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Quincy Jones Awarded Posthumous Oscar

Quincy Jones's daughter, the actress Rashida Jones, accepted the Oscar, telling the audience that the legendary hitmaker had been 'really excited to attend tonight'. Etienne LAURENT / AFP
Quincy Jones's daughter, the actress Rashida Jones, accepted the Oscar, telling the audience that the legendary hitmaker had been 'really excited to attend tonight'. Etienne LAURENT / AFP
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Quincy Jones Awarded Posthumous Oscar

Quincy Jones's daughter, the actress Rashida Jones, accepted the Oscar, telling the audience that the legendary hitmaker had been 'really excited to attend tonight'. Etienne LAURENT / AFP
Quincy Jones's daughter, the actress Rashida Jones, accepted the Oscar, telling the audience that the legendary hitmaker had been 'really excited to attend tonight'. Etienne LAURENT / AFP

The late Quincy Jones was posthumously awarded an honorary Oscar at an emotional and star-packed Hollywood gala on Sunday that also handed golden statuettes to the producers of the James Bond movie franchise.
US music industry titan Jones died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 91 just two weeks before he was set to receive one of the Academy's coveted lifetime achievement prizes at the Governors Awards, said AFP.
His daughter, the actress Rashida Jones, accepted the Oscar, telling the audience that the legendary hitmaker had been "really excited to attend tonight."
"He often said 'live every day like it's your last and one day you'll be right.' And he did that... the best, most beautiful life," she said, to a huge ovation.
Jones was best known for producing smash hit records for a who's who of music industry legends from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson.
"Truth is, the man had an equally powerful impact on the world of film," said actor Jamie Foxx, introducing his award.
Jones produced seminal Hollywood movies including "The Color Purple," and received multiple Oscar nominations for film songs and soundtracks including "In Cold Blood" and "The Wiz."
Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lopez and Zoe Saldana were among A-listers holding back tears in the audience as Jennifer Hudson sang a musical tribute.
Hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the swanky black-tie Governors Awards each year honor film industry veterans, many of whom are felt to have not received their dues at the regular Oscars.
The event also offers a chance for stars and studios to court Academy voters -- and size up their rivals -- as the next Oscars campaigns begin to take shape.
At Sunday's reception, "Succession" stars Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong -- campaigning for their news films "A Real Pain" and "The Apprentice" -- enjoyed a lengthy catch-up.
Acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar ("The Room Next Door") conversed with his exiled Iranian counterpart Mohammad Rasoulof ("The Seed of the Sacred Fig.")
Bond, James Bond
Daniel Craig -- who stars in this year's William S. Burroughs adaptation "Queer" -- chatted with friends by the bar, his lips firmly sealed about the identity of his successor as James Bond.
Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the half-siblings who have controlled the beloved 007 espionage franchise since 1995's "Goldeneye," were among the honorees Sunday.
Passed the reins by Broccoli's film producer father Albert, the duo have overseen several of the Bond series' biggest-ever movies including the $1 billion-grossing "Skyfall" in 2012, in which Craig played the suave British spy with a license to kill.
Anticipation continues to swell for the announcement of who will next play the world's most famous fictional spy.
"Just to get something out the way, we came here this evening to find out who the next James Bond is," joked Craig, on stage introducing their award.
"Don't look at me. But he might be in the room," he added -- before insisting he was joking.
British writer and director Richard Curtis, 68, who created "Notting Hill,Bridget Jones's Diary, "Love Actually" and "Four Weddings and a Funeral," received the Jean Hersholt statuette, which is specifically for humanitarian work by a film industry figure.
Curtis co-founded Comic Relief, a British charity that has raised some $2.5 billion over four decades by bringing together comedy and entertainment stars for zany challenges and wildly popular fund-raising telecasts.
A fifth honorary Oscar went to Juliet Taylor, the acclaimed casting director behind "The Exorcist,Taxi Driver,Annie Hall,Sleepless in Seattle" and "Schindler's List."

