Eliana Willis

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    Obie Awards, Sans Ceremony, Honor ‘Dark Disabled Stories’

    There was no formal celebration for the newest honorees. Instead, the American Theater Wing presented cash grants to sustain their work.The Obie Awards, a scrappy but venerable annual competition honoring the best theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway, has chosen “Dark Disabled Stories,” Ryan J. Haddad’s autobiographical work inspired by his experiences navigating the city with cerebral palsy, as the best new American play.The prize was announced on Saturday night, both by news release and on Spectrum News NY1, as the American Theater Wing, which presents the Obies, decided to forgo a costly ceremony — in most nonpandemic years, the Obies have been handed out at a boozy and often boisterous party — and instead to give grants of $1,000 to $5,000 directly to the winning artists and arts institutions.“These are unprecedented times, and it’s extremely challenging for theater right now, so we absolutely want to celebrate the achievements of Off and Off Off Broadway, but in doing so we want to have the most impact by putting money directly in the pockets of the artists and the companies making the work,” said Heather A. Hitchens, the Wing’s president and chief executive. “Everybody likes a party, and maybe some day it will make sense to do that again, but we’re not made of money — we’re a nonprofit, so how can we use our resources to be the greatest force for good right now?”The Obies, created by The Village Voice in the mid 1950s, have been in flux for years as The Voice foundered and the pandemic battered the theater industry. The Wing, with a board led by artists, has kept the Obies afloat with a combination of in-person and streaming ceremonies.The Obies proudly have no defined categories or set number of winners — a panel of judges, this year led by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, determines how to structure the honors each season. The awards announced this weekend were for shows that opened Off or Off Off Broadway between Sept. 1, 2022, and Aug. 31, 2023.The judges gave two awards for playwriting. One went to Hansol Jung for “Wolf Play,” about a twice-abandoned adopted boy who reacts to his trauma by behaving like a wolf and is depicted by a puppet; the play was staged first at Soho Rep and then at MCC Theater, in collaboration with Ma-Yi Theater Company. The other playwriting award went to Bruce Norris for “Downstate,” about a group home for men who are registered sex offenders; that play was staged at Playwrights Horizons in a production developed by Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and the National Theater in London.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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    5 Podcasts for Hollywood’s Awards Season

    As Oscars night approaches, these shows offer expert analysis and predictions, insight into behind-the-scenes machinations and reflections on front-runners of the past.The 2024 awards season has felt unusually hectic so far, thanks to the strike-delayed Emmy Awards shifting from their usual fall airdate to January. To help make sense of it all — and unpack the discombobulated state of Hollywood now — these five podcasts offer a mixture of expert analysis and predictions for the major ceremonies, original reporting on the industry trends and behind-the-scenes machinations that influence voting, and reflections on Oscar front-runners of the past that probably shouldn’t have been.‘Little Gold Men’This Vanity Fair series debuted in 2015, which means it’s been on hand to chronicle some of the weirdest moments in Academy history, like the 2017 Best Picture flub (when “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner instead of “Moonlight”), 2021’s muted Covid-era ceremony held in a cavernous Los Angeles train station, and the slap heard around the world in 2022. But even when there’s nothing quite so unusual going on, the analysis here always makes awards season more interesting. Hosted by the Vanity Fair journalists Michael Hogan, Katey Rich, Richard Lawson and Joanna Robinson, the conversation is always exhaustive and packed with expertise, exploring not just the contenders for Hollywood’s top prizes, but also the campaigning and strategizing that shape the race. Since many Oscar journeys begin at film festivals such as Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto, there’s no shortage of news and releases to cover year round, not to mention interviews; recent guests have included Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Greta Lee (“Past Lives”).Starter episode: “Oscar Voters, Start Your Engines”‘This Had Oscar Buzz’There’s a peculiar category of film that debuts with great fanfare, attracts plenty of awards buzz, and then fades from the cultural consciousness without a trace (and no awards). Not all of the films discussed on “This Had Oscar Buzz” fall into that bracket, but, as the title suggests, the focus is on the movies that had that buzzy aura around them, at least for a while. An early episode about “Cake,” a 2014 movie starring Jennifer Aniston as a woman living with chronic pain, exemplifies what works so well about this format — Aniston was lauded for her playing-against-type performance and campaigned intensely during that awards season, but was famously snubbed on Oscar nomination morning. The hosts, Joe Reid and Chris Feil, don’t belittle either the performance or the hustle, but rather use the hype around “Cake” as a jumping-off point to discuss Aniston’s career and celebrity more broadly, alongside the ins and outs of how exactly buzz gets built in the first place.Starter episode: “Alexander (With David Sims)”‘The Town With Matthew Belloni’Though not a traditional awards season podcast with predictions or play-by-play recaps, “The Town” is an invaluable resource for anyone hoping to understand the upheaval in Hollywood. Delivered in snappy episodes that clock in around 30 minutes, Matthew Belloni, a former editor of The Hollywood Reporter and a founding partner of the digital media company Puck, shares insights and exclusive reporting on the industry, whether the issue is last year’s monthslong writers’ and actors’ strikes, Disney’s succession woes or the cost-of-streaming crisis. In a recent episode, Belloni and Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood correspondent for The New York Times, went deep on the current state of the “unkillable” Golden Globes, which returned last year after a hiatus sparked by controversy surrounding its now-defunct unorthodox voting body, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Traditionally the first awards show on the calendar — and the most chaotic — the Globes have proved to have more staying power than many predicted, and this analysis is a good resource for anybody wondering why.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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    ‘S.N.L.’ Wonders What Men Will Do After Football Season Ends

