Congratulations to Chris and his father Robert on their awards!

Chris Pine earned a lead performance plaque for his role of a sociopathic terrorist in Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore at the Mark Taper Forum. Sharing triumphs in the solo performance category were Ed Harris for Neil LaBute’s Wrecks at the Geffen Playhouse and Leslie Uggams for her biographical musical Uptown Downtown at the recently reopened Pasadena Playhouse.

Two generations of Pines made their way to the stage when separate awards were announced. In addition to Chris Pine’s acceptance for his Inishmore win, Pine’s father, Robert Pine, came to the stage along with his fellow company members when the Antaeus Company took the evening’s final award for its production of King Lear.

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“We have two clear messages we would like millions of Americans watching the Super Bowl to know about BMW,” said Dan Creed, Vice President, Marketing, BMW of North America. “Even in the depths of the recession, BMW continued to invest in America, and as the global benchmark for clean diesel technology, we’re challenging stereotypes to show our advanced diesels are part of the future.”

Both these messages will be carried through BMW’s marketing efforts throughout the year. The Super Bowl advertisements also mark the debut of actor Chris Pine from Star Trek in 2009 and Unstoppable in 2010 as the voice of BMW.

Chris Pine, Hugh Jackman, Jude Law, Alec Baldwin and Isla Fisher will voice the lead roles in DreamWorks Animation’s 3D epic “Rise of the Guardians.”

Peter Ramsey is directing the pic based on “The Guardians of Childhood,” an upcoming series of children’s books by William Joyce, who will co-direct.

Guillermo del Toro and Michael Siegel are exec producing, while Christina Steinberg and Nancy Bernstein will serve as producers.

Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay-Abaire wrote the screenplay, which follows a group of heroic childhood legends, each with extraordinary abilities. When Pitch (Law), an evil spirit akin to the boogeyman, lays down the gauntlet to take over the world, the immortal Guardians must join forces for the first time to protect the hopes, beliefs and imagination of children all over the world.

Project was originally announced in December 2009, with Leonardo DiCaprio voicing Jack Frost, a role Pine will be taking over. He’ll be joined by Jackman’s Bunnymund (the Easter Bunny), Baldwin’s North (Santa Claus) and Fisher’s Tooth (the Tooth Fairy).

“It’s a thrill to be working with such an all-star team of actors and filmmakers,” Bill Damaschke, DWA’s chief creative officer, said in a statement to Variety. “When we bring Bill Joyce’s imaginative vision to the screen in 2012, audiences will experience an incredible story with a truly epic sense of adventure.”

DWA will release the film on Nov. 21, 2012.

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The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle announced its nominations for the 2010 season on Tuesday. The Antaeus Company’s production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” topped the list with five nominations, while Rogue Machine’s “Four Places,” Actors Co-op’s “Wit,” The Theatre @ Boston Court’s “The Twentieth-Century Way” and The Fountain Theatre’s “Opus” and “The Ballad of Emmett Till” each scored four.

As usual, Hollywood celebrities factored in to the choices: Ed Harris for Neil LaBute’s “Wrecks” at the Geffen Playhouse, Chris Pine in Martin McDonagh’s “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” at the Mark Taper Forum and “24″ star Gregory Itzin for the Antaeus Company’s “King Lear” at Deaf West Theatre in North Hollywood. Tony Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda picked up a nomination — and a win — for his score to “In The Heights” at the Pantages Theatre. (He was the only nominee in the category.)

The awards ceremony is scheduled to take place March 14 at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, where it was held last year. Founded in 1969, the organization’s voting members include theater reviewers from around Southern California, including two regular contributors to the Los Angeles Times — F. Kathleen Foley and David C. Nichols.

Read the full list of nominees at our Awards Tracker blog.

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If you told anyone that he would play Captain Kirk and Jack Ryan, two of the greatest fictional men’s men ever created, before he was even out of his 30s, he’d consider that a pretty decent life return. But Los Angeles native Chris Pine isn’t content with just evading tractor beams and bringing down international spy rings. Oh no. Before seeing if the snug Enterprise uniforms still fit next year for JJ Abrams’ Star Trek sequel and rebooting Tom Clancy’s CIA badass on the big screen for the first time in eight years (working title: Moscow), the 30-year-old has joined forces with Hollywood royalty Denzel Washington and director Tony ‘Top Gun’ Scott to add ‘stopping an out-of-control, toxic cargo-carrying freight train’ to his CV. The big show-off.

Unstoppable looks an insurance company’s nightmare – how many stunts did you take on yourself? As many as I could. There’s a point where I’m riding between two cars in a pretty precarious position, and I was proud that I actually said yes to that. It was a thrill – it’s certainly pretty scary looking at a two-tonne train that’s going 40mph and realising that, even if the director yells ‘Cut!’, it’s doing its own thing.

Did they let you drive a real train?
No, thank God. LA is so crowded, I’d be worried I’d be the breaking story on the news.

Did Denzel show you which lever did what?
I tried to soak in as much as I could. You know, I have the best job in the world because I get paid to go to graduate acting school, and this was like having a seminar with one of the best. Is the US as full of train nerds as the UK? I’m not sure it’s as big as in the UK – I actually lived in Leeds in my year abroad at university. I lived on Brudenell Road and loved getting fat off pints of bitter – but there is definitely a ‘trainspotter’ community in the US.

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The creators of the 1980s primetime soap Dynasty are developing a big-screen adaptation of the series, as I was first to report yesterday.

