French actor Jean Dujardin, star of last year's Oscar-winning movie "The Artist," will return this year as an Academy Awards presenter, along with his fellow laureates, organizers said Tuesday.

Meryl Streep, who won best actress last year, will present awards at this show, as will Octavia Spencer and Christopher Plummer, best supporting actress and best supporting actor respectively.

A $4 billion mega-casino complex is set to open in the Philippines in mid-March when the first of four franchise-holders starts commercial operations, the parent firm said in a disclosure released Wednesday.

The $1.2 billion Solaire Manila Resorts is one of four gaming operations licensed at Manila's bayside Entertainment City, a government project designed to compete with Macau, Las Vegas and Singapore as a gaming hub.

Golden Globe-winning actor Kiefer Sutherland has been named Man of the Year by Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals.

Sutherland will be roasted and receive his ceremonial pudding pot at a ceremony scheduled for Friday.

Rock star Reg Presley, lead singer of the Troggs on hit songs including "Wild Thing," has died. He was 71.

Presley's death after a year-long bout with lung cancer was announced late Monday night by friend and publicist Keith Altham on his Facebook page.

A member of a hugely popular Japanese girl band has shaved her head and issued a tearful videotaped apology for violating the megagroup's no-dating rule.

The spectacle has sparked debate in Japan over whether the band AKB48 exerts too much control over its performers.

Written by Anthony Sargon

Guillermo del Toro sure knows how to pick his projects. The grand story-teller serves as executive producer of "Mama", a horror film based on a 2008 short film of the same name. Though a little uneven, "Mama" is a consistently creepy and memorable horror fable that delivers where it counts.

An all-girl teenage rock band from Indian-administered Kashmir has decided to split after the region's top Muslim cleric declared their music to be "un-Islamic", their manager said Tuesday.

Pragaash, a three-piece group whose members are still in high school, had been the target of an online hate campaign ever since winning a "Battle of the Bands" contest in December.

Famous composer Marcel Khalife enthralled a Qatari audience with his Arab Spring-inspired suite "Oriental" in Doha, presented in collaboration with the Philharmonic Orchestra he helped set up in 2007.

The late Sunday performance aimed "to echo the cries of the Arab people for freedom," said the 62-year-old composer, whose latest work brings together tunes from the traditional Iraqi maqam musical style, mixed with others from the Levant, North Africa, Egypt and Andalusia.

Three week before the much-anticipated Oscars, U.S. film director and actor Ben Affleck won a new top prize for his film "Argo," a thriller about the rescue of American hostages in Iran.

"There was a point in my life where I was really down, really confused, I didn't know what was going to happen and I thought 'I should be a director!'. And so I did it, and I worked very hard," Affleck said late Saturday as he received the award for outstanding directorial achievement in feature film from the Directors Guild of America.

U.S. star Johnny Depp will play notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in the film "Black Mass", to be directed by Barry Levinson, the producers announced Saturday.

The film recounts the fate of the godfather of Boston's underworld who became an FBI informant to get rid of a gangster rival but was eventually arrested in 2011.