Kathryn

By many counts, 2009 was a great year for women in Hollywood. Female directors knocked out such hits as "The Proposal," "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel," "It's Complicated," and "Julie & Julia," as well as the Oscar contenders "The Hurt Locker" and "An Education." Sandra Bullock and Meryl Streep outperformed most of their male counterparts dollar for dollar at the box office, nabbing Oscar nominations to boot. The elusive female movie-going audience has started to gel into a potent force, driving such hits as the "Twilight" franchise, "The Blind Side" and this weekend's "Alice in Wonderland."

Winning an Oscar isn't easy, but film editor William Goldenberg has stacked the odds in his favor this year: He's competing against himself. The veteran splicer is nominated twice for his work on this year's CIA-themed films: Ben Affleck's "Argo" and Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty. " Since August 2011, Goldenberg has been working nonstop: first spending 15 months pulling together Affleck's 1970s Middle East drama before jumping into Bigelow's Osama bin Laden manhunt alongside co-editor Dylan Tichenor.

It's as inescapable as any law of physics: To be a movie director, you must first direct a movie. But being a movie director and becoming one are two fundamentally dissimilar things, as the filmmaking participants in the Envelope Roundtable made clear. For nearly two hours, five of the year's most celebrated filmmakers gathered together at The Times discussed the challenges -- and rewards -- of making distinctive and often highly personal movies, even as the studios grow all the more interested in presold sequels, remakes and adaptations of board games.

Click here to download TV listings for the week of Feb. 3 - 9, 2013 in PDF format This week's TV Movies     CBS This Morning Ed Whitacre. (N) 7 a.m. KCBS Today Katharine McPhee; Tiffani Thiessen; Nick Savoy; Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. (N) 7 a.m. KNBC Good Morning America Leeza Gibbons. (N) 7 a.m. KABC Live With Kelly and Michael Katharine McPhee; Leeza Gibbons. (N) 9 a.m. KABC The View Jewel. (N) 10 a.m. KABC The Wendy Williams Show Diahann Carroll; LeVar Burton, Leslie Uggams and Louis Gossett Jr.; Zumba.

Daniel Percy Lattimore is the kind of Super Lotto winner longtime players love to hate. The 75-year-old Ojai resident only started playing the game three months ago. Five bucks, twice a week. Always Quick Picks. No rituals. And most frustrating to long-losing Lotto dreamers, few plans for his new millions. That's $13 million. Or, put another way, $650,000 a year for the next 20 years.

Kathryn Bigelow sounds a wee bit tired of questions about being a "female director," but given that on Tuesday she became only the fourth woman to be nominated for best director by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, she knows it comes with the territory. "I long personally for the day when the modifier is a moot point," said a very happy Bigelow, whose film nabbed nine nominations, including one for best picture. "I anticipate that day will come, but if 'The Hurt Locker' can make the impossible seem possible to somebody, it's pretty overwhelming and gratifying.

It was supposed to be a family outing, but "it would have been ridiculous," Victoria Penley says, if only half of her family had gotten into Disneyland while the other half had to wait outside in the parking lot. That was the situation Penley says she faced on a Sunday afternoon a year ago.

There's a star on the stage of the Great Western Forum. Immaculately dressed as always, 6-foot-1, tanned, not a hair out of place, he is a veteran of such very public appearances. In seminar after seminar, convention after convention, he has captivated thousands of people around the world with his charisma, sincerity and enthusiasm. But this appearance, on Feb. 19, 2000, is something special for Mark Reynolds Hughes.

PARK CITY, Utah -- Since opening in theaters last month, the Osama bin Laden manhunt film “Zero Dark Thirty” has intrigued audiences with its inside look at how CIA officers do their jobs. But the employees of the agency who tracked the Al Qaeda leader say that while they understand the need for dramatic license, the  Kathryn Bigelow film gets a number of details about their professional and personal lives wrong. “The individual hunches [are what] came through on 'Zero Dark,' and that's not exactly how it happens,” said Nada Bakos, who spent years as a CIA target officer, gathering intelligence that helped lead to the elimination of suspected terrorists.

