Lincoln

The Oscar for best picture was won by "Argo," the true tale of a secret rescue mission in Iran during the Carter administration. It beat out "Lincoln," the story of how black Americans were rescued from slavery. Does this mean that Jimmy Carter's stock is on the rise? Nope, but Ben Affleck has certainly become a blue-chip player in Hollywood. Politics -- not the Hollywood kind, but the Washington kind -- played a significant role in public perceptions of both films, as well as a third that was nominated for best picture.

If any line item in the state or federal budgets cries out for more resources, or even just a little more respect, it's the arts and humanities. Never mind that many writers, artists and scholars have the fresh ideas that our times so desperately need. When politicians and columnists call for increased spending on STEM projects - that's science, technology, engineering and mathematics - don't they know they're alienating at least half the country? Let's reckon with the extent of the neglect.

Re "In 'Lincoln,' a historical lapse," Editorial, Feb. 12 I have two more examples to offer of historical lapses in the film "Lincoln" in addition to the inaccurate portrayal of how Connecticut's members of Congress voted on the 13th Amendment. Thaddeus Stevens, so brilliantly portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, declared that Negro equality was "simply before the law, nothing else," not during the climax of the debate on the amendment but earlier, on Jan. 5, 1864. And although rumors abounded in Washington for years, no hard evidence exists that Lydia Hamilton Smith, Stevens' housekeeper, was his mistress.

Sal Castro, a veteran Los Angeles Unified School District teacher who played a central role in the 1968 "blowouts," when more than 1,000 students in predominantly Latino high schools walked out of their classrooms to protest inequalities in education, died in his sleep Monday after a long bout with cancer. He was 79. Castro died at his home in the Silver Lake district, seven months after he was found to have stage 4 thyroid cancer, said his wife, Charlotte Lerchenmuller. In March 1968, Castro was a social studies teacher at Lincoln High School near downtown when he helped instigate the protests that became a seminal event in the development of the Chicano movement.

The Lakers saw the movie "Lincoln" together Thursday evening, a film that elicited mixed reactions from the players. Tweeted Pau Gasol: "We've watched "Lincoln"! Very good movie! It describes one of the most important moments in the history of the USA. Highly recommended!" Jordan Hill was not as impressed. "I fell asleep 8 times," he tweeted.  Regardless of whether the movie was a hit, it's positive that the team is doing activities together, a move that will further augment their chemistry on and off the court.

Only in Hollywood could a tiny, low-budget tale of a little girl named Hushpuppy who lives in the bayou take on a historical epic by master filmmaker Steven Spielberg about the 16th president's struggle to end slavery and the Civil War. But “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Lincoln” will both be vying for best picture and best director at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, after Thursday morning's Oscar nominations saw some shocking omissions,...

Bouncing down an empty country road, past browning cotton fields lined with signs advertising church services and cheap guns, historian John A. Lupton hunches over a minivan's steering wheel and ignores his aching back. He has been traveling for six days -- covering five states and more than 1,400 miles -- in a mentally exhilarating and physically exhausting pursuit of anything handwritten by Abraham Lincoln, as well as documents addressed to him: a frayed envelope the president addressed to a Confederate sympathizer; a dirty sheet of paper filled with the grumblings of a cotton farmer; a faded journal entry with notes about property rights that Lincoln scrawled in the margins.

Re "Suspicious voter forms easily traced in Florida," Sept. 30 How ironic that the party responsible for removing many barriers to voting used in the South after Reconstruction to prevent poor African Americans and poor whites from voting is resurrecting them in the form of voter ID laws, again to disenfranchise African Americans, the poor and the elderly, whom the GOP presumes vote mostly for Democrats. The cost of providing certified copies of birth certificates or naturalization papers, passports, driver's licenses or other form of identification will be a burden to many of these citizens.

Given that Steven Spielberg's historical drama "Lincoln" combines one of Hollywood's biggest directors and one of America's greatest heroes, it's not hard to imagine the result being an epic, reverential portrait of the 16th president. Instead, however, Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner and star Daniel Day-Lewis have treated Lincoln as more man than myth and focused on the political wrangling he orchestrated to end the Civil War and pass the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery. The decision seems to have been a shrewd one, as critics are nearly unanimous in praising the film.

Steven Spielberg's long-gestating "Lincoln" finally arrived last night at the New York Film Festival, and as with any blessed event, the debut prompted a level of excitement not seen since ... well ... the last time Spielberg made a much-hyped, awards-season movie. Or as Matt Dentler, former producer of the South by Southwest Film Conference & Festival, put it in a tweet: "'LINCOLN is Steven Spielberg's best film since 'WAR HORSE'!!" Our own Steven Zeitchik, covering the festival, saw  the movie last night, writing that it "got off to a strong if not spectacular awards-season start," playing to an "appreciative if not overwhelmingly loud festival audience," which sounds like a solid, if not ringing, endorsement to us. PHOTOS: Celebrities by the Times The headline writers at the Hollywood Reporter eschewed that sort of measured approach, trumpeting that last night's screening "turns the Oscar race upside-down ," which means either A)

Oscar winners and nominees battled for supremacy as new arrival "Lincoln" bested "Les Miserables" to take the top sales slot, and returning "Argo" was the No. 1 rental title over "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Skyfall," according to the tracking firm Rentrak. Here are the top discs for sale and for rental, for the weeks ending March 30 and March 31, respectively. RENTRAK TOP-10 DVD & BLU-RAY SALES 1.         “Lincoln”           Disney.             Week 1 2.         “Les Miserables”                 Universal.  Week 2 3.         “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”   Warner Bros.    Week 2 4.         “Rise of the Guardians” Paramount.

