Actress Anne Hathaway will help announce the nominees for this year’s
Oscars next week.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said the 27-year-old will
join the organisation’s president Tom Sherak to reveal 10 of the 24
awards.
The nominations will be announced at the academy’s Beverly Hills
headquarters on 2 February.
Hathaway was nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for her leading role in Rachel
Getting Married.
However, the star lost out in the best actress category to Kate Winslet,
who won the award for The Reader.
Hathaway’s other movie credits include The Devil Wears Prada and The
Princess Diaries.
This year, the best picture category has been opened up to include 10
movies, instead of five.
The ceremony, on Sunday 7 March, takes place a fortnight later than last
year’s event, to avoid coinciding with the Winter Olympic Games in
Vancouver.
Comedian Steve Martin and actor Alec Baldwin are set to present the show.

The original Titanic sank in 1912. Now the blockbuster movie it inspired
has also gone down.
This time, though, it was not an iceberg that toppled it, but a 3D film
about a blue-skinned alien race defending their planet against human
invaders.
Towards the end of the last decade, James Cameron’s epic Titanic became
the most successful movie ever with global takings of $1.843bn (￡1.14bn).
But that record no longer stands thanks to Avatar – also directed by
Cameron – which this week stole its crown as the all-time global box
office champ, with receipts of $1.859bn (￡1.15bn).
It is an astonishing achievement for the 55-year-old Canadian, and one
that is unlikely to be repeated in his or our lifetimes.
Yet it is also a triumph for the 20th Century Fox studio and its parent
company NewsCorp, the financial backers of this bold, predominantly
computer-generated science-fiction saga.
Quite simply, Avatar has been a phenomenon that has captured the cultural
zeitgeist in a way few could have predicted.
It did so despite having few star names and generating a mixed reaction
from the critics, many of whom slated its plot, dialogue and
characterisation.
The film has also drawn fire from the blogosphere, with some pundits
attacking it for what they see as its anti-American subtext and
environmentalist agenda.
Some have even accused it of being racist in its depiction of a white hero
coming to the aid of a persecuted indigenous population – largely
portrayed, incidentally, by African-American and native American actors.
No one would claim Avatar is high art, any more than they would consider
Titanic a modern masterpiece.
Yet what it does have in its favour is state-of-the-art visual effects
that transport the viewer to a spectacularly realised extra-terrestrial
world.
That Avatar was Cameron’s first feature since Titanic – winner of 11
Oscars in 1998 – was enough by itself to ensure it would be a major
release.
Yet it took a combination of canny scheduling, aggressive marketing and an
industry-wide drive to revive 3D for its full potential to be realised.
Had Avatar opened last summer, it would have faced much stiffer
competition for audiences and cinema screens.
By launching in December, though, the film has enjoyed a virtually
unchallenged month-long run without any significant challenges from other
titles.
Fox’s rivals may have deliberately refrained from taking it on, mindful of
the huge expectation that surrounded this heavily hyped picture.
Unconfirmed reports suggest Fox has spent as much as $150 million (￡93
million) promoting a movie some claim cost $300m (￡185m) to make.
Perhaps the key factor in Avatar’s success, though, has been the way it
has turned the revived interest in the 3D format to its advantage.
Last year, such animated features as Up, Monsters Vs Aliens and Fox’s own
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs showed the industry digital 3D projection
was a viable proposition.

Opposition activists in Kyrgyzstan have been holding a hunger strike
protest for two weeks.
They are calling for an end to political repression in the country
following the jailing of an opposition leader.
The EU has expressed concern over continuing attacks on journalists and
opposition politicians.
It has also renewed its call for an investigation into the murder of a
Kyrgyz journalist in December.
A group of opposition supporters have been conducting what they are
calling a rotating hunger strike in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, and also
in the Osh region in the south of the country.
They are calling for an end to political repression in the country.
Their action began 14 days ago after a former defence minister turned
opposition leader Ismail Isakov was sentenced to eight years in prison for
corruption.
Two other opposition politicians are also facing trials.
The European Union recently expressed deep concern over increasing attacks
and acts of intimidation towards opposition figures and independent
journalists in Kyrgyzstan.
The EU has highlighted the case of the Kyrgyz journalist Genadiy Pavluk,
murdered in neighbouring Kazakhstan in December.
He was thrown from the sixth floor of an apartment block with his hands
and feet tied together.
Mr Pavluk had been in the process of setting up an opposition newspaper.
The government has denied involvement in the attacks.
Once described as an island of democracy in Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan was
recently downgraded by the Washington-based rights watchdog Freedom House
to “not free”.
Critics point to an increasing centralisation of power in the hands of
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev and his family.
Mr Bakiyev has recently appointed his son to head an important government
agency which will oversee all foreign grants and credits.

