Two-time Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett added to her stack of global honors on Wednesday, accepting Japan’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale award at a black-tie ceremony in Tokyo.
At a news conference ahead of the presentation, the actress used the occasion to reflect on the value of creative uncertainty — and the destructive hubris of its opposite.
“In an uncertain world riddled with unthinking certainty I believe doubt is vital to the creative process,” Blanchett said. “It’s what starts the challenge, the questioning, the exploration. It allows conversation and connection. It allows change.”
Presented by the Japan Art Association, the Praemium Imperiale recognizes lifetime achievement across five disciplines: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and theater/film. Often described as the Nobel Prize of the arts, the honor places Blanchett among good company — past theater and film recipients have included Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Judi Dench and Catherine Deneuve. Ang Lee was the last Hollywood-associated recipient, taking the prize in 2024.
Japan’s Princess Hitachi presented Blanchett with her medal at the Meiji Kinenkan in Tokyo’s Moto-Akasaka district. Each laureate also receives a testimonial letter and an honorarium of 15 million yen (just under $100,000). This year’s other recipients were American artist Jenny Holzer, British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, American architect Daniel Libeskind and Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt.
Blanchett used her acceptance speech to offer a meditation on the limits of language and how artistic work finds its power in the inexpressable. Opening her remarks with a reference to surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, she described acting as “a profession that at its worst sinks into a quagmire of literalness but at its best can leave people speechless.”
Her creative starting point, she explained, is often the mysterious gap between what a character says and what they can’t seem to convey with language.
“I always look for meaning, for opportunity in the spaces between what is said, in what is not said, in what people are trying to say, in what they wish they had said and in what they wish they had not,” she said.
That search, Blanchett suggested, requires a willingness to remain unsure, even when uncertainty is read as weakness.
“The doubt that I will ever fully communicate is always with me. And as a woman that doubt is often interpreted as a lack of confidence. It is not. That doubt is my artistic starting point,” she said. “It’s what allows me to hear, it allows me to see, it allows me to sense.”
Continuing to take artistic risks over a long career, she added, requires courage and rigor — qualities she praised in her fellow laureates.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who serves as the prize’s U.S. international adviser, was also present at the press conference. Clinton is part of the international advisory network whose committees recommend candidates, with the final selections made by the Japan Art Association.
Clinton said the prize makes “a global declaration that artists and culture are essential pillars of our societies,” arguing that its role has only become more important amid threats to democratic values and the anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence.
“It’s also, I think, even more essential that we bolster the arts in a time when we are facing the transformations being brought about by artificial intelligence,” she said, making a call to rein in the technology’s risks while preserving the human capacities of imagination and connection.
Blanchett’s visit to Japan will next include appearances at the 39th Tokyo International Film Festival, which runs through Nov. 4. On Friday, she is scheduled to join filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Shahrbanoo Sadat for a Q&A following the Japanese premieres of five shorts supported by the Displacement Film Fund, the initiative she co-founded and leads to support displaced filmmakers.
Later Friday, she is due to appear with directors David and Nathan Zellner for a discussion accompanying their alien comedy Alpha Gang, in which she stars.
Blanchett concluded her Tokyo remarks on Wednesday with characteristic poise.
“I am profoundly grateful to have this honor bestowed upon me,” she said. “It’s an Olympus of sorts that I never conceived of even touching. It’s a beautiful, soul-soaring surprise, and a deep honor indeed.”

A small California town was hit with a dazzling nighttime glare as a tech startup tested its futuristic plan to beam sunlight onto Earth after dark — using powerful spotlights in the mountains instead of mirrors in space.
The Oct. 10 demonstration near Lone Pine illuminated a three-mile stretch of desert, giving locals a taste of the company’s ambitious vision to deploy 50,000 satellites over the next decade to reflect sunlight onto selected locations at night.
Reflect Orbital hauled high-powered generators and spotlights up Horseshoe Meadows Road near Mount Whitney, projecting intense beams onto the desert floor.
The company partnered with volunteers from the China Lake Mountain Rescue Group, who used the artificial illumination to practice nighttime search-and-rescue drills and stretcher carries under full-moon-level brightness.
But the technology has sparked public criticism and scientific concerns. Researchers warn that atmospheric scattering could create widespread “sky glow,” brightening areas miles beyond the target zone to levels exceeding a full moon and potentially disrupting nocturnal wildlife.
