David Tennant Ineligible For British Equivalent of a Tony

With reviews that proclaimed him to be one of the greatest Hamlets ever, you’d think David Tennant would have been a shoo-in for the British equivalent of a Tony, right? Wrong – the Doctor Who star didn’t even receive an Olivier nomination for Best Actor. And to add further insult, his co-stars Patrick Stewart and Oliver Ford Davies were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

However, there’s no big conspiracy: you can blame Tennant’s back injury for the snub. Tennant had to leave the production prior to its move from Stratford-upon-Avon to London, and, as The Daily Telegraph reports, “The Oliviers recognize excellence on the London stage.”

With Tennant ineligible, the nominees for Best Actor were David Bradley and Sir Michael Gambon for No Man’s Land, Adam Godley for Rain Man, and Sir Derek Jacobi for Twelfth Night. The nominees for Best Actress were Deanna Dunagan for August: Osage County, Lindsay Duncan for That Face, and Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton for The Chalk Garden.

In other news:

• The Stage says Kenneth Branagh is this year’s big snub.
• Terry Gilliam expresses his grief at the death of Heath Ledger, who died during filming of Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. “It just isn’t possible that he’s dead,” he says. “There’s nothing he can’t do, it just flows out of him with ease and grace. He lifted everybody. He wasn’t like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense.” (Telegraph)
• The Daily Telegraph predicts the BAFTA winners.
• Britain will get another 10 inches of the white stuff. Apparently, God heard you all complaining about the snow and said, “I’ll give you something to complain about!”(Telegraph)
• Britain’s most beautiful snow-covered homes.(Telegraph)
• The Guardian‘s Stuart Jeffries waxes rhapsodic on the London snow. “The snow’s silencing of the great roar of London: usually, I keep my iPod on as I walk to silence London’s racket: yesterday I didn’t want to. Every side street I strolled down yesterday offered – if this doesn’t sound too pretentious in a Karen Carpenter-meets-Immanuel Kant kind of way, which I know it does – an unexpectedly sublime kind of hush.”
• Simon Cowell had moobs and bad hair even as a teenager.(The Sun)
• John Cleese is doing a bit of “remodeling” on his face.(The Sun)
• Kate Winslet looks totally gorge at the Oscars luncheon.(Daily Mail)
• Christian Bale‘s meltdown: the dance remix.(NME)
• Amy Winehouse will record her album in “druggie paradise” Jamaica, reports The Sun.
• Four stars for Lily Allen‘s latest album from The Times‘ Pete Paphides: “What is it about Lily Allen – currently top of the singles charts with ‘The Fear’ – that appears to connect with people? She’s long since sucked us into a Truman Show of her own making. As long as the charm and the tunes remain intact, we’re powerless to resist.”
• Oasis‘ new video takes a pop at Prince Charles.(NME)
• The Guardian‘s Paul Flynn argues that Morrissey‘s nudie shot is the “sign of artistic decline”: “Frankly, it is ghastly. It looks like the sort of wilfully zany idea that an art director at Heat might throw at the boys from Gavin & Stacey to spice up the features section….As Morrissey adjusts his quiff, you can only exhale a long, deep and regretful sigh. The day that the man who once defined iconographic sleeve art takes visual cues from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is the day the music died.”
• The Kooks‘ Luke Pritchard is just not that into Mischa Barton.(The Sun)
• Glasvegas frontman James Allan pays tribute to Buddy Holly, who died 50 years ago today in a plane crash.(Guardian)
• Timothy Spall‘s son Rafe Spall, Cambridge Spies‘ Tom Hollander, Being Human‘s Aidan Turner, Hex‘s Zoe Tapper, and The History Boys‘ Samuel Barnett will all star in a new drama penned by Viva Blackpool creator Peter Bowker. It’s called Desperate Romantics, which “focuses on a group of English painters, poets and critics called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”(The Stage)
• Margaret Thatcher‘s daughter has been sacked from her BBC show for her use of an ethnic slur.(Times Online)