All eyes in the technology world are on Apple as it prepares to unveil its
latest creation, amid a swirl of speculation it is a tablet computer.
At 1800 GMT on Wednesday the company will hold a news conference in San
Francisco to launch the new product.
Media and tech blogs have been in overdrive, amid rumours the product will
be a keyboard-less tablet device.
For weeks, a flurry of photos and videos purporting to show the new device
have been circulating.
“One never knows what Apple might or might not do on any given Wednesday
in January,” said Mike Gartenberg, vice-president of strategy and analysis
at research firm Interpret.
“One thing we do know for sure is we are going to see some sort of new
device or category of device.”
The safe money is on the product being a tablet or slate-like computer
which traditionally bridges the gap between smartphones and laptops.
“The question here is does Apple have a different take on this category?
It has to be something that has a reason to exist all by itself and not
something that lives between a phone and a computer,” Mr Gartenberg told
BBC News.
Until now the tablet market has been regarded as a middling one with
revenue of around $950m (￡597m).
But many industry watchers believe Apple will do for this sector what the
iPod did for MP3 players.
Apple said it sold 21m iPods last quarter and, while that represented a
drop of 8% on the previous year, the company boasts a 70% market share.
“Our base case assumes the new tablet adds four million shipments, $3.2bn
(￡2.1bn) revenue and 82 cents of earnings per share in 2010, but we see
potential upside to six million units,” said Morgan Stanley analyst Katy
Huberty.
Interpret’s Mr Gartenberg agreed.
“Apple is not building products for tens of thousands of enthusiasts. They
are building products for tens of millions of customers,” he said.
Speculation has been rife about what this mythical device, sometimes
dubbed the “Jesus Tablet”, will actually do.
The closest followers of these trends are the blogs and so-called Apple
fan sites which have tracked everything from patents to supposed leaks
from various manufacturers and people claiming to have actual photographs.
“Apple has done an amazing job keeping this thing under wraps,” Paul
Miller, editor of tech blog Engadget told the BBC.
“We have just tracked eight years of rumour and speculation about a tablet
device from Apple, and here we are the day before the big announcement and
there is basically zero tangible information on it,” said Mr Miller.
Among the rumours is that the gadget will be a gaming device, an “e-reader
killer” or a really big iPhone.
Multi-touch will be at the heart of everything.
“Apple is looking at a new paradigm of user interface where the finger
replaces the mouse and the keyboard,” said Leander Kahney, founder of
CultofMac.com and author of Inside Steve’s Brain, a book about Apple boss
Steve Jobs.
“This is a very important step in mainstream computing.”
The tablet is expected to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi and 3G
cellular networks.

Several severed pigs’ heads have been found in mosque compounds in the
Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur.
The national police chief Musa Hassan linked the discoveries to recent
attacks on various houses of worship.
Pigs are considered unclean by Muslims and their presence in the mosque
compound will be taken as an insult.
In recent weeks, 11 churches, one Sikh temple and some Muslim prayer halls
have been vandalised amid a row over non-Muslims’ use of the word Allah.
Religious tensions in Malaysia have increased since a court ruled last
month that a Roman Catholic newspaper could use the word Allah in its
Malay-language edition to describe the Christian god.
“By looking at the modus operandi of the two incidents… I think it is
the same group that is involved in the previous attacks,” said Musa
Hassan.
AFP reported the police chief saying he believed the attacks were being
funded by a group that was attempting to worsen tensions in Malaysia, a
predominantly Muslim nation which is also home to large ethnic Chinese and
Indian communities.
“I think they are throwing money (to those carrying out the attacks) to
cause such incidents,” he told reporters.
“Don’t play with fire, I will not compromise on the security of the
country. Please do not provoke the public or any parties to undermine the
security of the country,” he added.
At least one severed pig’s head was found at the Taman Dato Harun mosque
in a nearby district, said the mosque’s prayer leader, Hazelaihi Abdullah.
The police chief confirmed this incident and said two others were left at
the nearby Al Imam al Tirmizi mosque.
Separately, Zulkifli Mohamad, the top official at the Sri Sentosa Mosque
on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, said men arriving for early morning
prayers found two bloodied pigs’ heads in plastic bags in the compound.
“We feel this is an evil attempt by some people to aggravate tensions,” Mr
Zulkifli told The Associated Press.
No-one has been hurt in the series of attacks on various houses of worship
since the 31 December court ruling which allowed non-Muslims to use the
word Allah as a translation for God.
Police have arrested 19 people in connection with the attacks so far.
Correspondents say some of Malaysia’s majority Muslim community suspect
Christians of wanting to use the word Allah to encourage Muslims to
convert to Christianity.
Analysts say the controversy has been stoked by hard-line elements within
Malay Muslim political groups to assert Malay primacy in a shifting
political scene.
The government has appealed against the ruling, in contrast to countries
like Indonesia, Egypt and Syria where Christian minorities freely use the
Arabic word to refer to God.