If Meryl Streep thought dressing like an Oscar would help her win the best actress prize, it worked!
The actress was a vision in gold at the 84th Academy Awards, donning an artfully draped Lanvin gown that left her looking strikingly similar to the coveted trophies on offer.
Meryl took home the big prize for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady but dozens of other stars won praise for their fashion choices.
Here are the best and worst frocks from the 2012 Oscars.
Gwyneth Paltrow in Tom Ford.
Michelle Williams in Louis Vuitton.
Rooney Mara in Givenchy.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in Atelier Versace.
Meryl Streep in Lanvin.
Penelope Cruz in Giorgio Armani.
Glenn Close in Zac Posen.
Jane Seymour.
Prince Albert and Princess Charlene of Monaco.
Emma Stone in Giambattista Valli Haute Couture.
Sandra Bullock in Marchesa.
Rose Byrne in Vivienne Westwood.
Octavia Spencer in Tadashi Shoji.
Tina Fey in Carolina Herrera.
George Clooney in Giorgio Armani and Stacy Keibler in Marchesa.
Gordon Wood, the man accused of pushing model Caroline Byrne off a cliff almost 20 years ago, has been acquitted of her murder.
Wood has spent more than three years in jail after a jury found he had killed Caroline, his girlfriend, by throwing her off Sydney’s notorious suicide spot, The Gap, in 1995.
On Friday, a panel of judges from the NSW Supreme Court unanimously overturned the decision on appeal, saying they were not satisfied that suicide could be excluded. They acquitted Wood, and he will be released from prison.
“I am not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt,” Justice Peter McClellan said.
During the original hearing in 2008, the jury did not accept the defence’s claim that Ms Byrne had a history of depression and committed suicide, like her mother before her. Wood was sentenced to 13 years in jail.
However, Wood appealed the decision. During the appeal last year, the defence questioned nine aspects of the original trial, including expert evidence that Wood was strong enough to throw Caroline off the cliff.
That evidence was based on tests using a conscious and co-operative subject. Lawyers for Wood argued Caroline would have struggled.
Wood’s family was in tears of relief at the outcome. His sister, Jackie Schmidt, has spent the past three years going through thousands of documents to help his appeal.
Caroline’s father Tony, who believes Wood killed his daughter and spent years fighting to bring the case to court, was ushered out of the courtroom by detectives.
Tony Byrne the victim’s father refused to comment as he left the Supreme Court building.
The Wood family were visibly moved by the verdict. Wood’s sister Jackie Schmidt, a long time campaigner for Wood’s freedom, told reporters they were expecting him to be released from Goulburn jail within the next few hours.
“We haven’t spoken to him yet, but he would be very relieved,” said Jackie. “It has been a long journey and there hasn’t been a lot of sleep over the last few days … relieved is an understatement.”
A Black Saturday fire-fighter who kicked his former partner in the head so hard it snapped her optic nerve and blinded her in one eye has been given a bravery award by the Royal Humane Society of Australasia.
In a ceremony attended by Victorian Governor Alex Curnov and other dignitaries at Melbourne Town Hall on Friday night Paul Francis McCuskey, 41, of Reefton in rural Victoria, was named as a recipient of the Humane Society’s Certificate of Merit for his part in helping to save an elderly woman and her animals in the Marysville area during the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires.
McCuskey is serving a five and a half year jail sentence after pleading guilty two years ago to a series of attacks on his former partner.
In one assault, he punched and kicked the pregnant woman in the stomach, only stopping after a friend intervened.
In another he dragged her from their bed and kicked her in the head, leaving her bleeding and in terrible pain. She lost the sight in her left eye. Doctors said the woman suffered injuries similar to those usually seen only in high impact car accidents.
The Humane Society said it would “review” the award.
The victim declined to comment, but she is believed to be extremely upset by the award.
Deb Bryant, CEO of the Women’s Domestic Violence Crisis Service, says any award to McCuskey is an outrage.
“Committing such violence against one’s partner is anything but brave, it’s outright cowardly,” she says. “This man doesn’t deserve any kind of public award; if anything he owes the public an apology for what he’s done.”
His fire-fighting colleagues agree. “I’m not going to stand up and fight for him,” says CFA captain Dan Bennett, McCuskey’s former commander.
“As far as we are concerned, he’s a scumbag and he’s where he deserves to be. What we’re disappointed in that it’s taken the shine off the award for the rest of the crew.”
Humane Society President Ross Campbell says that he and other members of the selection committee were not aware of McCuskey’s crime, guilty plea or jail sentence.
“We don’t check everybody out as to their status,” says Mr Campbell. “Whether or not the award is appropriate I can’t say at the moment. He was judged on what he did then, on that day… but if they are in prison then that would certainly be an issue.
“These people are given awards for saving the lives of others and there may be issues occasionally like this one where we have to review it because of other circumstances and I will do that straight away.”
Single women worldwide can breathe a sigh of relief — it turns out men aren’t dying out after all.
Previous research suggested that men would become extinct within the next five million years.
But a new study of rhesus macaque monkeys — one of man’s most distant cousins — found that although the Y chromosome is shrinking, the rate of decay is not as steep as once thought.
