When Hollywood rolls out the red carpet in 2013 for filmdom's Academy Awards, the venue will be the same but it will be called the Dolby Theatre.

Audio company Dolby Laboratories said on Tuesday that it had purchased naming rights for the 3,400-seat theatre that up until this year had carried the name of iconic film company, Kodak. The CIM Group, which owns the theatre and adjacent hotel and shopping complex, said Dolby had signed a contract that would be good through 2033.

"The academy's board of governors believes that the home for our awards is in Hollywood," academy president Tom Sherak said in a statement. The CIM group said it had signed a 20-year contract with the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences to keep the Oscars at the theatre.

The theatre carried Kodak's name from 2001 when it opened. Eastman Kodak Co withdrew from naming rights after filing for bankruptcy protection last January. Financial terms for the deal with Dolby were not disclosed. Kodak had agreed to pay US$75 million (S$93 million) to CIM over some 20 years to have its name on the theatre.

The annual Oscar broadcast is the year's second most-watched event on television in the United States behind football's Super Bowl. REUTERS

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Much as many designers might like to downplay the importance of dressing a major Hollywood star for the Oscars, there's no denying it can mean big business for a brand with everyone seemingly more interested in what the stars are wearing than what they're winning these days.

The 2012 Oscars, then, could be described as the crowning glory for lovable designer Alber Elbaz, who was preparing to celebrate a decade in the driving seat at French luxury label Lanvin when both Meryl Streep and Jean Dujardin turned up to collect their best actor awards wearing his designs.With Dujardin a long time fan of the label - and with men being somewhat more straightforward to attire for such occasions - his patronage was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

But Elbaz has told Women's Wear Daily that Streep's golden gown - which was created to order from eco-certified fabric made from recycled plastic bottles as part of Livia Firth's Green Carpet Challenge- was more of a gamble for the designer who had never even met his muse.

"The seamstress that made the dress worked for three days and three nights on the dress, and after she finished, she was sick for three days," he recalls. "And you know, with the Oscars, you do the dress and you never know if they will wear it. I wanted so much for [Streep] to wear it, just for this woman that didn't go to sleep for three days, and just put so much love into the dress."

The striking result, which divided fashionable opinion, is subsequently set to become one of the most memorable Oscar gowns of all time, ensuring name checks for both Lanvin and Elbaz every year when award season heats up. A labour of love, yes, but also a gift that keeps on giving.

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LONDON (Reuters) - One of the few places where the Harry Potter movies failed to weave their magic was the Oscars, and the blockbuster franchise's failure to win a single Academy Award in eight attempts still rankles with some key players.

The series, based on J.K. Rowling's best-selling boy wizard stories, was nominated for 12 Oscars over its 10-year history, in the art direction, visual effects, makeup, cinematography, costume design and music categories.

Each time it went away empty-handed, to the growing frustration of the cast and crew that worked on one of the most successful film franchises in history. The final chance came with the concluding installment "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2", released last year and shortlisted for art direction, makeup and visual effects.

In two of those categories it was beaten by Martin Scorsese's "Hugo", while the makeup award ended up going to Margaret Thatcher biopic "The Iron Lady". "I think a lot of us look fairly wryly at the politics of the American Academy (of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), of which I am a member," said John Richardson, special effects supervisor on the Harry Potter movies.

"It does beg the question why did Harry Potter not get recognized at all for the last Deathly Hallows film?" he told Reuters at the press launch of the new Potter studio tour at Leavesden Studios just outside London.

"We got three nominations from the ... Academy for probably one of the best-made and best-grossing films of the year, whereas a Martin Scorsese film, Hugo, which wasn't anything like as successful, won three awards, or was it four?"

In fact it was five -- art direction, cinematography, sound editing and mixing and visual effects. Deathly Hallows - Part 2 earned $1.3 billion in global ticket sales, according to Boxofficemojo.com, making it the third biggest movie of all time before inflation is taken into account. It was also a critical hit.

Nick Dudman, in the special makeup effects department, agreed that Potter films had been wrongly overlooked. "We keep losing," he told Reuters. "Potter has been very largely ignored by academies around the world, and it is slightly strange. "But the work is its own reward in many ways. We make fabulous things, we have a great time doing it."

