Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr wins Orwell journalism prize
Iran and Azerbaijan have expressed their eagerness to expand cultural ties. Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev said in a meeting with Iran’s Culture Minister Abbas Salehi that Tehran-baku relations went beyond diplomatic ties and have now turned into fraternal relations, IRNA wrote.
He recalled that in the last five years he has met Iran’s president 12 times.
The two countries, said Aliyev, have a lot of cultural commonalities, so holding cultural weeks will provide fine opportunities to expand bilateral ties. The Observer and Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr won the Orwell journalism prize for her investigation into the collapsed political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
The prize is awarded by the Orwell Foundation for the best political writing of the year, with the support of the family of the writer George Orwell, theguardian.com reported.
Cadwalladr said her experience of reporting the story, which resulted in the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg issuing a public apology for the misuse of user data, had been “like being strapped to a freight train for the last 18 months”.
“What we are seeing here is a systemic failure,” Cadwalladr told an audience in central London after collecting the prize. “Our laws do not work and our regulators are unable to regulate. We do not have the information we need from the big tech platforms.”
The judges praised her ‘whole set of amazing stories’ and said they believed that “if George Orwell had been here he would have been unanimous in choosing our winner”.
The Orwell prize for exposing Britain’s social evils went to Sarah O’connor, John Burnmurdoch and Christopher Nunn of the Financial Times for their study of the British towns left behind by the modern economy.
The Orwell book prize went to a visibly overwhelmed Darren Mcgarvey, also known as the Loki, for his book ‘Poverty Safari’, which explores deprivation in Glasgow. It was described as “not just an excellent example of political writing” but also “a book which needed to be written”.
Meanwhile, the Crick prize for the best article in the journal Political Quarterly went to Helen Thompson of the University of Cambridge.
The prize-giving was preceded by a debate on the impact of the Grenfell Tower disaster on society. The writer Anthony Anaxagorou, who lost friends in the fire, urged the public “to read more critically between the lines and to want more from their journalism”.
Orwell’s son Richard Blair, who helped present the prizes, said his father would have cast a critical eye over the Grenfell disaster and the media response. “Were he alive, and had this happened in his time, he would have very quickly cut through a lot of the obfuscation on all sides — both press and government.”
Compiled from Dispatches
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited a record number of new members, extending invitations to 928 people of whom three are Iranians.
The Academy topped last year’s record of 774 new members. It invited 683 members in 2016 and 322 in 2015, which were also record numbers.
Iranian cinematographer Hossein Jafarian, for his contribution in Asghar Farhadi’s ‘The Salesman’ and ‘Sara and Ayda’ by Maziar Miri, as well as Ali Asgari and Farnoosh Samadi for ‘Gaze’ and ‘The Silence’ in the short film and feature animation section.
The expansion is said to be an effort for more diversification.
According to Variety, the new invited class is 49 percent female, which brings the total representation of women to 31 percent — a considerable boost compared to the 28 percent representation in 2017. Meanwhile, the representation of people of color has increased from 13 percent in 2017 to 16 percent.
Other notable actors invited include Timothee Chalamet, Emilia Clarke, Lily James, Evan Rachel Wood and Dave Chappelle.
Actors make up about 20 percent of the Academy’s membership and are its largest branch. The new members come from 59 different countries and include South Korean actress Doona Bae, Algerian actress Sofia Boutella, and Indian actor Ali Fazal.
Some of the big-name actors include Daniel Kaluuya, Mindy Kaling, Tiffany Haddish, Kumail Nanjiani, Blake Lively, Amy Schumer, Dave Chappelle, Miles Teller, Randall Park, Daisy Ridley, Timothee Chalamet, Hong Chau, Emilia Clarke, Lena Headey, Blake Lively, Regina Hall, Rashida Jones, Lily James, Lily Collins, Chloe Grace Moretz, Olivia Munn, Kal Penn, Pedro Pascal, Amber Tamblyn, Damon Wayans, Gina Rodriguez, Sarah Silverman, Jada Pinkett Smith, Evan Rachel Wood, and Amandla Stenberg.
India received 20 invitations this year, including Shah Rukh Khan, Aditya Chopra, Soumitra Chatterjee, Madhabi Mukherjee and Naseeruddin Shah.
J.K. Rowling, Emily V. Gordon, Jonathan Nolan, Joe Robert Cole and Virgil Williams are among the most distinguished writers invited by the Academy.
Angela Robinson (‘Professor Marston and the Wonder Women’), Justin Simien (‘Dear White People’) and Sean Baker (‘The Florida Project’) are among the directors invited to join the Academy. International filmmakers include Luca Guadagnino, Andy Muschietti, Chloe Zhao, Nadine Labaki, Jeanpierre Jeunet, Ziad Doueiri, and Michel Gondry.