UR TV CAST

It would probably be a waste of this location to use the land opportunistically for housing; this is the time to take a long-term view of what is in London’s strategic interest and reject short-term answers.I definitely think that any future of the Dome location should follow the principle established by the New Millennium Experience Company to relate the employment and other benefits of the site to surrounding communities, particularly regarding training. As well as the local council ­ Greenwich ­ this ought to include the neighbouring boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham, as well as communities further afield along public transport routes. The accessibility of the location is one of its prime assets, particularly from deprived areas of inner east and south London.For a government that has prided itself on prudence, the Dome, like its plans for the Tube, has been an extraordinary example of politicians sticking to their guns when every sensible view was ringing the warning bells. In the process, vast amounts of public cash were thrown at the project. If the site has a future, then it must move out of the short-termism of the last few years and play its part in the economic dynamism and regeneration of the east of London.. I can understand the excitement of directors and actors, for whom a statue plated with gold means that they can order a similarly coated Rolls.

And I can see why the dressmakers, hair-stylists and chauffeurs of Los Angeles ring the day in tinsel on their calendar each year. I can understand the excitement of directors and actors, for whom a statue plated with gold means that they can order a similarly coated Rolls. And I can see why the dressmakers, hair-stylists and chauffeurs of Los Angeles ring the day in tinsel on their calendar each year. But will someone tell a transplanted American why the British media become so excited about the Academy Awards?
It is understandable that the tabloids take the chance to peer down those famous d?lletages, but even a toff-sheet such as The Daily Telegraph, while denouncing the spectacle as “toe-curling” and “cringe- making”, spreads Oscar news, frocks and analysis over three pages and takes most of the front to show us Julia Roberts’s gown and the back of her throat.Back in the USA, where I come from, the Oscars are taken about as seriously as the Eurovision Song Contest is here. But the British media behave as if Oscar night were a combination of the World Cup, the Nobel Prize and Miss Universe.Hollywood’s “love affair with the British is over”, sobbed one representative of Jilted Nation.

England’s failure to pick up more than one award, and that a minor one (for costume design), sent shock waves of self-doubt through the papers, which tried to recoup by counting the number of local designers who had clothed the Oscar crowd. One desperate cheerleader even pointed out that an actress who turned up in an Italian job had been considering two home boys.None of this corresponds with the vision of England that brought me here ­ a place where people coughed and gently smiled at outbursts of pointless enthusiasm. I expected the average ironic Brit to point out that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had little to do with either.A public-relations exercise since they began in 1927, the Oscars are voted for by such representatives of arts, or sciences, as administrators, executives, producers and, yes, public-relations men and women. Hollywood well knows there is no publicity mileage in any of these categories, but producers and pencil-pushers are honoured in the breach, by being able to glorify the actor or composer they may have tried to drive out of the industry the year before.One could see why grey, grimy Britain would be mesmerised by Hollywood glamour, in the days when there was such a thing. But nowadays, motion-picture actresses either go for “class” in boring post-deb dresses (Catherine Zeta Jones, in her basic black strapless, was about as glamorous as a lavatory attendant to anyone who remembers Rita Hayworth’s similar outfit in Gilda) or, like Courtney Love and Pamela Anderson, look as if they’re on their way to work, under the pier.Nor do the movies retain their economic or cultural power.

In a surrealistically sick joke, the Academy offered a television set as an inducement to keep acceptance speeches short. Television, of course, nearly made Hollywood a ghost town in the Fifties, and its evil adjunct, video, is now influential in killing off the film aesthetic (cinematography that won’t look good on the small screen isn’t likely to make it to the big one).The current American disdain of British artists is plain not only when films are judged, but before they’re made. In Hollywood’s great days, English actors were paradigms of heroism and elegance; now they’re in demand only to take the parts of villains or intellectuals ­ but I repeat myself ­ for moronic, jingoistic audiences.Is an authority that presides over this kind of art (or science) one to which you really want to submit yourselves for judgement, one to make you feel all is lost when you get the thumbs-down? Let’s get real, guys It’s only a movie.. ‘Labour has yet to make a convincing case that its foreign policy is guided by a superior set of ethics’

It is one of the most shameful blots on the record of the Blair administration.