‘Brokeback Mountain’ tops at British Academy Film Awards

London – “Brokeback Mountain” took four awards, including best picture, on Sunday at the British Academy Film Awards, boosting its hopes for the Oscars in two weeks’ time.

The film beat out a literary biopic “Capote,” L.A. story “Crash,” 1950s drama “Good Night, and Good Luck” and the British favorite, “The Constant Gardener.”

“The Constant Gardener,” a spy thriller and love story, went into the ceremony with 10 nominations, but took only one award, for editing. “Memoirs of a Geisha” won three awards, for cinematography, music and costume design.

Ang Lee was named best director for “Brokeback,” which is up for eight Academy Awards on March 5. Jake Gyllenhaal won the best supporting actor prize for playing Jack Twist, one of two cowpokes who fall in love over the course of a Wyoming summer.

Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, who adapted Annie Proulx’s short story, won the adapted screenplay prize.

Gyllenhaal’s co-star Heath Ledger was beaten out for the best-actor prize by Philip Seymour Hoffman for his depiction of the troubled writer Truman Capote in “Capote.”

Reese Witherspoon was named best actress for playing June Carter Cash, the wife and muse of country great Johnny Cash, in “Walk the Line.”

Thandie Newton took the best supporting actress award for “Crash,” an edgy depiction of racial divisions in modern-day Los Angeles. The film, which had nine nominations, also won the prize for best original screenplay.

In other awards, animation romp “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” was named best British film, beating nominees including “The Constant Gardener” and “Pride and Prejudice.”

“Pride and Prejudice” director Joe Wright won the award for best first-time writer, producer or director.

“De Battre Mon Coeur S’est Arrete” (“The Beat That My Heart Skipped”) – an acclaimed French film about a man torn between a love of music and a life of crime – was named best film not in the English language.

Producer David Puttnam received the Academy Fellowship for outstanding contribution to the film industry.

‘Godfather’ actor killed by bus in Manhattan

New York – Richard Bright, a character actor who appeared in all three “Godfather” movies and more recently on “The Sopranos,” was struck and killed by a bus, police said.

Bright, 68, was hit by a private Academy Bus as he crossed the street about 6:30 p.m. Saturday in his Manhattan neighborhood, police Detective Bernard Gifford said.

There were no arrests as of Sunday but police said the investigation was continuing. The bus driver told police he was not aware that he had hit anyone.

Bright played mob enforcer Al Neri in the “Godfather” movies, a bodyguard to the Corleone family patriarchs played by Marlon Brando and Al Pacino.

He played a con artist hustling Ali McGraw in 1972’s “The Getaway” and acted in dozens of other films such as Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” and in TV shows such as “Hill Street Blues.”

Clash of the ‘Apprentices’

New York – Sometimes there is too much of a good thing.

Martha Stewart believes her version of NBC’s popular reality show featuring Donald Trump flopped this past fall because of too much “Apprentice.”

Her show was supposed to be the sole show, starting out by having her fire Trump on the air, she told Newsweek for its issue on newsstands Monday.

“Having two ‘Apprentices’ was as unfair to him as it was unfair to me,” she said. “But Donald really wanted to stay on.”

Trump refuted the domestic diva would have given him a pink slip, citing the fact that he co-owned the show featuring him as a boardroom boss.

“I wish she would be able to take responsibility for her failure,” Trump told The Associated Press Sunday night in Dallas. He said her show didn’t have the right tone or the right demeanor.

The domestic diva lost an appeal last month, ending her criminal case for lying about a stock sale that sent her to jail for five months and nearly six months of house arrest.

Her company’s stock was down by more than half during the past year, but the company is doing better now, and “we’re back in spirit and in business dealings,” Stewart said

Advertisers and subscribers are returning to “Martha Stewart Living,” her magazine. And she has new projects planned, including a Sirius Satellite Radio show and a new magazine, Blueprint.

Ready for critics

New York – Kevin Federline is ready for a backlash over his brand-new role as white-boy rapper.

But it already can’t get worse, the dancer and husband of pop star Britney Spears told Newsweek for its issue on newsstands Monday.

“‘He hates his children, he treats his wife like dirt, he gets high all day,”‘ he said, quoting his critics. “If I was that bad, you think anyone, let alone Britney, would put up with it?”

He has released his single “PopoZao” on his Web site. It got 2 million hits in eight days, he said, which proves there’s interest.

He plans to release his debut album by this spring, but without featuring his wife on the album, said Federline, 27.

“We have collaborated,” he said. “But I’m not going to put the songs on this album because it’s like, ‘Respect me first; then I’ll show you what I’ve done with my wife.”‘

Federline has two children with his former girlfriend, Shar Jackson. He and Spears had a son, Sean Preston, in September. They married in 2004.