Aurelia Butler

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    For Stars at the Oscars, a Night of Celebration and Selfies

    The Academy Awards can be a fraught affair. When many of the world’s biggest stars gather to be validated for their artistry, the tension of parsing the winners from non-winners (not losers!) threatens to stultify the whole thing. But at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony — where “Anora” (and Sean Baker) won big, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande belted big-hearted songs, and Adrien Brody kissed and was kissed — our photographer caught the stars in unguarded moments of joyful support and celebration throughout the night.Cynthia Erivo, whose rousing duet with Ariana Grande, “Defying Gravity,” opened the ceremony, waved to a familiar face in the Dolby Theater.Rumer Willis and Demi Moore, in the foreground, and Penélope Cruz and Lupita Nyong’o, middle, chatting as Isabella Rossellini looks on.Colman Domingo, with his husband, Raul Domingo, taking a selfie. Ariana Grande, left, enjoyed a moment with her “Wicked” co-star Bowen Yang, center, and Matt Rogers, who co-hosts “Las Culturistas,” a podcast, with Yang.Jeremy Strong, nominated for best supporting actor for his role in “The Apprentice,” was saluted in a speech by his “Succession” co-star Kieran Culkin, who won the award.Mikey Madison celebrated winning the award for best actress for her role in “Anora.” “This is a dream come true,” she said. “I’m probably going to wake up tomorrow.”The nominees for best actor — from left: Timothée Chalamet, Colman Domingo, Adrien Brody, Ralph Fiennes and Sebastian Stan — huddled for an impromptu photo shoot.Emma Stone, last year’s best actress winner for “Poor Things,” poked her tongue at a neighbor.Margaret Qualley embraced her husband, the music producer Jack Antonoff, during a break in the show.Adrien Brody kissed Daniel Blumberg for winning best original score for “The Brutalist.” On the red carpet before the show, Brody had been surprised by a kiss from Halle Berry, who recreated their smooch at the 2003 Oscars.Sean Baker made history Sunday night, tying Walt Disney for most individual Oscars collected in one night, with four. His film “Anora” won five, including best picture.Fernanda Torres, a best actress nominee for “I’m Still Here,” connected with Colman Domingo. She was the second Brazilian to ever receive a best acting nod. Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, nominated in 1999, was the first.Jeff Goldblum, left, compared cellphones with his wife Emilie Livingston.Cynthia Erivo with Ralph Fiennes, who starred in “Conclave,” a film about the intrigue behind the selection of a new pope that received eight nominations.After his best actor win for “The Brutalist” was announced, Adrien Brody soaked in the moment. He then tossed his gum from the stage to his girlfriend Georgina Chapman.Ariana Grande with Ethan Slater, her co-star in “Wicked,” which was up for 10 Oscars.Demi Moore, left, reached across Margaret Qualley, her co-star in “The Substance,” to greet Qualley’s husband, Jack Antonoff. Moore, a nominee in the best actress category, lost to Mikey Madison. More

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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Chicago Jazz