Richardson said one reason why the Potter films failed to land any Oscars may have been the voting system, whereby the Academy's entire active membership can select winners in every category during the final ballot stage.

The BAFTAs, Britain's equivalent, differ in that all members can vote on eight main categories, but for every other nomination only those with specialist knowledge of that particular field can participate.

"The final (BAFTA) vote is a chapter vote, so the award is voted by your peers, if you like. "It so happens that we won the BAFTA, but I think it gives a truer critique of the work rather than being voted on by, with due deference to everybody, a lot of people who don't necessarily understand the work or technology that's involved in creating the film."

Deathly Hallows - Part 2 won the special visual effects BAFTA, beating Hugo, although Scorsese's film did trump Potter in the sound and production design categories. Richardson has been nominated six times for an Oscar, three of them for a Potter movie. He has won once, for "Aliens".

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The Help" could be a lot more thorny than it is, but as a tale of bigotry and racial prejudice set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s, its contours are surprisingly smooth. It doesn't have the high rage factor of, say, 1988's "Mississippi Burning," nor the intense, provocative drama of 1990's "The Long Walk Home" — both landmark films that deal with race and the civil rights movement. Instead, "The Help" is quite palatable, and whatever sarcasm or irony director/writer Tate Taylor may have intended are done up in metaphorical candy wrappers, much like the skirts worn by its privileged white women characters.

"The Help" does, however, throw around ideas and nuggets of wisdom designed to lead the viewer off on a process of pondering. Its very title suggests the film is more of an aid or a guideline to start thinking, rather than something that will come out with a magic solution to make everything OK.

Besides, nothing is really OK, either in the story or the current reality we're seeing some five decades after segregation laws in the southern United States were officially abolished. The median household income for the average white family in the U.S. is around 20 times that of a black family. In the movie, a black maid is asked why she chose her job, and she replies that her mother was a maid and her grandmother was a house slave. For her, it was a matter of course to be "the help" in a white household. Did she ever want to do anything else? Yes, but no one had ever asked her that question.

Judging from a modern-day persepective, these questions have the unmistakable patina of patronization to which "The Help" is well attuned. Taylor, working from an original best-seller by Kathryn Stockett, is more than alert to the ambience of downright condescension in the relationship between black "helps" and their white employers, and turns up the dial at every opportunity.

Interestingly, protagonist Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) is the guiltiest perpetuator of this mindset. As a young university graduate, Skeeter starts off wanting to write about the lives of the black housemaids in her community. She plugs away at the reluctant women until they begin to talk. Skeeter is essentially fair and spunky and good. But a lifetime of privilege and plenty has left its mark, and Skeeter is a thick-skinned oaf when it comes to gauging the feelings of her interview subjects. She can sit there, calm and serene, and ask questions such as, "What does it feel like to raise a white child when your own child's at home being looked after by somebody else?"

Stone is brilliant in portraying this particular brand of insensitivity, and the film's intrinsic value rests on the incredible range of emotions and expressions turned in by the whole cast. Especially gratifying to watch (indeed, once her face is in the frame it's impossible to tear your eyes away) is Viola Davis as housemaid Aibileen Clark, a role for which she was aptly nominated for the Best Actress Award at this year's Oscars. Her supporting costar, Octavia Spencer, won an Oscar for her role as Aibileen's gutsy colleague Minny.

Aibileen is smart and compassionate and, as they might say in the Southern tradition, she's a woman who's full of grace. Just the way she carries herself makes you think that if Aibileen were transported to the present day, she would at least be running her own company, or reforming the Medicare system.

But in 1963 Mississippi, Aibileen and the other women in her tightly knit and blatantly ghettoized black community go out to work in white women's homes for chicken-feed pay. They raise white children; they clean and scrub and cook. And they're told not to use the toilets in the house (that they polish to a gleaming whiteness) because that would be "unsanitary."

