Beverly Hills, CA – Final ballots for the 84th Academy Awards® were mailed today (February 1) to the 5,783 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Completed ballots must be returned to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) by 5 p.m. Tuesday, February 21.  Ballots received after the deadline will not be counted.

Listed on the ballots are nominees in 19 Awards categories.  Separate ballots for five categories (Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, Foreign Language Film, Animated Short Film and Live Action Short Film) will be distributed after verification of mandatory member attendance at screenings.

Following the tabulation of the votes, the winners’ names will be placed in sealed envelopes to be opened on Oscar Sunday, February 26.

Academy Awards for outstanding film achievements of 2011 will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center®, and televised live by the ABC Television Network beginning at 4 p.m. PT/7 p.m. ET.  The Oscar presentation also will be televised live in more than 225 countries worldwide.

The Telluride Film Festival (September 3-6, 2010) is announcing that its 2010 Guest Director is Michael Ondaatje. The celebrated writer has been invited to select a series of films to present at the 37th Telluride Film Festival. The Guest Director program is sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Each year Festival directors Tom Luddy, Gary Meyer and Julie Huntsinger select one of the world’s great film enthusiasts to join them in the creation of the program lineup. The Guest Director serves as a key collaborator in the Festival’s programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films to Telluride.

“When we first met with Michael to invite him to be our Guest Director, his enthusiasm was infectious and we knew we had made a perfect choice, ‘ said Tom Luddy.

Michael Ondaatje, best known as a novelist and author of The English Patient, has a body of work also encompassing memoir, poetry, music and film. He published a volume of memoir, entitled Running in the Family, in 1983. His collections of poetry include There’s a Trick With a Knife I’m Learning To Do (1979); The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (1981); The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems (1989); and Handwriting: Poems (1998). His first novel, Coming Through Slaughter (1976), is a fictional portrait of jazz musician Buddy Bolden. The English Patient (1992) won the Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1996. In 2000, Ondaatje was awarded the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the Prix Medicis, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Giller Prize for his novel Anil’s Ghost. Ondaatje’s most recent non-fiction work is The Conversations: Walter Murch & the Art of Editing Film (2002). His latest novel is entitled Divisadero (2007). He has directed two documentaries, Sons of Poetry (1970) and The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show (1971).

Julie Huntsinger remembers, “The ideas were already flowing in that first meeting. In the following weeks he asked us to help secure prints for him to screen movies fondly remembered as well as those he had heard about and was curious to consider.”

“The range of Michael’s choices will present audiences with an enthralling program of surprises and discoveries that cover an incredible range of styles, eras and subjects. His introductions promise to be enlightening, “ added Gary Meyer.

Past Guest Directors include Alexander Payne, Salman Rushdie, Peter Bogdanovich, B. Ruby Rich, Phillip Lopate, Errol Morris, Bertrand Tavernier, John Boorman, John Simon, Buck Henry, Laurie Anderson, Stephen Sondheim, G. Cabrera Infante, Peter Sellars, Don DeLillo, J.P. Gorin, Edith Kramer and Slavoj Zizek.

In keeping with Telluride Film Festival tradition, Ondaatje’s film selections, along with the rest of the Telluride lineup will be kept secret and unveiled on Opening Day, September 3, 2010.

Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow took home the Oscar for best achievement in makeup for Star Trek

In the recent round of talk show appearances by actors from the new version of Alice in Wonderland, many of the performers discussed their lengthy stints “getting into costume.”  This is both a travesty and at the same time not surprising.  While costumes have been heralded by cinema onlookers for decades, makeup has only recently been given the respect is has long deserved, both by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and by people who work in movie making alike.

Historically, makeup has only been treated as a marginalized side craft in movie making.  Honorary awards were given sporadically to exceptional makeups in films including The Mummy, created by Jack Pierce in 1932, The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, created by William Tuttle in 1964, and Planet of the Apes, created by John Chambers in 1968.  Unthinkably, an official Oscar for makeup did not exist until 1982 when the first award was given for Rick Baker’s stunning work in 1981’s An American Werewolf in London.

This year, three wildly divergent films were noted by the Academy with an Oscar nomination, drawn from a large field of potential candidates.  In what has become tradition of late, the Academy presents these three films at the Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Symposium – as those two crafts are often intertwined and whose craftspeople belong to the same union, Local 706.

