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    Netflix’s Head of Film, Scott Stuber, Is Departing

    Scott Stuber attracted Oscar-winning filmmakers to the streaming service and helped usher the entertainment industry into the streaming era.Scott Stuber, who brought Oscar-winning filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Jane Campion and Alfonso Cuarón to Netflix and in doing so helped to usher the entertainment industry into the streaming era, is leaving as the service’s film chairman, the company said on Monday.News of Mr. Stuber’s departure came on the eve of the Oscar nominations. During his tenure, which began in 2017, Netflix has had eight films nominated for best picture, though a win in that category has proved elusive.“Scott has helped lead the new paradigm of how movies are made, distributed and watched,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said in a statement. “He attracted unbelievable creative talent to Netflix, making us a premiere film studio.”While Mr. Stuber’s slate of movies helped to boost Netflix’s business substantially, he often clashed with Mr. Sarandos over strategy. Mr. Stuber often tried to appease filmmakers by pushing for wider theatrical releases than Mr. Sarandos was willing to undertake.Still, Netflix received the most Oscar nominations of any studio in 2020, 2021 and 2022. In addition to critical hits like Mr. Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” Ms. Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Mr. Cuarón’s “Roma,” Mr. Stuber’s tenure produced popular hits like “Red Notice,” “Bird Box” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”He made big bets on filmmakers he wanted to lure to the studio, spending $450 million to secure two “Knives Out” sequels from Rian Johnson and more than $160 million for Zack Snyder’s recent release, “Rebel Moon.” Greta Gerwig, who directed and co-wrote the blockbuster “Barbie,” is also working with Netflix on adapting two films based on the “Chronicles of Narnia” book series.“Maestro,” a biopic of the composer Leonard Bernstein, which Bradley Cooper wrote, directed and stars in, is one of the Netflix films expected to pick up several Oscar nominations this year. (Netflix will also announce its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday.)Netflix was sometimes criticized for prizing quantity over quality in its film strategy, a knock that Mr. Stuber acknowledged.“I think one of the fair criticisms has been we make too much and not enough is great,” he said in an interview in 2021, adding, “I think what we want to do is refine and make a little less better and more great.”In a statement on Monday, Mr. Stuber thanked Mr. Sarandos and Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and executive chairman, for “the amazing opportunity to join Netflix and create a new home for original movies.”“I am proud of what we accomplished,” he said, “and am so grateful to all the filmmakers and talent who trusted us to help tell their stories.”Mr. Stuber is scheduled to leave in March and will start his own media company. Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, will assume Mr. Stuber’s duties when he leaves. Last year, she essentially became Mr. Stuber’s boss, putting a management layer between him and Mr. Sarandos. More

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    Norman Jewison, Director of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and ‘Moonstruck,’ Dies at 97

    His movies — from dramas to comedies and musicals — became magnets for Oscars, but he was best known for socially conscious films, like “In the Heat of the Night.”Norman Jewison, whose broad range as a filmmaker was reflected in the three movies that earned him Academy Award nominations for best director — the socially conscious drama “In the Heat of the Night,” the big-budget musical “Fiddler on the Roof” and the romantic comedy “Moonstruck” — died on Saturday at his home. He was 97.His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Jeff Sanderson. He declined to specify where Mr. Jewison lived, saying that the family requested privacy.Mr. Jewison, whose career began in Canadian television and spanned more than 50 years, was, like his close friend Sidney Lumet and a select few other directors, best known for making films that addressed social issues. The most celebrated of those was “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), one of his earliest features and his first Oscar-winning film.A story of racial tensions in the American South filtered through a murder mystery that brings together a Black Philadelphia detective (Sidney Poitier) and a white Mississippi police chief (Rod Steiger), “In the Heat of the Night” could not have been more timely: It opened weeks after racial violence had erupted in Detroit and Newark. It went on to win five Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor, for Mr. Steiger.Mr. Poitier was among the many actors who had fond memories of working with Mr. Jewison. “He gives his actors room and keeps them as calm as he can, because it’s easier to speak with them when they’re calm,” he told The New York Times in 2011. “A director has to keep the actors on their toes while the camera’s running, but when the scene is done, they should be relaxing, nothing on their minds. There can’t be a constant level of seriousness. And with Norman, there’s always a lot of laughter.”Mr. Jewison lost the best director award for “In the Heat of the Night” to Mike Nichols, who won for “The Graduate,” and he never did win an Oscar for directing. But his films, and the actors in them, garnered many Oscars and 46 nominations.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?  More

