a form of pollution unknown to most people, said Kirsten Kapp, a biology professor at Central Wyoming College, who has studied microfiber pollution on the Snake River in the Pacific Northwest.

“We are learning more and more every day about the risk that microfibers and microplastics have in our aquatic habitats and wildlife species,” Kapp said. “I think it’s something people should be aware of.”
…

From: MeNeedIt

Wealthy cities are responsible for a huge share of greenhouse-gas emissions when calculations include goods they consume from developing countries, researchers said on Tuesday, challenging traditional estimates that put blame on manufacturing nations.

Looking at emissions based on consumption, affluent cities, mostly in North America and Europe, emit 60 percent more greenhouse gases than they do using traditional calculations, researchers said at a United Nations-backed climate summit.

Calculating emissions of greenhouse gases, which are blamed for global warming, traditionally looks at where goods such as cellular phones or plastic cups are produced, they said.

But consumption-based emissions presents a fuller picture by attributing emissions to the consumers rather than the manufacturers, said Mark Watts, head of C40, an alliance of more than 90 global cities.

The newer method of calculation puts the responsibility on richer consumers and “increases the scope of things that policy makers in cities can address to reduce emissions,” Watts said.

Cities account for an estimated 75 percent of carbon emissions, according to U.N. figures used at the summit.

Big cities, big problem

The estimate by C40 comes amid concern that national governments are not on track to meet the pledges they made in 2015 in Paris to reduce greenhouse gases and curb climate change.

Traditional calculations put manufacturing countries such as China and India amid the lead emitters of greenhouse gases.

Using consumption-based calculations, emissions in 15 affluent cities were three times more than they were with traditional figuring, the researchers said.

Using consumption-based emissions is “revolutionary” although still “on the periphery,” said Debra Roberts, a co-chairwoman on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“But … these are ideas whose time is probably almost imminent,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the Edmonton summit.

The researchers used trade and household data from 79 cities that are members of C40.

Some 750 climate scientists and city planners from 80 countries are gathered in the western Canadian city to help chart a global roadmap for cities to battle climate change.
…

From: MeNeedIt

Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until the age of 32.

It’s an extraordinary fact, considering the trajectories of most Hollywood directors. Orson Welles filmed Citizen Kane at 25. Steven Spielberg was 27 when he made Jaws. A 23-year-old John Singleton directed Boyz N the Hood.

It was already doubtful that DuVernay could jump from a career in film marketing and publicity so late and without even a film degree to back her up. That she is also a black woman made it even more unlikely.

But in just 13 years, DuVernay has successfully and improbably risen to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry, as a filmmaker, producer and agent of change, breaking down barriers and smashing ceilings wherever she sets her sights. 

Now, at 45, she has an Oscar-nomination (for the documentary The 13th), a historic Golden Globe nomination (for Selma, she was the first black female director to get that recognition) and has also become the first woman of color to get over $100 million to make a live-action movie. That film, A Wrinkle in Time, with its $103 million production budget, opens nationwide Friday.

The Walt Disney Co. acquired the rights to Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning 1962 novel in 2010, and it went through various writers and budget points. The story about an awkward 13-year-old girl, Meg Murry, who travels through time and space, was a notoriously unwieldy one that carried the dreaded “un-filmable” stigma.

“I was shocked that they called me,” says DuVernay. “I’d done Selma and The 13th. How did they even think that would work? But they did. And when they said I could make her a girl of color, it just grabbed my whole heart.”

DuVernay set off to do the impossible — make a big budget, kids-targeted sci-fi blockbuster with an unknown 13-year-old black actress (Storm Reid, now 14) as the lead.

“I think it’s incredible that Disney made the decision to hire Ava on this and gave her the creative control to cast whoever she wanted,” says Reese Witherspoon, who co-stars in the film as one of the mystical “Mrs.” alongside Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling.

‘Film is forever’

Winfrey, Witherspoon and Kaling, all hardworking multi-hyphenates themselves, marveled at DuVernay’s tireless work ethic and attention to detail. Once she even sent costume designer Paco Delgado back to hand paint hundreds of eyes on one of Winfrey’s costumes because that’s what she had seen in the concept drawing.

“I was like, ‘I think it’s fine without the eyes? I think it’s OK!’ Winfrey recalled.

