#fellowship 2024

[hwanswerland]

he's a work of art (cr. Sparkling Heart)

[tlotrgifs]

Happy New Year (2024).

[sethfuss]

14/10/24 INKTOBER ROAM

Just a Wizard on a walk

[baheuldey]

Serment (La Communauté de l'Anneau) / Oath (The Fellowship of the Ring) (Tolktober, 9), 2024, plume, pinceau, encre de Chine sur papier, 14,8 x 21 cm

[luckylittlexiii]

Day 6: trek

"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them. One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them."

[ary369]

Day 19 -Ridge-

[brian-in-finance]

… to @bcacstuff and her Anon who said

Looks like Cait is on an interesting path in HW not just as member of The Academy of Motion Pictures and actress but also making things work in this industry from BTS.

ACADEMY REVEALS 2024 NICHOLL SCREENWRITING FELLOWS

Posted: Monday, September 30, 2024

LOS ANGELES, CA – Four individuals and one writing team have been selected as recipients of the 2024 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. Each individual and writing team will receive a $35,000 prize and mentorship from an Academy member throughout their fellowship year. They also will participate in a week of virtual seminars, a virtual meet and greet with the Nicholl Fellowships committee, and in-person networking events, including a celebration in Beverly Hills on October 29. The Nicholl Fellowships were established in 1985 through the support of Gee Nicholl in memory of her husband, Don Nicholl.

The 2024 Nicholl Fellows are (listed alphabetically by author):

Alysha Chan and David Zarif (Los Angeles, CA), “Miss Chinatown”

Jackie Yee follows in her mother’s footsteps on her quest to win the Los Angeles Miss Chinatown pageant.

Colton Childs (Waco, TX), “Fake-A-Wish”

Despite their forty-year age gap, and the cancer treatment confining them to their small Texas town, two gay men embark on a road trip to San Francisco to grant themselves the Make-A-Wish they’re too old to receive.

Charmaine Colina (Los Angeles, CA), “Gunslinger Bride”

With a bounty on her head, a young Chinese-American gunslinger poses as a mail order bride to hide from the law and seek revenge for her murdered family.

Ward Kamel (Brooklyn, NY), “If I Die in America”

After the sudden death of his immigrant husband, an American man’s tenuous relationship with his Muslim in-laws reaches a breaking point as he tries to fit into the funeral they’ve arranged in the Middle East. Adapted from the SXSW® Grand Jury-nominated short film of the same name.

H (West Chester, PA), “The Superb Lyrebird & Other Creatures”

A neurodivergent teen who envisions people as animated creatures, battles an entitled rival for a life-changing art scholarship, while her sister unwisely crosses the line to help.

A total of 5,500 scripts, from 80 countries, were submitted for the 2024 competition.

The 2024 finalists are (listed alphabetically by author):

Kelly Beck-Byrnes, “Where the Boxelders Grow”

Tate Hamilton, “Delivery Girl”

Jamie Murphy, “Lights over Idaho”

Adele Smaill, “No Ghosts Tonight”

Justine Suh, “Deep”

The five fellowships are awarded with the understanding that recipients will complete feature-length screenplays during their fellowship year. The Academy acquires no rights to the works of Nicholl fellows and does not involve itself commercially in any way with their completed scripts.

The Academy Nicholl Fellowships Committee is chaired by Julie Lynn (Producers Branch). The members of the committee are Aldis Hodge and Caitríona Balfe (Actors Branch); Julien Thuan (Artist Representatives); Susan Shopmaker and Academy governor Kim Taylor-Coleman (Casting Directors Branch); Andrzej Bartkowiak (Cinematographers Branch); Allison Anders (Directors Branch); Bruce Hendricks and Marcus Hu (Executives Branch); Blaise Noto (Marketing and Public Relations Branch); Jason Michael Berman, Susan Cartsonis, Julia Chasman and Linda Reisman (Producers Branch); Sue Chan (Production Design Branch); Bobbi Banks (Sound Branch); and Destin Daniel Cretton, Susannah Grant, Ehren Kruger, Adele Lim, Justin Marks, Zak Penn and Katie Silberman (Writers Branch).

