In a move that some have called “surprising,” President Obama has been awarded this high honor. This New York Times article provides plenty of information regarding the relationship between this prize and the American presidency. Reactions from world leaders and former recipients can be accessed as well. Part of the committee’s citation hails his “…extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The following news reports provide additional elucidations: Facts and Numbers of the Nobel Peace Prize from the Washington Post; Common Misconceptions about the Nobel Peace Prize from the Associated Press; the BBC’s Obama Gets Award for World View; and the Wall Street Journal’s Nobel Committee’s Decision Courts Controversy.
Archive for Awards
2009 Nobel Prizes
To find out who has won what, please look here. Each winner has a profile page which can contain an interview and photo gallery. All past winners are also listed at this site. The New York Times has a very informative Topics section devoted to the Nobel Prize; NPR also has a special site.
2009 Class of the New Jersey Hall of Fame
Last night the 2009 inductees were presented. Their biographies, less one, may be read on the Hall’s website. Information on the sole recipient not highlighted on the list as of this posting, Lieutenant Brian Brennan, is available from another site; Lientenant Brennan received the Hall’s first “Unsung Hero” award. Coverage of the ceremony is available from nj.com, along with a video of Lieutenant Brennan’s speech.
2009 Pulitzer Prizes Announced
The awards were announced this afternoon at 3PM. The New York Times garnered five Pulitzers. For other book awards, please look at this site as well as this site from bookwire. A previous blog entry will direct you to other resources as well.
81st Annual Academy Award Winners
Here is the complete winners’ list, along with acceptance speeches.
Movie Awards
Can’t remember the seemingly endless stream of movie awards that occur at this time of the year? Do you know who just won the BAFTA for best picture? And what the heck is a BAFTA anyway? Well, fret no more! The following sites will guide you through the myriad awards: IMDb’s Road to the Oscars (which also supplies links to apposite newspaper articles); Metacritics Awards & Bests by Year(going back to 2002, and do not forget to look at its Reviews by Critic/Publication section); Yahoo’s Movies and Film Awards(with its copious links); and the ever reliable infoplease and its Movie Awards (with listings back to 1995). BTW, the BAFTA Awards are a British accolade, a combination of our OSCAR and Emmy awards. A good read on film is Film Quarterly: Forty Years, A Selection; other books on the cinema can be found here.
Best Movies Ever
Once again, the American Film Institute(AFI)has issued another “best movie” list, this time it is the 10 Top 10 - an enumeration of the top ten films in ten separate genres ranging from animation to the western.(We are gratified to note that The Searchers heads the list for westerns. In our humble opinion, a best film list is not a best film list without the inclusion of The Searchers.) This new compilation joins others that the AFI has produced, such as the 100 and 400 lists. Of course, not everyone will agree with this newest entry in the field; after all, criteria for these lists are highly subjective or specific. Other efforts at determining the best films can be found at the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, IMDb’s Top 250 Movies, the decennial lists compiled by the British Film Institute(BFI), Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Movies, the New York Times Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, and Yahoo’s Top Rated Movies of All Time for example. And let us not forget the Academy Awards. Did you know that the Guarini Library has over 3000 films in both VHS and DVD formats, and that they can be watched in our video viewing rooms? The films range from the 52-part The Unfinished Nation to The Kite Runner to the original Bad News Bears. All you need to do is present a current NJCU GothicCard at the second floor service desk(the films are on the second floor), and you will be allowed to view the film in one of our air-conditioned viewing rooms which can accommodate up to fifteen people. How do you find what films the Library owns? You consult OSCAR, the Library’s online catalog, where underneath the six dialog boxes, you will see a “location” pull-down menu. Limit your selection to “Media(Videos),” enter the movie title in the “Title” dialog box, or look for movies by “Subject,” and the results you will see will be from our video collection. And yes, we do own The Searchers. “That’ll be the day” when we don’t.
The Pulitzer Prize and Other Book Awards
Bob Dylan, among others, were presented with Pulitzers on Monday, April 7. The Pulitzers have a long and distinguished history, and have rewarded mostly journalistic writings which is in keeping with the founder of the awards, Joseph Pulitzer, an immigrant from Hungary, a Civil War veteran, a famous newspaper publisher, and a member of Congress. Online works dealing with Pulitzer are available, as is a profile in The New York Times which also includes excerpts from other papers. Also, check OSCAR for additional monographs on him. However, the Pulitzers are not the only book awards, far from it. In the Library’s database by title section, you will see Books in Print which has an extensive awards area. We also suscribe to the Children’s Literature Comprehensive Database which allows searchers to limit to award-winning works only. Other useful tools found on the Library’s homepage include the BookWire awards listings as well as the Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature which allows the searching of 78 separate awards. An outdated but still useful database is Booklist Center which covers a plethora of awards. So if you are assigned a report that requires you to read only certain award-winning books, we have the resources to limit your search and produce useful results.