DuVernay laughed that Winfrey recounted that moment.

“She came out and everyone applauded for the dress and it was extraordinary,” DuVernay explains. “But I looked and I said, ‘Well on the sketch there were little eyes. Where are those?’ And he was like, ‘Well this looks good too.’ And I’m like, ‘Well let’s go take a look at that anyway.”

Asking for what she needs, and wants, is something DuVernay has learned as she’s gotten older.

“Film is forever,” she says. “It’s cemented. You’ve got to do it right now and it’s got to be the best it can be. So, let’s go back and put the eyes on the dress.”

Witherspoon says she has never met a director who spends so much time talking about others: Acknowledging everyone’s contributions in a cast and crew of hundreds, and then spending weekends talking about other people’s work too, from Patty Jenkins to Ryan Coogler.

DuVernay always has something in the works. She’s afraid if she slows down, it might all go away.

“I just feel like I have a short window in this industry. There is no precedent for a black woman making films consistently. There are beautiful black women directors but there are seven-year, six-year gaps between them,” she says. “Even though people tell me it’s OK, I think it’s all going to stop tomorrow. I want to do as much as I can do when I can. It’s not unreasonable, you know? Tomorrow they can say, ‘No we don’t want you to make movies anymore.”‘

And, indeed, there is still that idea that female filmmakers are not given second chances, even when they succeed. It’s something DuVernay thinks about often.

“I look at Guy Ritchie. That guy is bulletproof,” she says. “He can make something that doesn’t work. The next week he’s the director of another thing. I look at him and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic.’ But that wouldn’t have been Patty Jenkins and it won’t be me.”

Planting a seed

Initial tracking suggests that A Wrinkle in Time may open in the mid-$30 million range, which might not even be enough to unseat Disney’s “Black Panther” (which DuVernay passed on directing) from the No. 1 spot.

Wrinkle, however, is film that is first and foremost for children ages 8 to 12, DuVernay says. Before a screening she asked the audience to try to watch it through the eyes of a child — an unusual request for something from an already very kid-friendly studio like Disney which makes films for the younger set that nonetheless appeal to a wide swath of ages.

Critics reviews are under embargo until Wednesday, and social media reactions so far have been unusually sparse for a film this big. DuVernay says of the critics that, “Some of them will see what we tried to do. Some of them, it’s not [going to be] for them. It is what it is.”

And it’s the film she wanted to make, for the 12-year-old her, and for someone like Kaling, who says that she always loved sci-fi but that it never loved her back.

“I’ll always direct things but who knows if that price point ever comes again. I’m OK with that. This is a big swing,” DuVernay says. “But the chance to put a black girl in flight? I will risk it. I risk it for those images. It may not hit now, but somewhere a Mindy Kaling, a chubby girl with glasses and brown skin will see it and it will mean something. Or, a Caucasian boy will see how a black girl says, ‘Do you trust me’ and the Caucasian boy says, ‘I trust you,’ and he follows her. Just to plant that seed and say that’s OK, you can follow a girl? Those images? I’ll risk it. I’ll risk it for that.”
…

From: MeNeedIt

The Trump administration Tuesday launched a new effort under the direction of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to overcome years of problems with electronic medical records and make them easier for patients to use.

Medicare will play a key role, eventually enabling nearly 60 million beneficiaries to securely access claims data and share that information with their doctors.

Electronic medical records were ushered in with great fanfare but it’s generally acknowledged they’ve fallen short. Different systems don’t communicate. Patient portals can be clunky to navigate. Some hospitals still provide records on compact discs that newer computers can’t read.

The government has already spent about $30 billion to subsidize the adoption of digital records by hospitals and doctors. It’s unclear how much difference the Trump effort will make. No timetables were announced Tuesday.

The government-wide MyHealthEData initiative will be overseen by the White House Office of American Innovation, which is headed by Kushner. His stewardship of a broad portfolio of domestic and foreign policy duties has recently been called into question due to his inability to obtain a permanent security clearance.

Medicare administrator Seema Verma said her agency is working on a program called Blue Button 2.0, with the goal of providing beneficiaries with secure access to their claims data, shareable with their doctors. Software developers are already working on apps, using mock patient data.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is also reviewing its requirements for insurers, so that government policy will encourage the companies to provide patients with access to their records.

