'King's Speech' Producer Learns Why You Don't Give Your Oscar to an Infant

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To win an Academy Award is the dream of most everyone in the filmmaking community, that golden statuette confirmation of the diligence, craftsmanship and artistry that went into your labor of love. That's certainly the case for the producers of Best Picture-winner "The King's Speech," who had to fight to find financing and then had to stage a rather dramatic come-from-behind victory to emerge as the big winner Oscar night on February 27. So in the euphoria after their triumph, you can understand why they'd be a little careless. But, seriously, who gives an Oscar to a 15-month-old to hold?

Unfortunately, that's what happened: Lara Egan, the daughter of co-producer Simon Egan, was handed the Oscar by the grandson of Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush's character) so that she could have her picture taken with it. And so she did what just about any 15-month-old does: She held it onto for a few moments, and then she let it go. The statuette hit the ground, causing dents and breaking the Oscar's chest plate. 

Simon Egan saw it fall, but he was too far away to do anything. "It wasn't so much that it fell," he told The Telegraph. "It was more the sound that it made when it hit the ground." Right afterward, there was stunned silence, and then there were some tears. "It is a thing of beauty and my daughter had destroyed it, albeit unwittingly," Egan said. "We were all terrified."

Thankfully, though, the story has a happy ending. The producers called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and discovered that they weren't the first people to commit a party foul with their Academy Award. "I was scared the night before to even walk across the road with it," said Egan, "but they were like, 'Come in, it is fine, make an appointment, and we will have it fixed.'"

So they went to something called "The Oscar Hospital," which handles damaged Oscars. According to Egan, a woman wearing gloves took their dented award and came back with a new one within minutes. Whether or not Egan was given a stern lecturing about proper Oscar-holding behavior is unknown, although we sorta hope he did. 

For his part, Egan sounds relieved that the whole thing turned out to be as painless as it was. But we hope all of you at home have learned two very valuable lessons. First, don't give a kid something that they might drop and break, especially if it's an Academy Award. Second, there is a magical place called the Oscar Hospital. Does the Academy offer tours? 

While we look into that, enjoy this video of cute little Lara dropping the Oscar. She won't be hearing about this the rest of her life. Certainly not.

Two U.S. Marshals, One Cop Wounded in St. Louis Shootout

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Two U.S. marshals and a St. Louis police officer were wounded in a shootout with a suspect they were attempting to arrest today. 

The standoff ended with the suspect shot to death and the three law enforcement officers taken to the hospital, St. Louis police said. 

The officers were attempting to serve an arrest warrant at the suspect's home in the St. Louis suburb called Dutchtown, when the man opened fire with a semi-automatic pistol as the officers tried to enter the home.

One marshal was shot in the head, sources told ABC News. He is alive but in critical condition. The second marshal is believed to have been shot in the leg or foot. 

A shot fired at the St. Louis police officer ricocheted off his bullet-proof vest and entered his shoulder. He appears to have suffered a broken shoulder, sources said. 

When authorities arrived at the suspect's home, he told them, "I'm only going out in a body bag," ABC News radio affiliate KTRS reported. 

Three children were removed from the home before shots were fired. 

"Two Deputy U.S. Marshals and one task force officer from the Eastern District of Missouri were serving an arrest warrant this morning at a residence in St. Louis when they were involved in a shooting – all three were struck by gunfire and have been taken to a local hospital," Jeff Carter, spokesman for the U.S. Marshals said in a statement. 

The shootings of U.S. marshals and police are the latest in a string of police casualties this year. 

As of March 8, 36 law enforcement officials have been killed in the line of duty nationwide. Of those four were federal agents, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. 

Last month, Deputy U.S. Marshal Derek Hotsinpiller was killed in West Virginia while attempting to serve an arrest warrant to suspected drug dealer.

In states, parties clash over voting laws that call for IDs, limits on where college students can cast ballots

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New Hampshire's new Republican state House speaker is pretty clear about what he thinks of college kids and how they vote. They're "foolish," Speaker William O'Brien said in a recent speech to a tea party group. 

"Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do," he added, his comments taped by a state Democratic Party staffer and posted on YouTube. Students lack "life experience," and "they just vote their feelings." 

New Hampshire House Republicans are pushing for new laws that would prohibit many college students from voting in the state - and effectively keep some from voting at all. 

