• Academy Award-winning actress Olivia Colman has been honored by Queen Elizabeth II -- the monarch she is about to play on the Netflix royal family TV drama The Crown. Colman was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the annual Queen's Birthday Honors list. The performer won a best-actress Oscar this year for playing 18th-century monarch Queen Anne in The Favorite. She plays Elizabeth in the third season of The Crown, which is currently in production. Colman said she was "totally thrilled, delighted and humbled" by the honor. The queen also made singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, 64, an Officer of the Order of the British Empire -- an honor far from his roots in Britain's punk and new wave scene during the 1970s. Other recipients of this year's Queen's Birthday Honors include British-Sri Lankan rapper MIA, whose real name is Mathangi Arulpragasam, 43, and Andrew Roachford, the singer-songwriter behind the band Roachford. Both were made a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to music. The honors are awarded twice a year, at New Year's and to mark the monarch's official birthday in June. They acknowledge hundreds of people for services to community or British life.
• Michael B. Jordan told the men known as the Central Park Five on Friday that he cannot watch footage of the new series When They See Us without getting emotional and feeling like as a young black man he, too, could have faced a similar ordeal. "It's dangerous in America when you're living in a black body," Jordan said. Jordan praised the men -- Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise -- for their perseverance and courage during a Los Angeles luncheon in which the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California honored Netflix's series about their case. "The whole time that these men were incarcerated, they never changed their story," he said. "They insisted of their innocence even as they did their time." Salaam cried as he accepted an award on behalf of series creator Ava DuVernay. "I'm not ashamed to cry in front of you," Salaam said after a moment of silence as he reflected on how he and the other men were "just boys" between the ages of 13 and 16 when they were wrongfully convicted. "Our story is a story of an egregious miscarriage of justice," he added. Salaam and the rest of the Central Park Five were exonerated in 2002 after being charged with the 1989 rape of a white woman in New York's Central Park. They received a standing ovation while accepting the ACLU chapter's inaugural Roger Baldwin Courage Award. Baldwin was one of the ACLU's founders and its first executive director.
A Section on 06/09/2019