“It’s our data, it’s our personal health information, and we should control it,” Verma said, making her announcement at a health care tech conference in Las Vegas.

The longstanding bipartisan goal of paying for health care value — not sheer volume of services — will not be achieved until patients are able to use their data to make informed decisions about their treatment, Verma added.

Independent experts said the administration has identified a key problem in the health care system.

“This is a good first step, but several key challenges need to be addressed,” said Ben Moscovitch, a health care technology expert with the Pew Charitable Trusts.

For example, the claims data that Medicare wants to put in the hands of patients sometimes lacks key clinical details, said Moscovitch. If the patient had a hip replacement, claims data may not indicate what model of artificial hip the surgeon used.

“Claims data alone are insufficient,” said Moscovitch. “They are incomplete, and they lack key data.”

The administration could address that by adding needed information to the claims data, he explained.
…

From: MeNeedIt

British inventor Trevor Baylis, the creator of the wind-up radio, died Monday at the age of 80.

Acquaintances say Baylis died of natural causes after a lengthy illness.

Baylis developed the BayGen radio in the early 1990s after seeing a television program about the spread of AIDS in Africa and the need to get lifesaving information to people who did not have electricity and could not afford batteries.

Inspired by old-fashioned gramophones, the wind-up radio functioned with an internal generator, doing away with the need for batteries or access to electricity. The invention won Baylis international acclaim.

The earliest version ran for 14 minutes at a time, and production facilities were located in South Africa.
…

From: MeNeedIt

Kenyan coffee has an international reputation for good quality. But Kenya’s coffee industry is struggling as production levels have dropped and a younger generation shows little interest in farming. VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from Kirinyaga County, Kenya.
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. President Donald Trump reaffirmed his pledge to impose stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum Monday. The plan sparked outcry and criticism from the international community, including from members of Trump’s party. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

There are cameras everywhere at the Academy Awards, but some of the most intimate celebrity moments at the show still manage to escape the lens.

Here’s a look at some of the backstage interactions that never made it to TV screens:

LADY-BIRD BONDING: Greta Gerwig and Laura Dern shared some poignant moments backstage before presenting the documentary award.

The two women spent at least 10 minutes backstage together chatting and preparing for their moment onstage, during which Dern gave Gerwig a bit of a pep-talk.

“It’s amazing. And it’s historic,” Dern told Gerwig of her best director nomination – the fifth woman in academy history to be so recognized. “Are you breathing?” the elder actress asked.

“Your dress is perfect. Your makeup is perfect,” Dern said. {“Let’s check the booty.”

With that, Dern and Gerwig turned around to reveal the back of their dresses to each other, which they deemed camera-ready.

Dern also advised her co-presenter not to slouch or lean into the microphone.

“Shoulders back,” Gerwig said, convincing herself.

Still, Dern worried about having worn her eyeglasses.

“No, they look so cute!” Gerwig said. “There’s nothing hotter than a hot lady with glasses.”

They discussed whether they should walk out arm in arm or holding hands. Gerwig took an impromptu vote with backstage workers, who said holding hands would be their best bet.

“Good,” Gerwig said. “We crowd-sourced it.”

The two women emerged onstage holding hands.

___

FOOT FETISH: Comedic actresses Maya Rudolph and Tiffany Haddish had planned to wear comfortable footwear onto the Oscar stage even before it became part of their lines Sunday night.

Haddish insisted on wearing her slippers onstage.

“Girl, I got bunions and corns,” Haddish told Rudolph. “The foot-fetish people will be all about it. Did you see that bunion? Did you see them corns?”

The comedienne joked to Rudolph that she’s been using “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” spray on her feet.

___

DIVA IN THE HOUSE: Oscar-winner Faye Dunaway likes to make her own rules. She refused to stay in her position backstage before announcing the best picture winner.

The 77-year-old Dunaway repeatedly walked away from her prescribed spot backstage before she and Warren Beatty were to announce the final award of the night.

She demanded to know where her lines were and whether Allison Janney won for supporting actress (she did).

When a backstage photographer snapped a candid photo of Dunaway, she was livid. She told the man to “go away” and made the kind of shooing motion one might use for a pet dog.

She and Warren Beatty successfully announced the best picture winner this year: “The Shape of Water.”

