Category: Новини

Movie dramas “The Power of the Dog” and “Belfast” led nominations on Monday for the annual Golden Globes in a year clouded by controversy and a scaled-down ceremony.

“Belfast,” set in 1970s Northern Ireland, and director Jane Campion’s Western “The Power of the Dog” got seven nods each. They were followed by global-warming satire “Don’t Look Up”; “King Richard,” about the father of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams; director Steven Spielberg’s new version of the classic musical “West Side Story” and coming-of-age tale “Licorice Pizza” with four each. Netflix movies received a leading 17 nominations. The winners of the Golden Globes will be announced on Jan. 9, but the ceremony’s format is unclear after broadcaster NBC earlier this year dropped plans to televise the glitzy awards dinner in Beverly Hills following a controversy over the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the group that votes on them.

Monday’s nominations were met mostly with silence from movie studios and actors who normally flood social media and reporters with thanks and reactions.

It is unclear whether any of the nominees will attend the 2022 ceremony, which had been one of Hollywood’s biggest awards shows in the run-up to the Oscars.

Rapper and actor Snoop Dogg was the only celebrity on hand on Monday to announce the nominations.

Critics objected to the Foreign Press Association having no Black members, and raised longstanding ethical questions over whether close relationships with Hollywood studios influenced the choice of nominees and winners. Tom Cruise in May returned the three Golden Globe statuettes that he has won.

The HFPA has since added 21 new members, six of whom are Black; banned gifts and favors; and implemented diversity and sexual harassment training. The group now has 105 members total.

Despite these moves, major film and TV studios have tried to distance themselves from the Globes.

“Belfast,” “The Power of the Dog,” deaf community movie “Coda,” sci-fi epic “Dune” and “King Richard” all got nods for best movie drama.

A musical take on the classic “Cyrano” and an adaptation of the Off-Broadway hit “Tick, Tick… Boom” will compete with “Don’t Look Up,” “Licorice Pizza” and “West Side Story” for best musical or comedy.

Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Nicole Kidman (“Being the Ricardos”), Will Smith (“King Richard”), Kristen Stewart (“Spencer”) and Denzel Washington (“The Tragedy of Macbeth”) were among the actors nominated for best drama movie performances.

In television, drama “Succession,” about a squabbling family media conglomerate, received a leading five nominations.

The HFPA said it had made its choices this year by watching films in movie theaters, at screenings and on streaming platforms in what it called “a fair and equitable voting process.”

“While the Golden Globes will not be televised in January 2022, we will continue our 78-year tradition,” it said in an open letter released ahead of Monday’s nominations. “The last eight months have been difficult, but we are proud of the changes we have achieved so far.”
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Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2021, a year that saw his electric car company become the most valuable carmaker in the world and his rocket company soar to the edge of space with an all-civilian crew.

Musk is also the founder and CEO of SpaceX, and leads brain-chip startup Neuralink and infrastructure firm The Boring Company. Tesla’s market value soared to more than $1 trillion this year, making it more valuable than Ford Motor and General Motors combined. 

Tesla produces hundreds of thousand of cars every year and has managed to avert supply chain issues better than many of its rivals, while pushing many young consumers to switch to electric cars and legacy automakers to shift focus to EV vehicles.

“For creating solutions to an existential crisis, for embodying the possibilities and the perils of the age of tech titans, for driving society’s most daring and disruptive transformations, Elon Musk is TIME’s 2021 Person of the Year,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Edward Felsenthal, said.

“Even Elon Musk’s spacefaring adventures are a direct line from the very first Person of the Year, Charles Lindbergh, whom the editors selected in 1927 to commemorate his historic first solo transatlantic airplane flight over the Atlantic.”

From hosting Saturday Night Live to dropping tweets on cryptocurrencies and meme stocks that have triggered massive movements in their value, Musk has dominated the headlines and amassed over 66 million followers on Twitter.

Some of his tweets have also attracted regulatory scrutiny in the past.

According to the magazine, “The Person of the Year” signifies somebody “who affected the news or our lives the most, for better, or worse.”

Time magazine named the teenage pop singer Olivia Rodrigo as its “Entertainer of the Year,” American gymnast Simone Biles “Athlete of the Year” and vaccine scientists were named “Heroes of the Year.”

Last year, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris were jointly given the “Person of the Year” title. Time began this tradition in 1927. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have also received the title in the past.
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Vicente Fernandez, an iconic and beloved singer of Mexican regional music who was awarded three Grammys and nine Latin Grammys, and inspired a new generation of performers, including his son Alejandro Fernandez, died on Sunday. He was 81 years old.