One bill would permit students to vote in their college towns only if they or their parents had previously established permanent residency there - requiring all others to vote in the states or other New Hampshire towns they come from. Another bill would end Election Day registration, which O'Brien said unleashes swarms of students on polling places, creating opportunities for fraud. 

The measures in New Hampshire are among dozens of voting-related bills being pushed by newly empowered Republican state lawmakers across the country - prompting partisan clashes akin to those already roiling in some states over GOP moves to curb union power. 

Backers of the voting measures say they would bring fairness and restore confidence in a voting system vulnerable to fraud. Many states, for instance, do not require identification to vote. Measures being proposed in 32 states would add an ID requirement or proof of citizenship, according to an analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. 

"I want to know when I walk into the poll that they know I am who I say I am and that nobody else has said that they are me," said North Carolina state Rep. Ric Killian (R), who is preparing to introduce legislation that would require voters to show a photo ID at the polls. 

Democrats charge that the real goal, as with anti-union measures in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere, is simply to deflate the power of core Democratic voting blocs - in this case young people and minorities. For all the allegations of voter fraud, Democrats and voting rights groups say, there is scant evidence to show that it is a problem. 

"It's a war on voting," said Thomas Bates, vice president of Rock the Vote, a youth voter- registration group mounting a campaign to fight the array of state measures. "We'd like to be advocating for a 21st-century voting system, but here we are fighting against efforts to turn it back to the 19th century." 

The debate over voter fraud has become a perennial issue since the contested 2000 presidential election. While limited by federal law and court rulings, states have authority over how they run elections. Although elections officials say there are occasional cases of fraud, experts say the battle lines are drawn largely along deeply partisan - and largely theoretical - lines. 

"Election policy debates like photo ID and same-day registration have become so fierce around the country because they are founded more on passionate belief than proven fact," said Doug Chapin, an election-law expert at the Pew Center on the States. "One side is convinced fraud is rampant; the other believes that disenfranchisement is widespread. Neither can point to much in the way of evidence to support their position, so they simply turn up the volume." 

Implications for 2012

The disputes are taking on national implications. Several states where newly empowered Republicans are pushing voter legislation, such as New Hampshire, Wisconsin and North Carolina, are expected to be battlegrounds in the 2012 presidential race. Democrats say the voters most likely to be affected are core pieces of President Obama's base. 

An analysis by the North Carolina State Board of Elections showed that any new law requiring a state-issued ID could be problematic for large numbers of voters, particularly African Americans, whose turnout in 2008 helped Obama win the state. 

Blacks account for about one-fifth of the North Carolina electorate but are a larger share - 27 percent - of the approximately 1 million voters who may lack a state-issued ID or whose names do not exactly match the Division of Motor Vehicles database. The analysis found about 556,000 voters with no record of an ID issued by the DMV. 

Republican lawmakers in North Carolina had pledged to make a photo ID bill a top priority for their new majority, but they have yet to release a plan, with the caucus deliberating over how restrictive it should be. The issue could present a dilemma for Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue, who would have to choose between signing or vetoing a bill that would be popular with swing voters but that could dampen turnout of voters she needs to win reelection next year. 

In Wisconsin, a photo-ID bill backed by the state's new GOP majority would not permit voters to use school-issued student cards. The measure would allow for other IDs, such as passports, but opponents say thousands of students who do not have Wisconsin driver's licenses or passports would face unfair hurdles that would keep many of them from voting.

Republican state Sen. Mary Lazich, who heads the chamber's elections committee, said the legislation is designed to prevent irregularities, such as allegations that votes have been cast by the deceased. She said she hoped to work with university officials to allow student IDs at some point. 

Student groups are rallying opposition, distributing fliers on campuses and creating Facebook pages to pressure lawmakers. 

"It's no coincidence that some of the groups being targeted and that would be most affected by the bill are more Democratic generally," said Sam Polstein, 19, a University of Wisconsin sophomore from New York who is helping to organize the protests. 

Opponents are also using a tea party twist - cost - to try to defeat the bill. 

States that require voter IDs also must be willing to pay for them, the result of a court ruling that declared part of Georgia's ID law unconstitutional because people lacking IDs would have to pay for cards themselves - creating, in effect, a poll tax. A legislative analysis shows the Wisconsin measure would cost the state $2.7 million a year.