“This is not a ‘concern’ — this is like a bullet in your head,” Princeton astrophysicist Gaspar Bakos told Sky and Telescope. “It’s the end of ground-based astronomy.”
Others fear the satellites could enable mass surveillance and attract military clients, while raising questions about who controls the night sky.
Climate scientists have also blasted the proposal.
“This is an idiotic project,” Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman told The Guardian, warning of “a huge number of unresolved questions and significant potential impacts.”
Reflect Orbital has purchased two dedicated rocket launches from India’s Skyroot Aerospace to deploy its first experimental mirror satellites. Its initial “Earendil” mission is scheduled for the second quarter of 2027.
Regulatory questions also loom.
The Federal Communications Commission granted the company its initial US demonstration license but explicitly said light pollution and environmental impacts fall outside its authority, leaving a legal grey area as responsibility shifts toward Indian space regulators.

Details of more than 41,000 personnel working for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including thousands involved in immigration enforcement, have been leaked to the public.
The leak includes names, work addresses and phone numbers of DHS staff, including agents working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, along with descriptions of the work they do for each agency.
Wednesday’s leak marks the third time in recent weeks that a government agency has been targeted by leaks or hacks.
A DHS spokesperson said the agency is “aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively.”
“We take all security threats against our employees and officers seriously and will work to ensure all are properly protected,” the spokesperson added.
The seemingly unprecedented breach of employee information was made public online. A group called the Department of Peace accessed the information from DHS, while journalist and cybersecurity researcher maia crimew alongside the website Distributed Denial of Secrets put it online.
Most of the agents included, more than 21,000 of them, work for CBP, according to the data. Nearly 6,600 work for ICE.
Other records show agents with Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service and even people working for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The leaked information also included dozens of previously unknown operation names, the agents that led and worked on those operations, and some of the technology they used in their work, including tech provided by Cellbrite and Palantir.
The groups wrote in an online statement that the the leak was not meant to be a directory of every DHS agent. Rather the aim was to replace “anonymity with accountability”, according to Emma Best, a co founder of DDoSecrets.
“The leak is extraordinary but deceptive in it’s simplicity as it identifies the officials responsible for overseeing covert and undercover operations, the government’s hunt for leakers and the failed BlueLeaks investigation – along with key personnel in DHS’s ever-escalating rendition and deportation programs,” Best added.
BlueLeaks refers to a massive leak of US police data in 2020, data from which DDoSecrets also hosted.
A spokesperson for the Department of Peace pointed directly at actions by ICE agents for the groups work to hack DHS records.
“On July 17th, Markwayne Mullin said he was ‘turning up the heat’. This is what happens to ICE when you do that,” the spokesperson wrote on Wednesday.
Okta is a popular online security tool that organisations use to ensure that only people with access to internal platforms are logging on to them.
A spokeswoman for Okta said the company is aware of the claims being made, but said: “Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised.”
Last month, the FBI was hacked by a group called ShinyHunters, which took personal information about thousands of agents.
In recent days, the Federal Election Commission, which makes public political campaign donation data, was taken offline because of a suspected hacking attempt.
Public backlash to US immigration enforcement has been building as the Trump Administration has pushed a huge increase in arrests and deportations of people suspected of being in the country illegally.
Immigration operations this year have repeatedly turned violent, with ICE agents shooting at more than two dozen people and killing at least nine people.

The Trump administration is proposing to dramatically scale back a Biden-era rule that aimed to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry at drilling sites nationwide.
Methane is a major contributor to climate change and is estimated to be 80 times more planet-warming than carbon dioxide in a twenty-year time frame. In 2023, the Biden administration finalized rules that were meant to rein in methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.
President Trump made the announcement while campaigning in Lubbock, Texas, Tuesday, saying his administration’s revision, under the Clean Air Act, would save the industry billions in production costs and spur more domestic drilling. The proposal comes as Republicans face a backlash from voters over high gas prices heading into the midterms.
“Behind every barrel of oil and every cubic foot of natural gas produced in the U.S. are millions of workers, businesses, and the heartbeat of this nation’s economy. The Biden EPA destructively targeted all this,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a press release.
