Damning study finds a 'whitewashed' Hollywood

In one of the most exhaustive and damning reports on diversity in Hollywood, a new study finds that the films and television produced by major media companies are "whitewashed," and that an "epidemic of invisibility" runs top to bottom through the industry for women, minorities and LGBT people.
A study to be released Monday by the Media, Diversity and Social Change Initiative at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism offers one of the most wide-ranging examinations of the film and television industries, including a pointed "inclusivity index" of 10 major media companies — from Disney to Netflix — that gives a failing grade to every movie studio and most TV makers.
Coming just days before an Academy Awards where a second straight year of all-white acting nominees has enflamed an industry-wide crisis, the report offers a new barrage of sobering statistics that further evidence a deep discrepancy between Hollywood and the American population it entertains, in gender, race and ethnicity.
"The prequel to OscarsSoWhite is HollywoodSoWhite," said Stacy L. Smith, a USC professor and one of the study's authors, in an interview. "We don't have a diversity problem. We have an inclusion crisis."
The study, titled the Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity, examined the 109 films released by major studios (including art-house divisions) in 2014 and 305 scripted, first-run TV and digital series across 31 networks and streaming services that aired from September 2014 to August 2015. More than 11,000 speaking characters were analyzed for gender, racial and ethnic representation and LGBT status. Some 10,000 directors, writers and show creators were examined, as was the gender of more than 1,500 executives.

The portrait is one of pervasive underrepresentation, no matter the media platform, from CEOs to minor characters. "Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed," the study concludes.
In the 414 studied films and series, only a third of speaking characters were female, and only 28.3 percent were from minority groups — about 10 percent less than the makeup of the U.S. population. Characters 40 years or older skew heavily male across film and TV: 74.3 percent male to 25.7 percent female.
Just 2 percent of speaking characters were LGBT-identified. Among the 11,306 speaking characters studied, only seven were transgendered (and four were from the same series).
"When we start to step back to see this larger ecology, I think we see a picture of exclusion," said Smith. "And it doesn't match the norms of the population of the United States."
Behind the camera, the discrepancy is even greater. Directors overall were 87 percent white. Broadcast TV directors (90.4 percent white) were the least diverse.
Just 15.2 percent of directors, 28.9 percent of writers and 22.6 percent of series creators were female. In film, the gender gap is greatest: Only 3.4 percent of the films studied were directed by women, and only two directors out of the 109 were black women: Ava DuVernay ("Selma") and Amma Asante ("Belle").

Former Miss America contestant dies week after car crash

 A former Miss America contestant who was critically injured in a car crash on a New Jersey highway died early Monday, a week after her car spun off a roadway and into trees.

Cara McCollum died at Cooper University Hospital, according to Frank DiMauro, chief operating officer of the TV station where she worked, and a Facebook message posted by her family.
Her family said in the Facebook post that the 24-year-old from Margate died with her family by her side in an operating room, and that her organs were donated.
"We've prayed constantly for a miracle, and we believe God has answered our prayers. Although it's not the miracle that we first envisioned, it's a miracle nonetheless," the family said. "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ... We all will miss her now that she's gone."
Her family posted a video of McCollum performing a version of "Cups" by Anna Kendrick in the film "Pitch Perfect."The song includes the lyrics "you're gonna miss me when I'm gone" and was performed by Miss New York Kira Kazantsev when she won the 2014 Miss America pageant. McCollum competed in that pageant after winning the 2013 Miss New Jersey title.
The Arkansas native graduated from Princeton University and was an anchor on SNJ Today, a news show serving the southern Jersey area.She was dating Keith Jones, a TV anchor for Philadelphia's NBC affiliate."Please accept our sincerest thanks for your heartfelt prayers," Jones wrote on Facebook. "Words fall short of describing the pain, but I'm eternally grateful and blessed for the time I spent with Cara. Her enormous heart enriched my life and changed me forever."
McCollum was alone in her vehicle and was not wearing a seatbelt when her Mustang veered off Route 55 in Pittsgrove Township and struck a tree, then spun again and hit two more trees before ending up in an embankment, police said.
State police say McCollum appeared to have been driving too fast for conditions on the wet road. They do not believe alcohol or drugs were a factor. The driver's side front air bag in her car deployed during the crash.

Kate Moss Spotted Walking with a Leg Brace and Crutches in London

It looks like Kate Moss will have to take a break from the catwalk – at least for a little while.

The supermodel was spotted wearing a brace on her right leg and walking with the support of crutches in London on Saturday.

Moss, 42, walked alongside beau Count Nikolai von Bismarck, and still managed to look chic in a gray and black-striped shirt, gray blazer, black pants and black boots.

The brace and crutches comes just after the duo were spotted on the slopes of a Verbier ski resort in Switzerland. Reps for Moss did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Moss has been linked to Bismarck – a descendant of the noble German family – since the fall, with U.K.'s The Telegraph explaining that the pair know each other through Bismarck's mother, Countess Debonnaire von Bismarck. He has also served as an assistant to famed fashion photographer Mario Testino.

Moss reportedly split from husband Jamie Hince last July, although it is unclear if either have formally filed divorce papers. 

Kerry Washington’s Mom Is a Game of Thrones Fanatic

She has made her love for the show very clear to her daughter

This isn’t the first time Kerry Washington has been embarrassed by her parents’ Game of Thrones obsession, and with the circles she runs in, it may not be the last. Washington appeared on Thursday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and revealed she had brought her mother along as her guest. However, dear old mom didn’t come to sit in the audience and watch her daughter; she came to meet Kimmel’s second guest of the evening, Thrones’Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

The elder Washington even stayed backstage in hopes of increasing her chances of meeting the man who plays Jaime Lannister. “My dressing room is next to his dressing room, so I have this fear that she’s got this cup against the wall, listening to what he’s doing,” the Scandal actress said.