The Wisconsin bill is poised for passage in the state Senate but is stalled because of the legislative standoff between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and state Senate Democrats over his plan to roll back public-sector unions' collective-bargaining rights. 

The outcome could be particularly critical in Wisconsin. Though Obama won the state easily in 2008, strategists in both parties expect his reelection contest to be much closer. In 2004, the Democratic nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), won there by just 11,000 votes, a margin easily covered just by the 17,000 out-of-state students who attend the University of Wisconsin's campus in Madison. 

New Hampshire bill

In New Hampshire, the measure that covers college students also targets members of the military who are temporarily stationed in the state. But there are no major military installations there, and GOP lawmakers have reserved their criticisms for the voting behavior of students - leading even some college-age Republicans to fight back. 

"There's no doubt that this bill would help Republican causes," said Richard Sunderland III, head of the College Republicans at Dartmouth College. But, he added, "this doesn't help if the Republican Party wants to try to win over people in the 18-to-24 age range." 

After posting O'Brien's comments about college students on the Internet, state Democratic Party officials accused the GOP of pushing the legislation to rig elections. Voting rights advocates have noted that the courts have affirmed the rights of students to vote where they live. 

A spokeswoman for O'Brien said he had not endorsed specific legislation but had spoken out in favor generally of tightening state voting laws. 

Same-day registration "coupled with a lax definition of residency creates an environment in which people may be claiming residency in multiple locations," O'Brien said in a written statement from his office. He added that changing the law "is not an idea targeting any particular political party or ideology." 

Still, the sponsor of the measure, state Rep. Gregory Sorg, addressing a packed public hearing room late last month, focused his ire directly at the college set. 

Average taxpayers in college towns, he said, are having their votes "diluted or entirely canceled by those of a huge, largely monolithic demographic group . . . composed of people with a dearth of experience and a plethora of the easy self-confidence that only ignorance and inexperience can produce." 

Their "youthful idealism," he added, "is focused on remaking the world, with themselves in charge, of course, rather than with the mundane humdrum of local government."

Secret to a happy marriage? Delusion.

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We’ve all seen those mismatched couples — where the husband is 10 times better looking than the wife. Or where she’s an absolute sweetheart, and he’s a total jerk. What does she see in him?, we think. What does he see in her?

If the couple is happily married, it could be that the better half of the couple has an idealistic vision of the lesser half. New research published in Psychological Science oddly enough finds that people who were, well, a bit delusional about their partners when they got married were more satisfied with their marriage three years later than those see-it-like-it-is realists.

University of Buffalo researchers recruited 222 couples heading in to apply for marriage licenses to fill out surveys on themselves, their partner, and their marriage every six months for three years. They then compared the self-ratings of respondents in terms of intelligence, creativity, athletic skills, etc., with how their spouse rated their attributes.

Those who inflated their partner’s assets also reported being more happily married. “People are very good at changing their definitions to match how they want to see themselves or how they want to see others,’’ lead study author Sandra Murray says in a statement. They can decide their spouse is the perfect match for them, even if they clash pretty badly.

Seeing a partner with rose-colored glasses could help protect against that decline in marital satisfaction that sets in almost as soon as the honeymoon bags are unpacked. “Seeing a less-than-ideal partner as a reflection of one’s ideals predicted a certain level of immunity to the corrosive effects of time,’’ write the researchers in the study.

They say there’s a case to be made for encouraging couples to maintain “positive, even unrealistic, perceptions’’ of each other to stay satisfied over the long haul.

And I have to admit, it does make sense. Thinking your partner isn’t good enough for you may entice you to seek out a better partner. Thinking that person is better than what’s out there might encourage you to stay and be more satisfied.

By the same token, inflating an insecure partner’s sense of self — by expressing your own delusional beliefs — will lessen that person’s fear of abandonment.

I’m just wondering if couples heading for a breakup can really transform that contempt into starry-eyed romance. The researchers say yes. “People have the power to shape their romantic fates through their behavior,’’ they write. “Indeed, the behaviors that sustain relationships (e.g., being supportive) and the behaviors that undermine relationships (e.g., being critical) are controllable ones.’’