Esther and Richard Shapiro’s flick would be a prequel centered on a young Blake Carrington and his first wife Alexis.

Well, I just chatted with the original ruthless and bitchy Alexis—Joan Collins!

Who does she think should play the young future oil moguls? Read on to find out…

For Alexis, Collins thinks onetime Bond Girl and new face of G-Star, Gemma Arterton, would be perfect.

“She has all the qualities that Alexis needs,” she exclusively told me from Birmingham, England, where she’s costarring in stage show Dick Whittington. “She’s sexy. She looks clever and she’s kind of vixenous.”

As for Blake (originally played by the late John Forsythe), Collins said, “I do think Chris Pine would be great as Blake. He’s a wonderful actor.”

Collins said she’d love to play Alexis again. “I certainly couldn’t play her in a prequel in the 1960s,” the 77-year-old Hollywood icon said, laughing. “But I always thought they should do it today with Alexis’ grandchildren, who about 20 years ago were five and six.”

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In an interview with today’s Herald-Sun Newspaper in Australia (to promote Unstoppable), rising superstar Chris Pine spoke briefly about his next gig, playing iniquitous CIA rookie Jack Ryan – the character played by sirs Baldwin, Ford and Affleck in The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Sum Of All Fears – in Paramount’s Moscow.

The film, somewhat of a reboot of the franchise that kicked off in 1990 with Red October, will be directed by Lost alum Jack Bender. It was reportedly going to shoot as early as February this year. Seems not.

Asked by the lovely Neala Johnson whether or not he was prepared to be ’stacked up against those who have come before’, Pine replies assuredly “Look, at the end of the day, people will obviously prefer one version over the other, whether it be Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck. I feel the same way about Star Trek – the only thing I can do is the best version of myself. I can only bring who I am to bear on the part and people either like that or not. Again, I don’t have much control over that, so all I can ask of myself is to do my best, try my hardest and to make sure that we have a really good story to tell, and then it to the hands of fate.”

Pine doesn’t know whether or not he’ll be doing anything as physical in the film as he did on Tony Scott’s Unstoppable.

“I dunno if any trains are gonna be involved”, the actor laughs. “I dunno what’s involved quite yet, I haven’t really seen the finished script, but some assorted running, for sure”.

In a recent interview with the delightful Katey Rich at Cinema Blend, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura mentioned that the script for the film is currently undergoing a rewrite and as yet, there’s no set date for filming.

“We’re going to shoot in the spring. There’s no set date. It’s a slow process of figuring out how much it’s going to cost and all that stuff. [It's] the same story– [Anthony Peckham] is going to bring his own particular flair to it. It is the origin story of Jack Ryan. Where you pick him up in his career is very true to what Clancy had as his backstory. You can explore some of the backstory you never had in previous movie. That will be fun for Clancy fan, and for an audience that hasn’t seen [the previous films], or seen them all in theaters. Chris Pine is going to make a great Jack Ryan. We really lucked out there.”

In Moscow, Ryan (Pine) will be fresh out of the Marines and gets himself involved in some sort of financial scandal in Russia. Apparently Wall Street plays a big part in the movie.

HE HASN’T even been in the business a decade yet, but Chris Pine has had his fair share of horror auditions.

I had one casting director stop me and say, ‘All right, now do it again and make me believe you’,” he recalls with a traumatised laugh.

“That was half of what she said, but also the tone that I can’t really recreate. It was just about the most miserable feeling on the planet.

“I just interpreted that as like, ‘OK, stop sucking, and try to be talented’.

“At that point you’ve lost, at that point it becomes not about the material at all, it becomes about your personal beef, and that’s never what it should be.

“The audition room is one of the most awkward, uncomfortable places to be, period. I don’t even know how producers do it, quite honestly.”

But an actor’s gotta do what an actor’s gotta do.

“Yup,” agrees Pine, “par for the course. Born masochist.”

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Unstoppable star Chris Pine graces the cover of the second weekly edition of The Hollywood Reporter, on stands Wednesday.

Pine is just one of a handful of hot, young Hollywood lights on which the industry is banking to replace the vaunted old guard of box office stars.

Between now and summer 2012, audiences will see Pine, along with a small group of young actors, pushing — and being pushed — into blockbuster star-making terrain.

“We need these kids desperately,” one studio producer tells THR. “And there happens to be a crop of five or six of them that are actually filling the role.”

And clearly the new status has its bonuses. As Pine tells THR, “To have just a bit more power to say yes and no is very appealing and intoxicating.”

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Tony Scott’s latest action flick Unstoppable was inspired by the actual events that placed two railway workers – a veteran engineer and a young conductor – in extraordinary and heroic circumstances. When Will Colson (Chris Pine), who was hired as a result of nepotism, gets paired with Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington), who has 28 years on the job, both realize that the less than ideal situation could make for one very long day. Little do they know, when they leave the rail yard, that an unmanned runaway train will lead to a terrorizing ordeal that will test everyone involved.

A combination of Scott’s filmmaking style and the lack of CGI, in favor of practical sets and real action, contributes to the urgency of the situation from start to finish, taking the audience on an intense, gripping ride. During the film’s press day, co-stars Denzel Washington, Chris Pine and Rosario Dawson, along with Tony Scott, talked about the challenges of making a film like Unstoppable, doing many of their own stunts while on a train going 50 or 60 mph, and getting to meet their real-life heroic counterparts. Check out what they had to say after the jump:

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