The global competition, which aims to identify and encourage talented new screenwriters, has awarded 186 fellowships since 1986. In 2024, several past Nicholl fellows added to their feature film and television credits:

Aaron Chung is a staff writer on Apple+’s “WondLa.”

Elizabeth Chomko directed the docuseries “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints.”

Eric Nazarian wrote and directed “Die like a Man.”

“Holy Irresistible” is from Andrew Shearer and Nicholas Sherman’s 2007 Nicholl-winning script.

“Interstate” is from Anthony Jaswinski’s 1997 Nicholl-winning script.

Jason Micallef is an executive producer and writer on Disney+’s “The Acolyte.”

R.J. Daniel Hanna wrote and directed two features: “Succubus” and “Hard Miles,” which he co-wrote.

For more information about the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, visit oscars.org/nicholl.

Oscars Press

Brian 29 June 2022

Remember Caitríona’s latest Academy role?

[3months2mordor]

On Hobbits and Existential Dread

or Why “The Scouring of the Shire” is the True Climax of The Lord of the Rings

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Or more accurately, there lived a human who had been in hard COVID quarantine for six months and certainly felt like a hobbit, what with all the staying inside and eating second breakfast and trying her best to ignore the world, which seemed in the summer of 2020 to be spiraling towards something unknown. And she, well I, was packing for college. On an impulse that I cannot explain except to say that I had previously binge watched all the movies in my seemingly infinite quaran-time, I packed a large red volume of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings with the intention to read it over the course of the semester.

What began as a simple personal challenge to read a chapter a night instead of doom scrolling on Twitter became a profound experience not only in terms of discovering that my parents were right in saying the book was actually really good, but also in realizing that the Hobbits, in their edenic Shire perched on the edge of a world about to enter catastrophe, were more like me, more like a lot of us, than Aragorn or the Elves or Dwarves or Men who people Middle Earth. And here is why the chapter at the very end of the last book where the Shire is nearly destroyed is so very, very important.

Tolkien takes careful time in his books to establish the attitudes and habits of his hobbits who live in pastoral harmony in near complete isolation from the rest of the world. They are content with what they have and don’t have the greed that drives Dwarves to dig, or the ambition that drives Men to war, or even the worship of nature that drives Elves deep into their forests to protect them. They build their hobbit holes, smoke what is definitely pot, and eat and drink heartily. They care little for news of the outside world and tend their fields instead. That’s it.

But the world does not cease to exist just because they want it to. It never does.

As Gandalf warns in Rivendale, “We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is growing dark.” (Part 1 Book 2 Chapter 1).

Regardless of how much the hobbits might ignore the coming of the Dark Lord Sauron and the existential threat that is his attempt to control the world, it will not go away. They will not be safe from the darkness just because they want to be and they have a supply of candles in the cupboard. And so, at the start of the story, evil comes to the Shire in the form of the Black Riders and Frodo, our hero, must leave to keep the Shire safe from the forces of darkness. Still Frodo is just a hobbit, albeit a brave one. So he laments to Gandalf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time” and Gandalf replies “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” (Part 1 Book 1 Chapter 2).

I feel this quote more deeply every year. A deep childish wish for things to exist as we expected them to be, but a solemn and more mature knowledge that Gandalf is right. That our time has already been given to us. All that we have left is what we do to make that time matter.

But back to Frodo, who takes a good seventeen years to heed this advice, but eventually sets off on an adventure to save the Shire which, spoiler alert, ultimately saves the world. Along the way people despair and seem to lose hope. Theoden, recovering from a spell that robbed him of agency and clearsightedness, cries “Alas! That these evil days should be mine, and should come in my old age instead of that peace which I have earned” (Part 2 Book 3 Chapter 6). Even Sam, in his darkest hour thinking he has lost Frodo for good, groans “I wish I wasn’t the last. I wish old Gandalf was here, or somebody. What am I left all alone to make up my mind? I’m sure to go wrong” (Part 2 Book 4 Chapter 10).