Fernandez was known for hits such as “El Rey,” and “Lastima que seas ajena,” his command of the ranchera genre and his dark and elegant mariachi suits with their matching wide-brimmed sombreros. 

His music attracted fans far beyond Mexico’s borders. Songs like “Volver, Volver” and “Como Mexico no hay dos” were extremely popular among Mexican immigrant communities in the U.S. because of how they expressed the longing for the homeland.

“It was an honor and a great pride to share with everyone a great musical career and give everything for the audience,” Fernandez’s family said on his official Instagram account. “Thank you for continuing to applaud, thank you for continuing to sing.” 

Fernandez, known also by his nickname “Chente,” died at 6:15 a.m. in a hospital in Jalisco state, his family said. Funeral plans were not immediately announced. In August, he had suffered a serious fall and had been hospitalized since then for that and other ailments.

Beginning early on Sunday, people began posting messages, many of them recalling the lyrics to one of the favorite mariachi requests at parties and restaurants that goes, “I am still the king.”

Music greats such as Gloria Estefan, Ricky Martin, Pitbull and Maluma took to social media to post heartfelt condolences, some citing how his music influenced them. Famous country singer George Strait said Fernandez was “one of my heroes.”

“I am broken hearted. Don Chente has been an angel to me all my life,” Ricky Martin said. “The only thing that gives me comfort at this moment is that every time we saw each other I told him how important he was to me.”

Mexico’s president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador also expressed his condolences, calling him “a symbol of the ranchera music.” 

Meanwhile, outside the hospital where he died, fans began arriving Sunday carrying photographs with the singer and belting out his best hits.

The timing of his death was also highlighted by fans as Fernandez often sang on Dec. 12 to mark the Catholic pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, an event that attracts vast crowds. The commemoration was being held on Sunday after it was canceled last year because of the pandemic. 

Vicente Fernandez Gomez was born on February 17, 1940 in the town of Huentitan El Alto in the western state of Jalisco. He spent most of his childhood on the ranch of his father, Ramon Fernandez, on the outskirts of the state capital, Guadalajara.

The artist sold more than 50 million records and appeared in more than 30 films. In 1998, he was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In April 2016, he said goodbye to the stage before about 85,000 people in Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. Spectators had traveled from northern Mexico as well as Colombia, other Latin American countries and the United States for the occasion.
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Anne Rice, writer of the supernatural and the macabre, has died. She was 80.

Christopher Rice, her son, posted on Twitter early Sunday: “. . . my mother, Anne Rice, passed away due to complications resulting from a stroke. . . The immensity of our family’s grief cannot be overstated.”

Rice is best known for her Vampire Chronicles books, which included Interview With the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and The Queen of the Damned. Interview With the Vampire became a movie in 1994, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

AMC Networks is set to premiere a series next year based on Interview with the Vampire. The company has acquired the rights to 18 of Rice’s books. The prolific author wrote over 30 books and had more than a million followers on Facebook, according to her website.

While Rice seemed to relish in the world of the undead, in the late 1990s, she rediscovered her Catholic faith, according to biography.com. That discovery prompted her to write Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Angel Time.

Rice was born in New Orleans and the city became the backdrop for many of her books.

Her son said in his Twitter post: “Next year, a celebration of her life will take place in New Orleans. This event will be open to the public and will invite the participation of her friends, readers and fans who brought her such joy and inspiration throughout her life.”

 
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When the nuns of Maredret Abbey in Belgium were struggling to scrape together the funds for badly needed renovation works, they turned to an occupation that for hundreds of years had been the preserve of monks: beer-brewing.

The 20-strong Benedictine community, founded in 1893, decided about five years ago it was time to team up with a brewer with the aim of to producing beer infused with some of their history and values while helping repair their convent’s leaking roofs and cracked walls.

After nearly three years of collaboration with brewer and importer John Martin, Maredret Altus, a 6.8% amber beer using cloves and juniper berries, and Maredret Triplus, an 8% blond incorporating coriander and sage, went on sale in summer.

“It’s good for one’s health. It aids digestion. All the sisters like the beer, we are in Belgium after all,” said Sister Gertrude, adding the nuns allowed themselves one bottle each on Sundays.

