British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has married his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, in a small private ceremony that came at the end of a tumultuous week during which a former top aide said he was unfit for office. The couple wed Saturday at the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral in front of a small group of friends and family, Johnson’s office said Sunday, confirming newspaper reports that were published overnight. Photos taken after the ceremony in the garden of the prime minister’s residence showed Symonds in a long white dress and floral headband. Johnson wore a dark suit. READ: Boris Johnson, fiancée Carrie Symonds wed in London “The Prime Minister and Ms. Symonds were married yesterday afternoon in a small ceremony at Westminster Cathedral,″ Downing Street said. “The couple will celebrate their wedding with family and friends next summer.” The couple have reportedly sent save-the-date cards to family and friends for a celebration on July 30, 2022. Under current coronavirus restrictions in England, no more than 30 people can attend a wedding. Johnson, 56, and Symonds, a 33-year-old Conservative Party insider and environmental advocate, announced their engagement in February 2020. Their son, Wilfred, was born in April last year. The marriage is Johnson’s third. He has at least five other children from previous relationships. Johnson’s previous marriages would not have stopped him from having a Catholic wedding because they didn’t take place in the Catholic church, Matt Chinery, an ecclesiastical and canon lawyer, told Times Radio. “In the eyes of the Catholic church, Boris Johnson woke up last week as somebody who wasn’t married and had never been married and so was free to marry in the cathedral this weekend,” he said. Johnson was baptized as a Catholic but he was confirmed as a member of the Church of England as a teenager. The last British prime minister to marry in office was Lord Liverpool in 1822. The wedding followed a difficult political week for Johnson. His former top aide, Dominic Cummings, on Wednesday told lawmakers that Johnson had bungled the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and said he was “unfit for the job.” Britain has Europe’s highest coronavirus death toll, at over 128,000 people, but it has also produced one of the world’s most successful vaccination programs, inoculating 74% of its adults. Daily deaths have plummeted to single digits of late, compared to over 1,800 one day in January. READ: Boris Johnson self-quarantining after contracting Covid-19 infected MP On Friday, a government ethics adviser released his long-awaited findings on the “cash for curtains” scandal in which Johnson was criticized for failing to disclose that a wealthy Conservative Party donor had paid for the redecoration of the prime minister’s official residence in London. Although Johnson later settled the bill, the inquiry found that Johnson had acted “unwisely” in carrying out the work without knowing where the money had come from. He was cleared of misconduct. The opposition Labour Party was not giving Johnson any space for a honeymoon, with one Labour lawmaker, Jon Trickett, suggesting that the weekend wedding was “a good way to bury this week’s bad news.”

At a socially distanced Oscar ceremony retooled for the pandemic, Chloé Zhao made history. The “Nomadland” filmmaker won best director on Sunday (April 25, 2021), becoming just the second woman in the 93 year of the Academy Awards to win the award and the first woman of color. Only Kathryn Bigelow, 11 years ago for “The Hurt Locker,” had previously won the award. The win, widely expected, caps the extraordinary rise of the China-born Zhao, a lyrical filmmaker whose “Nomadland” is just her third feature. Her film, the favorite to win best picture, is a wistful open-road drama about itinerant life in the American West. “I have always found goodness in the people I’ve met everywhere I went in the world,” said Zhao. “This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and to hold on the goodness in other no matter how difficult it is to do that.” Also read: Is this an ‘Asterisk Oscars’ or a sign of things to come? The 93rd Academy Awards, the most ambitious award show held during the pandemic, rolled out a red carpet and restored some glamour to the nearly century-old movie institution, but with a radically transformed — and in some ways downsized — telecast. The ceremony — fashioned as a movie of its own — kicked off with opening credits and a slinky Regina King entrance, as the camera followed the actress and “One Night in Miami” director in one take as she strode with an Oscar in hand into Los Angeles’ Union Station and onto the stage. Inside the transit hub (trains were still running), nominees sat at cozy, lamp-lit tables around an intimate amphitheater. Daniel Kaluuya won best supporting actor for “Judas and the Black Messiah.” The win for the 32-year-old British actor who was previously nominated for “Get Out,” was widely expected. Kaluuya won for his fiery performance as the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, whom Kaluuya thanked for showing him “how to love myself.” “You’ve got to celebrate life, man. We’re breathing. We’re walking. It’s incredible. My mum met my dad, they had sex. It’s amazing. I’m here. I’m so happy to be alive,” said Kaluuya while cameras caught his mother’s confused reaction. Also read: Oscar nominations Monday could belong to 'Mank' and Netflix With the awards capping a year