Later, while posing for photos with the night’s winners, Dunaway continued directing the photographers who captured her image.

___

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Native Americans took to social media to express gratitude to Hostiles star Wes Studi, Cherokee, who, during the 90th Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles last night, spoke Tsalagi, the language of the Cherokee people.

The Cherokee Nation itself took to Twitter to express gratitude.

“As a veteran, I am always appreciative when filmmakers bring to the screen stories of those who have served,” Studi said, introducing a filmed tribute to Hollywood’s portrayal of the military.  “Over 90 years of the Academy Awards, a number of movies with military themes have been honored at the Oscars. Let’s take a moment to pay tribute to these powerful films that shine a great spotlight on those who have fought for freedom around the world.”

Studi has enjoyed a long career in movies, appearing in such classic movies as Dances With Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, and most recently, he played Chief Yellow Hawk, co-starring with Christian Bale in Scott Cooper’s new western Hostiles.

Studi is affiliated with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, based in Tahlequah, the largest of three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes. The other two are the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, also headquartered in Tahlequah, and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Between 1836 and 1839, the U.S. military removed the Cherokee Nation from their lands in Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas and forced them west into Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in the Western U.S.

Native Americans have served in every branch of the U.S. military and in every war and conflict since the Revolutionary War.

Studi is a veteran himself.  Born in Nofire Hollow in rural Oklahoma, he joined the National Guard during his senior year at the now-defunct Chilocco Indian School, a boarding school in north-central Oklahoma.  He later volunteered for the U.S. Army and served 18 months in Vietnam.

“Amongst themselves, Native Americans are treated with a lot more honor for having served the people,” he told the Military Times in January.  “Our culture values the fact that our young men are willing and ready and able to put their lives on the line to protect others.”
…

From: MeNeedIt

There’s a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It’s powered by an army of real people.

From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework -drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can’t quite make out.

Such data feeds directly into “machine learning” algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. Many such technologies wouldn’t work without massive quantities of this human-labeled data.

These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world – even in the U.S. And it underpins a technology that could change humanity forever: AI that will drive us around, execute verbal commands without flaw, and – possibly – one day think on its own.

For more than a decade, Google has used people to rate the accuracy of its search results. More recently, investors have poured tens of millions of dollars into startups like Mighty AI and CrowdFlower, which are developing software that makes it easier to label photos and other data, even on smartphones.

Venture capitalist S. “Soma” Somasegar says he sees “billions of dollars of opportunity” in servicing the needs of machine learning algorithms. His firm, Madrona Venture Group, invested in Mighty AI. Humans will be in the loop “for a long, long, long time to come,” he says.

Accurate labeling could make the difference between a self-driving car distinguishing between the sky and the side of a truck – a distinction Tesla’s Model S failed in the first known fatality involving self-driving systems in 2016.

“We’re not building a system to play a game, we’re building a system to save lives,” says Mighty AI CEO Daryn Nakhuda.

Marjorie Aguilar, a 31-year-old freelance makeup artist in Maracaibo, Venezuela, spends four to six hours a day drawing boxes around traffic objects to help train self-driving systems for Mighty AI.

She earns about 50 cents an hour, but in a crisis-wracked country with runaway inflation, just a few hours’ work can pay a month’s rent in bolivars.

“It doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but for me it’s pretty decent,” she says. “You can imagine how important it is for me getting paid in U.S. dollars.”

Aria Khrisna, a 36-year-old father of three in Tegal, Indonesia, says that adding word tags to clothing pictures on websites such as eBay and Amazon pays him about $100 a month, roughly half his income.

And for 25-year-old Shamima Khatoon, her job annotating cars, lane markers and traffic lights at an all-female outpost of data-labeling company iMerit in Metiabruz, India, represents the only chance she has to work outside the home in her conservative Muslim community.

“It’s a good platform to increase your skills and support your family,” she says.

The benefits of greater accuracy can be immediate. At InterContinental Hotels Group, every call that its digital assistant Amelia can take from a human saves $5 to $10, says information technology director Scot Whigham.

When Amelia fails, the program listens while a call is rerouted to one of about 60 service desk workers. It learns from their response and tries the technique out on the next call, freeing up human employees to do other things.