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Entertainment

Tom Cruise Touts ‘Wild’ Dark Comedy ‘Digger’ to Theater Owners

Cast member Tom Cruise and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu of the upcoming film "Digger" react during the Warner Bros. Pictures presentation at CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, April 14, 2026. (Reuters)
Cast member Tom Cruise and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu of the upcoming film "Digger" react during the Warner Bros. Pictures presentation at CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, April 14, 2026. (Reuters)
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Tom Cruise Touts ‘Wild’ Dark Comedy ‘Digger’ to Theater Owners

Cast member Tom Cruise and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu of the upcoming film "Digger" react during the Warner Bros. Pictures presentation at CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, April 14, 2026. (Reuters)
Cast member Tom Cruise and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu of the upcoming film "Digger" react during the Warner Bros. Pictures presentation at CinemaCon, the official convention of Cinema United, in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, April 14, 2026. (Reuters)

Tom Cruise said he took four decades of acting to get to a place where he could play the eccentric oil tycoon at the center of an upcoming dark comedy, "Digger."

Cruise introduced the first images from the movie on Tuesday at the CinemaCon convention of theater owners in Las Vegas.

They showed the 63-year-old transformed into the character Digger Rockwell, an older man with thinning gray hair, a beer belly, a Southern accent and a fondness ‌for cats.

In ‌the movie, Rockwell inadvertently unleashes an ecological disaster that ‌carries ⁠the world to ⁠the brink of nuclear war, before scrambling to try and save the planet.

"It took 40 years to be able to put on the boots of Digger Rockwell and play the many, many layers of this character," Cruise said. "The movie is wild, it's funny, and I can't wait for you all to see it."

The Warner Bros movie is set ⁠to debut in theaters in October.

Cruise was joined on ‌stage by the film's director, four-time Oscar ‌winner Alejandro Inarritu.

The maker of "Birdman" and "The Revenant" said he and Cruise first discussed ‌the film seven years ago.

Cruise, who was filming "Top Gun: Maverick" ‌at the time, said he had been an admirer of Inarritu's films and rushed over to the director's house on his motorcycle when he asked to meet.

"We know that he is fearless: the stunts, the planes, the jumps," Inarritu ‌said of Cruise. "But I have to say, I think this is another kind of fearless. This ⁠role possibly could ⁠be (his) most challenging," adding, "It was a high-wire act."

Cruise kicked off a celebrity-studded presentation of upcoming films from Warner Bros, the studio coming off a year of commercial success and 11 Oscars. It is in the process of being sold to Paramount Skydance in $110-billion deal.

Zendaya, Timothee Chalamet and Jason Momoa touted "Dune: Part Three," the conclusion to the sci-fi series due for release in December. The film is set 17 years after the events of the second "Dune" movie.

"The years don't seem to have been kind to anyone on Dune," Zendaya said, explaining where the series picks up. "It's been a really difficult, challenging, ungentle and unkind few years, and I think there's so much left still to fight for."

Entertainment

Billy Crystal Will Return to Broadway in One-Man Show About the House He Lost to LA Wildfires

Billy Crystal arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on March 2, 2025, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Billy Crystal arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on March 2, 2025, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
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Billy Crystal Will Return to Broadway in One-Man Show About the House He Lost to LA Wildfires

Billy Crystal arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on March 2, 2025, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)
Billy Crystal arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on March 2, 2025, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP)

Billy Crystal will return to Broadway this fall in a very intimate one-man show that will take the audience into his family's longtime Los Angeles home that was leveled in wildfires.

“860,” written and performed by the Tony- and Emmy-winner, will begin previews this October at a theater to be revealed later. The title comes from the street address for the home Crystal and his family lived in for 46 years, a house lost in last year's devastating Palisades fires.

“I invite you to come inside 860 and I’ll tell you all the funny and touching things that happened there, not only in my career but to our family,” Crystal said in a statement. “It’s a joyous and heartfelt visit, about how with the love of family and friends and your inner strength, you can get through tough times.”

This is Crystal’s first return to Broadway following his “Mr. Saturday Night,” which he premiered in 2022 and earned Tony nominations for best book and lead actor in a musical. Scott Ellis will direct his new work.

Crystal has had success with one-man shows before. He turned his memoir “700 Sundays” into a stage show — in 2004 and revived in 2013 — that won him a Drama Desk Award in 2005.

The Palisades and Eaton fires erupted in Jan. 7, 2025, killing 31 people and destroying about 13,000 homes and other residential properties. The fires burned for more than three weeks and clean-up efforts took about seven months.

At the televised fundraising concert FireAid, held at the end of January 2025, Crystal appeared as the first host in the same clothes he was wearing when he fled his family home.

Crystal said he returned to the wreckage of his home and began to wail: “I had not cried like that since I was 15 and I was told that my father had just died.” His daughters soon found a rock in the wreckage with the word “Laughter” engraved in it.

Crystal made a name for himself first in comedy, from stand-up to TV’s “Soap” to the films “When Harry Met Sally” and “City Slickers.” Then in 1992, he got serious with the movie “Mr. Saturday Night,” which he directed, co-wrote and starred in.

Entertainment

Inside the Fireproof Vault Housing US Movie History

Nitrate Film vault Leader George Willeman explains how the different functions of the vault work at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress' National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, on April 2, 2026. (AFP)
Nitrate Film vault Leader George Willeman explains how the different functions of the vault work at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress' National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, on April 2, 2026. (AFP)
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Inside the Fireproof Vault Housing US Movie History

Nitrate Film vault Leader George Willeman explains how the different functions of the vault work at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress' National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, on April 2, 2026. (AFP)
Nitrate Film vault Leader George Willeman explains how the different functions of the vault work at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress' National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, on April 2, 2026. (AFP)

Once upon a time in the golden days of Hollywood, the movies were bigger, the stars brighter and the celluloid they were filmed on was, well, explosive.

Which is why the US Library of Congress maintains a special, fireproof vault in Virginia, near Washington, DC.

There, the highly combustible nitrate film used from the dawn of cinema in the 1890s until the early 1950s has a permanent home, rarely accessed by the public but toured by AFP.

Lost movies on the volatile but durable medium are still being discovered and preserved in the facility. And thanks to digitization, the lost treasures can also be safely viewed for the first time in decades.

Some 145,000 film reels are stored in strictly fireproof conditions in a vast, chilly vault at the library's National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia.

It is crammed with cinematic treasures that rekindle warm memories of an era when movies ruled.

The vault's leader, George Willeman, reeled off the names of classics with negatives there: "Casablanca," Frank Capra-directed films like "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and the grand-daddy of all action movies, "The Great Train Robbery" from 1903.

Down a spartan corridor so long it seemed to recede into the distance, he unlocked a series of cell-like steel doors.

Inside each of the 124 cells -- there's one dedicated just to the Disney archive -- were floor-to-ceiling cubby holes.

Each one held film canisters containing negatives and prints, all arranged meticulously: packed tight to prevent canisters from opening, but far enough apart to prevent any fire from spreading.

Since being set up in 2007 in a former US Federal Reserve building in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the vault has maintained a perfect no-fire record.

- Film nerds' delight -

Nitrate film is just part of the center's collection of more than six million items of moving images and recorded sound. They also have supporting scripts, posters and photos.

Willeman, who sports a button badge with the invocation to "Experience Nitrate," said the Library of Congress began preserving the medium when in the 1960s, "it was discovered that so much film was being lost" due to fires and defunct companies throwing negatives away.

With the American Film Institute, the library began collecting and copying nitrate film, including the holdings of big Hollywood studios - RKO, Warner Brothers, Universal, Columbia and Walt Disney.

They also tapped the personal collections of film icons like movie impresario and silent era star Mary Pickford and motion pictures inventor Thomas Edison, whose early studio produced hundreds of films.

"We're 50 some years in, and it (the collection) just keeps growing," Willeman said.

With the arrival of digital media, the mission has expanded beyond preservation for purists and cinema historians -- who say movies just look better on nitrate footage -- to putting old films online.

"Now we can make them available for everybody, which to me, being the film nerd I've been since, like, third grade, is just amazing."

Nitrate film made by early artisans often preserves better than the later safety film, said Courtney Holschuh, nitrate archive technician.

At a workstation with no light bulbs or exposed batteries -- either of which could ignite dust or gas from vintage film -- Holschuh recounted how last September she carefully peeled apart a cache of 10 vintage reels donated by a retired schoolteacher.

There were 42 different titles on the reels -- only 26 of which have been identified. They included a lost film, "Gugusse and the Automaton," by French cinema pioneer Georges Melies.

"So much of our early film history is still out there for us to see and to experience," Willeman said.