of national reckoning on race and coming days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for killing George Floyd, police brutality was on the minds of many attendees. King said that if the verdict had been different, she might have traded her heels for marching boots. Travon Free, co-director of the live-action short winner “Two Perfect Strangers,” wore a suit jacket lined with the names of those killed by police. His film dramatizes police brutality as an inescapable time loop like a tragic “Groundhog’s Day” for Black Americans. “Today, the police will kill three people. And tomorrow, the police will kill three people. And the day after that, the police will kill three people because on average, the police in America everyday kill three people, which amounts to about a thousand people a year,” said Free. “Those people happen to disproportionately be Black people.” Years after the Academy Awards were harshly criticized as “OscarsSoWhite” — and after the film academy’s membership was greatly expanded in recent years — a historically diverse slate of nominees led to records in many categories. Read ‘Nomadland’ wins best picture at a social distanced Oscars Best supporting actress went to Yuh-Jung Youn for the matriarch of Lee Isaac Chung’s tender Korean-American family drama “Minari.” The 72-year-old Youn, a well-known actress in her native South Korea, is the first Asian actress to win an Oscar since 1957 and the second in history. She accepted the award from Brad Pitt, an executive producer on “Minari.” “Mr. Brad Pitt, finally,” said Youn. “Nice to meet you.” Hairstylists Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” became the first Black women to win in makeup and hairstyling. Ann Roth, at 89 one of the oldest Oscar winners ever, also won for the film’s costume design. The night’s first award went to Emerald Fennell, the writer-director of the provocative revenge thriller “Promising Young Woman,” for best screenplay. Fennell, winning for her feature debut, is the first woman win solo in the category since Diablo Cody (“Juno”) in 2007. The broadcast instantly looked different. It’s being shot in 24 frames-per-second and in more widescreen format. In a more intimate show without an audience beyond nominees, winners were given wider latitude in their speeches. In the opening, King explained how Sunday’s Oscars were even possible — testing, vaccinations, social distancing and more testing. The safety protocols, she said, echoed those of film shoots during the pandemic. “It has been quite a year and we are still smack dab in the middle of it,” King said. The telecast, produced by a team led by filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, moved out of the awards’ usual home, the Dolby Theatre, for Union Station. With Zoom ruled out for nominees, the telecast included satellite feeds from around the world. Performances of the song nominees were pre-taped and aired during the preshow. “Husavik (My Hometown)” from “Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.,” was preformed from the Iceland town’s harbor. Others were sung from atop of the academy’s new $500 million film museum. Pixar notched its 11th best animated feature Oscar with “Soul,” the studio’s first feature with a Black protagonist. Peter Docter’s film, about a about middle-school music teacher (Jamie Foxx), was one of the few big-budget movies in the running at the Academy Awards. Another was Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” which last September attempted to resuscitate moviegoing during the pandemic, took best visual effects. David Fincher’s “Mank,” a lavishly crafted drama of 1940s Hollywood made for Netflix, came in the lead nominee with 10 nods and went home with award for cinematography and for production design. Best adapted screenplay went to the dementia drama “The Father.” “My Octopus Teacher,” a film that found a passionate following on Netflix, won best documentary. Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round” won best international film, an award he dedicated to his daughter, Ida, who in 2019 was killed in a car crash at age 19. The red carpet was back Sunday, minus the throngs of onlookers and with socially distanced interviews. Only a handful of media outlets were allowed on site, behind a velvet rope and some distance from the nominees. Casual wear, the academy warned nominees early on, was a no-no. Stars, limited to a plus-one, went without their usual battalions of publicists. But even good show may not be enough to save the Oscars from an expected ratings slide. Award show ratings have cratered during the pandemic, and this year’s nominees — many of them smaller, lower-budget dramas — won’t come close to the drawing power of past Oscar heavyweights like “Titanic” or “Black Panther.” Last year’s Oscars, when Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” became the first non-English language film to win best picture, was watched by 23.6 million, an all-time low. Sunday’s pandemic-delayed Oscars bring to a close the longest awards season ever — one that turned the season’s industrial complex of cocktail parties and screenings virtual. Eligibility was extended into February of this year, and for the first time, a theatrical run wasn’t a requirement of nominees. Some films — like “Sound of Metal” — premiered all the way back in September 2019. The biggest ticket-seller of the best picture nominees is “Promising Young Woman,” with $6.3 million in box office. Read Anthony Hopkins wins best actor Oscar for 'The Father'