“That’s the best-case scenario,” the host joked.

Leonardo DiCaprio: Winning 'an amazing feeling'

Here's another Bafta clip of Leonardo DiCaprio, describing winning his best actor award for The Revenant as "an amazing feeling". 

Speaking after the awards, he heaped praise on director and fellow Bafta winner Alejandro G Inarritu and called him "an absolute genius".

Wilderness drama The Revenant, starring Leon ardo DiCaprio, has dominated this year's Baftas.

It was named best film while DiCaprio won best actor and Alejandro G Inarritu best director.

The Mexican director described the win as "overwhelming". He said DiCaprio's "talent and commitment" to the "risky project" had "kept the film breathing".

The ceremony at London's Royal Opera House on Sunday was hosted by Stephen Fry.

Reaction to Bafta winners

DiCaprio, who plays fur-trapper Hugh Glass, said he was "humbled and honoured" and praised the influence of British actors on his acting career. He also used his win to wish his mother a happy birthday.

Apocalyptic action movie Mad Max: Fury Road took four awards: for make-up and hair, editing, costumes and production design.

Brie Larson won the best leading actress award for her role as a kidnapped mother in Room.

Director Lenny Abrahamson, who picked up the award on her behalf, called her "one of the best actors of her generation."

Men face higher risk of cancers linked to oral sex

Washington, United States: Men are twice as likely as women to get cancer of the mouth and throat linked to the human papillomavirus, or HPV, one of the most common sexually transmitted infections, researchers say.

For men, the risk of HPV-driven cancers of the head and neck rise along with the number of oral sex partners, researchers said Friday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in the US capital.

Nearly two out of three of these oral cancers in the United States and most western nations are caused by infection with the HPV 16 strain of the virus, and incidence of cancer is on the rise in recent years, said Gypsyamber D’Souza, who teaches epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Middle aged white men are at particularly high risk compared to other races.

She said her research shows that youths are engaging in oral sex at increasingly young ages, compared to past generations.

‘Our research shows that for men, the number of oral sex partners—as that number increases, the risk of an oral HPV infection increases,’ she told reporters.

But with women, the number of sexual partners does not appear to raise the risk.

‘Comparing men and women with the same number of sexual partners, a man is much more likely to become infected with oral HPV than a woman.’

Furthermore, women who have a greater number of vaginal sex partners appear to face a lower risk of oral HPV infection, she said.

The reason may be that when women are first exposed to HPV vaginally, they mount an immune response that prevents them from getting an oral HPV infection, she said.

But men do not seem to have equally robust immune responses.

‘Men are not only more likely to be infected with oral HPV infection than women, but our research shows that once you become infected, men are less likely to clear this infection than women, further contributing for the cancer risk.’

HPV infection is quite common, and most people clear the virus within a year or two, she said.

In some cases, however, HPV does not go away and can lead to cellular changes in the mouth and throat, which eventually become cancerous.

Oral sex may raise the risk of head and neck cancer by 22 percent, according to a study published January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

This type of cancer has risen 225 percent in the last two decades.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urges HPV vaccination for all pre-teen boys and girls so they can be protected against the infection before they become sexually active.

The pain and sadness of a Columbine killer's mother

The Columbine High School attack was 17 years ago, but remains etched into the consciousness both in the US and around the world. After years of silence, the mother of one of the two killers has been speaking to BBC Newsnight's Kirsty Wark."The hardest thing to understand was kids killing kids."
Columbine will forever be the shorthand for high school shootings in the US.

The Columbine attack

• 20 April 1999
• Columbine High School in Colorado
• Carried out by students Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17)
• Both took their own lives in the library of the school after the attack
• 12 students and one teacher were killed
• 21 others were injured
• Subject of a documentary by Michael Moore in 2002, Bowling for Columbine

Sue doesn't shy away from hard questions. She takes me through the day of the massacre, and her initial reaction. For the first months she was in in a really extreme state of denial.

"I didn't know that he was a killer. What I believed, at first, was that he was involved in something that had gone terribly wrong and people were hurt and killed. But in my mind, I could not accept him as a killer… until six months later when I actually saw the police report and they were able to say yes, this really occurred."

Sue's deep-set dark brown eyes betray her profound sadness. I asked her how she could cope with knowing that her son and Eric Harris had planned to kill everyone in Columbine High school, where the roll call was almost 2,000 pupils, and to that end they had amassed an arsenal of more than 90 bombs, guns and grenades.

"When I thought of that, and thought of the magnitude… I really didn't think I was going to live through it."

In her book Sue writes that it would have been better for the world had Dylan not been born - but not for her.

"When I think about what he did to other people, the lives he took, the trauma that he caused - for even the people who lived through this event and will have trauma for the rest of their lives - or who lost siblings or friends in this incident, there is no measuring that or quantifying it."

"I know it is terribly hard for me to even talk about my love for Dylan, for them to even hear me say that. But he was my son and knowing him did enrich my life and I loved him and he brought joy to me when he was alive. And since his death I have found meaning in life in trying to find answers to understand why this happened and how this terrible thing came about."

Sue described how on the morning of the massacre when it was still dark, and the house was black, her son, usually a reluctant early riser, thundered down the stairs, past her bedroom, right to the front door.

"I couldn't see him but all I heard him say was 'bye', and then he slammed the door and left."

In her book she writes that she was startled by the harshness in his voice. She and her husband Tom decided he would talk to her son that evening to find out if something was wrong. Of course, they never saw him again.

I asked her what she wished she had done that morning.

"I wish I had just tackled him and just said: 'Sit down. You're not going anywhere. We're gonna talk.'"