Yet despite it all the One Ring is destroyed and the King returns and good wins. Everything is set right and our heroes get a chance to rebuild the world rather than watch it crumble. They get to go home.

Now this is a fine story and one I desperately needed amongst all of the *everything* going on in 2020. However it is not the ending that stuck with me. For you see once Frodo and his companions return home, the Shire is not the same place they left it.

The Shire, in their year long absence, has descended into a despotic police state run by a wealthy, privileged hobbit who stays in his hole rather than try to help his people as Men, who tower over the hobbits, and are specifically and on multiple occasions called bullies, abuse their power. They use their strength to take food and (let’s face it) weed from the hobbits, desecrate their land with deforestation and pollution, and create a state of fear and paranoia that anyone could be taken at any moment to prison without trial after only a mere whiff of seditious behavior. The world has come to the hobbits and they are so paralyzed with fear that they are unable to do anything other than sit in their hobbit holes and keep their heads down, hoping that they and their families will make it through.

Now, Frodo and his companions, having seen the change that can be wrought from people who stand up to bullies and fight to make a difference, see the state of their home and immediately understand the despair their friends and neighbors have fallen into because they too have felt it. These are the hobbits who faced thousands of orcs and rode in battle and walked to Mount Doom with only each other to lean on and they know how deeply despair of impossible odds can affect someone. But they have also learned that that despair is not inevitable. They saw the Ents on their last march when Treebeard said it was “likely enough that we are going to our doom… But if we stayed at home and did nothing the doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has been long growing in our hearts; and that is why we are marching now” (Part 2 Book 3 Chapter 4). They saw the Rohirrim ride to battle against impossible odds because it was the right thing to do. They saw even the most pitiful Gollum play his part in saving the world. And they saw the Eagles fly in to help carry the day.

There’s always hope if there’s something worth fighting for.

And so, back in the Shire which was not the Shire they knew but still the one they love, the four heroic hobbits do what had once seemed impossible: they get the hobbits, in their apathy and terror and existential despair, to stand up and fight. And it’s hard, and people die, and it gets worse before it gets better, but in the end the bullies are run off and the hobbits are victorious and they begin to rebuild, not just their homes but their forests and their relationships with each other too.

The hobbits, and me really, wanted to curl up in their holes and hope the world would go away. And sometimes, God, that seems like it’s the only thing you can do when darkness is spreading far on the horizon and it keeps creeping closer but isn’t here yet. But Sauron is not the scariest thing in this book. Tolkien’s real villain was the fear and despair that can paralyze you to stay in your hole until the Shire is burning around you. Yet even the most comfortable and secure hobbits have to stand up and face the world because if we don't, no one else will.

There is a reason Frodo is able to see the mission to the end. And it’s not that he’s exceptional in the way other heroes are. No. In fact it is because he is unexceptional and unambitious and also uncompromising that the deed is able to be done. He, like the hobbits he helps at the end of the series, has to get up and work to fight the evil that hurts people every day. And Frodo doesn’t save the hobbits of the Shire; they save themselves. Then they rebuild. They grow things again, not better, not the same, but they have to go on living. And, I don’t know, I needed to realize that.

We aren’t Aragorn with a throne and a legendary sword and a destiny to be king, we aren’t the Elves with their centuries of knowledge and skills, we aren’t the Dwarves with their mountain holds to hide in. Heck, we’re not even Frodo, or at least I’m not. There’s no way I could handle a walk that long. We’re the hobbits. We see the existential wave of dread and terror that is coming and our instinct to hide from it, to hold it off as long as we can and then silently accept it when it comes. Because what can one little halfling do against a thing like that?

