Sean Penn, who has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine since the large-scale invasion four years ago, skipped the Oscar ceremony on Sunday to be in the country instead. In return, Ukrainian officials gave him a makeshift statuette modeled on an Oscar and forged from metal taken from a railway carriage damaged during the war.
Media outlets including the BBC say Penn, 65, won his third Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for the film 'Una battaglia dopo l'altra', but he was absent from the awards night. In a video posted by Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, CEO of Ukrainian Railways, the executive tells Penn, "You are missing the Oscars... So we made this. It is made with a railway carriage damaged by the Russians."
Penn has visited Ukraine multiple times since the Kremlin launched the full-scale invasion. He also donated one of his Oscars to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2022.
Moscow asks UNESCO and Oscars organizers to review documentary over children footage
On a related note about Oscars and the war, Russia's Presidential Council for Human Rights has asked the film awards committee and UNESCO to check whether the rights of minors were respected in the production of the documentary 'Mr. Nobody vs. Putin', which won in the Best Documentary category.
The council says a significant portion of the film's footage was shot in a Russian school and was originally intended for educational use. The Russian news agency Tass quoted the council's statement asserting that international law sets high standards for protecting the rights and privacy of minors. The statement claims that the creation and distribution of the film violated both international standards for protecting children and generally accepted ethical practices for handling footage of minors.
The council added that it is important for works that receive prestigious international awards not to be linked to potential violations of children's rights.
