Ravings of the Loquacious Madman

81st Annual Academy Awards

Performance by an actor in a leading role

• Richard Jenkins in “The Visitor” (Overture Films)
• Frank Langella in “Frost/Nixon” (Universal)
• Sean Penn in “Milk” (Focus Features)
• Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
• Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

• Josh Brolin in “Milk” (Focus Features)
• Robert Downey Jr. in “Tropic Thunder” (DreamWorks, Distributed by DreamWorks/Paramount)
• Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Doubt” (Miramax)
• Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.)
• Michael Shannon in “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage)

Performance by an actress in a leading role

• Anne Hathaway in “Rachel Getting Married” (Sony Pictures Classics)
• Angelina Jolie in “Changeling” (Universal)
• Melissa Leo in “Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics)
• Meryl Streep in “Doubt” (Miramax)
• Kate Winslet in “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company)

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

• Amy Adams in “Doubt” (Miramax)
• Penélope Cruz in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (The Weinstein Company)
• Viola Davis in “Doubt” (Miramax)
• Taraji P. Henson in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.)
• Marisa Tomei in “The Wrestler” (Fox Searchlight)

Best animated feature film of the year

• “Bolt” (Walt Disney), Chris Williams and Byron Howard
• “Kung Fu Panda” (DreamWorks Animation, Distributed by Paramount), John Stevenson and Mark Osborne
• “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Andrew Stanton

Achievement in art direction

• “Changeling” (Universal), Art Direction: James J. Murakami, Set Decoration: Gary Fettis
• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Art Direction: Donald Graham Burt, Set Decoration: Victor J. Zolfo
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Art Direction: Nathan Crowley, Set Decoration: Peter Lando
• “The Duchess” (Paramount Vantage, Pathé and BBC Films), Art Direction: Michael Carlin, Set Decoration: Rebecca Alleway
• “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage), Art Direction: Kristi Zea, Set Decoration: Debra Schutt

Achievement in cinematography

• “Changeling” (Universal), Tom Stern
• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Claudio Miranda
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Wally Pfister
• “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Chris Menges and Roger Deakins
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Anthony Dod Mantle

Achievement in costume design

• “Australia” (20th Century Fox), Catherine Martin
• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Jacqueline West
• “The Duchess” (Paramount Vantage, Pathé and BBC Films), Michael O’Connor
• “Milk” (Focus Features), Danny Glicker
• “Revolutionary Road” (DreamWorks, Distributed by Paramount Vantage), Albert Wolsky

Achievement in directing

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Fincher
• “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Ron Howard
• “Milk” (Focus Features), Gus Van Sant
• “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Stephen Daldry
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Danny Boyle

Best documentary feature

• “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” (Cinema Guild), A Pandinlao Films Production, Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath
• “Encounters at the End of the World” (THINKFilm and Image Entertainment), A Creative Differences Production, Werner Herzog and Henry Kaiser
• “The Garden” (A Black Valley Films Production), Scott Hamilton Kennedy
• “Man on Wire” (Magnolia Pictures), A Wall to Wall in association with Red Box Films Production, James Marsh and Simon Chinn
• “Trouble in the Water” (Zeitgeist Films), An Elsewhere Films Production, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal

Best documentary short subject

• “The Conscience of Nhem En” (A Farallon Films Production), Steven Okazaki
• “The Final Inch” (Vermilion Films in association with Google.org), Irene Taylor Brodsky and Tom Grant
• “Smile Pinki” (A Principe Production), Megan Mylan
• “The Witness- From the Balcony of Room 306” (A Rock Paper Scissors Production), Adam Pertofsky and Margaret Hyde

Achievement in film editing

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Lee Smith
• “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Mike Hill and Dan Hanley
• “Milk” (Focus Features), Elliot Graham
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Chris Dickens

Best foreign language film of the year

• “The Baader Meinhof Complex” (A Constantin Film Production), Germany
• “The Class” (Sony Pictures Classics), A Haut et Court Production, France
• “Departures” (Regent Releasing), A Departures Film Partners Production, Japan
• “Revanche” (Janus Films), A Prisma Film/Fernseh Production, Austria
• “Waltz with Bashir” (Sony Pictures Classics), A Bridgit Folman Film Gang Production, Israel

