Aurelia Butler

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    Ready for Their Close-Ups at the Oscar Nominees Dinner

    On Tuesday night, over 100 Oscar nominees gathered at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles for a class photo in the David Geffen Theater.Demi Moore, left, who starred in “The Substance,” and Cynthia Erivo, center, who starred in “Wicked,” are both vying for a best actress Oscar. Zoe Saldaña, right, is nominated in the best supporting actress category for her role in “Emilia Pérez.” In the upper left corner of the group, seated two rows above Timothée Chalamet, Ralph Fiennes clasped his hands and looked deep in thought, as though he were still pondering matters of papal importance in “Conclave.” Grouped together in the front row, the Oscar-nominated actresses Zoe Saldaña, Mikey Madison, Monica Barbaro, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande formed a power quintet. “Everyone say ‘Oscar nominee!’” Erivo crowed as the flashbulbs went off.Ariana Grande is competing for a best supporting actress award for her role in “Wicked.”Still, with so many A-list filmmakers in the frame, there was bound to be someone who asked for another take. Here, it was the “Dune: Part Two” auteur Denis Villeneuve, who noted that the best director nominee James Mangold (“A Complete Unknown”) had the misfortune of arriving in the theater just after the class photo had been snapped.Jeremy Strong is nominated in the best supporting actor category for his role in “The Apprentice.”“Can we take a picture again?” asked Villeneuve.Sebastian Stan is competing for a best actor Oscar for his turn in “The Apprentice.”Academy president Janet Yang granted his wish, though she noted good-naturedly, “No more stragglers.”Isabella Rossellini is a best supporting actress nominee for her performance in “Conclave.”Typically, the nominees would have gathered earlier this month for the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, an event that was canceled this year as the academy reshuffled its schedule because of the Los Angeles wildfires. In its place, the nominees were invited to a cocktail hour and dinner held just days before this Sunday’s Oscar ceremony.Mikey Madison is up for a best actress award for her role in “Anora.” Over cocktails before the class photos were taken, the “Sing Sing” star Colman Domingo chatted with the “Nickel Boys” director RaMell Ross, while Grande hugged the journalist Tracy Gilchrist, who had conducted the widely memed “holding space” interview with her and Erivo. Nearby, the “Substance” director Coralie Fargeat was engaged in a deep conversation with Jane Fonda, who had inspired the character played by Demi Moore in the film.Demi Moore is a best actress nominee for her turn in “The Substance.”With Oscar voting long concluded, the night’s schmoozing felt more fraternal than frantic. There were no winners and losers, nor campaigns to still be waged. Instead, there was free-flowing champagne and conversation, and best of all, none of it had to fit into an acceptance speech or commercial break.Timothée Chalamet is nominated in the best actor category for “A Complete Unknown.”Ralph Fiennes is vying for a best actor award for his performance in “Conclave.”Cynthia Erivo is nominated in the best actress category for her role in “Wicked.”Sean Baker is a best director nominee for his film “Anora.”Monica Barbaro is nominated in the best supporting actress category for “A Complete Unknown.”Diane Warren is nominated for the original song “The Journey” from the film “The Six Triple Eight.” Adrien Brody is up for a best actor award for his performance in “The Brutalist.”The director Denis Villeneuve, whose film “Dune: Part Two” is up for best picture. More

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    2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival

    Girls prevailing against the odds is one theme that has surfaced among the 13 features and 79 short films in this year’s festival in New York.A teenager rescues and defends an infant creature whose species the surrounding adults have condemned as vicious and predatory. Another adolescent battles injury and other hurdles in a quest for basketball stardom. A small child in Mexico contracts polio but finds solace in the world of art. And an 11-year-old Kurdish immigrant arrives in Berlin, ultimately relying on soccer talent to feel at home again.These young people, protagonists in works that will be shown in the 2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival, are all fierce, fearless and — perhaps most striking — female. This year’s festival, which begins a three-weekend run in Manhattan on Friday, includes 13 features and 79 short films, many of them proudly celebrating girls and women.Although the slate doesn’t neglect films about boys, among them tales of time-traveling brothers and a boatbuilding father-son team, the choices exalt girl power more than any of the festival’s selections in recent memory.“A lot of these stories of strong girls and women are true-to-life stories,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. She referred to two films that have their initial festival showings this weekend (every feature has two screening dates): Erica Tanamachi’s live-action documentary “Home Court” follows the Cambodian American basketball player Ashley Chea from her California preparatory school to her freshman year at Princeton, while the animated “Hola, Frida,” by André Kadi and Karine Vézina, draws on the early years of the artist Frida Kahlo.“Obviously, the story of Frida Kahlo is a story that a lot of people feel like they’re familiar with, but telling it from the perspective of her child self is really interesting,” Villaseñor said.Delivering unusual fare that young viewers might otherwise miss — short films, offbeat independent cinema, subtitled foreign movies — is a hallmark of the festival, now in its 29th year and one of the largest and broadest of its kind. (It also operates classroom programs and a national touring film slate.) And unlike many film fairs for children, the New York festival, which offers program tickets starting at $17 (a full-festival pass is $135), includes multiple screenings for teenagers and even college students, who can see some of their peers’ work in a showcase on March 15.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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    Who Makes the Red Carpet? Steve.

    On a recent weekday morning in La Mirada, a suburb outside Los Angeles, Steve Olive, 58, walked among hundreds of carpet rolls in red, green and lavender in a white, sun-drenched, 36,000-square-foot warehouse.Laid out on the floor was a 150-foot stretch of rug, delivered by truck from Georgia a few days before, in the custom shade of Academy Red that is only available for the Oscars.Mr. Olive himself may not be famous, but celebrities have strolled the plush craftsmanship of his carpet for nearly three decades.His company, Event Carpet Pros, has supplied carpets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys and Emmys, as well as for Disney, Marvel and Warner Bros. movie premieres and the Super Bowl.And, at a moment when carpets have moved beyond the classic red and become splashier and more intricate, his handiwork has become more prominent. He has crafted custom designs like a shimmering, sunlit pool carpet for the 2023 “Barbie” world premiere and a green-and-black ectoplasm drip carpet for the “Ghostbusters” world premiere in 2016 that took a month to create.“I haven’t come across anything that we couldn’t do,” Mr. Olive, who founded the company with his brother-in-law, Walter Clyne, in 1992, said in an interview.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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    Drake Postpones 4 Australia and New Zealand Tour Dates

    Dates for Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland were postponed for a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said. The tour coincided with the release of his latest album.Drake, whose new album topped the Billboard 200 chart this week after Kendrick Lamar had made him a punchline at the Super Bowl halftime show, has canceled four tour dates in Australia and New Zealand because of a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said on Wednesday.It was not immediately clear what the conflict was, but Drake’s team said it would work to reschedule the dates along with adding additional shows.“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience,” Drake’s representatives said in a statement. “Drake and the entire team have had an incredible time doing these shows and are excited to return soon. We look forward to sharing the rescheduled dates with you as soon as possible.”The Anita Max Win Tour kicked off this month in Perth, Australia, and was scheduled to have 16 shows across major cities in the country and New Zealand.But Drake canceled a March 4 show in Brisbane, a March 7 show in Sydney and two shows in mid-March in Auckland, New Zealand.The tour coincided with the release of his latest album, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, a longtime Drake associate. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week.It was the first new album since his much-publicized beef with Lamar, whose diss track “Not Like Us” accused Drake of pedophilia. Drake sued Universal Music Group for defamation for releasing and promoting the song. His lawsuit called the allegations in the song false and accused the label of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”But the song has continued to grow. This month Lamar won five Grammy Awards for the song, including song and record of the year, and performed it to a huge global audience at the Super Bowl halftime show.Joe Coscarelli More

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    An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block

