Anup Jalota: New avatar Adrien Brody and Halle Berry: Winners all Eliza Dushku: Turning in town

The Oscar fever is back and it’s time to catch those Academy Award-winning movies again on the small screen since this year’s nominees are largely out of bounds for us, poor Calcuttans. So before watching the awards live and exclusive on STAR Movies on Sunday, February 27, you can tune in to the biggest Oscar award-winning and nominated movies, starting this Tuesday on the same channel.

The movie fiesta comprises an amazing line-up of blockbusters including the Halle Berry-starrer Monster’s Ball, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, the Tom Cruise-starrer Minority Report and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can. The February festival kicks off this Tuesday with Roman Polanski’s The Pianist at 11.15 pm. The film which won three Oscars - Best Director (Roman Polanski), Best Actor (Adrien Brody) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ronald Harwood) - depicts the real-life story of a Polish composer who owes his miraculous survival of the holocaust to music.

So, before you start praying for the DiCaprios and Swanks, get ready for the best of the past. All this month, on STAR Movies.

After enthralling everyone with his bhajans, Anup Jalota has finally given in to the fusion funda. His new album Koyaliya sees him coming together with Abhijit Pohankar for “eight passionate love compositions of new-age Indian music”.

“These days the youth don’t have time to sit through an entire evening of classical music. So this album will introduce to them classical and semi-classical music forms in a very simple manner. If they like the concept they can listen to classical music in a more detailed manner,” Jalota tells Metro.

As for Abhijit Pahonkar, it was another opportunity to work with an Indian music legend. “I would say the music has Indian classical and semi-classical vocals aesthetically layered with modern instrumentation and sounds that would appeal to the common man and the young generation,” he says.

The album, released by Universal Music, is named after the famous song, Koyaliya, by the queen of thumri and ghazal, Begum Akhtar.

She first appeared on the small screen as a kick-ass vampire slayer of the bad sort in the popular TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eliza Dushku was the perfect contrast to Sarah Michelle Gellar - the dark-haired neurotic beauty Faith offset the blonde Buffy’s “nice” image. But the troubled troublemaker eventually turned out all right, helping the gang save the world from monsters. In fact, Eliza even made several appearances on the spin-off show Angel.

The 24-year-old made her big-screen debut opposite Juliet Lewis in That Night, in 1992, after a nationwide hunt for the right girl for the role. Since then, she has worked with Robert de Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Halle Berry, Ben Affleck and more. Remember her as the spoilt daughter of spy dad Arnold Schwarzenegger in True Lies? In fact, ‘mom’ Jamie Lee Curtis is her idol.

The American beauty of Albanian and Danish descent is back in town with the horror flick Wrong Turn. The film is about a group of campers stuck in a forest, who find a mysterious cabin. But it’s full of body parts and other grotesque elements, the belongings of mountain men deformed by years of inbreeding. They then go after the campers...