In the meantime, the maids' employers hold tea and cocktail parties and do the social climbing thing. The little girls of these awful women declare that the black maids are like their real mothers as soon as their biological moms are out of earshot. Sadly, they grow up into made-up, done-up, bigoted witches, represented here by the town nightmare she-racist Hilly Holbrook (an excellent Bryce Dallas Howard).

"The Help" weaves classy entertainment from a downright downer of subject matter. Perhaps it turns out more feel-good than one would hope, under the circumstances. And it ultimately fails to address the politics of domestic labor, and how in the developed world it still symbolizes servitude and degradation, especially among the white-collar class. In one scene, Aibileen croons that her young charge is "important and special," which you could interpret: "You will never have to scrub toilets or wash dishes."Which means, of course, that someone else has to do it for her.

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Paltrow took our breath away when she sashayed on to the red carpet at the Oscars in a white, figure-hugging gown and co-ordinating cape by Tom Ford. But she's the first to admit her sartorial success wasn't all down to her good taste, but the fruit of several helping hands behind the scenes, starting with her stylist, Elizabeth Saltzman.

"Ordinarily, in preparation for an event, she'll [Saltzman] work with no more than four specific designers to gather several viable options for the event," writes Paltrow in her latest lifestyle newsletter, Goop .

Saltzman, who is fashion director at the glossy title Vanity Fair, visited Tom Ford only a week prior to the big event. "This dress screamed OSCARS to me" she explains. "It simply was 'the one'. The dress was composed of all the elements that I look out for Gwyneth: supreme elegance, grace, royalty, extreme modern luxury, simplicity without lacking intense skill and risk."Not much to ask then...

Saltzman discloses that finding a perfect gown begins the moment the nominees are announced and doesn't end until the moment her client steps onto the red carpet. Issues including which other stars designers might be dressing, what colours others could be wearing, the type of fabric, plus the politics around pairing a celebrity with the right designer all have to be considered.

Saltzman says: "The advantage I have is that I'm not new in the industry and I've built relationships that are not about screwing anyone else over."39-year-old Paltrow has also chronicled getting ready for the big day, beginning with a pre-awards workout at 10am, getting her roots done, hanging out by her hotel pool with her kids, and eating a turkey burger and fries (we're not so convinced about that one!).

What then follows is several hair and make-up attempts before settling on the right look to accompany the dress, then adding lashings of diamonds. What nuggets of wisdom does Saltzman have for us mere mortals who happen to need a knockout gown, even if it's not for the star-studded Oscars?

"Think about what looks best on you, not which dress you like on the hanger. Think about your posture. Look at yourself in the mirror with how you would naturally stand, not in pose, as you're usually not posing. Think about where you are going and how much you can relax knowing you are safely, securely, happily dressed."

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LOS ANGELES—Next year’s Oscar nominees will have a little more time to jockey for a prize on awards night, and will have a little less time jockeying to be a nominee. That’s because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Wednesday said it had set the date for the 85th Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 24, two days earlier than this year’s ceremony, while scheduling the announcement of Oscar nominees for Jan. 15, nine days earlier than this year’s announcement.

The net effect will be a small adjustment in campaign dynamics, as the nominees get an extra week to bask in what Academy officials sometimes like to call their “nominee-ness,” before the envelopes are opened on Oscar night. This pushes the nominations announcement into a mid-January spot that has normally been occupied by the Golden Globes — so the Academy seems to be crowding its competitor just a bit, though it shows no sign yet of jumping Oscar night into an early February or even late January date, as some have suggested.

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Virtual paper dolls? DIY fashion magazine? Shopping wish list? It’s difficult to describe exactly what Polyvore — an online tool that enables users to design and share sartorial collages — is. With more than 13 million visitors each month, the five-year-old Web site has tapped into a fan base that doesn’t just want to digest fashion trends — it wants to create them. The Washington Post partnered with Polyvore in January to launch Oscars Remix, an Academy Awards-themed contest that offered one winner the chance to play style editor in the pages of The Washington Post.

