The 85th Academy Awards season got under way on Thursday as the heaviest number of Oscar nominations — including nods for best picture — went to “Lincoln,” about a president’s struggle with the Civil War; “Life of Pi,” about a shipwreck survivor and a tiger; “Silver Linings Playbook,” a comedy, of sorts, about a man with bipolar disorder; and “Les Misérables,” filled with songs of the oppressed. Close behind were “Argo,” about political captivity; “Amour,” a French-language film about aging and dying; and “Django Unchained,” a tale of slavery and retribution. “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which chronicles a child’s encounters with rising floodwaters in the bayou, and “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the murky pursuit of a national enemy, also received best picture nominations. As Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes report, the shocker was a triple snub in the best director category: Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty”), Ben Affleck (“Argo”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Django Unchained”) were passed over despite widespread expectations that one or all of them would be nominated. Instead, the nominations went to Steven Spielberg (“Lincoln”), Ang Lee (“Life of Pi”), Michael Haneke (“Amour”), David O. Russell (“Silver Linings Playbook”) and Benh Zeitlin (“Beasts of the Southern Wild,” his first film). In all, nine films received best picture nominations in a field that can include as many as 10 or as few as 5, depending on how voters from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spread their hand.
Beats Electronics, which has been slow to reveal its plans for a streaming music service since it bought the digital service, Mog, last year, has made two hires that should signal to Spotify, Rhapsody and others that Beats is serious about challenging them. On Thursday, Beats — whose founders are the hip-hop star Dr. Dre and the music executive Jimmy Iovine — announced that Ian Rogers of Topspin Media would be the chief executive of its digital service, which is code-named Daisy. Last month, a profile in The New Yorker of the musician Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails, “The Social Network”) revealed that he was acting as creative director. As Ben Sisario reports, the announcement on Thursday offered few details about what music fans (and current Mog subscribers) can expect. Daisy will be based on Mog’s technology to some degree, although executives suggested some changes, like the ability for artists to interact with their fans.
Axe, the men’s grooming brand, is promoting a new line of products called Apollo by sending 22 consumers into space. The Unilever brand refers to the effort as the Axe Apollo Space Academy, or AASA, meant to rhyme with NASA. As Andrew Adam Newman reports, Axe is contracting with the Space Expedition Corporation, which plans to begin conducting commercial flights on Lynx, a suborbital space plane, in 2014. The Lynx, which is being developed by XCOR Aerospace, will take off and land horizontally, like an airplane, and use rocket power to blast into space. It seats only the pilot and one passenger. Space Expedition Corporation, which reports having already sold more than 200 tickets for future spaceflights, usually charges $100,000 for each flight that Axe is giving away. Flights are planned to last about an hour, reach an altitude of 64 miles, and provide a weightlessness experience of about five to six minutes before the Lynx descends. The flights will be from Curaçao, the island off the Venezuelan coast.
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