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    Ewa Podles, a Rare Contralto With Sweeping Range, Dies at 71

    With her molten chest voice and commanding presence, Ms. Podles, a galvanizing Polish opera singer, developed a cult following.Ewa Podles, the Polish contralto whose darkly molten, three-octave-plus voice and commanding presence made her a favorite of opera connoisseurs, died on Friday in Warsaw. She was 71.Her death, in a hospice center, was confirmed by her stepdaughter, Ania Marchwinska, who said the cause was lung cancer.Aficionados embraced Ms. Podles (whose full name was pronounced AE-vuh PODE-lesh) not just for her exciting performances, but also for how unusual she was: True contraltos — the lowest-lying female voice type, deeper than a mezzo-soprano — are hardly common.Developing the low chest register as much as the rest of the voice, a contralto is “like an alto in the lower range, like a soprano on top,” Ms. Podles told The New York Times in 1998. And she fit that bill: Though her tone was melancholically hooded and brooding, with a cavernous chest register, she also had the high notes and agility to excel at Handel and Rossini’s most demandingly florid roles.“It’s a very rare voice,” Ms. Podles said of her instrument.And she wielded it with utter authority. “Never, for even one moment of one recitative in any opera, was she anything but riveting in her conviction,” the conductor Will Crutchfield, who collaborated with her several times, said in a phone interview. “She had something to say.”Ewa Maria Podles was born on April 26, 1952, in Warsaw to Walery and Teresa (Sawicka) Podles, a member of the chorus of the Polish National Opera.“My mother was an extraordinary singer,” Ms. Podles told The Times. “She had a very, very deep voice, like a man. She recorded a bit on the radio, but everyone who heard her asked: ‘Is it really a woman singing?’”Ms. Podles didn’t have to fight for her low notes, either. “It’s the most natural register in my voice,” she said. “I was born with this chest voice. Some people hate the chest voice, and some people say: ‘Oh, it’s magnificent. I adore you.’”She studied in Warsaw at the conservatory that is now the Chopin University of Music, and she was a prizewinner at the 1978 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1984, taking over for the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, another singer with both earthy power and dazzling coloratura, in the title role of Handel’s “Rinaldo.” (That part, like many of Ms. Podles’s Baroque specialties, was originally written for a male castrato and is typically sung today by a lower-register female singer or a male countertenor.)While Ms. Podles was hardly unknown in American opera circles, the repertoire in which she specialized wasn’t standard fare at U.S. opera houses, and her only Met appearance after “Rinaldo” was a 2008 run in the small but crucial role of La Cieca in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.” Ms. Podles became something of a cult figure, one of the singers that fans make a point of traveling to hear.And, like many cult artists, she was not to all tastes. Her acting was unabashedly old-fashioned — a sometimes wide-eyed, arms-outstretched embodiment of opera’s stylized, semi-mythic side.Ms. Podles, left, with the soprano Deborah Voigt in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda” at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008.Richard Termine for The New York TimesWell-groomed modern singers aim for a smooth, unobtrusive flow between the different parts of their voices; Ms. Podles reveled in the breaks between them. As she told The Times, gutsily relishing the chest register, as she did, is off-putting to some listeners. She said that while the top and bottom extremes of her voice came easily, the rest needed to be diligently built, and her middle register could be a bit breathy.But for many, she was unforgettable. “The sheer, round, sensuous beauty of her voice was staggering,” the eminent pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who toured and recorded with her, said in an interview. “I don’t want to make comparisons, but when I worked with Jessye Norman” — the American soprano who died in 2019 — “you had the same sense of this huge, engulfing but not piercing sound, a wide sound.”And when elemental intensity was called for, as in Mussorgsky’s cycle “Songs and Dances of Death,” Ms. Podles was ideal.“She had this mournful quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said. “She could draw you into states of sadness and lament and pain that were overwhelming in their sincerity and beauty, so you liked feeling bad with her.”Ms. Podles’s husband, Jerzy Marchwinski, a prominent pianist who curtailed his performing career because of back problems and who was a close adviser to his wife, died in November. In addition to her stepdaughter, Ms. Marchwinska, she is survived by her and her husband’s daughter, Maria Madej, and four grandchildren.Among a wide-ranging repertoire, Ms. Podles sang songs by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and works with orchestra by Mahler, Brahms, Prokofiev and Penderecki. Her operatic characters extended to Verdi’s Azucena and Eboli, Adalgisa in Bellini’s “Norma,” Erda in Wagner’s “Ring” and Klytämnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra.” (She even played the bearded lady Baba the Turk in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”)Ms. Podles appeared onstage for the last time in Barcelona in 2017, as the comically highhanded Marquise de Berkenfield in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.”“She had that unmistakable great-singer quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said, “of holding the audience absolutely in the palm of her hand.” More