    The reel-to-reel tape is from a Gaslight Cafe show in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Dylan was playing to audiences you could count in a glance or two.On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style.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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    Timothée Chalamet’s Very Viral Oscars Season

    The 29-year-old actor has hit the usual stops, but the defining moments of his awards campaign have been distinctly online.Going viral during awards season is not necessarily a good thing. Look no further than the unearthed social media posts of “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón for the most extreme example of how an actor’s online behavior can sink a film’s chances.But in other cases social media can be a tool for a contender. Timothée Chalamet, a best actor nominee for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in the biopic “A Complete Unknown,” knows this. Leading up to the Christmas release of his film and through the ensuing months on the awards trail, Chalamet has waged a highly amusing, sometimes odd, campaign eschewing the old, staid ways of Hollywood promotion. In addition to some somber interviews about how much Dylan means to him, Chalamet has posted videos of himself dancing, worn kitschy outfits and turned social media feeds into his own personal art project.While Chalamet has appeared on traditional media, he has utilized it in surprising ways where virality seems to be the end goal rather than reaching typical viewers of those programs.What we’re witnessing is perhaps the first Gen Z Oscar campaign. Technically, Chalamet, who was born in 1995, is a millennial, but he’s a child of the internet who understands its weird contours and knows that sometimes a post doesn’t have to make sense to be appealing. This won’t necessarily translate to Oscar gold, but it has certainly been fun to watch it unfold. Here are Chalamet’s greatest hits from this very unusual Oscar run.“College GameDay”The first sign that Chalamet was doing something different with his promotional campaign for “A Complete Unknown” came when he appeared on ESPN’s “College GameDay” in early December. It’s typical for celebrities to show up on the broadcast and join the analysts in predicting which teams are going to win the day’s matchups, but Chalamet, who broke out in art-house indie films, seemed like an odd choice for the gig.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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    There’s a New Kind of Woman Onscreen, Thanks to Women Behind the Camera

    Movies contain a multitude of bodies in different sizes, colors and muscle tones, bodies that are trim, bulky, parched, surgically altered. Talking about them, though, especially women’s bodies, can be understandably fraught. For some observers, writing about them is unnecessary and objectifying, even if a lot of other people — politicians, activists, influencers, Supreme Court justices — can’t stop talking about them. “We’re always talking about the feminine condition and the role of women,” the filmmaker Agnès Varda once said. “But I want to talk about the woman’s body, about our bodies.” I want to talk about them, too.That’s because some of the most memorable movies that I’ve seen lately are from female filmmakers who are also clearly thinking about women’s bodies and helping expand what kinds of women we are seeing onscreen. One such movie I keep returning to is Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” a recently released drama set on the frayed edges of Las Vegas. In a scene that keeps playing in my head, a cocktail waitress, Annette — played by a soulful Jamie Lee Curtis — climbs atop a small platform in the casino where she works and begins dancing. As slot machines ping around her, she slowly gyrates to the 1980s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Annette looks like she’s in her own world. She looks glorious.Curtis, who’s 66, has said the scene shows the “degradation of women at the end of their lives,” adding, that “nobody cares.” Scarcely any casino patrons glance at Annette as she dances, true. But I did care, and I suspect I wasn’t alone. I get it, though; older women can feel invisible — I do. Yet here Curtis, who’s bathed in beautifully diffused light during the scene, the camera pointed up in seeming adulation, is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips into a squat, her thighs tense and strong. I adored watching Curtis play Annette, and I think Coppola wants us to love this character as much as she clearly does. That is also glorious.Playing the cocktail waitress Annette, Jamie Lee Curtis is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips in a scene from “The Last Showgirl.”Roadside Attractions“The Last Showgirl” touches on mothering, friendships, the commodification of beauty and the role that women play, willingly or not, in their own objectification. It explores how identity is partly created, sustained and jeopardized by the gaze of others, and what it means when women gaze — at others, at themselves — which puts the film in dialogue with recent movies like “Babygirl,” “Nightbitch” and “The Substance,” which received five Oscar nominations. The protagonist of “Showgirl” is Annette’s friend, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) a dancer whose revue is shuttering. Clouded with worry, Shelly — like Anderson, the character is 57 — is anxious about her future and sense of self. Who is she, after all, if no one looks at her?Anderson likes to be makeup free; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl — “feeling beautiful, that is powerful” — but when she puts on her costume, she’s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she’s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of “The Last Showgirl” as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.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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    Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign

    Lobbying the public to attract the votes of the academy is an odd practice — but you can’t say Chalamet hasn’t excelled at it.Democracy is broken, they say. The wants of the electorate are contradictory and rooted in base emotions rather than rational thought. Viable alternatives are nonexistent, so we treat the ensuing insanity as a spectator sport, posting impotently as the world burns. I could be talking about electoral politics, but in this instance I am actually talking about Oscar campaigns.We as individuals do not cast the ballots that determine the year’s best actor or finest cinematographer or most evocative sound design. That privilege falls to a shadowy elite, who decide these things based on their personal aesthetic judgments — but also, it turns out, based on larger narratives that all of us get to judge, narratives about who has achieved true stardom or whose moment has come. It’s a strange arrangement: The public has no official say, and yet our collective gut-check vibes appear to influence the result just the same. Hence the Oscar campaign, which aims not just to persuade academy voters that a given contender deserves their support, but also to create a good story around it — and, ideally, a culture-wide consensus that the nominee’s victory is nearly inevitable.The 2025 race has been weirder than most. Three campaigns stand out — one weirdly funny, one weirdly disastrous and one weirdly endearing. The funny one involved the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” An endless promotional push surrounded the film’s November release, and a clear bid for Oscar recognition followed, but the highlight of the whole thing was its strangest moment: a journalist solemnly informing the two lead actresses, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that fans of the film were “holding space” for the lyrics of the breakout song “Defying Gravity.” Erivo was visibly moved by this news; Grande then reached out to hold Erivo’s pointer finger. Both women appeared to be on the verge of tears. The moment was so eerie and absurd that it was rehashed online for weeks. Maybe it helped: Each woman did ultimately secure an Oscar nomination.The disaster involved “Emilia Pérez,” the polarizing Spanish-language French musical crime film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. For a moment, this looked like the film to beat: It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actress. But it was quickly subsumed by a series of controversies. There was criticism, from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, that the film was “a step backward for trans representation”; there was negative coverage from the Mexican press about how the country was portrayed. Most devastating, there were unearthed social media posts by the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, disparaging George Floyd and Islam, among other hot-button topics — most likely torpedoing the chances of the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.Then there was the third offensive, the one credited with “making Oscar campaigning fun again.” Timothée Chalamet claimed a best-actor nomination, his second, for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — a film he’s quite good in, especially when he evokes Dylan’s unique blend of mumbly insouciance and magnetic star power. His status as a favorite slipped after he lost out on early awards. But his campaign has been something else: not just fun, but a genuine masterpiece of self-promotion.It has scored so many hits, across so many platforms, that it’s helpful to break them into categories. In October, when Chalamet showed up to a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (and later posed with the winner at the Golden Globes), it made for the kind of charming general-interest story that would be shared widely on Facebook. When he appeared in a video with the internet personality Nardwuar and talked about how “I rip Milk Duds” at the movies: That one serviced a slightly different segment, the “extremely online.” Elsewhere he would give special attention to the niche demographic of “Bob Dylan nerds,” to which I personally belong. On Instagram, he posted a video of himself listening to the 1980s outtake “Blind Willie McTell.” Even more specific was a reference to Dylan’s bizarre, bewigged appearance at the 2003 Sundance premiere of his own Dylan movie, “Masked and Anonymous” — Chalamet copied that wardrobe at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” a gesture that only the most committed Dylanologists would fully appreciate.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