At the March 6 event, elegantly hosted by Leonard Engelman at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater, the outstanding nuances of this craft presented makeup as a truly artistic endeavor as intricate as cinematography, editing, music, or any one of a number of particular jobs within the overall field of motion picture creation.

Vittorio Sodano (makeup effects) and Aldo Signoretti (hairstylist) were responsible for aging the youthful actors for Il Divo

First up was Il Divo, an Italian production featuring character and age makeups, one specialty of makeup artists throughout the decades going back to the earliest films.  In fact, age makeup mastery is often one of the most awarded types of skills for makeup artists, especially in the Academy Awards, including last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Greg Cannom), Amadeus (Dick Smith), and a host of films whose work was not awarded due to the lack of an official Oscar category (an example of a glaring omission would be Bob Schiffer’s beautiful work in Birdman of Alcatraz).  In Il Divo, the age makeups were apparently created with the use of old age stipple in favor of prosthetic appliances in many stages, both of which are popular techniques for aging a character.  From Italy, Vittorio Sodano (makeup effects) and Aldo Signoretti (hairstylist) were responsible for Il Divo, with Signoretti commenting to the symposium audience how a lengthy testing period was necessary to properly age the actors in progressive stages.  According to one longtime makeup and hairstyling expert, Sodano also used “very large, extremely thin silicone appliances that wrapped around the face on the main male character, Andreotti.  His wife, played by Anna Bonaiuto, wore the fewest appliances – only one piece.  There was stretch stipple used on others, but they also had bald caps, foam caps with hair punched in and many other subtle things that were undetectable to the untrained eye.” As evidenced by Il Divo’s photo display, many of these age makeups were striking in their appearance and transformation of the youthful actors into believable middle and old-age characters.

Joel Harlow created the makeup for Eric Bana’s Romulan character Nero for Star Trek

Next was Star Trek, director JJ Abrams’ energetic re-imagining of the 44-year-old science-fiction franchise as a wholly new feature film.  Featuring a range of makeup work, including Vulcans and Romulans created by Joel Harlow, aliens designed and created by Barney Burman, and an entire principal cast supervised by makeup department head Mindy Hall, Star Trek – the eventual Oscar winner – required the talents of all three of the recipients to realize the enormous project.  Hall, who has previously department headed other non-science-fiction projects, spoke of the need to approach each character as an individual makeup, whether or not he or she was realized with prosthetics.  Additionally, Hall detailed the time-consuming process of creating eyebrows for her Vulcans by shaving the actors’ actual eyebrows and painstakingly hand-laying new Vulcan eyebrows one hair at a time.  She often collaborated on Vulcans with Harlow, who later added that he created the Romulan characters with large prosthetic headpieces that covered the actors’ foreheads and cheeks which had to be carefully painted and often applied without the benefit of previously lifecasting his actors.  Harlow also created and applied ears for his Vulcan and Romulan characters, breathing new life into the designs originally conceived for the 1960s TV show.

Barney Burman’s Aliens

A third-generation legacy, Burman, whose grandfather, Ellis, Sr., uncle, Sonny, father, Tom, and brother Rob, all trained in creating prosthetics, was tasked with numerous alien manifestations.  Working with a large crew in his Los Angeles-area lab, he took lifecasts of actors, sculpted alien makeups, made molds of the clay sculptures, and fabricated appliances in silicone, one of several materials that prosthetic artists utilize, including foam latex, gelatin, and others.  Certainly, Star Trek was a complex, massive, and classic project for which to create makeup characters, but it is the combined abilities of Hall, Harlow, Burman and their extensive crews which brought the film its richly deserved Oscar.

Makeup and hair designer Jenny Shircore and hairstylist Jon Henry Gordon were responsible for the Oscar nominated hair and makeup for The Young Victoria

Unfortunately, the representatives of the third film, The Young Victoria, were stuck in a travel delay and did not partake in the onstage presentations or interviews about their work in the period film.  Yet, they finally arrived in the post-event reception and spoke about the lengthy process of changing contemporary actors into those from the early 19^th century.  Makeup and hair designer Jenny Shircore mentioned the hours needed to do so with Emily Blunt as the title character while hairstylist Jon Henry Gordon noted that he has been specializing in period hair work since an uncredited turn on 1997’s Titanic.

With extensive insight into this most hands-on of crafts in cinema, the symposium merely contained one major flaw: it only takes place once a year, whereas regularly-held seminars about this crucial aspect of the business would illuminate the machinations of makeup artistry for not only fans and enthusiasts of movies but also for the denizens of people who work inside the business as well.