But even the hobbits of the Shire stand up eventually. Even hobbits can take that dread for a bleak future and turn around and create new life. There’s a reason why the symbol of the Shire returning to peace and throwing off the yolk of oppression is a tree. The bullies cut down Bilbo’s old one and it can’t come back. But Sam plants a new one anyway and hopes it will grow.

I’m reading the Lord of the Rings again before this election as I did last time. But this time I’m not alone. I’m reading it with friends. I marked passages like the ones above that made me think but also ones that made me laugh because there is joy in amongst the shadows and if we cannot find those moments it’s hard to keep looking for the light. In rewatching The Two Towers film the other day I was struck, as I usually am, by Sam’s speech at the end of the movie, based on one he gives in “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol.” I think it bears quoting in full.

Sam: It’s all wrong By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

Hobbits are remarkable people, Tolkien says, and I hope we are too. I hope we can get through this by raising up our own Shires full of hobbit warriors to face the world and not lie down and give up. Because if everyone did that there would still be a One Ring and Sauron would rule forever.

But we have to save the Shire. It’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. We have to believe that. I have to. I will do my part to make sure it does, but first I have to believe it’s possible. We have to take that existential terror and turn it into righteous fury because we have seen what a shadow can do and we cannot let it spread again. We have been there. But we will not go back again.

[mojomann67]

INK24 - Day 31 - Argonath Lord Of The Rings

#inktober #inktober2024 #argonath #thepillarsofkings #lordoftherings #fellowshipofthering

[figureskatingcostumes]

Young You's Lord of the Rings costume (with two different headpieces) at the 2024 World Championships and 2024 South Korean National Championships.

And in detail:

(Sources: 1, 2, 3 and 4)

[moromaitar]

Inktober 2024 Day 6: Trek.

The Fellowship heads south. Pen on paper.

[tlotrgifs]

The Ring is altogether evil!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Trump’s Volunteers: ‘Beautiful Ladies’ From a Secretive Evangelical Church In Spindale, NC

Robert Draper and Michael Gold at NYT:

Former President Donald J. Trump has gruesome rhetorical staples he likes to deploy at his political rallies, including homicidal sharks, bird-killing windmills and Hannibal Lecter. Amid the litany, one less morbid aside tends to escape notice. “Those beautiful ladies from North Carolina are here again without their husbands,” Mr. Trump observed at a rally in Mosinee, Wis., on Sept. 9, veering off from a rant about the 2020 election. He gestured toward the rafters and a row of a dozen impeccably coifed women in brightly colored pantsuits, as if they had wandered in from an Easter gala. The women waved and blew kisses at the former president, who speculated that the women had attended “249 or something” rallies. “That means they have money,” he said approvingly. Mr. Trump has called out the self-described “North Carolina Girls” at rallies this year in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Arizona and South Carolina, in addition to events in their native state. But the women are unusual in ways beyond their ubiquity.

All are members of an evangelical charismatic Christian church in the tiny town of Spindale (population 4,238) in western North Carolina. The church, Word of Faith Fellowship, has for decades drawn controversy over its cultish insularity and its treatment of children and adults who have been judged by church leaders to be sinners. As church leaders have acknowledged in legal proceedings, Word of Faith relies on a practice known as “strong” or “blasting” prayer. Former church members have described the entire congregation surrounding and screaming at a single member for as long as an hour in an effort to expunge the evil from the person. Church officials say this characterization is overstated. Beginning with a report by the TV news journal “Inside Edition” in 1995 and culminating in an investigative series by two Associated Press reporters that would become a book in 2020, numerous former church members have come forward and described being physically assaulted during such prayers.

In an interview, Matthew Fenner, a former congregant who told the A.P. reporters that he was 19 when he was blasted and beaten by five church members in 2013 for being gay, said that Word of Faith rationalized its brutal treatment of him and others. “To them, I wasn’t being abused,” Mr. Fenner said. “I was being saved and delivered.”