Scientists had previously discovered that the male Y chromosome had shrunk from 1,400 genes 300 million years ago, to just 45 genes now.
Based on this rate of decay, they predicted the male chromosome, and thus all human men, would die out within the next five million years.
But the latest study has found that the ‘male extinction’ claims have been greatly exaggerated.
Researchers concede there was a rapid decrease in Y genes at first, but that this has now slowed dramatically.
The rhesus species has not lost any Y genes in the past 25 million years, while humans have lost just one. Furthermore, the human Y has been completely stable for the past six million years.
“The Y was in free fall early on and genes were lost at an incredibly rapid rate,” study leader Professor David Page from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“But then it levelled off — and it’s been doing just fine since.”
Who knew Justin Theroux had a hidden talent for breakdancing?
He recently appeared on Ellen to show off his moves which he says his girlfriend Jennifer Aniston is “obsessed with”.
He said Aniston’s obsession with his breakdancing started when he showed her a Zoolander performance.
“I breakdanced at a friend’s wedding, so [Jennifer has] been saying, ‘When are you going to breakdance?’ If I don’t have my ‘breaking shoes’ then I don’t breakdance,” he said.
Luckily, Aniston had planned ahead by sending the shoes over to Ellen before the show.
Watch Justin show off his breakdancing moves in the video player above.
For most, marriage is about love but a new US survey has found that many singles don’t necessarily marry for love.
A Match.com survey, which surveyed 5000 people, found that men are more likely than women to marry someone who they don’t love.
The survey found that 31 percent of men admitted they would marry someone who has everything they are looking for in a partner, but who they weren’t in love with compared to 23 percent of women.
The data collected also showed that although men weren’t necessarily interested in finding love, they were interested in settling down, even if the situation was not ideal.
Sex and relationship therapist Doctor Laura Berman who blogs for Match.com said men are likely to commit to a woman they don’t feel romantically linked to so that they don’t feel like they are being left behind.
“Well, even though we often think of men as die-hard commitment-phobes, the truth is that they are just as susceptible to peer pressure as women are,” she said about the survey.
“If they see all of their buddies getting hitched and having kids, they will feel a desire to follow suit, especially if their partner is pressuring them down the aisle.”
The survey also found that 21 percent of men confessed that they would tie the knot with someone that they weren’t sexually attracted to.
Men in their twenties had a stronger urge to marry than those in their thirties, but the desire rose again for men in their forties.
Although Dr Berman says the decision to marry someone who you don’t feel a romantic connection with may seem easy for some men, it isn’t necessarily the right choice and can often end in failed relationships.
“Ultimately, a man will only get to that place of deep commitment and love when he is ready to and you can’t ever force such feelings,” she said.
Kathy Lette with her son Julius, 21, who has Asperger's.
Kathy Lette talks for the first time about the painful day she was told her son, Julius, had Asperger’s and how she’s coped with his eccentric view of life and his dark days.
Kathy Lette sat in stunned silence in a London doctor’s office as he told her that her son, Julius Robertson, then just three, suffered from a developmental disorder.
“I remember the paediatrician’s voice being all light and falsely cheery, which was how I knew something was seriously wrong,” recalls Kathy, London-based author, mother of two and wife of human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.
“The word ‘autism’ slid into me like the cold, sharp edge of a knife. This is a diagnosis that pulls you into the riptide and drags you down into the dark. The doctor had reduced him to a black and white term — autism. But, to me, Jules was full of the most vibrant colours.”
Kathy Lette, 53-year-old veteran of a thousand interviews, is a bundle of jangled nerves. Normally, the effervescent princess of pun, co-author of the iconic ’70s novel Puberty Blues, takes questioning in her stilettoed stride, all part of the business of being an internationally successful writer published in 120 countries.
Yet today is different. Today, Kathy is doing something she has never done before. Today, she is talking about her relationship with her son, Julius, now 21, who has lived his life with Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder closely associated with high-functioning autism.
She is also talking about her new book, The Boy Who Fell To Earth, on sale March 1, the sometimes funny, sometimes moving story of Merlin, a boy with Asperger’s, and his mother, Lucy, who struggles to cope after her husband runs out.
The book is, as Kathy points out, a work of fiction, not a memoir. Yet there is a lot of Julius in Merlin and a lot of humour, love and emotional truth in Kathy’s writing.
Talking about her family is something Kathy has avoided over the years. Articles about her are littered with one-liners about feminism and double entendre, but her private life has remained off limits — until now.
The link between her latest work and her own life is inescapable. It is, after all, the reason she wrote the book.
“This is not the book that I intended to write,” says Kathy. “It just came pouring out of my pen. And sometimes that happens. They say writing is the cheapest form of therapy.
“My son has Asperger’s. I have never spoken about or mentioned that before in a public context. In the past, that was because he was still a child, but now he’s 21 and he has read the book and he loves it, and he agrees with me that it could help people understand young people like him, which can only be a good thing.
“He says he loves being Aspergic because it makes him quirky and funny. It’s an amazing condition and there are a lot of strengths that go with it. He has an incredible vocabulary and amazing numeracy skills, and a very idiosyncratic, eccentric view of life, which can be disarming and charming in its own way, but it also has its difficulties.”
Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder that falls within the autism spectrum of disorders and is often characterised by good language skills but poor communication, a difficulty in forming friendships, repetitive behaviours and a childhood preference for playing alone or with older children or adults.
Many Aspergics talk in extensive detail about a narrow topic — subatomic particles or Brazilian stamps — yet often can’t recount what happened during their day or understand subtlety, jokes or sarcasm.
“It’s a little bit like raising a Martian who speaks Swahili at times because they don’t read emotions very well,” says Kathy.
“People with Asperger’s have no filter and tend to say what they are thinking. Like the time my son asked his intimidating headmaster what he wrote on his driver’s licence for hair colour, being completely bald? Or enquired of a leather-clad bikie if he’d ever noticed that his chin looked like upside-down testicles?”
Read more of this story in the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
“They called wrap on set and I went back to my apartment and took a long look in the mirror,” Rebecca tells the March issue of The Australian Woman’s Weekly.
“I said, ‘Wow, I’m fat.’ Well, not fat, but pretty chunky. And I had to be back on set for Packed to the Rafters in two weeks. I went on a diet and started trying to lose the weight.”
Rebecca, 47, started an aggressive diet, cutting out bread, pasta, and alcohol but the onset of menopause meant that the weight wasn’t coming off as quickly as it used to.
After weeks of feeling angry and anxious, Rebecca decided enough was enough — and decided to quit dieting forever.
“I was starting to stress out about the weight and not being able to lose it,” she says. “But then I thought, ‘Well, I can be grumpy, sad and hungry, but that wouldn’t be good, not for me, not for my family, not for anyone’.
“I’d be terrible to live with if I was all those things at once, so I thought, I’ll just be grumpy. I won’t be hungry anymore.”
“I am not an all or nothing kind of girl. I’m not going to give up everything. I’m just not. Life is too short, so I am going to have chocolate and I am going to have a glass of wine. And on my cheat day, I am going to have ice-cream. “
Rebecca is now down to a healthy size 10, and says she doesn’t care if she never gets back to her old body.
“Luckily, the great thing about being older is that I don’t feel the pressure to be a size 6 or 8 again,” she says. “I am a size 10. I’m healthy and I’m fit. I’m 65kg, which is smack bang in the middle of the healthy weight range for my height and age.
“I’m not at my pre-baby weight, but I refuse to beat myself up over it. There are plenty of more important things to worry about. It’s so sad that we put so much pressure on ourselves and emphasise the way that we look rather than, for example, our mental health.”
“We feel very blessed with our four healthy, happy and lovely children,” Mary tells the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. “First a boy, then a girl and now the twins. It was… ‘Wow, we’re having twins!’
“I realise we had the best of help, but being a mother and breastfeeding a couple of twins with two children already — it was a bit of a strain.
Despite the difficulties of having four children under five, Mary says she loves every second of her chaotic life.
“It is the most enjoyable time in your life because you are so absorbed in your own little bubble with your small, innocent children,” she says. “They are just like God delivered them.”
Mary returned to royal duties just five months after the birth of Vincent and Josephine.
“I reckoned I could say yes to a few things and then it suddenly gained a life of its own,” Mary says. “Nobody ever said, ‘Where is she?’ I never felt any expectations about me returning to the public eye.
“But there were events I had said yes to two years previously and they were in my engagement book. And, suddenly, there were a lot of meetings in the nursery — even if I have children, I cannot just resign from the public.”
Mary, who turned 40 on February 5, carries out an extensive list of royal duties every month. She supports several charities and foundations and spends a lot of time travelling.
This leaves very little times for relaxing, but no matter how hectic her life gets, Mary says her children make her feel “rich” beyond belief.
“First and last, we are a family that needs to thrive,” Mary says. “And experience this family of brothers and sisters together. You just sit still and observe in amazement.
“The love floating between them. You feel rich. When you have four children, the concept of sleep gains an entirely new meaning. You have four possibilities of being disturbed.”
Tania Herman, the woman serving at least nine years in jail for trying to kill Maria Korp, her lover Joe’s wife, has spoken for the first time from prison.
In an interview published exclusively in The Australian Women’s Weekly, Herman — who shares a unit with Herman Rockefeller killer Bernadette Denny — says she was “a bloody idiot” who was “brainwashed” by Joe.
“I am still amazed myself and think how the hell could I ever have gotten in so deep?” she says. “My biggest regret is taking a mother away from her children because I would hate that to happen to me.”
Herman says she knew what she was doing was wrong when she waited in Maria’s garage that fateful morning, but Joe Korp’s words — “don’t let the bitch get out of the garage alive” — were ringing in her ears.
She says she was in “a set frame of mind, but as soon as I saw the blood, something snapped. I panicked. I put her in the boot of her car and just drove. As I was driving, I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking, ‘This is wrong, this is wrong’.”
Herman is counting down the days until her release, and says she longs for privacy and “normal conversation”. Reports she punched Judy Moran were “totally inaccurate”. She has sporadic contact with her daughters, and saw the eldest for the first time only recently.