Achievement in makeup

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Greg Cannom
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), John Caglione, Jr. and Conor O’Sullivan
• “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” (Universal), Mike Elizalde and Thom Floutz

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Alexandre Desplat
• “Defiance” (Paramount Vantage), James Newton Howard
• “Milk” (Focus Features), Danny Elfman
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), A.R. Rahman
• “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Thomas Newman

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song)

• “Down to Earth” from “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Music by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman, Lyric by Peter Gabriel
• “Jai Ho” from “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Music by A.R. Rahman, Lyric by Gulzar
• “O Saya” from “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Music and Lyric by A.R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam                  

Best motion picture of the year

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), A Kennedy/Marshall Production, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Ceán Chaffin, Producers
• “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), A Universal Pictures, Imagine Entertainment and Working Title Production, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Eric Fellner, Producers
• “Milk” (Focus Features), A Groundswell and Jinks/Cohen Company Production, Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen, Producers
• “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), A Mirage Enterprises and Neunte Babelsberg Film GmbH Production, Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Donna Gigliotti and Redmond Morris, Producers
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), A Celador Films Production, Christian Colson, Producer

Best animated short film

• “La Maison en Petits Cubes” (A Robot Communications Production), Kunio Kato
• “Lavatory- Lovestory” (A Melnitsa Animation Studio and CTB Film Company Production), Konstantin Bronzit
• “Oktapodi” (Talantis Films), A Gobelins, L’école de l’image Production, Emud Mokhberi and Thierry Marchand
• “Presto” (Walt Disney), A Pixar Animation Studios Production, Doug Sweetland
• “This Way Up” (A Nexus Production), Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

Best live action short film

• “Auf der Strecke (On the Line)” (Hamburg Shortfilmagency), An Academy of Media Arts Cologne Production, Reto Caffi
• “Manon on the Asphalt” (La Luna Productions), A La Luna Production, Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont
• “New Boy” (Network Ireland Television), A Zanzibar Films Production, Steph Green and Tamara Anghie
• “The Pig” (An M & M Production), Tivi Magnusson and Dorte Høgh
• “Spielzeugland (Toyland)” (A Mephisto Film Production), Jochen Alexander Freydank

Achievement in sound editing

• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Richard King
• “Iron Man” (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), Frank Eulner and Christopher Boyes
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Glenn Freemantle and Tom Sayers
• “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood
• “Wanted” (Universal), Wylie Stateman

Achievement in sound mixing

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), David Parker, Michael Semanick, Ren Klyce and Mark Weingarten
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo and Ed Novick
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty
• “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt
• “Wanted” (Universal), Chris Jenkins, Frank A. Montaño and Petr Forejt

Achievement in visual effects

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton and Craig Barron
• “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.), Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber and Paul Franklin
• “Iron Man” (Paramount and Marvel Entertainment), John Nelson, Ben Snow, Dan Sudick and Shane Mahan

Adapted screenplay

• “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (Paramount and Warner Bros.), Screenplay by Eric Roth, Screen story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord
• “Doubt” (Miramax), Written by John Patrick Shanley
• “Frost/Nixon” (Universal), Screenplay by Peter Morgan
• “The Reader” (The Weinstein Company), Screenplay by David Hare
• “Slumdog Millionaire” (Fox Searchlight), Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy

Original screenplay

• “Frozen River” (Sony Pictures Classics), Written by Courtney Hunt
• “Happy-Go-Lucky” (Miramax), Written by Mike Leigh
• “In Bruges” (Focus Features), Written by Martin McDonagh
• “Milk” (Focus Features), Written by Dustin Lance Black
• “WALL-E” (Walt Disney), Screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Original story by Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter

18 February 2009 by Emma Young

newscientist.com

TAKE anyone with a psychiatric disorder and the chances are they don’t sleep well. The result of their illness, you might think. Now this long-standing assumption is being turned on its head, with the radical suggestion that poor sleep might actually cause some psychiatric illnesses or lead people to behave in ways that doctors mistake for mental problems. The good news is that sleep treatments could help or even cure some of these patients. Shockingly, it also means that many people, including children, could be taking psychoactive drugs that cannot help them and might even be harmful.