    Jazz has experienced a meaningful resurgence in popularity over the past 15 years or so, especially among younger listeners. What’s driving that? You could make the case that there is a particular hunger, now that so much of life is lived in the digital cloud, for the messy and untamed energy of jazz, and for its way of putting a live process on display. And if that’s the case, then it makes a lot of sense that Chicago jazz has been at the forefront of this recent surge. Chicago has always represented a particularly rootsy, physical and — yes — windy ideal in jazz. So perhaps it’s an especially heady antidote to that sense of digital disappearance.The Chicago jazz sound amounts to a sum of the city’s Black histories: In it you can usually hear something of the snowy, clamoring traffic in Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” from 1940; the yowl of Howlin’ Wolf’s electric guitar in a 1950s blues bar; the drummers and dancers pounding out rhythms at one of Kelan Philip Cohran’s gatherings at the 63rd Street Beach in the late 1960s; even the antiracist street protests of the 1990s.The Windy City was an important musical outpost from the start of the recorded era, when many blues and jazz musicians moved there from the South and became stars. It’s also known as a cradle of the avant-garde, thanks to institutions like Sun Ra’s Arkestra, established there in the early 1950s, and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a seed-sowing collective that celebrates its 60th anniversary this spring. Today, the city remains at the forefront of contemporary jazz thanks to artists like Nicole Mitchell, Kahil El’Zabar, Makaya McCraven, Tomeka Reid, Jeff Parker and Isaiah Collier, each a latter-day A.A.C.M. affiliate who has springboarded into a leading role on the international jazz circuit. And the label International Anthem, founded 12 years ago in Chicago, has become one of the biggest success stories in the indie-jazz business.We asked writers, musicians and other linchpins of the Chicago scene to tell us what tracks they would play to make a newcomer fall in love with the distinctive but multifaceted sound of Chicago jazz. Read on, listen to their picks in our playlists, and if you have favorites of your own, drop them in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Ernest Khabeer Dawkins’ New Horizons Ensemble, ‘Mean Ameen’Dee Alexander, vocalistErnest Khabeer Dawkins leading the New Horizons Ensemble.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesThis recording, featuring some of the stalwarts of Chicago’s improvised music scene, should tantalize the palate of any listener new to creative music. The music is exploratory, while at the same time being funky and accessible. This Ernest Dawkins composition is a homage to Chicago’s own Ameen Muhammad, who died in 2003 at 48. Muhammad, a dear friend of Dawkins, was not only a renowned trumpeter and composer but also a highly admired and respected educator; “Mean Ameen” gained international notoriety over the course of his brief career. Ernest Khabeer Dawkins is one of those rare individuals who manages to balance a passion for community, mentorship and art. For me, this piece represents the saxophonist and bandleader at his best, through a beautiful dedication to a dear friend.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Why Is Hollywood Obsessed With Architects? ‘The Brutalist’ Gives Us a Hint.

    The trope of the embattled auteur exerting their will is too tempting for filmmakers to ignore.Now that the White House has decreed that all new government structures be made in a classical style, let’s cue up the original film of buildings and hubris — King Vidor’s “The Fountainhead” (1949), based on the 1943 novel by Ayn Rand.In the film’s final shot, the architect Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) stands squinting atop his latest skyscraper, the tallest in the world, with the wind popping his shirt. Inspired in part by Rand’s admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, Roark has battled decades of herd mentality and bland neoclassical buildings in order to assert his vision of a gleaming, geometric Modernism upon America’s skyline. He has behaved ruthlessly, even sexually assaulting his eventual wife (Patricia Neal) in her mansion on the outskirts of a quarry. As he surveys Manhattan from his new perch, Roark seems a terrible demigod of will.What he doesn’t seem is an actual designer. Like the novel, Vidor’s film (which Rand wrote the screenplay for) spun an influential but misleading myth of architects as solitary artists. In the interwar period, conceptual-minded architects — from Wright in America to the Bauhaus school in Germany — turned the formerly public language of pediments and arches into a canvas for non sequiturs of personal expression. For decades that evolution helped turn the profession into a shorthand for greatness. The Museum of Modern Art began exhibiting models and plans in 1932: Buildings had become sculptures. Paul Simon was able to write a convincing (and spine-tingling) paean to Frank Lloyd Wright without any deep knowledge of his work. Time magazine put Philip Johnson, a Roark incarnate, on a 1979 cover, looking like a Batman villain.Lately that world seems to want reappraisal. A housing crisis, an epidemic of cheap development and luxury glass, red tape and a postpandemic “return to office” movement have called into question the use and feasibility of new construction. A recent play, opera and exhibition on New York’s most influential master builder, Robert Moses, decry the toll bridges and expressways he erected at the expense of the people they were meant to serve. In various outlets, the debate has resurged over the human effects of brutalism, the imposing concrete style that possessed architects from the early 1950s to the late 1970s but alienated more of its users than perhaps any modern style. (See: the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building in D.C., by Marcel Breuer, or Boston’s City Hall.)In a world where building seems difficult at best and oppressive at worst, what’s the point of being an architect at all? That question unites two of last year’s most talked-about movies: Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis.” To be sure, both films peddle the trope of the embattled auteur. In “Megalopolis,” the gloomy genius Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) battles philistines in his quest to renovate New Rome, a thinly-veiled Manhattan. (There is even a skyscraper scene to match Vidor’s.) Corbet’s tortured architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), too, a Jewish-Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust based roughly on Breuer, obsesses over a bunkerlike civic chapel that will brood over 1950s Pennsylvania in reinforced concrete, again recalling Roark, who in Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (the book, but not the film) builds a secular Temple of the Human Spirit for a rich financier. When Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), finds his blueprints and tells him, “I’m just looking at you,” she’s voicing the old belief: Buildings are extensions of their authors.But these movies flip that formula, as if to explain how we’ve changed our minds about it — one bleakly, the other romantically.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    In ‘The Electric State,’ Jolting a Robot to Life

