Hollywood, Health & Society’s 15th annual Sentinel Awards had it all, including top names from the entertainment industry, a NASA astronaut who wowed the audience when she recounted her childhood dream to one day follow in the footsteps of Neil Armstrong, and moving tributes to the spirit of two young boys who have touched many hearts—one a fictional TV character and the other whose real life flashed brightly and ever so briefly.
What do you get when you mix TV legend Norman Lear with climate change experts and some of the funniest comedy writers around, and put them all in front of a packed house?
One only had to look at a montage of video clips from TV shows presented at Hollywood, Health & Society’s July 22 panel on health-care coverage, Affordable Me: The Face of Obamacare On the Ground & On the Air, to see how far we’ve come.
With this week’s release of the National Climate Assessment, a major scientific study on how the U.S. is already feeling the widespread effects of climate disruption, Hollywood, Health & Society’s invitation-only screening of Extreme Realities couldn’t have come at a better time.
Lost in all the white-hot noise over the recent rocky roll-out for Obamacare enrollment—with a glitchy government website and revelations that many people would not be allowed to keep their current coverage, despite what the president promised—was an overlooked but important fact: the Affordable Care Act had fundamentally changed how health insurance companies could operate.
With the sun shining and deer quietly nestled on patches of lawn at the wooded, tranquil NASA-JPL complex in the foothills near Pasadena, it’s easy to forget that some of the world’s most advanced research is being conducted—right here in our own back yard—on how to counteract the dark threat brought on by global warming.
A NASA-JPL climate scientist made the global come into sharp local focus when he was asked during a recent panel about the vanishing ice in northern Greenland, the dramatic backdrop for the film Inuk and its story of traditional ways being threatened by global warming.
The Lifetime movie Call Me Crazy: A Five Film, whose overlapping storylines featured an all-star cast portraying people dealing with mental illness, received first place in the Primetime Drama (Major Storyline) category at the 14th annual Sentinel for Health Awards held in Hollywood.
Hollywood, Health & Society Director Sandra de Castro Buffington and HH&S program administrator Chris Dzialo recently traveled to India for the public launch of its global center called The Third Eye, bringing in local writers for a series of panels, classes and storytelling workshops, and taking them on a research trip to explore the kinds of health-related challenges facing young girls and women in a remote village.
“It’s a topic that has had lots of heat,” said Martin Kaplan, the founder and director of the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, in his opening remarks at the event held June 27 at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. “I hope tonight will not only add light but also the human face—the stories that are so central to what it’s all about.”