No one knows how many people might fall into this category. "That is very frightening," says psychologist Matt Walker from the University of California, Berkeley. "Wouldn’t you think that it would be important for us as a society to understand whether 3 per cent, 5 per cent or 50 per cent of people diagnosed with psychiatric problems are simply suffering from sleep abnormalities?"

First, we’d need to know how and to what extent sleep disorders could be responsible for psychiatric problems. In the few years since sleep researchers identified the problem, they have made big strides in doing just that.

Doctors studying psychiatric disorders noticed long ago that erratic sleep was somehow connected. Adults with depression, for instance, are five times as likely as the average person to have difficulty breathing when asleep, while between a quarter and a half of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suffer from sleep complaints, compared with just 7 per cent of other children.

Until recently, however, the assumption that poor sleep was a symptom rather than a cause of mental illness was so strong that nobody questioned it. "It was just so easy to say about a patient, well, he’s depressed or schizophrenic, of course he’s not sleeping well – and never to ask whether there could be a causal relationship the other way," says Robert Stickgold, a sleep researcher at Harvard University. Even when studies did seem to point in the other direction, the findings were largely overlooked, he says.

In 1987, for example, Patricia Chang and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported a study of 1053 male medical students who had been followed for an average of 34 years after graduation. During that time, 101 of them developed clinical depression and 13 of these committed suicide. It turned out that students who had reported suffering from insomnia were twice as likely to develop depression as those with no trouble sleeping. The team concluded cautiously that insomnia was "indicative of a greater risk" of problems later. Stickgold goes further. He believes the study shows that insomnia can predispose people to depression.

He’s not the only one to be persuaded both by findings such as Chang’s and by the growing realisation that some sleep problems generate symptoms that mimic those of certain psychiatric disorders.

In 2006, Paul Peppard at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his team studied the relationship between depression and sleep-disordered breathing. In sleep apnoea, the most common form of SDB, a blockage or narrowing of the windpipe causes a steep drop in oxygen levels, temporarily waking the sleeper. The team randomly selected about 800 men and 600 women from a working population and evaluated them in the lab for SDB and depression. There are four categories of SDB and for each increase in a person’s SDB category – from "minimal" to "mild", for example – their odds of getting depressed almost doubled, the team found (Archives of Internal Medicine, vol 16, p 1709). Depression cannot have been the main cause of the poor sleep, since we know SDBs stem from physical factors such as excess fat thickening the windpipe or a large tongue or tonsils relative to the size of the windpipe opening. Instead, this work suggests that sleep disorders lead to the depression.

Indeed, Daniel Buysse, medical director of the Sleep and Chronobiology Program at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has found that treating depressed patients’ sleep problems with a drug such as benzodiazepine can produce a dramatic turnaround in their mood disorder. Buysse does not provide an estimate for the proportion of depressed patients who fall into this category – but he has gone on the record saying that for some patients insomnia seems to cause depression.

Poor sleep may also explain some of the characteristic behaviours associated with other mental illnesses. For example, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that impaired sleep can induce the manic episodes suffered by people with bipolar disorder, according to a review published last May (American Journal of Psychiatry, vol 165, p 830). Stickgold even thinks that it can cause a common problem associated with schizophrenia, namely, the failure to master rote tasks such as how to use a piece of machinery. While healthy people improve overnight on tasks that require such motor skills, Stickgold’s team has found that people with chronic schizophrenia do not. "We have identified a failure specifically of the sleep-dependent component of procedural learning," the researchers write (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.bps.2004.09.012). So, in theory, improved sleep should help with this symptom.

