Steven Spielberg to get highest
US civilian honour Filmmaker Steven Spielberg, singers Barbra Streisand, Gloria Estefan, James Taylor and composer Stephen Sondheim are among the recipients of this year’s Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honour. It will be presented to the awardees at the White House by the US President Barack Obama on November 24. Other recipients include veteran activist Bonnie Carroll, music producer Emilio Estefan, former representative Lee Hamilton, NASA mathematician Katherine G. Johnson, baseball legend Willie Mays, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), conductor Itzhak Perlman, and former EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus, reports a website. Posthumous honours will go to Yogi Berra, Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman elected to Congress; Indian treaty rights activist Billy Frank Jr., and human rights leader Minoru Yasui. The list of recipients of each year’s Medal of Freedom usually includes a handful from entertainment. Actress Meryl Streep and musician Stevie Wonder were among the recipients in 2014. (IANS)
Adele loves hip hop culture
Adele may be too far from creating hip hop music, but the Oscar-winning singer is surely a fan of the genre. The 27-year-old songtress, whose latest single “Hello” is topping the charts, is in love with the video of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ new track “Downtown”, it was reported. “The dancing! The marching! The mopeds! The chariots! You have to give it to that video – how ridiculous it is. It played a lot with hip hop culture – and I love hip hop culture, I love the bigness, the grandness, the showing-off-ness of it, I appreciate it and I revel in it,” she said. The “Rolling In The Deep” hitmaker said she was “in tears” while watching the clip for the song because it was so funny. “There’s something about these guys mocking the extravagance of (the culture) that I really responded to. It really made me laugh – I was in tears watching it,” she said. However, her all time favourite video is the one made for electronic musician James Blake’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s song “Case Of You”. “My favourite video of all time is actually for James Blake’s ‘A Case Of You’, the one that has Rebecca Hall in it – I can’t watch it without my entire body shaking.” (PTI)
Lindsay Lohan starts shooting
The Shadow Within Actress Lindsay Lohan teased fans with the news of an upcoming movie “The Shadow Within” when she shared a close-up selfie on her Instagram. “My first day on my new film! Will be sending a sneak peak of my character this week #theshadowwithin,” the 29-year-old actress wrote of her latest project while sporting a bright lip and damp hair. The former Disney star had a series of blockbuster hits in the earliest years of her career including The Parent Trap, Freaky Friday and Mean Girls. Her career came to a halt when she experienced a torrid timeline of multiple arrests, went to rehab on numerous occasions throughout the late 2000s and became entrenched in legal conflict over an array of misdemeanors and probation violations. Her highly anticipated career comeback, the titular role of Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime’s 2012 biopic Liz & Dick, turned out to be a commercial flop and the actress has not experienced a hit film since. (PTI)
