Film Director

Herbert Ross was ready to start, his sleeves rolled up, his body poised at the edge of a high black stool. The veteran director had been through opening days before, plenty of them, after turning out 24 films in as many years. But this was something new, he told his assembled cast and crew: "We are embarked, I hope, on an adventure." They certainly are.

ROME - "For our next play, it's either Xenophon, Aristophanes or 17th century French comedy - and I would like some opinions," said the director to his troupe. The actors sitting around a theater in Rome had just settled in to discuss future projects - and to mull over how the last production they participated in became a film that had narrowly missed out on being an Oscar nominee. Keeping an eye on proceedings was a guard, since every performer was a convicted mobster or drug trafficker and the theater was in Rome's high-security Rebibbia prison.

Sara Montiel Spanish actress was 1950s Hollywood star Sara Montiel, 85, a famed, sultry-voiced Spanish actress who achieved Hollywood stardom in the 1950s, died Monday in Madrid, according to her biographer, Peter Villora. The cause was undetermined. Also known as Sarita Montiel, she was born Maria Antonia Abad on March 10, 1928, in Campo de Criptana in the La Mancha region of central Spain. An acknowledged beauty with an almost husky singing voice, Montiel starred in more than 50 films, many of which were musicals.

At a reception last month in New York, I introduced myself to the Polish film director Agnieszka Holland. "Ah," she said, extending her hand. "I am sorry that I did not include your mother in the movie. " She was referring to "In Darkness," a nominee for best foreign language film at this year's Academy Awards. We'd had friendly correspondence over the last two years. So why did she feel the need to apologize before another word was spoken? Because her film is a fictionalized interpretation of the central episode in my mother's life.

Gold Standard writer Glenn Whipp has been sweeping through all 24 Oscar categories this week, assessing the races, predicting the winners and helping you prevail in your Oscar pools. He's looked at the shorts , the sound categories , the visual crafts races , the Adele-rific song and score scene, screenplays and film editing and the animation, documentary and foreign-language feature contests. Now: best picture and director. FULL COVERAGE: Oscar 2013 | Top nominees BEST PICTURE The nominees: “Amour” “Argo” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” “Django Unchained” “Les Misérables” “Life of Pi” “Lincoln” “Silver Linings Playbook” “Zero Dark Thirty” And the winner is … “Argo.” In a year packed with so many fine movies, it's still puzzling how nearly every group bestowing awards has fallen in line (and apparently in love)

Nicholas Ray faced a roomful of film students. They had come to learn from the director who'd made James Dean an icon in "Rebel Without a Cause" and a gunslinger of Joan Crawford in the distaff western "Johnny Guitar. " Ray began a mock exercise in filming a scene and the reverential students waited for his instructions — and they waited. Ray fell inexplicably silent. Minutes passed, then hours, and finally the students left, bewildered by the tall, frail man with an eye patch and wild, white hair.

George Stevens Jr. was brought into the family business as a teenager when he worked as a production assistant on the 1953 Western classic "Shane," which his father, George Stevens, was directing. After college, he joined the crew of his dad's 1956 epic "Giant," for which the filmmaker won his second best directing Oscar, and then shot the location footage in Amsterdam for his father's 1959 drama, "The Diary of Anne Frank. " "I think I was the first one who directed a major part of one of his pictures," Stevens said in a recent interview.