It also seems that behavioural problems resulting from lack of sleep may be misdiagnosed as attention-deficit disorder (ADD) and ADHD. In 2005, Clifford Risk, director of the Marlborough Center for Sleep Disorders in Massachusetts, presented a study to the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians. Of 34 adults with sleep apnoea that he investigated, 16 had scores that suggested a moderate or severe impairment of attention. Subsequent treatment for the apnoea led to substantial improvements in attention scores for 60 per cent of these individuals – suggesting that for this sub group, at least, the sleep apnoea caused the difficulties with attention.

Likewise, in an analysis of 83 children with ADHD, David Gozal from the University of Louisville, Kentucky, and colleagues found that a quarter of those diagnosed with mild ADHD suffered from sleep apnoea, compared with just 5 per cent of those with strong ADHD and 5 per cent of healthy controls. "SDB can lead to mild ADHD-like behaviours that can be readily misperceived and potentially delay the diagnosis and appropriate treatment," the team concluded (Pediatrics, 2007, vol 111, p 554). What’s more, a study of children undergoing surgery to remove their tonsils and adenoids (a common treatment for snoring and sleep apnoea) found that before the operation, one-quarter had a diagnosis of ADHD compared to 7.4 per cent of healthy controls. But a year after the operations, half of these children no longer met the criteria for ADHD (Archives of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery, vol 133, p 974). Mark Kohler from the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide, Australia, who has studied links between ADHD and sleep, suspects that some children are being treated with drugs such as Ritalin while their true problem, a sleep disorder, goes unrecognised.

So how does poor sleep lead to behavioural and psychological problems? Some of the links are apparent. For example, every parent knows that tired children usually become hyperactive rather than sleepy. Sleep disruption also bumps up stress hormone levels, which could contribute to daytime anxiety, a component of many psychiatric disorders. More intriguingly, it now seems sleep disruption can fundamentally interfere with the brain’s ability to process emotion and to react to an emotional stimulus in an appropriate way (see "Feeling emotional? Take a nap").

While it is common knowledge anecdotally that a poor night’s sleep is likely to make you more irritable the next day, Walker and his colleagues uncovered key evidence for why this should be so. The team showed a set of increasingly disturbing images to people who had slept normally and people deprived of sleep for 35 hours. In the sleep-deprived group, the gruesome images produced 60 per cent more activity in the amygdala – a primitive, emotionally reactive part of the brain – than in well-rested people. Further scans revealed that in those deprived of sleep the amygdala was failing to communicate with the prefrontal lobe, which normally controls and sends inhibitory signals down to the emotional brain. "The reason we don’t blow our top when someone says something we don’t like is because we have a highly developed prefrontal cortex, which acts as an emotional brake," says Walker. A loss of communication between the amygdala and the prefrontal lobe is one way that sleep loss could create psychiatric symptoms, he thinks. "In a number of psychiatric disorders, such as depression, it has been demonstrated that the frontal lobe’s activity becomes disrupted. There’s also preliminary evidence [of this] for ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder," Walker says.

In another strand of research, evidence is growing that sleep – and dreaming, REM sleep, in particular – helps the brain to process memories. Disrupt this mechanism, and you could end up with psychological problems such as PTSD.

In August 2008, Stickgold and colleagues reported that when people are presented with pictures of an emotional or neutral object or scene, their memory for these scenes decreases during the day. After a night’s sleep, they forget pretty much everything except the things that roused their emotions, for which their memories stay the same, or even improve (Psychological Science, vol 19, p 781). Cast your mind back, says Walker, and you will appreciate that almost all of your memories are emotional ones. He thinks this is because emotions act as a red flag for important things that we should be remembering. But, crucially, if you recall them now you don’t re-experience the visceral reaction that you had at the time. Somehow, the brain has retained the memory while stripping away the visceral emotion. Both Stickgold and Walker believe this stripping process occurs during REM sleep.

They note that during REM, production of serotonin and noradrenalin shuts down in the brain. Noradrenalin is the neurochemical associated with stress, fear and the flight response; it translates to adrenalin in the body. Serotonin modulates anger and aggression. "You get this beautiful biological theatre during REM sleep, where the brain can go back over experiences it has learned in days past, but can do so in a situation where there are none of these hyping-up neurochemicals," Walker says. So although dreams can be highly emotional, he thinks that they gradually erode the emotional edges of memories.