Word of Faith has consistently disputed these claims. As one of the members who frequently volunteers at Trump rallies, Hannah Davies, said in a testimonial posted on the church’s website: “I want everyone to know this prayer is not abusive, no one is hit, no one is punched, no one is screamed at. This prayer is full of love and freedom.” None of the church’s history comes up at Mr. Trump’s rallies, and the former president has never once mentioned the church the North Carolina women belong to. The women serve as a trusted volunteer arm of the campaign’s advance team. They arrive well before the beginning of a Trump event, set up chairs in the V.I.P. section, run the media sign-in table and disassemble the V.I.P. section after the rally is over. Contrary to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the women attend the rallies without their spouses, in recent months their husbands have been seen distributing floor passes and policing the V.I.P. areas, all of them in blue long-sleeved shirts with “Team Trump” on the back and their first initial and last name stenciled on their shirt pockets.

[...] In the statement, Mr. Farmer said that his wife, Andrea Farmer, is among the volunteers. Others represent the upper echelon of the church’s hierarchy, beginning with the co-founders of the church, Jane and Sam Whaley. Robin Webster, their daughter and a longtime teacher in the church’s K-through-12 private school, is also a volunteer, as is the church’s associate minister, Kim Waites. Word of Faith is in Rutherford County, where the Republican Party chairman, Bryson Smith, a church member, encouraged others to travel to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, writing on social media: “Calling all patriots! Our country needs you! The time is now!” [...]

Republicans say the church constitutes a formidable voting bloc in the 10th Congressional District, which includes all of Rutherford County. During the 2020 Republican primary, the incumbent congressman, Representative Patrick McHenry, carried every precinct in the district except for the church’s home in Spindale — a likely consequence, Republicans said, of Mr. McHenry’s support for church closings during the first months of the Covid pandemic, which Word of Faith initially resisted.

A group of women volunteers, usually not occupied alongside their husbands, travel to every Donald Trump rally.

They come from the cultic Word Of Faith Fellowship in Spindale, North Carolina.

Read the full story at NYT.

[hjbirthdaywishes]

May 25, 2024

Happy 85 Birthday to Ian McKellen.

[glitterghost]

Need to try to harness hobbit joy again in 2024, so I can leave all this orc anger behind in 2023.

[wind-in-the-sky]

Whumptober day one

Just a sneakpeak for day one's prompt which should be out tomorrow afternoon!

(It's late, so not off to a great start, lol)

Just as he manages to fell the last of the orcs that had gathered at the top of the hill near the bleak remains of the seat of seeing, Aragorn heard a great ringing cry come from further down – HasteUrgencyAidByTheValarHelpHelpHelp – the horn of Vorondil had sounded, just as it had been at the beginning of this quest, and with its urgent song it compelled all those who could to aid the fair son of Gondor.

Springing into action, Aragorn belts down the hill to where that desperate sound had come from, followed closely by Legolas and Gimli both – the tree branches grasping and snagging at their legs, hindering them in their race against time. Soon enough, they break into an area of flatter ground to the sound of pitched fighting and the unmistakable whistle-thud of arrows meeting flesh – No, it couldn’t be! – but there is scant time to pause, as the fresh set of orcs set upon them. Aragorn is a near blur in his action; his sword biting deep into orcish flesh and his dagger backing it up. He dimly registers a low whistle from Gimli about the numbers of dead already lying around them; Boromir was a man who took after the warrior legends of old, and his skill with a blade was formidable.

A sudden icy dread seized his spine as he broke through the enemy ranks and races ever closer – Merry and Pippin were with him, and if that were the case then Boromir would willingly sacrifice his body to see his “little ones” safe. Aragorn finally burst into the clearing, and laid eyes on that which he had dreaded most – Boromir is slumped over his knees, several black arrows piercing his chest, blood leaking from the wounds crimson-bright as it dripped onto the forest floor. A great, hulking orc looms over him, drawing a twisted black bow to deliver the final shot. 

NO!