Chloé Zhao won another directing award for Nomadland, which also won best film on the second night of the mostly online awards. Anthony Hopkins was a surprising win for The Father; at 83, he's the oldest male actor to win a BAFTA. Promising Young Woman and Emerald Fennell also came in for surprising wins, and Youn Yuh-jung's win for...
Hawking was no Newton. He said so himself. At a White House event in 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton read a question from the Internet: “How does it feel to be compared to Einstein and Newton?” He replied, “I think to compare me to Newton and Einstein is media hype.” Then again, as Charles Seife demonstrates in Hawking Hawking,...
Real talk: "Kathleen Tiernan, a trainee at Ballet Austin, fears that the pandemic will financially stunt the ballet industry for years to come. 'I don’t know that I would wanna risk going to one of those small companies that could be very close to shutting down,' said Tiernan, who is still in auditions season. 'And I don't know how...
Why did the media not come out and treat it as the truly awful (and unacceptable) fact that it was? "Unlike past stories, The Hollywood Reporter’s offers, for the first time in Rudin’s almost 40 years as a producer, an unromanticized affirmation of the seemingly endless anecdotes about him as a manager. It details his alleged misbehavior as well as his...
Zhao, director of Nomadland, is the first woman of color and only the second woman ever to win the DGA award. Though director David Fincher didn't win for Mank, he had a great line: "Directing ... is a bit like trying to paint a watercolor from four blocks away through a telescope, over a walkie-talkie, and 85 people are...
To keep actors safe - and, of course, to cover their own liability - some productions are now employing intimacy coordinators. But contracts can go farther, and the #TimesUp group has suggested that "a so-called 'nudity rider' or 'simulated sex waiver' should be in place before filming begins." - BBC
Lucky statues! "Without themselves needing to organise, these historically neglected members of the inanimate community have within the last few months secured privileges, protections and high-level advocacy that, in addition to their existing plinth status, falls only narrowly short of full suffrage – and even that cannot confidently be ruled out." - The Guardian (UK)
The easiest part of being an extra, ahem, a background artist, is that you just have to be there. "Being an extra requires no experience, no acting talent and no talking." - Los Angeles Times
The monument, stolen (or "liberated," if you prefer) from a cemetery in Alabama, will now be returned to its former owners, United Daughters of the Confederacy. "'Everything about the South is painfully polite, even the racism, that is, until it’s not. We don’t have the luxury of being polite,' the activists said in a statement. 'We aren’t doing this...
Despite what every podcast host says (is forced to say?) and what your author friends tell you, it's not five-star reviews. Those are literally a dime a dozen. This is a different appeal, according to a study, and it explains why people crying about books on TikTok can juice those books' sales. - Fast Company
Art museums sometimes have difficulties responding to the current moment, by design. A new show in Louisville might change some of that. "Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle."...
Beatts helped shape the early days of Saturday Night Live. "'It was pretty much any adjective you want to throw at it,' she told the Orange County Register in 2013. 'It was exciting, stimulating and fabulous. It was also horrible, boring and exhausting.'" - Washington Post
The art fest was planned for February, then July, and at locations all over the city (supposedly to promote social distancing). But as July get closer, organizers decided to move it once again - to an online-only location, and to try a 2022 restart in real life. Pandemic uncertainty strikes again. - Los Angeles Times
It's not easy for a woman in comedy, and that's doubly true for a Black woman. Ask Ziwe (who now has a series on Netflix). "You really have to create for yourself and create in that vacuum because you’re not going to get the instant gratification and validation." - Variety
The rush of documentaries - they are cheaper to make, and especially if they're true crime, there's a willing and eager audience - has some aesthetic issues. "Cornball fuzzy re-creations lack credibility. ... It doesn’t have to be like this. Plenty of recent shows and movies have made compelling artistic choices that enliven the storytelling." - The New York...
