Lady Gaga will not perform at Oscars
Lady Gaga will not be performing at Sunday’s 95th Academy Awards ceremony. Oscars executive producer and showrunner Glenn Weiss confirmed Wednesday that the Oscar winner, who is nominated this year for her “Top Gun: Maverick” power ballad “Hold My Hand,” will not take the stage to sing the song.
Weiss said that the artists who perform this year’s Oscar-nominated original songs were invited to perform, but Lady Gaga couldn’t make it work due to her filming schedule for “Joker: Folie a Deux.”
“She is in the middle of shooting a movie right now,” Weiss said. “Here we are honoring the movie industry and what it takes to make a movie. And after a bunch of back and forth, it didn’t feel like she can get a performance to the caliber that we’re used to with her and that she is used to. So she is not going to perform on the show.”
However, it’s unclear if she’ll still attend. The other nominees for best original song have been confirmed for a performance at the ceremony airing on ABC.
New fungicide named after Reeves: Fans are used to Keanu Reeves playing characters that kill their enemies. So it’s no wonder that scientists in Germany named a group of new fungus-killing compounds after him: keanumycins.
Scientists hope it can kill fungus known to threaten crops and treat fungal infections in humans.
“The lipopeptides kill so efficiently that we named them after Keanu Reeves because he, too, is extremely deadly in his roles,” Sebastian Gotze, the lead author of the study on the fungicide, said in a statement.
Although the study by the Leibniz Institute for
Natural Product Research and Infection Biology was published early last month, news of the discovery didn’t make its way to Reeves until this last weekend during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session.
Reeves was grateful for the shoutout, but wished the scientists named it after one of his lethal alter egos instead.
“Hi, thank you...they should’ve called it John Wick...but that’s pretty cool...and surreal for me,” Reeves wrote through the Lionsgate account in response to a user who shared the news, referring to his title character in the action franchise. “But thanks, scientist people! Good luck, and thank you for helping us.”
Author Falconer dies:
Author and illustrator Ian Woodward Falconer, known for his “Olivia” book series for children, has died at age 63.
Falconer’s lawyer and agent Conrad Rippy said Falconer died Tuesday of natural causes while with family in Connecticut.
Falconer’s “Olivia” books feature a clever piglet with a great imagination named Olivia.
The first book, “Olivia,” was published in 2000. It stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for over a year, was awarded the Caldecott Honor and has sold over 10 million copies. He wrote and illustrated seven sequels.
March 10 birthdays: Musician Norman Blake is 85. Actor Chuck Norris is 83. Actor Sharon Stone is 65. Actor Jasmine Guy is 61. Bassist Jeff Ament is 60. Actor Paget Brewster is 54. Actor Jon Hamm is 52. Rapper Timbaland is 51. Singer Robin Thicke is 45. Singer Carrie Underwood is 40. Actor Olivia Wilde is 39. Actor Emily Osment is 31.