Actress and singer Rita Moreno will be honored with the Producers Guild of America’s 2022 Stanley Kramer Award. Moreno will receive the award at the 33rd Annual Producers Guild Awards on Saturday, March 19, 2022 at the Fairmont Century Plaza.
The Stanley Kramer Award honors a production, producer or other individuals whose achievement or contribution illuminates and raises public awareness of important social issues. Producer and director Stanley Kramer created some of the most powerful work in the history of American motion pictures, including such classics as Inherit the Wind, On the Beach, The Defiant Ones and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Past recipients of the Stanley Kramer Award include: Jane Fonda, Get Out, Loving, Fruitvale Station, The Normal Heart, Bombshell, The Hunting Ground, An Inconvenient Truth and Hotel Rwanda.
In a joint statement, Producers Guild presidents Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher shared, “With grace, intelligence, charisma, and kindness, Rita Moreno made her mark in history as a brilliant entertainer and leveraged that star power to shepherd stories that tap into the human experience and represent people and communities we rarely see celebrated in film and TV. Beyond her on-screen contributions, she has used her unmistakable voice to hold a mirror to the prejudices and inequities that she so often experienced throughout her career. Her activism, strength, and artistic contributions set the precedent for how to be a changemaker in Hollywood, and it is our great honor to present Rita with the Stanley Kramer Award this year.”
Moreno said, “The last thing I ever dreamed of in my young life was being honored in any circumstance. That the Producers Guild of America has chosen to honor me not only for my work but for the principles I have tried to uphold and live by throughout my life is so gratifying. I am thrilled.”
Oscar, Tony, Grammy and two-time Emmy winner Rita Moreno’s illustrious career as an actress, dancer, singer and producer has spanned more than seven decades, beginning with her Broadway debut at age 13. Moreno has starred on Broadway and London’s West End, appeared in more than 40 feature films and countless television shows, and has performed in numerous regional theaters including her one woman show, Life Without Makeup, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Most recently, Moreno co-stars and is an executive producer of the Steven Spielberg remake of the classic, West Side Story, which released worldwide this past December. She also stars in the upcoming feature film, The Prank, due to be released in 2022. Her documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, for American Masters Pictures had its world debut at Sundance Film Festival last year. She also continues to headline as a guest artist with symphony orchestras as well as perform lectures and speaking engagements around the country.
In her career, Moreno has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, the Peabody Career Achievement Award and the Kennedy Center Honor.
Google’s AI model faces European Union scrutiny from privacy watchdog
European Union regulators said Thursday they're looking into one of Google's artificial intelligence models over concerns about its compliance with the bloc's strict data privacy rules.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission said it has opened an inquiry into Google's Pathways Language Model 2, also known as PaLM2. It's part of wider efforts, including by other national watchdogs across the 27-nation bloc, to scrutinize how AI systems handle personal data.
Google's European headquarters are based in Dublin, so the Irish watchdog acts as the company's lead regulator for the bloc's privacy rulebook, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
The commission said its inquiry is examining whether Google has assessed whether PaLM2's data processing would likely result in a "high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals" in the EU.
Large language models like PaLM2 are vast troves of data that act as building blocks for artificial intelligence systems. Google uses PaLM2 to power a range of generative AI services including email summarizing. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The Irish watchdog said earlier this month that Elon Musk's social media platform X has agreed to permanently stop processing user data for its AI chatbot Grok. The platform did so only after the watchdog took it to court the month before, filing an urgent High Court application to get X to "suspend, restrict or prohibit" processing of personal data contained in public posts by its users.
Meta Platforms paused its plans to use content posted by European users to train the latest version of its large language model after apparent pressure from the Irish regulators. The decision "followed intensive engagement" between the... Read More