 

The beers are based on spelt, a grain mentioned in texts by Saint Hildegard, a German Benedictine abbess from the 11th century who has inspired the Belgian order, along with plants commonly grown in the nuns’ garden.

Edward Martin, head distiller and great-grandson of the brewer’s founder, said production was currently 300,000 bottles per year, which would rise to around 3 million within a couple of years. Outside Belgium, it is already being sold in Italy and Spain.

Abbey beers, which involve a brewer paying royalties in exchange for using the abbey name, are common in Belgium, but until now they have only been with abbeys housing monks.

Maredret Abbey is just a kilometer from male counterpart Maredsous Abbey, whose beer, made by Duvel, is widely available.

Sister Gertrude stressed they did not see each other as rivals.

“They were aware, informed and they gave us the green light. It’s not a competition, more a complementarity,” she said.
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Italy’s La Scala has postponed its ballet season premiere after a coronavirus outbreak in its ranks, just days after the famed Milan theater staged its high-profile opera season opener with a full-capacity audience.

At least one of the four ballerinas who tested positive for COVID-19 also appeared in the Dec. 7 premiere of the opera Macbeth.

Ten other people linked to the outbreak tested positive for the virus, all of them theater support personnel, including someone who worked in the hairdressing department, the theater said in a statement.

Italian health authorities placed several other people in quarantine because they were in close contact with those confirmed infected, La Scala said.

La Scala Theatre Ballet was scheduled to perform La Bayadere to open its season on Dec. 15. The performance has been pushed back until Dec. 21.

The 19th century ballet is based on a score by Ludwig Minkus and choreography that Rudolf Nureyev debuted with the Paris Opera ballet in 1992. La Scala’s performance of the ballet marks the first time the Nureyev Foundation has allowed another company to perform it.

The opening of La Scala’s opera season is considered a highlight of Italy’s cultural calendar and took on added glitter this year after the 2020 edition was televised due to the pandemic.

While the Dec. 7 performance officially launched La Scala’s opera season, the theater staged pre-season operas, ballets and other events for several months, one of the few European houses to resume regular, full-capacity performances.

Italy, like other countries in Europe, is seeing an increase in new coronavirus cases as cold weather sets in. The country reported 20,000 new cases Friday.

However, the latest wave so far is more contained in Italy than in other European nations, and the country’s daily death toll has generally stayed below 100 for months.

Officials credit 85% of Italy’s population over age 12 being fully vaccinated, as well as continued mask mandates and health pass requirements to access workplaces, restaurants, museums and theaters. 

 
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Shortly after Kholoud al-Faqeeh was appointed judge in an Islamic religious court in the Palestinian territories, a woman walked in, laid eyes on her and turned around and walked out, murmuring that she didn’t want a woman to rule in her case.

Al-Faqeeh was saddened, but not surprised — people have long been accustomed to seeing turbaned men in her place. It was only in 2009 that she became one of the first two women appointed in the West Bank as Islamic religious court judges. But she sees her presence on the court as all the more important since it rules on personal status matters ranging from divorce and alimony to custody and inheritance.

“What was even more provoking is that these religious courts are in charge of women’s cases,” al-Faqeeh said. “A woman’s whole life cycle is before these courts.”

Women like al-Faqeeh are increasingly carving out space for themselves in the Islamic sphere, and in doing so, paving the way for others to follow in their footsteps. Around the world, women are teaching in Islamic schools and universities, leading Quran study circles, preaching and otherwise providing religious guidance to the faithful.

This story is part of a series by The Associated Press and Religion News Service on women’s roles in male-led religions.

The formal ranks of Islamic leadership remain largely filled with men, but while women don’t lead mixed-gender congregational prayers in traditional Muslim settings, many say they see plenty of other paths to leadership.

“When it comes to knowledge, the leader who is the religious scholar, the spiritual guide, the one who is teaching people their religion … that can be done by women or men, and historically always has been,” said Ingrid Mattson, the London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at Huron University College in London, Ontario.

There are diverse views across the different regions, cultures and schools of Islamic thought about the permissibility and scope of women’s leadership roles in the faith.

Some of the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions and practices were preserved and transmitted by the women closest to him, such as his wives. Many women say that provides a foundation they seek to build on.

Mattson said that people always ask whether a woman can be an imam, but that framing reflects a Western context focused on the weekly congregational prayer rather than “what our Islamic heritage did in terms of providing religious leadership across society to meet many different needs.”