When a computer can’t make out a customer call to the Hyatt Hotels chain, an audio snippet is sent to AI-powered call center Interactions in an old brick building in Franklin, Massachusetts. There, while the customer waits on the phone, one of a roomful of headphone-wearing “intent analysts” transcribes everything from misheard numbers to profanity and quickly directs the computer how to respond.

That information feeds back into the system. “Next time through, we’ve got a better chance of being successful,” says Robert Nagle, Interactions’ chief technology officer.

Researchers have tried to find workarounds to human-labeled data, often without success.

In a project that used Google Street View images of parked cars to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods, then-Stanford researcher Timnit Gebru tried to train her AI by scraping Craigslist photos of cars for sale that were labeled by their owners.

But the product shots didn’t look anything like the car images in Street View, and the program couldn’t recognize them. In the end, she says, she spent $35,000 to hire auto dealer experts to label her data.

Trevor Darrell, a machine learning expert at the University of California Berkeley, says he expects it will be five to 10 years before computer algorithms can learn to perform without the need for human labeling. His group alone spends hundreds of thousands of dollars a year paying people to annotate images.
…

From: MeNeedIt

Held one year ago, the 90th Academy Awards would have very likely been a rose-colored nostalgia fest.

But this year, with a culture-wide reckoning over decades of sexual misconduct, a film business in decline, a volatile political climate and the fact that last year the esteemed show couldn’t even manage to present its biggest award correctly, the film academy and host Jimmy Kimmel on Sunday staged a complex and sometimes incongruous dance of attempting to both honor and atone for the past.

In many ways, the show inside the Dolby Theatre went exactly as planned – scripted, tight, full of past-looking montages, forward-thinking speeches and produced to appeal to all. Presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty got a best picture redo, (“What happened last year is Waterhouse under the bridge,” Kimmel quipped) and 86-year-old Rita Moreno got to wear her dress from the 1962 ceremony again.

The Walt Disney Co. sneaked a fair amount of promos (“A Wrinkle in Time,” and “Mary Poppins Returns”) and self-congratulations (for “Black Panther”) into its ABC broadcast and the production did its best to appeal to the “regular moviegoer” by trotting out Gal Gadot and other stars to literally give candy to a theater full of people. 

The awards also effectively skirted the awkwardness of having an accused man in the spotlight by shifting around long-held presenter traditions and having Jodie Foster and Jennifer Lawrence present the best actress award instead of Casey Affleck. Emma Stone got her Natalie Portman moment, presenting the directing award to “four men and Greta Gerwig.”

Activists like #MeToo creator Tarana Burke were included in a song segment. And three Harvey Weinstein accusers, Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek and Annabella Sciorra, were given a moment to themselves on stage for nothing more than the fact that they were brave enough to speak up before a hopeful video played highlighting a changing industry, post #MeToo and more diverse. 

The video highlighted Greta Gerwig, the fifth woman to ever be nominated for best director, Yance Ford, the first transgender nominee for “Strong Island,” Dee Rees, whose “Mudbound” scored a historic cinematographer nomination and the Pakistan-born Kumail Nanjiani, nominated for “The Big Sick.”

The nominees signaled a renaissance. The winners told a slightly different story.

With a more diverse, more international and younger infusion of voting members into the film academy, the movie in love with movies still won the top awards. Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy romance “The Shape of Water,” won best picture, director, score and production design. 

“Growing up in Mexico, I thought this could never happen,” del Toro said. “It happens.”

The acting awards, which have been locked for three months, went to the expected winners – all esteemed veterans and three of whom had never been nominated before: Frances McDormand won best actress for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and her co-star Sam Rockwell won for his supporting performance. Gary Oldman picked up the best actor prize for transforming into Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour” and Allison Janney for becoming Tonya Harding’s mother in “I, Tonya.”

At 89, James Ivory became the oldest Oscar-winner for his adapted screenplay for “Call Me By Your Name.” And Christopher Nolan’s ambitious World War II nail-biter “Dunkirk” picked up three technical awards.

But Gerwig’s “Lady Bird” left empty handed, Rachel Morrison did not become the first female cinematography winner (the long-snubbed Roger Deakins got that honor finally for “Blade Runner 2049” after 14 nominations) and Ford was not the first transgender Oscar-winner.