A week and a half before the movie "Lincoln" opened last November, Cindy Ransick had an amazing Lincoln moment of her own. The executive director of the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society Museum opened three scrapbooks stored in the museum's archives and, among hundreds of items of correspondence, found a letter from Abraham Lincoln to his friend and Republican Party activist Leonard Swett, a calling card from Mary Todd Lincoln and...

Kristen Bell and fiance Dax Shepard have welcomed their baby girl. Shepard, 38, who stars in NBC's "Parenthood," announced the arrival Thursday on Twitter and revealed the newborn's name, which falls in line with Jessica Simpson's masculine-name-for-females heuristic. "Lincoln Bell Shepard is here," Shepard tweeted . "She has mom's beauty and dad's obsession with breasts. Hooray!" PHOTOS: Oddly fantastic celebrity baby names Added the new mommy: "My new roomate poops her pants and doesn't pay rent...basically @daxshepard1 pre-sobriety :)

A showplace of the early automotive age in downtown Los Angeles a century ago is set to be revived by new owners who have ambitious plans to turn it into offices, a restaurant and a nightclub near L.A. Live. Long vacant, the stocky five-story building at 11th and Hope streets was a warehouse for the now-defunct local department store chain Desmond's. It still has the company's name affixed to the top. But its glory days date to 1916 when it opened as a full-service outpost of Ohio automaker Willys Overland Co. and once sold luxurious Willys-Knight cars to the city's well-to-do.

On the Road Available on VOD beginning Monday Director Walter Salles, screenwriter José Rivera and producer Francis Ford Coppola have given themselves the almost-impossible task of adapting Jack Kerouac's beloved Beat Generation novel "On the Road," a fictionalized account of Kerouac's late '40s cross-country road trips with his live-wire buddy Neal Cassady. Salles shoots for a simultaneously poetic and realistic style, similar to that in his art-house hit "The Motorcycle Diaries"; and he has a good cast, with Sam Riley as Kerouac stand-in Sal Paradise, and Garrett Hedlund as the Cassady character, Dean Moriarty.

In a dramatic debut at the 2012 New York International Auto Show, Lincoln billed the mid-sized 2013 MKZ as the standard bearer for a transformed Lincoln, the first of an array of new models to entice younger buyers. What went unsaid was that the brand, once the choice of presidents and movie stars, had seen better days. Sales only continued their long slide in 2012, with just 82,000 Lincolns going out the door - about half of what Cadillac sold and about 213,000 fewer than class-leading Mercedes, according to Motor Intelligence.

Tony Kushner had a decade's worth of plays behind him when his epic two-part masterpiece, "Angels in America," exploded in the mainstream in 1992, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize, two best play Tonys and a clutch of other stage awards. In adapting the play with Mike Nichols for cable TV, he discovered a fresh way to tell stories; "Angels" eventually won 11 Emmys for HBO in 2004. Since then, the playwright has added screenwriting to his credits with 2005's "Munich" and this year's "Lincoln" (both for director Steven Spielberg)

It looks like Abraham Lincoln. It moves like Abraham Lincoln. And it quotes Abraham Lincoln. But historians say it still doesn't sound like Abraham Lincoln. After a four-year absence, Walt Disney Co. pulls the curtain back today on a new high-tech version of Lincoln for its "Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln" show at the Opera House on Main Street in Disneyland. The animatronic Lincoln, incorporating cutting-edge technology that gives the mechanical man nuanced, lifelike facial expressions and lip movements, first premiered debuted at the 1964 World's Fair in New York.

Re "Deficit target hit, but at what price?," March 4 The goal of reducing projected federal deficits over the next 10 years by $4 trillion has been achieved, but only by making extremely inefficient across-the-board cuts required by the "sequester" agreement. This happened largely because of the continued allegiance by Republican lawmakers to a no-tax pledge. The tail is wagging the elephant. It's time for reasonable Republicans to mount a campaign to take back their party.

The big winners at this year's Academy Awards: adult moviegoers. For years, the studios have fixated on young men in their teens and 20s, serving up big-budget popcorn movies populated with dazzling visual effects, comic book heroes and high-voltage action sequences. They've also made films geared to win awards, but oftentimes those pictures bring prestige without huge financial returns. At the Oscars on Sunday night, however, six of the nine best picture nominees were hits that earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office.