Editors

Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg, who is nominated for an Academy Award for directing this year's  best picture nominee "Lincoln," will receive the American Cinema Editors' ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award at the 63rd ACE Eddie Awards on Feb. 16 at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. "Steven Spielberg is a cinematic treasure," said the ACE Board of Directors in a statement Wednesday morning. "For over four decades he has been moving audiences around the world with his unique, powerful brand of storytelling.

Hans Massaquoi, a former managing editor of Ebony magazine who wrote a distinctive memoir about his unusual childhood growing up black in Nazi Germany, died in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday, his 87th birthday. He had been hospitalized over the Christmas holidays, said his son, Hans J. Massaquoi Jr. Inspired by the late Alex Haley, the author of "Roots," Massaquoi decided to share his experience of being "both an insider in Nazi Germany and, paradoxically, an endangered outsider.

Aristocracy's bitter fruit It is embarrassing to me to see that so many educated American citizens are "star-struck" by wealth such that, to them, wealth itself seems to be an end justified by any means ("Lording It Up," Jan. 6). This show is about aristocracy. Aristocracy has been recognized as a crime against humanity. All of the pretty little fantasies about aristocracy (kings, queens, princes, etc.) are incomplete without the truth of the subjugation of millions in each of the respective countries and the refusal by these aristocrats to recognize the pain and suffering of their fellow human beings, while keeping to themselves all of the wealth of their respective countries, violently where necessary.

Film editor Bud S. Smith and his wife, sound editor Lucy Coldsnow-Smith, have sold their Hollywood Hills home of more than 40 years for $880,000. The hillside storybook cottage-style home, built in 1926, is surrounded by patios and gardens. Features include a step-down living room with high ceilings and a fireplace, two bedrooms and a separate one-bedroom guest apartment. Smith was nominated for Oscars for his film editing work on "The Exorcist" (1973) and "Flashdance" (1983)

Under the watchful eye of a librarian at the Huntington, Paul Bryan Gray gently turns the delicate pages of an 1855 edition of El Clamor Público , Los Angeles' first newspaper published entirely in Spanish. These bound volumes are like old friends for Gray, who spent two years reading every line during more than a decade of work on his new book "A Clamor for Equality," a biography of El Clamor 's remarkable 18-year-old editor, Francisco P. Ramirez. "I was fascinated by this guy Ramirez," says Gray, 74. "He was a civil rights activist when people didn't talk about it. He was a community organizer before there was such a thing....

Mike Hopkins, 53, an Academy Award-winning sound editor who worked on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, died Sunday in a rafting accident in New Zealand. Hopkins drowned when his inflatable raft capsized during a flash flood in a river on New Zealand's North Island, police Senior Sgt. Carolyn Watson said. His wife, Nicci, survived. The New Zealand Herald newspaper quoted "Rings" director Peter Jackson as saying many actors, directors and film crew members who were lucky enough to work with Hopkins would miss him deeply.

The fans have spoken: Long live the Kings. A few days ago, we invited you to vote in an informal survey to choose the top five Southern California sports stories of the year, and the results were overwhelming: The Kings' Stanley cup victory was the top story. The Kings were named on 41% of the ballots, easily outdistancing the Galaxy, which was named on 25%. The rest of the top five: the sale of the Dodgers (7.5%), the Lakers' acquiring Steve Nash and Dwight Howard (5.4%)

Midge Turk Richardson, a former nun and parochial school principal in Los Angeles who cast off her habit for the world of New York publishing, where she reigned for nearly two decades as editor of Seventeen magazine, has died. She was 82. Richardson, who was found in her New York City home Dec. 17, appeared to have died in her sleep from natural causes, according to her stepson, Kevin Richardson. A Los Angeles native, Richardson spent 18 years as a nun in the order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, including seven years as superintendent of Our Lady Queen of Angels High School.

Fyodor Khitruk Animated Soviet version of 'Winnie the Pooh' Fyodor Khitruk, 95, a prominent Russian animator and director who created the Soviet Union's cartoon version of A.A. Milne's classic Winnie the Pooh stories, died Monday in Moscow, according to the Russian Animated Film Assn. The cause of death was not specified. Khitruk was best known for his work aimed at children, such as "Vinni-Pukh," as Winnie the Pooh is known in Russia. The cartoon series was produced between 1969 and 1972 and continues to air on television.

In the making of "Argo," editor William Goldenberg cut a million feet of film - more than 185 hours of raw footage - into a two-hour movie. "Argo," directed by and starring Ben Affleck, tells the story of the 1980 CIA-Canadian operation to rescue six fugitive American diplomatic personnel, disguised as a film crew, from revolutionary Iran. Goldenberg selected shots and assembled them into sequences ranging from the suspenseful intensity of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran to the comic absurdity of a Hollywood read-through of a bogus sci-fi film.