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Former UCLA Student Gavin Hood Wins Oscar

Gavin Hood, a former UCLA Extension student, is congratulated by this year`s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for Tsotsi. Hood earned his certificate in Film, Television, and Digital Media from UCLA Extension?s Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts Department in 1992. He studied seriously and took screenwriting courses in the Extension?s Writers? Program.

After winning an Artes Award (South Africa?s equivalent to an Emmy), Hood made his first feature film, A Reasonable Man, based on a screenplay he had written at UCLA Extension. Last month, UCLA Extension screened Tsotsi as part of its popular Sneak Preview series, and Hood was on hand to speak with the audience. `I feel proud and excited and thankful to UCLA Extension for welcoming me back,` Hood said. `It?s affirming, I think, for UCLA Extension and affirming for me to feel that I delivered on what they taught me.`

`It was a great environment where you learned not only from the lecturers ?who in the Extension program were people who worked in film ? but also from the people in your class because of the experience they had in other fields,` he said recently to a writer from the LA Weekly. Hood took the filmmaking skills he acquired at UCLA Extension back to his native South Africa, where he wrote and directed educational dramas for the country?s Department of Health on topics including HIV/AIDS, teenage prostitution, and child abuse.