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    Depardieu Sexual Assault Suit Dropped Over Statute of Limitations

    Hélène Darras, a French actress, had accused Gérard Depardieu of groping her in 2007 on a movie set. A separate investigation of the actor is proceeding, Paris prosecutors said.A sexual assault lawsuit filed against Gérard Depardieu by a French actress has been dropped because it was past the statute of limitations, prosecutors in Paris said on Monday, but the French actor is still under investigation in a separate case.In the lawsuit that was dropped, the actress Hélène Darras had accused Depardieu of groping her on the set of “Disco,” a comedy released in 2008. Her suit had been filed in September but was made public only last month, shortly before she appeared in a France 2 television documentary alongside three other women who also accused Depardieu of inappropriate comments or sexual misconduct.The documentary, which showed Depardieu making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea, set off a fierce debate in France that prompted President Emmanuel Macron and dozens of actors, directors and other celebrities to defend Depardieu, splitting the French movie industry.Depardieu, 75, has denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations against him.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?  More

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    Mary Weiss, Who Sang ‘Leader of the Pack,’ Is Dead at 75

    As the lead singer of the Shangri-Las, she conveyed passion, pathos and toughness — and reached the Top 40 six times while still in her teens.Mary Weiss, who in 1964 was the lead singer of the Shangri-Las’ No. 1 hit, “Leader of the Pack,” extracting every ounce of passion and pathos available in a three-minute adolescent soap opera, died on Friday at her home in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 75.Her death was announced by the author and television writer David Stenn, who had been collaborating with Ms. Weiss on a stage musical about the Shangri-Las. He said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.“Leader of the Pack,” the Shangri-Las’ second and biggest hit, was narrated by a young woman who falls in love with a motorcycle-riding tough guy without her parents’ approval — “They told me he was bad/But I knew he was sad” — and is then left bereft when he dies in a road accident on a rainy night.Produced and co-written by Shadow Morton, the single featured call-and-response vocals, full-tilt teenage angst and motorcycle sound effects. It was excessive and melodramatic, requiring acting as much as singing, but Ms. Weiss sold it with her yearning performance. She was just 15 when it topped the charts.From left, Mary Ann Ganser, Betty Weiss and Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las in 1965.David Dalton“I’m kind of a shy person, but I felt that the recording studio was the place that you could really release what you’re feeling without everybody looking at you,” Ms. Weiss was quoted as saying in “Always Magic in the Air,” Ken Emerson’s 2005 book about notable songwriting teams of early rock ’n’ roll. “I had enough pain in me at the time to pull off anything and get into it and sound believable.”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?  More

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    21 Savage Returns to No. 1 With ‘American Dream’

