Benh Zeitlin wins best feature debut for "Beasts of the Southern Wild"
By Jill Lawless
LONDON (AP) --“Rust and Bone,” Jacques Audiard’s soaring story of love, loss and killer whales, was named best picture at the London Film Festival on Saturday.
The movie is a thriller-cum-melodrama about the unlikely relationship between a bare-knuckle boxer (Matthias Schoenaerts) and a whale trainer, played by Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard, who suffers a tragic workplace accident.
The president of the award jury, British playwright David Hare, praised it as “a film full of heart, violence and love.”
French filmmaker Audiard won the same award at the London festival in 2009 for his prison drama “A Prophet.”
American director Benh Zeitlin took the best debut feature prize with his atmospheric bayou saga “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Juror Hannah McGill praised the “daringly vast, richly detailed” film, which has won wide praise since its Sundance Film Festival debut earlier this year.
The trophy for best British newcomer went to Sally El Hosaini for “My Brother the Devil,” the story of British-Egyptian brothers struggling with conflicting loyalties and identities in modern-day London. The best documentary prize went to Alex Gibney’s “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” an investigation of sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic church.
Director Tim Burton and actress Helena Bonham Carter — real-life partners as well as creative collaborators — received career honors known as British Film Institute Fellowships during an awards ceremony at London’s Banqueting House.
Founded in 1957 to show the best of the world’s cinema to a British audience, the London festival has in recent years tried to carve out a place on the international movie calendar with bigger pictures, more glittering stars and more high-profile awards.
Highlights of the 12-day festival included Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage drama “Argo,” Michael Haneke’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Amour,” Rolling Stones documentary “Crossfire Hurricane” and Roger Michell’s “Hyde Park on Hudson,” a comedy-drama with Bill Murray as U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More