Arts & Entertainment
Hollywood's Big Night
Shining a light on Oscar's Jewish nominees.
Nate Bloom
Special to the Jewish News
competing falafel stands on the West Bank.
Despite their differences, the Israeli soldier
son of the Jewish family falls in love with
the young Palestinian woman who works as
a cashier at her family's stand.
T
he 79th Annual Academy
Awards airs 8 p.m. Sunday, Feb.
25, on ABC. Here are sketches of
the Jewish Oscar nominees. More informa-
tion can be found at www.Oscar.com .
Actors And Directors
Alan Arkin, 72, is nominated for Best
Supporting Actor for his performance as
the very quirky grandfather in the com-
edy-drama Little Miss Sunshine. His
previous nominations were Best Actor for
playing a Soviet submarine captain in the
comedy The Russians Are Coming, The
Russians Are Coming (1966) (Arkin's
screen debut) and Best Actor for playing
a deaf mute in the drama The Heart is a
Lonely Hunter (1968).
Arkin was born in 1934 in Brooklyn, the
son of two Jewish intellectual leftists. The
family moved to L.A., where Alan's father,
David Arkin, a painter, managed to get a
teaching job in the L.A. public schools, only
to be fired during a McCarthy era witch-
hunt. Many years later, his firing was ruled
illegal; he gained footnote fame in 1970
when the rock band Three Dog Night had
a monster hit with the anti-racism tune
"Black and White," lyrics by David Arkin.
Alan Arkin kept to himself in high
school, seeing himself, in the words of an
old interview, "a foreigner, a Russian-
German Jew from New York in the land of
suntanned blondes." He took drama work-
shops from the time he was 10; his most
important teacher was Bernard Zemach, a
famous Russian-Jewish choreographer who
often used Jewish themes in his work.
In 1956, Arkin dropped out of college to
join the folk music group the Tarriers, with
whom he recorded the popular hit "The
Banana Boat Song!' However, by 1959,
Arkin found his musical success wanting;
he still burned to be an actor.
He struggled for a time, but by 1963 he
was the toast of Broadway, playing a young
Jewish guy trying to break into showbiz
in Carl Reiner's autobiographical hit play,
Enter Laughing.
Building on his Oscar nomination, but
not fitting the 1960s' image of a traditional
leading man, Arkin carved out a strong act-
ing career by playing character parts in big
movies, while often taking the lead in more
modest budget films.
The actor's first wife was Jewish, and
she is the mother of his sons, Matthew
48
February 22 • 2007
The musical opening scene from the Oscar-nominated Best Live Action Short West
Bank Story
and Adam (a well-known actor in his own
right). They divorced in 1960. He married
twice more, having another son with his
second wife.
Arkin may not discuss his Jewish back-
ground much, but he has deftly played quite
a few Jews: a detective-rabbi in Friday the
Rabbi Slept Late; a Jewish magician in
the film version of Isaac Bashevis Singer's
Magician of Lublin; an amiable Canadian
Jewish crook in Joshua, Then and Now;
the leader of the revolt of Jewish prison-
ers in Sobibor concentration camp in the
TV miniseries Escape from Sobibor; and
another Nazi death-camp inmate in Jakob
the Liar.
On top of these and other roles, Arkin
has directed films (Little Murders), writ-
ten children's books and picked up some
nice checks directing TV commercials.
British film director Stephen Frears,
65, is nominated for Best Director for his
work on The Queen-, a film that follows the
British royal family during the period right
after Princess Diana's death.
Frears mostly directed British TV
shows until his 1985 film My Beautiful
Laundrette became an unexpected box-
office and critical hit. Since then, he has
directed other critically acclaimed films,
including, The Grifters, High Fidelity,
Dangerous Liaisons and Dirty Pretty
Things. His 2001 film Liam had British
anti-Semitism in the 1930s as its subject.
Frears is the son of an Anglican father
and a Jewish mother. He was raised an
Anglican and didn't know his mother was
Jewish until he was in his late 20s. His
brother, who knew the truth, told Stephen
about their mother not long after Stephen
married his current wife, Jewish painter
Annie Rothenstein.
In a 2001 interview, Frears, who is not
religious, told a Jewish newspaper that
he thought his mother hid being Jewish
because of the low-key anti-Semitism so
prevalent in Britain, especially right after
World War II.
Gil Kenan, 30, made his directing debut
with the hit animated film Monster House.
It is one of three films nominated for the
Best Animated Feature Oscar. If it wins,
Kenan picks up an Oscar his first time at bat.
Kenan was born in London but moved
with his family to Tel Aviv when he was
an infant. When he was 7, his Jewish par-
ents relocated to Los Angeles. During the
Lebanon War, Kenan told an Israeli news
service, he called his relatives in Ramat-
Gan, Israel, practically every day.
Kenan studied film at UCLA, where a
student film he made so impressed famous
director Robert Zemeckis that he asked
Kenan to direct Monster House. The
movie, which took three years to make,
was co-produced by Zemeckis (who isn't
Jewish) and Steven Spielberg.
Ari Sandel, 32, was born and raised in
Southern California. He is nominated for
Best Short Live Action Film (fiction) for his
cute Israeli-made movie, West Bank Story.
It is a musical comedy based on Romeo
and Juliet and West Side Story. An Israeli
Jewish family and a Palestinian family have
Producers
Steven Spielberg, whose father fought
in World War II, co-produced Clint
Eastwood's companion films about that
war's battle of Iwo Jima: Flags of our
Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The
latter film, from the Japanese perspective,
is nominated for Best Picture. If it wins,
Spielberg gets another Oscar.
Peter Saraf, David Friendly and
Marc Turtletaub are the producers of
Little Miss Sunshine. If it scores a Best
Picture win, they all will snag their first
Oscars.
Friendly, who had a religious upbringing,
is the son of the late Fred Friendly, the presi-
dent of CBS News from 1964-66. In the '50s,
Fred was the news producer for legendary
CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. George
Clooney played Fred Friendly in his movie
Good Night and Good Luck, which was
up for the Best Picture Oscar last year.
Screenwriters
Sacha Baron Cohen's wild mock docu-
mentary and runaway hit Borat: Cultural
Leanings of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan received
only one Oscar nomination, for Best
Adapted Screenplay.
Cohen wrote the flick with his four
co-nominees, who include Dan Mazer, a
British Jew who met Cohen at Cambridge
University.
Cohen's father is a wealthy businessman
who was born in Wales. His mother is an
Israeli who settled in Britain after marrying
Sacha's father. His maternal grandmother,
who fled Nazi Germany, still lives in Israel.
Sacha, 36, had a strong Jewish upbring-
ing, including belonging to a Zionist youth
group. He studied history at Cambridge but
turned to a TV career not long after gradu-
ating from college in 1994.
Borat, a crude and absurdly anti-Semitic
mythical journalist from Kazakhstan,
began as a British TV character, as did
Cohen's other well-known alter egos, rapper
Ali G and Bruno, a gay Austrian designer
with a Nazi streak.
Some respected critics despised the Borat
movie's crudeness. But most professional
comedians loved Borat, believing Cohen
had done something really fresh.