Oscar Award 2010

Washington DC: Oscar night always captures millions of imaginations worldwide with its classic blend of the Hollywood royalty, glimpses of movie-making magic and the ceaseless speculation on who would win the most coveted crowns. This year, on a grey Sunday evening in Los Angeles, the 82nd Academy Awards did not disappoint.

With a riveting showdown building between a goliath feel-good blockbuster and a relatively unknown new entrant on a controversial subject, audiences were kept guessing until the very end about whether Avatar or The Hurt Locker would win in the Best Film and Best Director categories. The fact that they were respectively directed by James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow, who used to be married to each other, only heightened the sense of a movie-like plot within the Oscars.

And the day belonged to The Hurt Locker, which swept the coveted prize of Best Picture. It was also a double triumph for Kathryn Bigelow who became the first woman to be awarded Best Director. She dedicated her victory to men and women in uniform the world over. The Hurt Locker snatched up six awards in total, a tidy sum for a film made on a budget of $11 million, compared to Avatar's nearly $400 million. Avatar won three academy awards on Sunday evening.

In an unusual shift from previous years, the number of films nominated for the Best Picture award was increased from five to 10. The last time 10 films were nominated was back in 1943, when Casablanca won. “After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,” said Sid Ganis, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

In an equally polarised competition for the Best Actress award, newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, who was highly acclaimed for her role in Precious, as a poor, abused African American struggling against the odds in New York, was pitched against stalwarts of Hollywood like Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren and Sandra Bullock. Bullock, who was nominated for her Sarah-Palin-esque soccer-mom performance in The Blind Side went on to win the award. However another star of Precious, Mo'Nique, walked away with the Best Actress in a Supporting Role award.

Among the men, Jeff Bridges struck gold in the Best Actor category, beating out some impressive rivals such as George Clooney, Morgan Freeman, Colin Firth and Jeremy Rener. Bridges, who is from a lineage of actors, said, “Thank you Mum and Dad, for turning me on to such a groovy profession.” Christoph Waltz took home the Best Actor in a Supporting Role award for Inglourious Basterds, a quirky and violent rewriting of World War II by Quentin Tarantino.

But as always, the glitter of Oscar night was about so much more than just the top awards. The Academy cinematically remembered its knights who had fallen during the course of the year, including Patrick Swayze, David Carradine, Ron Silver, Brittany Murphy, Michael Jackson and Natasha Richardson. And of course Hollywood wouldn't be Hollywood without the usual dose of tomfoolery – ably provided this time by hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, and Ben Stiller who turned up as a blue Na'vi warrior (from Avatar). Presenting the award for best make-up, he said, “After I announce the winner I will try to stand as far away as possible so as not to demean their moment of triumph.”

An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs in the World

LONDON (Reuters) – A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.

A panel of 41 scientists from across the world reviewed 20 years' worth of research to try to confirm the cause of the so-called Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction, which created a "hellish environment" around 65 million years ago and wiped out more than half of all species on the planet.

Scientific opinion was split over whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in what is now India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted around 1.5 million years.

The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.

"We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

The new study, conducted by scientists from Europe, the United States, Mexico, Canada and Japan and published in the journal Science, found that a 15-kilometre (9 miles) wide asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in what is now Mexico was the culprit.

"We now have great confidence that an asteroid was the cause of the KT extinction. This triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides, which created tsunamis," said Joanna Morgan of Imperial College London, a co-author of the review.

The asteroid is thought to have hit Earth with a force a billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.

Morgan said the "final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs" came when blasted material flew into the atmosphere, shrouding the planet in darkness, causing a global winter and "killing off many species that couldn't adapt to this hellish environment."

Scientists working on the study analyzed the work of paleontologists, geochemists, climate modelers, geophysicists and sedimentologists who have been collecting evidence about the KT extinction over the last 20 years.

Geological records show the event that triggered the dinosaurs' demise rapidly destroyed marine and land ecosystems, they said, and the asteroid hit "is the only plausible explanation for this."

Peter Schulte of the University of Erlangen in Germany, a lead author on the study, said fossil records clearly show a mass extinction about 65.5 million years ago -- a time now known as the K-Pg boundary.

Despite evidence of active volcanism in India, marine and land ecosystems only showed minor changes in the 500,000 years before the K-Pg boundary, suggesting the extinction did not come earlier and was not prompted by eruptions.

The Deccan volcano theory is also thrown into doubt by models of atmospheric chemistry, the team said, which show the asteroid impact would have released much larger amounts of sulphur, dust and soot in a much shorter time than the volcanic eruptions could have, causing extreme darkening and cooling.

Gareth Collins, another co-author from Imperial College, said the asteroid impact created a "hellish day" that signaled the end of the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs, but also turned out to be a great day for mammals.

"The KT extinction was a pivotal moment in Earth's history, which ultimately paved the way for humans to become the dominant species on Earth," he wrote in a commentary on the study.

(Collins has created a website at http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/Chicxulub.html which allows readers to see the effects of the asteroid impact.)

(Editing by Myra MacDonald)

Wind score an own goal