In PTSD this process seems to fail, so that traumatic memories are recalled in all their emotional detail. It is not clear yet why this happens, but there is evidence that people with PTSD have higher waking levels of noradrenalin and serotonin. This might mean that neurotransmitters cannot be damped down sufficiently during REM sleep for the emotional intensity of the memories to be stripped away, says Walker.

Clearly there is still a lot of work to be done in untangling the ways in which sleep disruption might create psychiatric symptoms. Among the anomalies that need explaining is the fact that antidepressant medications reduce REM sleep and yet can be very effective. Then there is the puzzling finding that many people with depression say they feel happier after a night deprived of sleep (Biological Psychiatry, vol 149, p 471).

Nevertheless, when it comes to exactly how and to what extent sleep disorders could be responsible for psychiatric problems, Walker says: "We’re getting there. Five years ago, that question wasn’t on the radar for anyone – scientists or lay people. The fact that we’re aware of it now and asking those questions means it’s inevitable we’ll find out."

By Debra Gordon
From Health magazine

The list of wine’s benefits is long—and getting more surprising all the time. Already well-known as heart healthy, wine in moderation might help you lose weight, reduce forgetfulness, boost your immunity, and help prevent bone loss.

With America likely to edge out France and Italy in total wine consumption in the near future, according to one analyst, and with women buying more than 6 out of every 10 bottles sold in this country, we’re happy to report that wine may do all of the following:

1. Feed your head
Wine could preserve your memory. When researchers gave memory quizzes to women in their 70s, those who drank one drink or more every day scored much better than those who drank less or not at all. Wine helps prevent clots and reduce blood vessel inflammation, both of which have been linked to cognitive decline and heart disease, explains Tedd Goldfinger, DO, of the University of Arizona School of Medicine. Alcohol also seems to raise HDL, the so-called good cholesterol, which helps unclog your arteries.

2. Keep the scale in your corner
Studies find that people who drink wine daily have lower body mass than those who indulge occasionally; moderate wine drinkers have narrower waists and less abdominal fat than people who drink liquor. Alcohol may encourage your body to burn extra calories for as long as 90 minutes after you down a glass. Beer seems to have a similar effect.

3. Boost your body’s defenses
In one British study, those who drank roughly a glass of wine a day reduced by 11% their risk of infection by Helicobacter pylori bacteria, a major cause of gastritis, ulcers, and stomach cancers. As little as half a glass may also guard against food poisoning caused by germs like salmonella when people are exposed to contaminated food, according to a Spanish study.

4. Guard against ovarian woes
When Australian researchers recently compared women with ovarian cancer to cancer-free women, they found that roughly one glass of wine a day seemed to reduce the risk of the disease by as much as 50 percent. Earlier research at the University of Hawaii produced similar findings. Experts suspect this may be due to antioxidants or phytoestrogens, which have high anticancer properties and are prevalent in wine. And in a recent University of Michigan study, a red wine compound helped kill ovarian cancer cells in a test tube.

5. Build better bones
On average, women who drink moderately seem to have higher bone mass than abstainers. Alcohol appears to boost estrogen levels; the hormone seems to slow the body’s destruction of old bone more than it slows the production of new bone.

6. Prevent blood-sugar trouble
Premenopausal women who drink one or two glasses of wine a day are 40 percent less likely than women who don’t drink to develop type 2 diabetes, according to a 10-year study by Harvard Medical School. While the reasons aren’t clear, wine seems to reduce insulin resistance in diabetic patients.

10. Robbie and Julia- The Wedding Singer

9. Robert Kincaid and Francesca Johnson- Bridges of Madison County

8. Marcee Tidwell and Rod Tidwell- Jerry Maguire

7. Harold and Maude- Harold and Maude

6. Sam Wheat and Molly Jensen- Ghost

5. Noah Calhoun and Allie Hamilton- The Notebook

4. Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater- Titanic

3. Rocky Balboa and Adrian- Rocky

2. WALL-E and EVE- WALL-E

1. Buttercup and Westley- The Princess Bride

From premiere.com