    How the makers of a new Netflix science fiction movie enhanced the look of the cute, round-headed bot at its center.Kid Cosmo’s head is enormous, as robot heads go. The primary nonhuman hero of the film “The Electric State” (on Netflix March 14), Cosmo has a bright yellow globe of a head the size and shape of an exercise ball, propped atop an incongruously spindly frame.Cute? Yes. Mechanically feasible? Not really.Cosmo’s character was inspired by Skip, the similarly bigheaded hero of Simon Stalenhag’s graphic novel. A cult hit when it was first published in 2018, the book “The Electric State” is set in an alternate 1990s universe after a mysterious war has ravaged the California landscape, leaving the husks of enormous drones and robots in its wake.“Simon Stalenhag’s work is what attracted me to this movie to begin with,” said Matthew E. Butler, the film’s visual effects supervisor. “But his designs are often aesthetically cool and engineeringly impossible.”In the film, Cosmo and his young companion, Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, embark on a journey across the American West to find Michelle’s brother. Along the way, they meet up with scores of other robots, many just as improbably designed as Cosmo.Of course, Cosmo doesn’t really need to make mechanical sense in either the graphic novel or the feature film, given the flights of physics fancy regularly found in both mediums. But Anthony and Joe Russo, the film’s directors, wanted to ground their movie in reality, even more so given the story’s 1990s setting (think Orange Julius and MTV News with sci-fi enhancements), and the film’s fanciful robots, which include a midcentury postal carrier (voiced by Jenny Slate) and an urbane Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson).Millie Bobby Brown as Michelle, with Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk)NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Wizard of Vinyl Is in Kansas

    Hydraulic machines whooshed in a sprawling Kansas factory as melted vinyl squeezed through molded stampers like pancake batter, turning out fresh new albums about once a minute. Workers inspected the grooves for imperfections, fed album jackets into a shrink-wrapper and stacked the finished products on tall dollies for shipping.Acoustic Sounds occupies a hodgepodge of squat industrial buildings in Salina, a city of about 50,000 near the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, where grain elevators and a gigantic frozen pizza plant jut out from the flat plains landscape. Over the last 15 years, this unassuming complex has become a leading manufacturer of the music industry’s most surprising hot format: vinyl LPs.Pacing the floor was Chad Kassem, the company’s founder, who was bit by the audiophile bug as a 22-year-old who’d run into trouble with the law and now, four decades later, is a top player in the booming business of vinyl. Speaking in a slow drawl, but moving quickly on the ground, Kassem, 62, explained his obsession with making the best-sounding records possible — a never-ending pursuit that involves hunting down decades-old master tapes and making minute adjustments to tweak the temperature of an embryonic wad of polyvinyl chloride by a degree or two.Chad Kassem in his studio at Acoustic Sounds, where he keeps two turntables by his desk to check records.David Robert Elliott for The New York TimesThe control room of a recording studio operated by Acoustic Sounds at a former church in downtown Salina that Kassem bought in 1996.David Robert Elliott for The New York Times“What I’m all about,” he said, “is saving the world from bad sound.”Introduced in 1948, vinyl LPs seemed destined for extinction by the early 2000s, if not before, as the music industry went digital. But over the last decade or so, the format has been reborn, embraced by fans as a physical totem in an age of digital ephemera, and by increasing ranks of analog loyalists who swear by its sound. Today, the symbol of the vinyl craze may be a rainbow of collectible LPs by pop stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish, which young fans snap up by the millions (though many may never be played). But on a chilly recent afternoon, Acoustic Sounds’ assembly lines were humming with albums by the likes of John Coltrane, Steely Dan and Lightnin’ Hopkins, in deluxe packages that go for up to $150 apiece.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    French Cinema Celebrates Its Covid Recovery