There were glimpses of progress, in Chile’s “A Fantastic Woman,” which starred the transgender actress Daniela Vega, won best foreign film. Disney and Pixar’s celebration of Mexican culture, “Coco,” took best animated feature, as well as best song for “Remember Me.”

“The biggest thank you of all to the people of Mexico,” said director Lee Unkrich to loud applause. “Marginalized people deserve to feel like they belong. Representation matters.”

And Jordan Peele became the first African-American to win best original screenplay for his horror sensation “Get Out.”

Peele said he stopped writing it “20 times,” skeptical that it would ever get made.

“But I kept coming back to it because I knew if someone would let me make this movie, that people would hear it and people would see it,” said Peele. “So I want to dedicate this to all the people who raised my voice and let me make this movie.”

Even McDormand used her moment on stage to make a statement on behalf of women.

“If I may be so honored to have all the female nominees stand with me,” McDormand said.

“We all have stories to tell and projects we need financed,” she added, before uttering the phrase “inclusion rider,” referring to actors signing contracts that mandate a film’s gender and racial inclusivity.

Everyone seemed to take this moment of an industry in flux to heart.

“We can’t let bad behavior slide anymore,” said Kimmel at the show’s start. “The world is watching us.”

And indeed as the last show in this very long season, made even longer thanks to the Olympics, and with an unprecedented pressure to address all the ills of society and 90 years of movies it was perhaps always going to be too big a feat for one group of entertainers to tackle in a single nearly four-hour production.

There’s only so much they can do, after all, and there is no one like Kimmel to remind everyone that it is still the movie industry.

In an aside about the pay disparity between Mark Walhberg and Michelle Williams for “All the Money in the World” reshoots, Kimmel said upon discovering that both actors were represented by the same talent agency that, “This one shook me.”

“If we can’t trust agents, who can we trust?”
…

From: MeNeedIt

Looks in neutrals, reds and purples brought the drama Sunday on the Oscars carpet at Hollywood’s biggest fashion show.

Salma Hayek looked like exotic royalty in a custom Gucci gown in lilac. It was heavily jeweled and had a busy, ruffled tiered skirt. Rita Moreno, meanwhile, honored Academy Awards history by donning the same gown (with a bold patterned full skirt) she wore in 1962, when she won an Oscar for “West Side Story.”

“It’s been hanging in my closet this whole time,” Moreno told The Associated Press.

Among the walkers in Los Angeles were a few recently returned Olympians, including skier Lindsey Vonn in a fringed black gown and diamond choker with statement red stones. Figure skaters Adam Rippon and Mirai Nagasu walked together. He wore belt-leather straps that crossed his chest and she chose a sheer, long-sleeve gown in soft blue.

Allison Williams of “Get Out” went for neutral. So did Gina Rodriguez in a nude sheath with silver embellishment, a plunging neckline and full princess skirt, courtesy of Zuhair Murad.

Among those in red was Allison Janney of “I, Tonya,” in long sleeves that fell to the ground. Sofia Carson wore a red cape gown with 26.10 carats of diamonds in her Chopard choker. Meryl Streep also wore red, a deep plunge at the neck. Last year’s best actress Emma Stone chose skinny trousers and a pink-belted, red tuxedo jacket.

The purple peeps also included presenter Ashley Judd, who went strapless in a dark shade by Badgley Mischka, accompanied by diamond strands.

There was an abundance of white, including fitted looks worn by Margot Robbie, Jane Fonda, Laura Dern (in Calvin Klein) and Mary J. Blige. One actress, Taraji P. Henson, was all leg in ethereal black with a high slit.

Among the standout guys: “Get Out” writer-director Jordan Peele, in a creamy white tuxedo jacket, and Chadwick Boseman, who honored his kingly T’Challa character in “Black Panther” with a long embellished coat.

Boseman’s co-star, Lupita Nyong’o, repped Wakanda in royal, one-sleeved gold with a studded sash element that had black detailing.

One of the evening’s brightest pops of color came on Viola Davis in electric pink from the Michael Kors Collection, hoops in her ears and a clutch to match. “Lady Bird” star Saoirse Ronan wore soft pink from Calvin Klein, while Greta Gerwig, who wrote and directed the coming of age film, offered another bright pop – hers in marigold yellow.

In beauty, a side-part trend took hold, both in updos and loose.
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From: MeNeedIt