    Kali Uchis’s “Orquídeas” opens at No. 2, giving the Colombian American songwriter her highest chart position yet on the Billboard 200.21 Savage, the London-born mainstay of Atlanta rap, has the first new No. 1 album of 2024 with “American Dream,” following holdovers by Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen.“American Dream” is 21 Savage’s fourth chart-topper overall, and the first time he has led the Billboard 200 as a solo artist since “I Am > I Was” five years ago; since then, he has gone to No. 1 twice via collaborative projects with Drake (“Her Loss,” 2022) and the producer Metro Boomin (“Savage Mode II,” 2020).The album is 21 Savage’s latest since the apparent resolution of his long-running problems with his immigration status. The week before the Grammy Awards in 2019, where he had been set to perform, the 31-year-old rapper, whose real name is Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for being in the United States illegally. After delays in his case, 21 Savage said in October that he had become a permanent U.S. resident.In its debut week, “American Dream,” which was announced just a few days before its release on Jan. 12 — and features guest appearances by Doja Cat, Travis Scott, Lil Durk, Young Thug and others, as well as spoken segments by the rapper’s mother, Heather Carmillia Joseph — had the equivalent of 133,000 sales in the United States. Most of that was from streaming, with nearly 170 million clicks, according to the tracking service Luminate. The 15-track LP had 4,000 sales as a complete package.Ariana Grande’s first solo song in more than three years, “Yes, And?,” opens at No. 1 on the Hot 100, her eighth track to top Billboard’s flagship pop singles chart. “Eternal Sunshine,” her next studio album, is due March 8.Also this week, “Orquídeas,” the fourth studio album by the singer Kali Uchis, which is performed primarily in Spanish, opens in second place, Uchis’s highest chart position ever. The album, whose title translates as “Orchids,” and features guest spots by Latin stars like Peso Pluma, Karol G and Rauw Alejandro, had the equivalent of 69,000 sales, including 51 million streams and 31,000 copies sold as a complete package.Wallen’s nearly year-old “One Thing at a Time,” which logged a 17th time at No. 1 last week, falls to third place this week, while Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 4 and Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” is No. 5. More

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    Green Day Gets Loud Again on ‘Saviors’

    On “Saviors,” its 14th studio album, the pop-punk trio returns to stadium-sized rock.Praising a return to form is a barbed compliment at best. It implies recent missteps, a decline, the waning of youthful inspiration, the toll of a long career — perhaps all of them at once. It suggests that the sensible way forward is to double back. Still, “Saviors,” Green Day’s new album, is a decisive, even overdetermined return to form.Ever since its beginnings in the late 1980s, Green Day has stayed contentious. Billie Joe Armstrong has sung about personal grievances — including struggles with himself — as well as the ways they intersect with larger political currents, most ambitiously on the band’s 2004 concept album, “American Idiot,” which went on to be adapted into a Broadway musical.The band can still cause a stir. In recent years, Armstrong has been performing the song “American Idiot” by changing the line “I’m not a part of a redneck agenda” to end with “the MAGA agenda” instead. But when he sang that phrase on broadcast TV this past New Year’s Eve, right-wing media seized on the line to raise a fuss.“Saviors” finds contemporary targets. It opens with “The American Dream Is Killing Me,” which goes barreling ahead as Armstrong derides conspiracy theories and anti-immigrant attitudes, touches on homelessness and real-estate exploitation and declares that as a nation, “We are not well.”In “Living in the ’20s,” Armstrong confronts a decade that’s brought supermarket shootings and murder hornets, while in the quick-strummed “Strange Days Are Here to Stay,” he sings about bleak expectations: “I can’t see this ending well/Now that it’s too late.”While Green Day has pushed against power structures, it has honored musical ones. With Armstrong on guitar and vocals, Tré Cool on drums and Mike Dirnt on bass, there has always been a virtuosic neatness behind Green Day’s blare.Green Day arrived as a proud heir to the fast, blunt, tuneful, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes candid punk that the Ramones had formulated in the 1970s. As Green Day’s catalog grew, it became clearer that the band was well aware of generations of guitar bands, from its grunge contemporaries back through Van Halen, Cheap Trick, Boston and Aerosmith to the Who and the Beatles.Green Day invariably delivers precisely arranged songs with clear-cut verses, choruses and bridges. Its 1994 album, “Dookie” — with hits including “Basket Case” and “Welcome to Paradise” — heralded the commercial breakthrough of punk-pop that was simultaneously raucous and high-gloss.“Saviors” trumpets its connections to Green Day’s past. For its international tour this year — to be joined along the way by bands including Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid and the Hives — Green Day has announced it will play all the way through both “Dookie” and “American Idiot,” coinciding with their 30th and 20th anniversaries. Green Day made “Saviors” with Rob Cavallo, the co-producer of both albums, who last worked on Green Day’s three stripped-down 2012 albums “¡Uno!,” “¡Dos!” and “¡Tré!”Green Day’s more recent albums had strained to be different: noisier, murkier and often using all its resources to simulate lo-fi recording. “Saviors,” by contrast, is forthrightly lavish. Guitars and vocals are multi-layered, and the drum sound is gigantic; orchestral arrangements appear out of nowhere. The band proudly blasts again in songs like the standout track, “Dilemma,” in which Armstrong — who entered rehab after an onstage tirade in 2012 — grapples with trying to stay sober. “I don’t want to be a dead man walking,” he proclaims over stadium-shaking guitar chords.“Saviors” revisits the production approach of the so-called “loudness war” of the 1990s and 2000s, when it seemed studios sought to make, as Meat Loaf sang, “everything louder than everything else.” The waveforms of nearly every song on “Saviors” measure as what recording engineers call “brickwalled” — pushed to a constant, flattened peak. On a playlist alongside tracks that include more ups and downs, that loudness is supposed to feel exciting. But on an entire unrelenting, 15-track album, it grows wearing.Perhaps it’s inevitable that on Green Day’s 14th studio album, some of the songs have beats and chord progressions that can feel like retreads. On “Saviors,” the production often strives to offset familiarity with impact. Yet “Father to a Son” — in which an uncertain parent vows to try his best — unmistakably echoes “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” even with an orchestra now supplementing the power chords.For sonic variety, Green Day flaunts its rock scholarship. “Bobby Sox” — with Armstrong singing about the homey comforts he’d offer a girlfriend, a boyfriend or a best friend — is an outright homage to Pixies, exploding from a quiet verse to a crashing chorus. And the depressive but stubborn “Goodnight Adeline” could almost have been an arena march from Oasis.“Saviors” doesn’t hide its craftsmanship or self-consciousness, but they are a means to an end. Green Day is still angry, disgusted, worried and no longer so amused about the state of the world. This time, the band has decided to shout about it.Green Day“Saviors”(Reprise/Warner) More