The oil and gas industry, which vigorously opposed the 2023 rules, said EPA’s proposed rollback will address some of the challenges companies have faced in trying to comply with the regulations.
“We look forward to working with the Trump administration on a more workable approach that supports American energy production, provides greater regulatory certainty and advances continued emissions reductions,” Dustin Meyer, vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade organization for the U.S. oil and gas industry, said in a statement.
But environmentalists say this may end up actually costing the industry more.
“Methane is natural gas, or natural gas is methane,” says Jon Goldstein, associate vice president at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And so if you’re capturing more natural gas, you’re not allowing it to leak out, you’re not allowing it to be flared, you have more product that you can sell. And so that offsets a lot of the costs.”
“That is harmful to our energy security, and it’s harmful to taxpayers that ought to be seeing royalty and tax revenue collected off of this gas that’s going to waste,” Goldstein adds.
One of the regulations the EPA wants to cut is the “Methane Super Emitter Program.” Across the U.S., oil and gas pipelines, refineries, and other energy facilities sometimes have huge leaks of methane. But methane is invisible and difficult, not to mention expensive, to detect. The super emitter program is supposed to take effect in January 2027. It would allow the government to delegate monitoring for big methane leaks to certified third parties, including private and nonprofit methane satellite programs.
“The easiest way to think about it is that if the government is alerted to a big leak, then if it’s reported by certified third parties, then they could use that information,” says Paasha Mahdavi, a political science professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies the oil industry.
“[The government] needs help from other people to say, ‘Hey! You’re breaking the law!’ so they’re able to prosecute,” Mahdavi adds.
If that program goes away, Mahdavi says it will be harder for the government to spot large leaks of the planet-heating gas from oil and gas facilities. “And we need that because it’s really hard to see this stuff,” he says.
The EPA’s announcement would also loosen regulations on methane leaks coming from low-volume “marginal” oil wells that are considered “marginally economic,” meaning they don’t make much money.
“People assume marginal well must equal small emissions,” Goldstein says. But he says satellites and new technology find that’s not true. “These old sort of end-of-life wells nearing the end of their production life are actually responsible for the lion’s share of methane pollution from the [oil and gas] production sector,” Goldstein says.

Skydance Corp., the new company formed from David Ellison’s massive Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, has established the leadership team overseeing financial operations across the business.
Ellison and Ynon Kreiz, co-CEO of Skydance, previously announced the senior leadership team for the new company (a day before the deal officially closed). Since then, different business units and corporate groups have been laying out the new executive teams for the combined Paramount-WBD, which will have annual revenue of nearly $70 billion on a pro-forma basis and net debt of around $80 billion.
On Wednesday morning, Skydance CFO Dennis Cinelli (formerly Paramount Skydance’s finance chief) sent a memo to staffers announcing the leadership team for the finance group — which will be intimately involved in trying to help the company achieve its projected $6 billion in annualized cost savings, an exercise set to include what are expected to be several rounds of layoffs.
“Today we’re announcing the leadership team for Skydance Finance. Each of these leaders brings the experience and judgment to help us build something exceptional, and I’m excited to work alongside them and to share where I think we can take this team from here,” Cinelli wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by Variety.
Cinelli thanked employees who “put in extraordinary effort to support the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery” and said that “your work was essential to getting this deal done.” He also gave a shout-out to the legacy Warner Bros. Discovery finance team, writing that “you kept the business performing through a long period of not knowing how this would end. That takes discipline, and it didn’t go unnoticed.”
He continued, “As you’ve heard David [Ellison] say, our goal is to become the next-generation media and entertainment company. We’ll only get there if Finance operates at the highest level and helps drive the business. Every greenlight decision, technology investment, partnership deal and number reported externally depends on the quality of your work.”
According to Cinelli, the new Skydance financial leadership “reflects the strengths of both organizations and puts the right leaders in the right places.” Here’s the structure he outlined in the memo:
Corporate Leaders
Business Unit CFOs (dual-reporting to Cinelli and their respective BU heads)
In addition to those appointments, Bryon Rubin is stepping out of his role as CFO of TV Media to become COO of Skydance Television.
“There will be challenges as we integrate businesses and keep raising the bar, but I have great confidence in this team. What we do matters, and how we do it matters even more,” Cinelli wrote in the memo.
Cinelli also outlined six “pillars” guiding the finance organization: