I was a little harsh on Lady Gaga when, half-joking, I accused her and Tony Bennett of mugging our dear Jewish diva Barbra Streisand at the Grammys. Today, I am singing Gaga’s praises for turning around what had become the Debbie Downer Academy Awards with an exuberant “Sound of Music” montage celebrating the 50th anniversary…
“Ida,” a Polish film about a Catholic woman who discovers she is the Jewish child of Holocaust victims, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski collected the Oscar at the 87th annual Academy Awards Ceremony Sunday night in Los Angeles. The spare black-and-white drama, set in Poland in 1962, won…
Getty Images (JTA) — Jewish artists and themes featured among the winners at the 87th Academy Awards in Hollywood Sunday night, but the star-studded night was marred when the show overlooked the death Joan Rivers. The evening’s “In Memoriam” segment, devoted to film industry notables who have passed away over the past year, included, among…
Image courtesy Cassis Films (JTA) — The idea for “Aya” began with a daydream: What if you were waiting for someone at the airport and instead you picked up a total stranger? What then? That wisp of a fantasy, dreamed up by Mihal Brezis many years ago while waiting with a friend at Tel Aviv’s…
Every year since 1963, Poland has submitted a movie for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Nine of the country’s past submissions have been shortlisted for the prize, and 2015 marks the 10th: “Ida,” a black-and-white film about a Polish nun (Agata Trzebuchowska) who discovers she is Jewish and that her parents were…
Awards season is here. I love it so much that I wish I were receiving an award myself. Seriously, I will accept any award, from any ceremony, in any category. “Where is my award?” I will ask, while watching my TV. But absent some miraculous occurrence whereby I am transported into another dimension in which…
(JTA) — If Damian Szifron’s “Wild Tales” (“Relatos Salvajes” in Spanish) wins an Academy Award on February 22 — it was nominated last week for Best Foreign Film — it will be Argentina’s third Oscar and the first for a film directed by an Argentine Jew. The film, which combines humor, suspense and violence, consists…
Wes Anderson’s whimsical film “The Grand Budapest Hotel” was nominated for nine Academy Awards Thursday morning, just days after winning the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical. Named one of the best films of the year by several top critics, it could earn Anderson, a director whose cult following has steadily grown over the…
100% of profits support our journalism