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    What to Expect When the Oscar Nominations Are Announced

    Big showings by “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” are likely in an especially strong year.The Q. and A.’s and cocktail parties are a wrap. The votes have been cast. And on Tuesday, we’ll find out which movies and artists will have a chance at Academy Awards when the Oscar nominations are announced.It was an unusually strong year for films, meaning that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had some hard choices to make by the time voting closed last week. As I have written throughout this awards season, this year, there are simply more good movies and great performances than there are awards to honor them. When I came up with predictions, I was tied up in knots trying to narrow down the list. But that also means I have some ideas about the names and titles Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid will announce when they reveal the nominees at 8:30 a.m. on ABC and Oscars.com. Here’s what to expect:“Barbenheimer”: The juggernaut made up of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” dominated the box office last summer and has continued to be a force when it comes to prizes. Both films made strong showings last week when the acting, directing and producing guilds released their nominations, and spots for both on the best picture list are all but guaranteed. For the biopic “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan is now the presumed front-runner for a directing nod, and it’s a good bet you’ll see Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. among the acting nominees. For “Barbie,” the picture is a little less clear in the individual categories. Director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie are likely, but not assured, of spots while Ryan Gosling should be guaranteed a supporting-actor slot.Double-Digit Nominations: I expect “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and the historical-crime tale “Killers of the Flower Moon” to each score double-digit nominations. Thanks to the short lists that the academy released last month, we already know that these movies have a good chance of competing in technical categories like score and sound. Still, there’s one race where “Barbie” can’t max out: Though three songs from the film — “I’m Just Ken,” “Dance the Night” and “What Was I Made For?” — all advanced to the short-list phase, only two songs per film are allowed in the final five.“The Holdovers”: Alexander Payne’s dramedy about a history teacher, a cook and a student forced to stay behind at a boarding school over winter break has been coming on strong all awards season long. Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who play the adults on campus, have won key prizes already; look for their names to show up on Tuesday. And besides a likely best picture nod, there could be ones for directing and screenplay as well.Acting categories: The two Golden Globe winners Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) are strong locks for best actress; the question will be who fills out the rest of the category. Besides Giamatti and Murphy for best actor, expect Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) and Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”), leaving just one spot a question mark. In the supporting categories, Robert De Niro (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) will probably join Downey and Gosling, while Jodie Foster (“Nyad”), Emily Blunt (“Oppenheimer”) and Danielle Brooks (“The Color Purple”) will probably line up next to Randolph.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?  More