In Morocco

Aziza Moufid, a 40-year-old in Morocco, is one of those who have taken up the mantle of leadership within the faith, in her case by serving as one of the country’s “mourchidat,” or female religious guides.

The “mourchidat” are trained at an institute for male and female students founded by and named after Moroccan King Mohammed VI. Female graduates teach religion classes and answer women’s questions at mosques or during outreach work in schools, hospitals and prisons.

Moufid, who recalls looking up to the female university professors who taught her Islamic studies, has been working as a guide mostly via WhatsApp during the pandemic. She uses the platform to explain sayings of the prophet to children; to help women learning to memorize and recite the Quran; and to counsel teenage girls about a variety of topics from modesty to prayers to menstruation.

“There are sensitive issues that some of them may not dare discuss even with their mothers or sisters,” Moufid said. “But there’s no such shame between us. I tell them, ‘I am your sister. I am your friend. I am your mother.'”

Mohammed VI institute director Abdesselam Lazaar, a man, said the services of the “mourchidat” have been in high demand. 

“The women here in Morocco are very keen on memorizing the Quran and learning about religion.”

In the US

Half a world away in the United States, Samia Omar, who became Harvard University’s first Muslim woman chaplain in 2019, said female students there similarly appreciate being able to bring questions about things like menstruation to her instead of to a man.

Omar also sees herself as saving them from being taught a version of Islam devoid of discussion of their rights.

“I’m serving and teaching these young girls and women the way I hope other women will help teach my daughters later,” she said.

Omar didn’t always plan to become a religious leader. But the twists and turns of her life, including an abusive marriage, a divorce and losing a daughter to cancer, led her to the calling she now practices alongside her current husband, who also serves as a Muslim chaplain.

During the divorce, some at her mosque tried to dissuade her from turning to the legal system. She ignored that pressure and ultimately won full custody of her kids, but the experience left Omar feeling that some men exploit the religion to oppress women.

That can have grave spiritual consequences, Omar said. “Many young women don’t understand that we’re important in Allah’s eyes.”

Many in the U.S. have advocated for a larger role for women in mosques, from better prayer spaces for female worshippers to more seats on governing boards and a more friendly mosque culture. Some are also calling for a more decentralized leadership model at mosques, one that includes a paid female resident scholar in addition to a male imam.

While there is hope for such advances, “things are not great for women in leadership … in our sacred spaces,” right now, said Tamara Gray of Rabata, a nonprofit working to empower Muslim women to imagine themselves as leaders, scholars and teachers.

Change takes “a lot of patience and a lot of discussion and a lot of just being able to be courageous,” Gray said, adding that Islamic scholarship by women is sometimes met with distrust in Muslim communities.

To that end, she founded the Minnesota-based nonprofit, whose programs include online courses in Islamic sciences. Through virtual gatherings focused on spiritual growth and worship, Gray said, women are able to experience being in a sacred space and then “go back to their own mosque and insist, really, that their mosque make them feel valued, respected, seen.”

During a recent virtual event joined by dozens of women, there were tears, laughter and ululations as the group celebrated Gray’s receipt of a certificate authorizing her to teach certain sayings and traditions of the prophet.

“The words of the prophet … they are weightier than a mountain of gold,” Gray told the group.

Promoting women’s spiritual leadership is crucial to keeping Muslims connected to their faith in America, in the eyes of Celene Ibrahim, a chaplain who researches gender and Islam.

“You can’t carry this on your own,” Ibrahim said, referring to male religious leaders. “This is a big task, and it’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of task.”

In the West Bank 

Al-Faqeeh, the judge, said that women’s long absence from judgeships in the Palestinian Islamic court owed in part to custom and to the fact that many viewed the post “as a religious position, like that of an imam.”

On the contrary, she said she saw it as a judicial one that relies on the rulings of the Islamic Shariah, and argued that there are no reasons to exclude women.

There were bumps in the road, both big and small, after her appointment, as some male judges and court employees seemed less than happy about it. Opposition also came in the form of a Friday sermon that she did not attend but in which, she was told, the speaker railed against allowing women to hold the position.

But things have gone smoother since, and she often senses relief on the part of women with cases before the court who feel they can talk openly to her about sensitive personal issues. “The once-impossible dream became possible,” al-Faqeeh said.

Reem Shanti, 40, who recently applied to become a judge on the religious court and considers al-Faqeeh a role model, said the appointment of women has opened up a world of possibilities for her and others.

“It provided women with an incentive,” Shanti said, “and gave them a strong push.”

 
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