Oscars for Blood Diamond?

Filed in archive Celebrity Jewelry on January 26, 2007

Leonardo DiCaprio's latest film, Blood Diamond, has gotten the Oscar nod. He is up for best actor, and there are many other possible Oscars for this movie including best sound and editing. You can vote for your favorites right now on the Yahoo Movie site.

This movie has been stirring up controversy before it was even released, and it hasn't stopped according to this article from Telegraph News, Oscar-nominated film unearths curse of Sierra Leone's 'blood diamonds':

He [Richard Foray ] and thousands of other small-scale miners in Sierra Leone fear that Hollywood's portrayal of their country's civil war could now rob them of their livelihoods.

Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio's latest film, opens across Britain today, charting the trade in illegally-mined and sold gemstones during Sierra Leone's 11-year conflict, which ended in 2002. Bootleg copies of the film are already showing here, on flickering screens in tin-shack video halls. Few are impressed.

"It's true that it shows the way things were during the war, but people here are so worried that others in the West will think that is the way it is now,"' said Mr Foray, 41, in Koidu, 210 miles northeast of Freetown.

It is not. The people who are mining now are not the rebels; we are true miners trying to make money for feeding the family and school fees."

Koidu, the capital of the country's Kono district, is Sierra Leone's diamond mining Heartland, peppered with craters excavated by hand by the town's 100,000 artisan miners. Beneath hills covered in coconut palms and along muddy riverbanks lie some of the richest diamond deposits in the world. Working mines already earn Sierra Leone more than £75 million a year.