January 18, 2016

While “Monster Monday” takes a little break, World Book is pleased to bring you a new Behind the Headlines Monday feature. For the next few months, our editors will prepare blog posts on superstars in a variety of fields, including sports, music, and motion pictures. We hope you enjoy our inaugural “Megastar Monday.” Please let us know what you think!

Whether she first captivated you as Ree, the tough teen who tries to keep her family together by tracking down her drug-dealing father in the Ozark Mountains in Winter’s Bone (2010) or thrilled you as Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of the popular “Hunger Games” series of science-fiction films which began in 2012, audiences can’t get enough of Academy Award-winning American actress Jennifer Lawrence. The 25-year-old is the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, earning $52 million from 2014 to 2015.

Jennifer Lawrence received the Academy Award for best actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Credit: © Shutterstock

Lawrence is currently charming audiences as Joy, the title character of the latest film directed and co-written by David O. Russell. It is the third film directed by Russell in which Lawrence has starred. Released on Christmas Day 2015, the film, loosely based on a true story, is a modern-day Cinderella tale about a kind and charismatic young woman who is thwarted and undermined by her own family. After she invents a new kind of floor mop, she takes on the cruel world of commerce as she faces life’s joys and disappointments. In reviewing the film, New York Times film critic A. O. Scott commented on Lawrence’s motion-picture magnetism: “Joy’s Cinderella qualities suit [Lawrence] perfectly, and she has the rare ability to combine radiance with realism. Like some of the great screen goddesses of old … she seems at once impossibly magnetic and completely down to earth, regal and democratic, ordinary and perfect.”

Lawrence won a Golden Globe and has been nominated for an Academy Award for best actress for her performance in Joy. She won an Oscar for best actress for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), becoming the second-youngest best actress Oscar winner. (Marlee Matlin was the youngest, winning for her role in Children of a Lesser God in 1986.) In Silver Linings Playbook, also directed by Russell, Lawrence portrayed a mentally unstable young widow who falls in love with a divorced man who has recently been released from a psychiatric institution.

Jennifer Shrader Lawrence was born on Aug. 15, 1990, in Louisville, Kentucky. After appearing in local theatrical productions as a child, she traveled to New York City with her mother in 2004 to interview with talent agencies. She soon began acting in television commercials and in television movies and series. Lawrence later moved with her family to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career. From 2007 to 2009, she acted in the situation comedy “The Bill Engvall Show.”

Lawrence made her motion-picture acting debut in the drama Garden Party (2008). Her other films include the dramas The Poker House and The Burning Plain (both 2008); the adventure film X-Men: First Class, the drama The Beaver, and the romantic drama Like Crazy (all 2011); the thriller House at the End of the Street (2012); the crime drama American Hustle (2013); and the drama Serena (2014).

Other World Book articles: 

• Motion pictures (2010) – A Back in Time article
• Motion pictures (2012) – A Back in Time article
• Motion pictures (2013) – A Back in Time article

February 23, 2015

The 87th Academy Awards were presented at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California, last night. Award winners in some of the major categories included Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which won for the best picture of the year. The film’s director, Mexico’s Alejandro G. Iñárritu, won the Oscar as best director. The film starred Michael Keaton as a washed-up superhero actor trying to revive his career by directing and starring in a Broadway play. British actor Eddie Redmayne won the Academy Award as best actor for his portrayal of the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in the biographical picture The Theory of Everything. Julianne Moore received the Academy Award as best actress for her performance as a professor facing early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in Still Alice. J. K. Simmons won the best supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of a sadistic jazz band instructor in Whiplash. The Academy Award for best supporting actress went to Patricia Arquette for her performance as a divorced mother trying to make a life for herself and her two children in Boyhood. Filmed over the course of 12 years, the film, directed by Richard Linklater, was notable for documenting the real-life aging of the actors in the film. Actor Neil Patrick Harris hosted the awards for the first time.

In a still photograph from the movie Birdman, Michael Keaton plays an actor shadowed by the superhero character he once played. (Credit: © Fox)

The Academy Awards are supervised by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with headquarters in Beverly Hills, California. Last evening’s broadcast reached viewers in more than 100 countries. But the original ceremony on May 16, 1929, was a small affair attended by only 270 guests at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, at $5 a ticket. Unlike the highly anticipated event it is today, the first ceremony held little suspense when the awards were presented, as the winners had been announced three months earlier. In 1930, the Academy kept the results secret until the ceremony, but it gave a list in advance to newspapers for publication at 11 p.m. on the night of the awards. This policy continued until 1940, when the Los Angeles Times published the names of the winners ahead of the ceremony in its evening edition. In 1941, the Academy adopted the sealed-envelope system that is still in use today. In 1953, the Oscar ceremony was televised for the first time, reaching millions of viewers in Canada and the United States. Since 1969, the ceremony has been broadcast internationally.

Other World Book articles:

• Motion Picture

• See also Back in time articles for Motion picture from 1922 through 2014

February 25, 2013

British actor Daniel Day-Lewis received this year’s Academy Award for best actor for the title role in Steven Spielberg’s motion picture Lincoln. Day-Lewis is first man to win the best actor prize three times. He previously received Oscars for My Left Foot (1989) and There Will be Blood (2007). His co-star in the film, Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln, was nominated but failed to win in the best supporting actress category. Field had previously won Academy Awards for best actress for her performances in Norma Rae (1979) and Places in the Heart (1984).

Lincoln was nominated for best picture of the year, but the prize went to the thriller Argo, which was produced, directed, and starred in by Ben Affleck. In 1998, Affleck shared an Academy Award with Matt Damon for their original screenplay for the drama Good Will Hunting. Argo, which was co-produced by actor George Clooney, tells the story of how in 1980 the Central Intelligence Agency, with the help of a Canadian diplomat, rescued a group of Americans from Iran after they had escaped from Iranian protesters who were taking over the United States embassy in Tehran.

Ang Lee (right), a Taiwanese-born motion-picture director, won the 2013 Academy Award for best director for “Life of Pi.” “Argo,” a movie co-produced by American actor George Clooney (left), won the best picture award. (AP/Wide World)

Affleck was not nominated for best director. Ang Lee won the directing award for Life of Pi. The film was based on a fantasy novel about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. In total, Life of Pi won four Oscars, more than any other film this year. The award was Lee’s second directing Oscar. The Taiwanese-born director won previously for Brokeback Mountain in 2006.

Jennifer Lawrence won the Academy Award for best actress for her role as a troubled young women in the film romance Silver Linings Playbook. Anne Hathaway won the best supporting actress award for her role as Fantine, a woman broken by poverty and human cruelty, in the movie musical Les Miserables. Christoph Waltz won the best supporting actor award for playing a German bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s slave revenge movie Django Unchained. The Austrian actor previously won an Oscar playing a Nazi in another Tarantino film, Inglorious Basterds, in 2010.

Additional World Book articles:

• Motion pictures
• Iran 1980 (a Back in Time article)

Feb. 27, 2012

The Artist, a mostly silent, black-and-white motion picture about a silent-film actor who can’t make it in “talkies,” swept the 84th Annual Academy Awards presented in Los Angeles on February 26. The film’s star, well-known French actor Jean Dujardin, won for best actor. The film also collected the awards for best picture, best director, best costume design, and best score. American actress Meryl Streep, who had won Oscars in 1979 and 1982, collected the best-actress award for her performance as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

Heavily favored actress Octavia Spencer won the Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in The Help, about African American maids working in the South during the Civil Rights Era of the 1960′s. The Oscar for best supporting actor went to British actor Christopher Plummer for his performance in Beginners, the story of the relationship between a father and son, told in flashbacks. Plummer also became the oldest actor or actress to win a performance Academy Award.

Additional World Book articles:

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• Back in Time (Motion Picture 1932)
• Hollywood