Aurelia Butler

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    At the Kennedy Center, a Send-Off to Biden and Questions About the Future

    A bipartisan crowd honored Francis Ford Coppola, the Grateful Dead, Bonnie Raitt, Arturo Sandoval and the Apollo Theater. Some wondered if Donald J. Trump would attend next year.The arrival of the president to the center box is typically a pro forma affair each year at the Kennedy Center Honors. But President Biden’s arrival on Sunday night carried the tinge of a Washington on the verge of change.President-elect Donald J. Trump did not attend any of the honors events during his first term, in a sharp break with tradition. So the question of whether Sunday night might be the last time the commander in chief attends for the next four years was front and center as celebrities, artists and officials gathered to pay tribute to the arts.“I was talking to people backstage, and they’re going to try to get as many of these Honors in place now before the inauguration,” David Letterman joked as the audience roared with laughter.This year the center honored the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the beloved rock band the Grateful Dead, the Cuban American jazz trumpeter and composer Arturo Sandoval, the singer and songwriter Bonnie Raitt and the landmark Apollo Theater, in Harlem.Queen Latifah, hosting the celebration, said, “We find hope in heartache and hard times, and now more than ever, we need artists to help us uncover our shared truths, one story, one rhythm, one lyric at a time.”Bonnie CashThe host, Queen Latifah, told the crowd that artists “find hope in heartache and hard times, and now more than ever, we need artists to help us uncover our shared truths, one story, one rhythm, one lyric at a time.”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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    Golden Globes 2025: ‘Emilia Pérez’ Leads Nominations, Plus Nods for ‘Conclave’ and ‘Wicked’

    The movie received 10 nods, leading the field. Angelina Jolie, Timothée Chalamet, Pamela Anderson and Zendaya drew acting nominations.The point of the Golden Globes has become clearer in recent years: It’s a cash register masquerading as an awards show — an opportunity to sell advertising, promote winter movies and flog designer gowns.Celebrity attendance makes the whole thing run, of course, and so trophies are dangled as bait. On Monday, the companies behind the Globes announced the 2025 list of nominees, and — ka-ching! — there are a ton of stars on it, including Angelina Jolie, Timothée Chalamet, Zoe Saldaña, Nicole Kidman, Jamie Foxx, Jake Gyllenhaal, Ariana Grande, Keira Knightley, Pamela Anderson, Zendaya, Demi Moore, Glen Powell, Selena Gomez, Daniel Craig, Kate Winslet, Miley Cyrus and Denzel Washington.Netflix’s “Emilia Pérez,” a Spanish-language musical exploring trans identity, received 10 nominations, the most of any movie, including one for best comedy or musical. “The Brutalist,” “Conclave,” “Wicked” and “Anora” will be among the other films contending for the top prizes, with “The Bear,” “Shogun,” “Only Murders in the Building” and “Baby Reindeer” among the programs vying for the TV equivalents.Notable nominations included Winslet, a surprise double nominee for “Lee,” a little-seen biopic with mediocre reviews, and “The Regime,” a poorly reviewed HBO mini-series. The best director category included Coralie Fargeat for her satirical body horror film “The Substance” and Payal Kapadia for “All We Imagine Is Light,” about a Mumbai nurse; both women will now figure more prominently in the Oscar conversation.And the notable omissions? Danielle Deadwyler (“The Piano Lesson”) and Marianne Jean-Baptiste (“Hard Truths”), both perceived as potential Oscar nominees, were among several Black performers who did not make the list. Similarly, the prison drama “Sing Sing” was largely passed over, although its star, Colman Domingo, received a nod.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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    The London Contemporary Music Festival Trolls for Aesthetics

    The directors of the London Contemporary Music Festival discuss this year’s edition, the event’s 10th anniversary.Recently, the London Contemporary Music Festival released a limited run of merchandise. There was a graphic T-shirt featuring the names of musicians whose creations have appeared at past festivals, plotted on a graph with two axes: the Y labeled “twee” to “brutal,” and the X “top” to “bottom.” Brian Ferneyhough was a brutal top, Cornelius Cardew a twee bottom, and Laurie Anderson was somewhere in between.The festival — equal parts adventurous and provocative — leans further into artistic trolling for this year’s 10th anniversary edition. Titled “LET’S CREATE,” it focuses on the trickster figure in art, which it describes as “shape-shifter, border-crosser, mischief-maker, lord of misrule.” This is a return to what the festival’s directors, Igor Toronyi-Lalic and Jack Sheen, see as its essence.“The trickster is our patron saint, for all experimental music,” Toronyi-Lalic said in an interview. “That is the impetus.”“LET’S CREATE” is a nod to the much-discussed set of principles and desired outcomes used by Arts Council England to inform their funding decisions. Similar trickery streaks through the program. Take Wednesday’s concert, “Sorry.” After the British premiere of Philip Corner’s 1969 performance “During This Concert the Hall Will Be Bombed — or Blown Up,” there’s a sci-fi opera (featuring Spam and the cost of living crisis) by the noise artist Russell Haswell and a pantomime by Adam de la Cour inspired by the Garbage Pail Kids, (which themselves are a 1980s parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids). Then, closing the evening, the electronic producer Aya plays music by the other 45 Ayas listed ahead of her on music database Discogs.Holding together a packed festival program — the music spans from the final notes that Plato heard to the present, with nearly 50 world premieres — are similar feats of niche trolling. To introduce “LET’S CREATE,” Toronyi-Lalic and Sheen asked ChatGPT what the 19th-century music critic Eduard Hanslick might have made of it. “It is not music they are creating but a chaotic charade masquerading as artistic rebellion,” the digital Hanslick replied.The initial impulse for the festival came as a reaction to the “Rest Is Noise” festival at the Southbank Center in 2013; Toronyi-Lalic thought that it was too focused on music written before 1940. Over a decade later, the London Contemporary Music Festival still feels driven by its directors’ dissatisfaction with programming, commissioning and even taste in England.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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    Golden Globes Nominees 2025: See the Complete List