After receiving more than 7,000 entries featuring everything from flapper-length pearls inspired by “The Artist” to Angelina Jolie’s Versace-framed leg, we chose an ethereal collage with Michelle Williams (above) by Anamarija Brstilo of Split, Croatia. We gave Brstilo a final challenge that’s decidedly more Washington — create a look (below) for Michelle Obama’s official dinner Wednesday with British Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife, Samantha.

Brstilo, a 29-year-old mother-to-be, works as a marketing assistant for the U.N. Development Program’s energy efficiency project. Her day job has nothing to do with fashion, and she uses Polyvore to escape into a “secret world” where she can immerse herself in her hobby.

“The fashion world is often very far away from us regular people, whether it’s because of our size or because of money,” Brstilo says. Polyvore is “a great way to try out new things and maybe inspire yourself to do something like that in your own closet.”

Brstilo has an eye for detail and an ability to tap into the aesthetic of individual women. The classic sets she designed for Williams and Obama adhere to one of her core fashion principles.

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TEHRAN -- Playwright, director and actress Chista Yasrebi plans to stage a play that will take a look at the social impact of filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s win at this year’s Academy Awards.  Farhadi’s “A Separation” won the foreign-language film Oscar at the 84th Academy Awards in February.
 
The play entitled “2012 Oscars” will show the response of five Iranian families to the triumph, she told the Persian service of the Fars News Agency on Sunday.  Yasrebi said that the play will be performed by 14 main actors including Sima Tirandaz and Afsaneh Mahian, and a strong supporting cast.
 
“I will play the role of a lead character of the performance and three prominent screen actors will make honorary appearances in five-minute monologs during the play,” she stated.  “Stage actors will play all main characters of ‘A Separation’ in scenes from the play,” she added.
 
Yasrebi is scheduled to stage “The Little Mermaid” at Tehran’s Iranshahr Theater Complex in mid-spring. However, she said that she will replace it with “2012 Oscars”.  Her troupe also plans to perform “Genghis Khan” at Tehran’s City Theater Complex in autumn.

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The 2007 Academy Awards were the first Oscars to be chronicled on Twitter in real time, by the Hollywood gossip blog Defamer. At the time, Twitter was a rather unknown novelty, but today it boasts millions of users and is an ever-updating reflection of the vox populi.

So many Twitter users have expressed opinions about this year’s Academy Awards race that it would be virtually impossible for someone to find and digest them all. That’s why The Times, IBM and the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab created the Oscar Senti-meter, an online tool that can catalog a large number of Oscar-related tweets each day and uses language-recognition technology to analyze positive, negative and neutral opinions. It also counts the number of tweets.

Tweets captured by the Senti-meter on Feb. 26, the day of the awards ceremony, showed a massive increase in volume, as huge numbers of people took to Twitter to share their opinions about the show in real time.

The volume of Oscar-related tweets first spiked at 5:41 p.m., coinciding with the first award of the night, cinematography, which went to “Hugo.” The win, an upset over “The Tree of Life,” sparked chatter on Twitter at a rate approaching 10,000 tweets per minute. In the two months leading up to the Oscars, the film “Hugo” averaged just over 2,500 tweets per day.

One Twitter user wrote, “Best Cinematography goes to HUGO! Over Tree of Life -- very interesting #oscars.”By the end of the night, “Hugo” would take home five awards and rack up 107,041 total tweets.
The 6-o’clock hour broke the barrier of 10,000 tweets per minute twice, peaking at 6:58 p.m., when Christopher Plummer won the award for supporting actor for his role in “Beginners.” The award capped a season sweep for Plummer, who also won BAFTA, SAG and Golden Globe awards for his performance.

One Twitter user’s reaction: “Glad Plummer won. Beginners was better then some of the Best Picture nominees I saw. Looking at you Tree of Life & Moneyball. #Oscars.”

The highest spike of the night, and the only moment to break the barrier of 20,000 tweets per minute, was just after 8:24 p.m., when Meryl Streep won a lead-actress statuette for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” Many people had expected Viola Davis, of the Southern drama “The Help,” to win.

Twitter users reacted to Streep’s win with a mix of approval and disappointment. One user wrote, “I am so excited that Meryl Streep won Best Actress! I can't believe she only won 3 out of 17 times. She deserved so many more.”