    The French movie industry has been celebrating statistics that show an increase in movie attendance.Ronald Chammah, who owns a pair of small cinemas on the Left Bank of Paris, remembers well the grim days in 2022, when he wondered whether the French passion for moviegoing — a pastime that France invented 130 years ago — had been irreparably diminished by pandemic lockdowns.But that was then. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Chammah was sitting in a packed Parisian cafe happily describing the Sunday in late November when he sold out screenings from a roster of Armenian art-house directors — Inna Mkhitaryan, Artavazd Pelechian, Sergueï Paradjanov — known mostly to hard-core film buffs.“That day, we broke the record for our theaters,” Mr. Chammah said with a note of astonishment. “It was full, all day long — sold out, sold out, sold out.”The global movie business had a disappointing 2024, thanks in part to Hollywood strikes. At the Oscars on Sunday, Sean Baker, winner of best director for “Anora,” used his acceptance speech to lament the pandemic-era loss of hundreds of American movie screens. “And we continue to lose them regularly,” Mr. Baker said. “If we don’t reverse this trend, we’ll be losing a vital part of our culture.”But in France, there has been a more celebratory feeling of late, with fresh statistics suggesting that its audiences are leading the way in returning to what are lovingly known as “les salles obscures” — the “dark rooms” of their movie theaters.That celebration was infused with a very French idea about citizens’ moral obligation to support the arts and to do so somewhere other than at home. The Institut Lumière, a film society based in Lyon, declared that last year’s French admissions numbers amounted to a triumph over both the pandemic era and the “invasive digital civilization” of scrolling and swiping.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Chris Jasper, Who Helped Revitalize the Isley Brothers, Dies at 73

    A classically trained pianist turned songwriter, he was a cornerstone of the soul group’s sound during its fertile second act in the 1970s.Chris Jasper, a Juilliard-trained keyboardist, singer and songwriter who brought an expansive musical vocabulary to the long-running R&B group the Isley Brothers, helping push them into a new hit-making era in the 1970s and ’80s with singles like “That Lady” and “Fight the Power,” died on Feb. 23. He was 73.His death was announced in a statement on his Facebook account, which noted that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December. The statement did not say where he died.Mr. Jasper, who was also a producer, started his decade-long run as an official member of the Isley Brothers in 1973. He added musical complexity to the long-running R&B group as it took on a richer, funkier style for a new decade.Looking back on the Isley Brothers’ sound in a 2020 interview with Rockin’ Hot Radio, a Delaware-based station, he said, “It’s R&B, of course,” but added that he borrowed “voicings that were used in classical music, and in particular the Romantic period, with composers like Debussy, even 20th-century composers like Gershwin.”Mr. Jasper, far left, with other members of the Isley Brothers in a mid-1970s publicity photo. Seated are Ronald, left, and Rudolph Isley; standing are, from left, Marvin, O’Kelly and Ernie Isley. T-Neck RecordsDuring his tenure, the group lodged more than a dozen singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and more than a dozen albums on the Billboard 200 — six of them in the Top 10, including “The Heat Is On,” which reached No. 1 in 1975.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Music Took Over This Year’s Oscars

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeIn seemingly every crevice of the 97th Academy Awards, there was music, or a reminder of it. It was a song from a nominated film being performed, like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande delivering one of their “Wicked” duets; or it was the best score winner Daniel Blumberg, a onetime indie-rock hero now on a second musical act; or it was the musical sections of the host Conan O’Brien’s stand-up bits.And even when there was no music performed, there was music in the air: Timothée Chalamet, who did not take the stage, nominated for the role of Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown”; nods to how music functioned in the night’s big winner, “Anora,” and in the polarizing nominee “Emilia Pérez”; and the appearance of Mick Jagger, gamely making an age joke at his own expense.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how the Oscars incorporated music into this year’s ceremony, in manners both smooth and bumpy; whether music made for movies can ever be cool; and whether O’Brien should be making jokes about Drake and Kendrick Lamar.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More