    The movies and TV series competing for the 82nd Golden Globe Awards. The ceremony will air on Jan. 5.The nominations for the 82nd Golden Globes were announced Monday, and “Emilia Pérez” and “The Brutalist” are the top nominees.The musical “Emilia Pérez” received the most nominations at 10, followed by the epic period drama “The Brutalist” with seven. On the television side, “The Bear” led with five nominations, but was in good company with “Only Murders in the Building” and “Shogun” receiving four each.The ceremony, hosted by the comedian Nikki Glaser, will air on Jan. 5 on both CBS and Paramount+. See below for the full list.Best Motion Picture, Drama“The Brutalist”“A Complete Unknown”“Conclave”“Dune: Part 2”“Nickel Boys”“September 5”Timothée Chalamet in “A Complete Unknown.”Searchlight PicturesBest Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy“Anora”“Challengers”“Emilia Pérez”“A Real Pain”“The Substance”“Wicked”Best Motion Picture, Animated“Flow”“Inside Out 2”“Memoir of a Snail”“The Wild Robot”“Wallace and Gromit: Vengence Most Fowl”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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    Elaine May Makes a Rare Appearance to Talk About ‘Mikey and Nicky’

    At a screening of the gangster tale starring Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, the director recalls her battle with Paramount to get the film released.At Metrograph theater on Friday, a crowd of around 175 people was treated to the cinephile’s equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting on the Lower East Side: A rare public appearance by the 92-year-old writer, director and actress Elaine May.May chooses her creative projects sparingly — she won a Tony in 2019 for her last major acting role, in “The Waverly Gallery” — and almost never sits for interviews. But her friend and longtime collaborator Phillip Schopper convinced her that it was a worthwhile occasion: A screening, hosted by the American Cinema Editors society, of the director’s cut of her storied 1976 gangster flick, “Mikey and Nicky,” followed by a craft-oriented discussion with Schopper and an assistant editor on the film, Jeffrey Wolf. “Ask me anything,” May said to them at the start of a lively 40-minute discussion — a tantalizing prospect coming from such an elusive figure.May’s directorial career started out with a hit: Her riotous 1971 comedy “A New Leaf,” which was released a decade after the dissolution of her era-defining professional partnership with Mike Nichols.But in 1973, as she began shooting “Mikey and Nicky” — a bleakly funny tale of wounded masculinity and betrayal, starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk — she and the executives at Paramount started butting heads. In part because she needed to work around Falk’s busy “Columbo” schedule, production went late and over budget. When May did not deliver a cut of the film by the contractual deadline, and several reels of the film mysteriously disappeared, Paramount sued her. Litigation stretched on for nearly year, until, in May’s telling on Friday, studio executives “got really nervous that I would be jailed.” She heard one of the higher-ups reason, “Do we really want to be the only studio that has ever jailed a director for going over budget?”In the end, as May recalled, they reached a compromise: “They actually gave me the movie back because they didn’t want to promote it, because they thought it would be such a flop.” Paramount buried it with an extremely limited release over Christmas 1976. Critics largely spurned it — in The Times, Vincent Canby wrote of May that “it took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed” — and audiences who associated May’s name with zany comedy were put off by the film’s dark tone.In recent years, though, “Mikey and Nicky” has been the subject of a reappraisal and has finally found an audience, thanks in part to a 4K restoration of the director’s cut that was supervised by Schopper and released by Criterion in 2019. May’s directorial reputation, too, has been on the rise over the past decade. To a younger generation of cinephiles that does not remember the press’s frenzied fascination with the Paramount lawsuit or the production travails of her fourth and final film, “Ishtar,” May is now appreciated as a maverick filmmaker who challenged the studio’s whims and worked on her own terms. The audience that had sold out the Metrograph screening in mere minutes was noticeably reverent and intergenerational.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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    Golden Globes Snubs and Surprises: Jon M. Chu, Danielle Deadwyler, ‘The Substance’ and More

