Sacha Baron Cohen wins Britannia comedy award

Sacha Baron Cohenin wheelchair stunt as he is honoured at the BAFTA-LA’s Britannia Awards, while Rob Brydon shines as the host of the film awards.

The British film community in Los Angeles kicked off this year’s awards season with BAFTA-LA’s Britannia Awards which featured some of Britain and America’s leading stars.

Hosted by Rob Brydon, who boosted his chances of a Hollywood career by having 1,500 guests at the Beverly Hilton Hotel roaring with laughter, and televised on BBC America, the light-hearted Britannia Awards have established themselves as one of the foremost award shows before the Golden Globes in January and the Oscars in March.

Wine flowed throughout the evening, which started with a VIP party and reception, and the comic tone of the night was set by Brydon with impersonations of how Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins and Michael Caine would have handled the George Clooney role in Gravity.

The top award, the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for excellence in film, went to George Clooney, who was introduced by Julia Roberts. She said she was chosen for the job because a) Brad Pitt was out of town and b) Matt Damon was in town but unavailable. She described Clooney, with whom she co-starred in the Oceans Eleven films, as “one helluva guy.”

(Credit; Telegraph)

Miley Cyrus smokes a joint on stage at EMAs

Miley Cyrus courted more controversy at the MTV European Music Awards by smoking cannabis on stage, while Eminem and One Direction were the big winners

Miley Cyrus lit up what looked like a cannabis joint as she accepted the award for Best Video at the MTV European Music Awards in Amsterdam last night.

She also performed her single We Can't Stop, reprising her twerking performance from the VMAs earlier this year.

Cyrus, 20, has been open about her drug use in the past, telling Rolling Stone magazine that she believes "weed is the best drug on earth".

She accepted the Best Video award for her single Wrecking Ball, in which she appears naked.

Eminem was the biggest individual winner of the night, collecting awards for Global Icon and Best Hip Hop act, on the same day as The Marshall Mathers LP 2 became his seventh consecutive UK number one album.

(Credit; Telegraph)

Artist Rita Duffy 'nearly quit Londonderry culture year'.

Rita Duffy expressed her frustration in a painting: 'Running away from Derry'

One of Northern Ireland's leading artists has said she nearly stopped working on Londonderry's UK City of Culture year because of bureaucracy.

Rita Duffy, who ran the Shirt Factory Project in the city, said she had "major problems" with some people from Derry City Council.

She added that for a time she had to fund the project herself.

At one stage, the artist directed her frustrations into a work called: "Running Away From Derry."

Speaking on the BBC One programme, The View, she added her voice to those who fear the problems between the city council and the Culture Company will threaten any hopes of a legacy flowing from the City of Culture year.

"It was really, really difficult to get this up and running, " she said.

"It wasn't the most welcoming place. I had major problems with individuals from Derry City Council. I couldn't get money to the project. In fact, at one stage I was leaving.

"I was employed by the Culture Company. If it wasn't for them I wouldn't have been here. Graeme Farrow (the Culture Company's head of programming) heard my proposal and, credit to him, commissioned it.

"It was getting it actually to happen. I funded this project with my credit card, such was the level of bureaucracy between the Culture Company and Derry City Council.

Rita Duffy said it was really difficult to get the project up and running

"I mean, Derry had an amazing opportunity to put on this year of culture and by and large I think it's been really good, but I think there've been huge, huge gaps exposed that need to be sorted."

In response, Derry City Council said it worked with the Culture Company to ensure delivery of the Shirt Factory into a gallery. It is more than satisfied it successfully delivered what it set out to achieve.

A spokesperson said: "Council worked tirelessly in close partnership with the Culture Company to ensure delivery of this space within the short timeframe involved and the obvious difficulties that arise in transforming a designated factory into a gallery.

"Council is more than satisfied that it successfully delivered what it set out to achieve.

"The City Factory space has proven to be a huge success, showcasing a range of exhibitions including Rita Duffy's Shirt Factory, the major photographic exhibition Picturing Derry and a major exhibition of photographic and video works by 2012 Turner prize nominee Willie Doherty."

The Shirt Factory Project has now come to an end. Part pop-up museum, part contemporary art gallery, it also had a shop selling uniquely branded souvenirs with a Derry theme.

Rita Duffy said that in January she intends to return to the project that employed four people. She's currently working on a range of funding opportunities, both private and public. She also hopes to link the project to Belfast.

(Tribute to the BBC)

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, M¡longa, review

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's new show M¡longa is a wonderfully inventive reinvention of Argentine dance.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was born in Belgium to a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father, and is a teetotal vegetarian. An Arab who doesn’t eat meat and a Belgian who doesn’t drink beer, he has always considered himself a thoroughbred outsider. Yet this sense of apartness has in fact long been one of the dance world’s greatest assets. It has propelled him on a lifelong quest to explore foreign cultures, immerse himself in them, find out what links us all.

And given that tango – which perhaps above all other dance forms is all about complex, wordless communication between partners – it was perhaps only a matter of time before this supremely humanistic choreographer turned his attention to Argentina’s greatest export.

M¡longa (silly typography aside, the word for both a tango party and an earlier dance style) is a very beautiful show indeed, a perfectly judged 90 minutes straight through, and Cherkaoui’s best for some time. Having walked us via huge video projection along the backstreets of Buenos Aires, where tango began in the 1890s, and set up an air of easy conviviality on stage, he goes on to play with the art form in all manner of wonderful ways, dissecting its movements, tropes and moods, and reassembling them in all sorts of new and riveting configurations.

With a superb, five-strong band stage-left playing a fusion of tango staples such as Piazzolla’s Libertango, along with elegant and inventive variations by Cherkaoui’s regular composer Szymon Brzóska, partners dance back-to-back, one man with two women, five couples as one, three men together. Thanks to a splendid and almost never intrusive contribution from video and set designer Eugenio Szwarcer, cardboard cut-outs come alive, one couple is transformed into a vast kaleidoscope, another multiplied into a bubbling crowd of performers. As reported by the Telegraph.