In a Glendale public school classroom, the immigrant's daughter uses no English as she conjugates verbs and writes sentences about cats. More than a decade after California voters eliminated most bilingual programs, first-grader Sofia Checchi is taught in Italian nearly all day — as she and her 20 classmates at Franklin Elementary School have been since kindergarten. Yet in just a year, Sofia has jumped a grade level in reading English. In the view of her mother — an Italian immigrant — Sofia's achievement validates a growing body of research indicating that learning to read in students' primary languages helps them become more fluent in English.

Editor's note: Taking a moment from her vigilant defense of depicting scenes of torture in "Zero Dark Thirty," director Kathryn Bigelow here addresses something else close to her heart about the film: The power, strength and vulnerability that lead actress Jessica Chastain brings to the work. *** Talent comes in many guises, but all original talents share the same quality: They're unique, one of a kind. Totally unlike the rest of the crowd. Jessica Chastain, at least to my mind, is one of our original talents, a rare and gifted actress.

As the debate over “Zero Dark Thirty” and torture rages on , director Kathryn Bigelow staunchly defended the Oscar-nominated film Tuesday on “The Colbert Report.” Describing the movie as a “first rough cut” of history, Bigelow expressed her own unequivocal objection to torture, which she characterized as “reprehensible.” But she said she would have been “whitewashing” history if she had chosen not to include scenes...

Kathryn Hahn is a familiar face from her supporting roles in such films as “How Do You Know,” “Revolutionary Road” and “Anchorman” and TV shows “Parks and Recreation,” “Girls” and “Hung.” Now, the 38-year-old actress is getting her first leading role in a feature film with “Afternoon Delight,” a dramatic comedy premiering Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. “Delight” is somewhat akin to a contemporary creative class retelling of “Diary of a Mad Housewife.” In the film, Hahn plays Rachel, a married mother of one who is suffering from a certain upscale ennui.

For a long time, measuring more years than I care to count, I thought the movie that became "Zero Dark Thirty" would never happen. The goal, to make a modern, rigorous film about counter-terrorism, centered on one of the most important and classified missions in American history, was exciting and worthy enough, or so it seemed. But there were too many obstacles, too many secrets, and politicians standing in the way of an easy path. Somehow, though, thanks to the great persistence of my filmmaking team and an enormous dose of luck, we got the movie made and found studio partners with the courage to release it. Then came the controversy.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden last year proved a bigger draw for this past weekend's moviegoers than a battle against organized crime 70 years ago. The thriller "Zero Dark Thirty" had a decisive victory at the box office, grossing $24 million in the United States and Canada, according to an estimate from distributor Sony Pictures. Despite a bigger budget and more famous stars, such as Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, "Gangster Squad" opened to a disappointing $16.7 million.

Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow were behind two of the most acclaimed movies of 2012, the political thrillers "Argo" and "Zero Dark Thirty," and the smart money in Hollywood had both vying for directing honors at next month's Academy Awards. Yet when the Oscar nominations for director were announced Thursday, Affleck and Bigelow were passed over. Instead, two of the five slots went, stunningly, to longshot Hollywood outsiders: a 30-year-old New Orleans artist making his feature debut and an Austrian auteur who has worked almost exclusively outside the English language.

Don Knotts, the saucer-eyed, scarecrow-thin comic actor best known for his roles as the high-strung small-town deputy Barney Fife on the 1960s CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show" and the leisure-suit-clad landlord Ralph Furley on ABC's '70s sitcom "Three's Company," has died. He was 81. Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at UCLA Medical Center, according to Sherwin Bash, his longtime manager. Family members said that his longtime friend Griffth was one of his last visitors at Cedars on Friday night.

Craig Johnson comes as advertised. Standing outside the Autry National Center on a boiling summer afternoon, the Wyoming-based crime novelist is decked out in a long-sleeve shirt made of heavy cotton, scuffed brown boots and a 10-gallon hat that provides shade, but not nearly enough. Spotting his interlocutor, Johnson sticks out his hand and delivers a booming "How ya doin'?!"

If you're keeping score this Oscar season - and who isn't? - chalk up this year's nominations as a victory for the bullying power of the United States Senate and an undeserved loss for "Zero Dark Thirty" in general and director Kathryn Bigelow in particular. Yes, "Zero Dark" did get five nominations, including best picture, lead actress for Jessica Chastain and original screenplay for Mark Boal. But that was only one more than for the ineffective "Anna Karenina" and nowhere near the 12 picked up by Steven Spielberg's front-running "Lincoln.