    Female directors were well-represented, while “Dune: Part Two” and “Sing Sing” didn’t do as well as expected.The 82nd Golden Globes nominations were announced Monday morning and the unconventional musical “Emilia Pérez” had plenty to sing about: The Netflix film topped all movies with 10 nominations, followed by “The Brutalist” and “Conclave.” Here are some of the most notable takeaways from this year’s field.Ryan Reynolds rebuffedRyan Reynolds wasn’t nominated for “Deadpool & Wolverine.”20th Century Studios/MarvelBefore a series of recent scandals prompted the Golden Globes to diversify its voting membership, you could count on this show to favor celebrity over critical consensus: Every year, the list of nominees included A-list megastars who were recognized even when their projects were not up to par. The old Globes voters, for instance, would have been eager to nominate the “Deadpool & Wolverine” star Ryan Reynolds for best actor in a comedy or musical, if only to lure Reynolds and his wife, Blake Lively, to their red carpet. The new Globes voters proved more resistant to his charms, though they did find room for the Marvel blockbuster in their dubious box-office achievement category, added last year.A ‘Sing Sing’ setbackClarence Maclin, left, and Colman Domingo in “Sing Sing.”A24Just last week, the A24 prison drama “Sing Sing” had a strong night at the Gothams, picking up wins for lead performance (Colman Domingo) and supporting performance (Clarence Maclin). The Globes proved less enamored: Only Domingo scored a nomination, and both Maclin and the film were snubbed. After an acclaimed but quiet run in theaters earlier this summer, the “Sing Sing” awards-season relaunch just took its first notable hit.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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    Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Made a Record $2 Billion of Ticket Sales

    Over 21 months, the pop superstar’s culture-dominating stage show doubled the gross of its closest competitor, according to ticket sales figures confirmed for the first time.For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world.Now we know exactly how big.Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.Those figures were confirmed to The New York Times for the first time by Taylor Swift Touring, the singer’s production company. While the financial details of the Eras Tour have been a subject of constant industry speculation since tickets were first offered more than two years ago — through a presale so in-demand it crashed Ticketmaster’s system — Swift has never authorized disclosure of the tour’s numbers until now.The official results are not far from the estimates that trade journalists and industry analysts have been crunching for months. But they solidify the enormous scale of Swift’s accomplishment. Just a few months ago, Billboard magazine reported that Coldplay had set an industry record with $1 billion in ticket sales for its 156-date Music of the Spheres World Tour — a figure that is just half of Swift’s total for a similar stretch of shows in stadiums and arenas.Every date on the Eras Tour was sold out, and spare tickets were scalped at eye-popping prices — or traded within the protective Swiftie fan community, often at face value.According to Swift’s touring company, a total of 10,168,008 people attended the concerts, which means that, on average, each seat went for about $204. That is well above the industry average of $131 for the top 100 tours around the world in 2023, according to Pollstar, a trade publication.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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    Best Songs of 2024

    Listen to 68 tracks that made major statements, boosted big beefs, propelled up-and-comers and soundtracked the party this year.Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay ZoladzJon ParelesA Little Strife, a Lot of RhythmHere’s a dipperful of worthwhile tracks from the ocean of music released this year. The top of my list is big-statement songs, ones that had repercussions beyond how they sound. Below those, it’s not a ranking but a playlist, a more-or-less guided cruise through what 2024 sounded like for one avid listener. I didn’t include any songs from my list of top albums, which are worth hearing from start to finish. But in the multiverse of streaming music, there are plenty of other possibilities.1. Kendrick Lamar, ‘Not Like Us’Belligerent, accusatory and as tribalistic as its title, “Not Like Us” wasn’t an attack ad from the 2024 election. It was the coup de gras of Kendrick Lamar’s beef with Drake, a rapid-fire, sneering assault on multiple fronts. Its spirit dovetailed with a bitterly contentious 2024.2. Beyoncé, ‘Texas Hold ’Em’“Texas Hold ’Em” isn’t just an invocation of Beyoncé’s home state. It’s a toe-tapping taunt at the racial and musical assumptions behind country music as defined by record labels and radio stations. Rhiannon Giddens picks an oh-so-traditional claw-hammer banjo intro and Beyoncé — raised in Texas — promises “a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown,” singing about drinking and dancing and daring gatekeepers to hold her back.3. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Please Please Please’Sabrina Carpenter delivers a sharp message on the slick “Please Please Please.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesComedy is tricky in a straight-faced song, but Sabrina Carpenter’s eye-roll comes clearly through the shiny pop of “Please Please Please.” The singer tries to placate and possibly tame a boyfriend who sounds more obnoxious in every verse. “I beg you, don’t embarrass me,” she coos; eventually she reaches a breaking point.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