[Costello:] Welcome back to DAYBREAK. Academy Award winning actress Charlize Theron picked up an eight- and-a-half pound statuette when she won the Oscar for best actress. Well now the native South African has been presented with pure gold from her country's president. CNN's Charlayne Hunter-Gault joins us live from Johannesburg with more on this. Looked like a pretty exciting ceremony.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault, Cnn Johannesburg Bureau Chief:] Well, Carol, it's been really exciting. I mean last night the president and a couple of the bosses of the mining industry did indeed present her with gold. It was embedded in a rock. It hasn't been taken out yet. But Charlize Theron is being treated like gold, like royalty in this country. There hasn't been anything like it in recent weeks or months. They are rolling out the red carpets everywhere from the presidential guesthouse, where she met with the president last night, she, along with her mother and some of her traveling companions. The president also invited some people he had met on a political walkabout from the neighborhood. So that was great. They were very excited. And she is being interviewed by journalists all day. All this morning, she was being interviewed in different interview segments. Some 50 journalists standing around, photographers waiting to take photos of the woman the president called our South African star. She has brought together South Africans like nothing I can remember in recent days. When she met with the president last night, she was looking stunning. She was wearing a white pantsuit and very, very high heels, which made her tower over the president quite a bit. But and when she received the when she received the gold, she said that she was she thought it was just lovely, that it was just beautiful, but she didn't have a lot to say there. She Carol.
[Costello:] No, I wasn't saying anything. I'm just interested in if people in South Africa, or the whole of Africa, I should say, did they see her movie, "Monster?"
[Hunter-gault:] Well, you know it was released a lot later here than it was in the United States, and but it has been released. It was released before she arrived. In fact, before she won the Academy Award, although South Africans were betting that she was going to win it even though they hadn't seen the movie. And they have also shown it in the small town of Benoni where she comes from. We were there recently. People were so excited. She went to elementary school there. And initially, New Metro, which released the movie, hadn't planned to release it in Benoni, but there was pressure put and so it has been released there and people are very excited. One of the things that South Africans are talking about is how much she has changed her accent. You know she was and she's an Afrikaner from here, as you know, and she yet she has changed into an American accent as you see in "Monster" and some of the other films she's done. So everybody is pretty intrigued by that Carol.
[Costello:] And certainly proud. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, live from Johannesburg in South Africa this morning, many thanks to you. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com Birth Daughter; Charlize Theron Returns to South Africa