Another user felt differently: “Streep is great; an icon; but her performance over Viola Davis in The Help? Really?”According to the Senti-meter’s analysis, tweets about Davis were more likely to be positive than those about Streep.

All told, Streep was mentioned in 146,470 tweets on Feb. 26, more than 40 times her daily average in the two months leading up to the show, and Davis was mentioned in 27,036 tweets, more than the previous two months combined.

Overall, “The Help” and best-picture winner “The Artist” had the most positive sentiment among all movies. One thing you can count on every year at the Oscars, no matter who wins, is that they’ll get people talking. Check out theinteractive Senti-meter tool, and read sample tweets, and track tweet volume for the entire awards season by clicking here.   

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Bret McKenzie, Best Original Song Oscar winner for The Muppets' "Man or Muppet," at the 2012 Academy Awards after-party. The song had only one competitor: Sergio Mendes, Carlinhos Brown, and Siedah Garreatt's "Real in Rio," from Carlos Saldanha's Rio. (Photo: Darren Decker / © A.M.P.A.S.)

"I grew up in New Zealand watching The Muppets on TV," McKenzie said in his acceptance speech. "I never dreamed I’d get to work with them. And I was genuinely starstruck when I finally met Kermit the Frog. But once you get to know him, he’s just a normal frog. And like many stars here tonight, he’s a lot shorter in real life. Just a few jokes."Bret McKenzie kept on with his "jokes" at the q&a backstage. See partial transcript (courtesy of AMPAS) below.

Q. Here you are joining the ranks of Hugh Jackman, Jane Campion. How does such a tiny country like New Zealand produce so many award winning artists…?
A. Well, it's a great place to grow up. You can do whatever you want there. Uhm, whereas, America, I think everyone's obsessed with their careers. New Zealand, you get to just live your dreams.

Q. Bret, being a Flight of the Choncords fan, how was it writing the song without Jemaine [Clement]?
A. Seems to work, seems to have come off very well. But, uhm, well, I am looking forward to writing with Jemaine in the future here. Because I can, you know, I will being able to pull out the Oscar card, and say, "Oh, I think we should use this chord," and I won an Oscar. So, yes.

Q. … Two songs were nominated for this. Why do you think that is and what particularly do you think about your song, not only allowed you to be nominated, but, like, to win?
A. Well, I am not sure why they only nominated two songs, but I was very happy with that situation. … I think the system, you know, leads itself toward musicals instead of songs, you know, the needle dropped.
Why my song won? To be honest, I think it was one of those musical numbers where, uhm, everyone did a great job, James Bobin, the director, did such a cool video. Jason Segel just channeled his, I don't know — he went really deep in his performance, both in the recording and on the screen. And, uhm, yeah, just felt like it was one of those, one of those things that fell into place very easily.

Q. Thank you, thank you. So, have to ask, do you feel certain amount of pressure living up to the legacy of previous Muppet songs? Like the "Rainbow Connection"?
A. Like the classic "Rainbow Connection"? I absolutely do. And, uhm, a friend of mine said, when I got the job of working on the film … "You will need to write another "Rainbow Connection." And I said, "You're right." And I didn't. And it's an honor to get this because "Rainbow Connection" didn't win an Oscar, but there's no doubt that that song is, you know, an absolute, timeless classic, and this is nothing in comparison.

Q. You mentioned Jim Henson the Muppets creator when you were up on stage. Can you talk about what he meant to you growing up and what this means? Just talk about your next [inaudible] and what he means to you?
A. Yeah. In the eighties, when I was at home a lot watching TV, my dad one day brought home a video recorder, and that was the latest thing. He'd been to America and came back with a video recorder. No one else had one. It was pretty exciting, but he only had two video cassettes, and one was The Dark Crystal. So, my brother and I watched that movie at least twice a week for, I guess, for about five years.
So, uhm, infinitely, Jim Henson influenced me, and I think it's you know, he is a huge inspiration. And, uhm, the other thing I love about the guy is he made children's, uhm, films that I think he found funny; that he was making them for adults that didn't patronize the minds of children.

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