Hollywood’s awards season kicks into high gear on Sunday at the Golden Globes gala, with the politically charged “One Battle After Another” expected to solidify its status as the film to beat, two months ahead of the Oscars.Paul Thomas Anderson’s screwball thriller, which centers on an aging revolutionary (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti), is a rollicking ride featuring violent leftist radicals, immigration raids and white supremacists.At a time when the United States is deeply polarized, many critics and pundits have hailed the film as capturing the moment.With nine nominations, “One Battle” appears a lock to take home the prize for best comedy/musical film.”We’re seeing a real sweep and a juggernaut in that movie,” Deadline’s awards columnist and chief critic Pete Hammond told AFP, recalling that so far, it has won every best picture prize so far this season.DiCaprio will vie for best actor with Timothee Chalamet, who boosted his Oscars campaign with a win at the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday for his star turn in “Marty Supreme” as an ambitious 1950s table tennis player.”Leonardo DiCaprio would be tremendously helped by actually winning at the Globes. That’s the ideal moment to stop Timothee Chalamet’s momentum before the Oscars,” Hammond said.Teyana Taylor, who plays an unapologetically bold leftist revolutionary, could fuel a sweep for “One Battle” if she can pick up the prize for best supporting actress.But in her way are Amy Madigan for her wacky villainous turn in “Weapons” and Ariana Grande for her portrayal of Glinda in the blockbuster “Wicked: For Good.”- ‘Sinners’ versus ‘Hamnet’ -The Golden Globes offer separate awards for dramas and comedies/musicals — widening the field of stars who could walk the red carpet, and fueling the suspense. “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s searing period horror film about the segregated South of the 1930s, is expected to be the toughest competition for “One Battle” at the Oscars. But at the Globes, they are in separate categories.”Sinners” surprised moviegoers with its eclectic mix of vampires, politics, race relations and blues music.It is the frontrunner for the best drama film Globe, against rival “Hamnet,” which stars Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his grief-stricken wife, as the two cope with the death of their young son.”Sentimental Value,” the Norwegian family dramedy starring Stellan Skarsgard, earned a strong eight nominations, is also in the running.A “Sinners” victory “would be an indication of a real change,” Hammond says, noting that in the past, voters “were never actually that drawn to Black stories.”Buckley is the favorite for best drama actress honors.The Golden Globes went through a crisis period, following a Los Angeles Times expose in 2021 that showed that the awards’ voting body — the Hollywood Foreign Press Association — had no Black members.Now under new ownership, and with the HFPA disbanded, a wider net of overseas critics has been brought in to pick the winners.”That makes it much more difficult for pundits to predict,” Hammond explained.”These new voters are less keen on movies that make a lot of money at the box office, and more interested in international movies that are highly praised in Cannes and Venice.”- Prize for Iran’s Panahi? -One of those movies is Brazilian thriller “The Secret Agent,” and lead actor Wagner Moura — already a winner at the Cannes Film Festival — is favored to win best drama actor honors over “Sinners” star Michael B. Jordan, according to awards prediction site Gold Derby. Skarsgard, a Hollywood stalwart, is poised to take home the award for best supporting actor. “The Secret Agent” and “Sentimental Value” will vie for the Globe for best non-English language film with “It Was Just An Accident” from Iranian director Jafar Panahi. “The Globes may want to make a statement and give him this prize,” Hammond said of Panahi,  who has been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison over “propaganda activities” against the Islamic republic.The Globes also honor the best in television, with HBO’s black comedy anthology “The White Lotus,” sci-fi office thriller “Severance” and searing teen murder saga “Adolescence” leading the contenders.Comedian Nikki Glaser will return as host of the gala in Beverly Hills.

NASA crewmembers at the International Space Station will return to Earth within days after an astronaut suffered a health issue, the US space agency said Thursday, the first such medical evacuation in the orbital lab’s history.Officials did not provide details of the medical event but said the unidentified crewmember is stable. They said it did not result from any kind of injury onboard or from ISS operations.NASA chief medical officer James Polk said “lingering risk” and a “lingering question as to what that diagnosis is” led to the decision to return early. Officials insisted it was not an emergency evacuation.The four astronauts on NASA-SpaceX Crew 11 — US members Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman along with Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov — would return within the coming days to one of the routine splashdown sites.Amit Kshatriya, a NASA associate administrator, said it was the “first time we’ve done a controlled medical evacuation from the vehicle. So that is unusual.”He said the crew deployed their “onboarding training” to “manage unexpected medical situations.””Yesterday was a textbook example of that training in action. Once the situation on the station stabilized, careful deliberations led us to the decision to return Crew 11… while ensuring minimal operational impact to ongoing work aboard.”- ‘Trained professionals’ -The four astronauts set to return have been on their mission since August 1. Such journeys generally last approximately six months, and this crew was already due to return in the coming weeks.Officials indicated it was possible the next US mission could depart to the ISS earlier than scheduled, but did not provide specifics.Chris Williams, who launched on a Russian mission to the station, will stay onboard to maintain US presence.Russians Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev are also there.NASA had previously said it was postponing a spacewalk planned for Thursday due to the medical issue.Astronauts Fincke and Cardman were to carry out the approximately 6.5-hour spacewalk to perform power upgrade work.Continuously inhabited since 2000, the ISS functions as a testbed for research that supports deeper space exploration — including eventual missions to Mars.The ISS is set to be decommissioned after 2030, with its orbit gradually lowered until it breaks up in the atmosphere over a remote part of the Pacific Ocean called Point Nemo, a spacecraft graveyard.

Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a US immigration agent on Wednesday in the midwestern city of Minneapolis, was an “extremely compassionate” person, her mother told the Minnesota Star-Tribune newspaper.”She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being,” Donna Ganger told the newspaper. The 37-year-old — a poet and a mother to three children — was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer while she was behind the wheel of her car. The Trump administration was quick to claim her death was an act of self-defense, but local authorities and witnesses dispute that account — and widely shared video evidence has called into question the officer’s use of deadly force. In 2020, Good earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Old Dominion University in Virginia, the school said in a statement honoring her Wednesday. “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace. My hope is for compassion, healing, and reflection at a time that is becoming one of the darkest and most uncertain periods in our nation’s history,” university president Brian O. Hemphill said.Good was a published poet who was awarded the Academy of American Poets 2020 poetry prize while at her university. In a biography for the award, she was described as loving movie marathons and making “messy art with her daughter and two sons.” US media report that her private Instagram account bio described her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN” and had an emoji of a rainbow LGBTQ+ flag.Her children were from her first two marriages and at the time of her death, she was married to a woman, who she lived with in Minneapolis where they were raising her youngest child, a six-year-old boy.More than $800,000 has been raised to support her surviving family.Despite accusations from the Trump administration that she was endangering the lives of federal immigration agents, Good’s mother told the Minnesota Star-Tribune that she was not taking part in any action against ICE. Her first husband, who declined to be identified, told US media that Good was a devoted Christian and was not an activist.

Hours after a fatal shooting in Minneapolis by an immigration agent, AI deepfakes of the victim and the shooter flooded online platforms, underscoring the growing prevalence of what experts call “hallucinated” content after major news events.The victim of Wednesday’s shooting, identified as 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, was hit at point-blank range as she apparently tried to drive away from masked agents who were crowding around her Honda SUV.AFP found dozens of posts across social media platforms, primarily the Elon Musk-owned X, in which users shared AI-generated images purporting to “unmask” the agent from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.”We need his name,” Claude Taylor, who heads the anti-Trump political action committee Mad Dog, wrote in a post on X featuring the AI images. The post racked up more than 1.3 million views.Taylor later claimed he deleted the post after he “learned it was AI,” but it was still visible to online users.An authentic clip of the shooting, replayed by multiple media outlets, does not show any of the ICE agents with their masks off.Many of the fabrications were created using Grok, the AI tool developed by Musk’s startup xAI, which has faced heavy criticism over a new “edit” feature that has unleashed a wave of sexually explicit imagery.Some X users used Grok to digitally undress an old photo of Good smiling, as well as a new photo of her body slumped over after the shooting, generating AI images showing her in a bikini.Another woman wrongly identified as the victim was also subjected to similar manipulation.- ‘New reality’ -Another X user posted the image of a masked officer and prompted the chatbot: “Hey @grok remove this person’s face mask.” Grok promptly generated a hyper-realistic image of the man without a mask.There was no immediate comment from X. When reached by AFP, xAI replied with a terse, automated response: “Legacy Media Lies.”Disinformation watchdog NewsGuard identified four AI-generated falsehoods about the shooting, which collectively amassed 4.24 million views across X, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.The viral fabrications illustrate a new digital reality in which self-proclaimed internet sleuths use widely available generative AI tools to create hyper-realistic visuals and then amplify them across social media platforms that have largely scaled back content moderation.”Given the accessibility of advanced AI tools, it is now standard practice for actors on the internet to ‘add to the story’ of breaking news in ways that do not correspond to what is actually happening, often in politically partisan ways,” Walter Scheirer, from the University of Notre Dame, told AFP.”A new development has been the use of AI to ‘fill in the blanks’ of a story, for instance, the use of AI to ‘reveal’ the face of the ICE officer. This is hallucinated information.” AI tools are also increasingly used to “dehumanize victims” in the aftermath of a crisis event, Scheirer said.One AI image portrayed the woman mistaken for Good as a water fountain, with water pouring out of a hole in her neck.Another depicted her lying on a road, her neck under the knee of a masked agent, in a scene reminiscent of the 2020 police killing of a Black man named George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked nationwide racial justice protests.AI fabrications, often amplified by partisan actors, have fueled alternate realities around recent news events, including the US capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and last year’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.The AI distortions are “problematic” and are adding to the “growing pollution of our information ecosystem,” Hany Farid, co-founder of GetReal Security and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told AFP.”I fear that this is our new reality,” he added.