    Dakota Johnson hosted and Justin Timberlake was the musical guest in an episode that brought back some old favorites and also offered a few surprises.The Super Bowl may still be two weeks away, but as far as “Saturday Night Live” is concerned, this is your last weekend to experience authentic N.F.L. football.This latest “S.N.L.” broadcast, hosted by Dakota Johnson and featuring the musical guest Justin Timberlake, kicked off with a parody of CBS’s coverage of the A.F.C. championship game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens, with Andrew Dismukes and James Austin Johnson playing the anchors Tony Romo and Jim Nantz.Dismukes began with some enthusiasm for the game: “We’ve got two generational talents at quarterback,” he said. “Two elite defenses. I expect this to be an all-out battle for the next three hours.” Then a hint of emotion crept in as he added, “And after that, it’s all over.”“All over?” Johnson asked.“Football,” Dismukes said. “After today it’s just — it’s done.”Yes, there’s the Super Bowl, but, as Dismukes said: “That’s not real football. The Super Bowl is for commercials and Usher and people who never watch football asking how many points a touchdown is worth. Today is the last real football day for just us guys.”The rest of the CBS broadcast team tried to make their peace with this eventuality. “What are men supposed to do on Sundays now?” asked Mikey Day, who was playing the analyst Bill Cowher. “Just go to their friends’ houses for no reason?”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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    Ukraine Criticizes HBO, Saying New ‘White Lotus’ Actor Supports War

    On social media, Ukraine’s foreign ministry posted clips of the Serbian actor Milos Bikovic receiving a medal for cultural achievement from Vladimir Putin in 2018.Ukraine’s foreign ministry criticized HBO this week after Milos Bikovic was cast in the third season of “The White Lotus,” saying without evidence that the Serbian actor had supported Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.HBO announced on Jan. 12 that Bikovic, 36, would be joining the dark comedy about wealthy tourists at island resorts. On Wednesday, the foreign ministry of Ukraine made the accusations against Bikovic on social media, writing, “HBO, is it all right for you to work with a person who supports genocide & violates international law?”Bikovic was awarded the Pushkin Medal, which honors contributions to Russian arts and culture, by President Vladimir V. Putin in 2018 and received Russian citizenship by presidential decree in 2021.In February 2022, the day after the invasion began, Bikovic said on Instagram that he wished the war had not happened. “War and bloodshed on any side reminds us of how far humanity is from global unity and love,” he wrote in Russian and Serbian. “God save the lives of all those who are now in danger!”Ukraine’s foreign ministry and Bikovic did not respond to requests for comment. An HBO spokesman said questions should be directed to Bikovic’s representatives.President Biden has called Russia’s invasion genocide, and The New York Times has collected evidence of brutalities by Russia, including the willful killing of noncombatants.A 79-second video that Ukraine’s foreign ministry posted on social media interspersed scenes from “The White Lotus” with clips of Bikovic accepting the award from Putin and previous comments it said the actor had made about Russia. In a voice-over, it claimed that Bikovic was “the Kremlin’s foreign mouthpiece.”During Bikovic’s acceptance speech for the Pushkin Medal, he emphasized unity between Russia and Serbia. “What a joy for Russians and Serbs in our homeland because we have the same worldview,” he said in Russian.Ukraine barred Bikovic from entering the country in 2019 for what it called national security reasons. At the time, he told a Serbian publication that “from the human and poetic point of view the situation is absurd and interesting.”Before he was cast in “The White Lotus,” Bikovic acted in movies including “South Wind,” which follows a gang member in Belgrade; “Sunstroke,” about military officers remembering the collapse of the Russian Empire; “Ice,” in which he plays a figure skater; and “The Balkan Line,” about a military operation during the Kosovo war.Season 3 of “The White Lotus” is set to begin production in Thailand next month and is scheduled to air in 2025. It will feature Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey and the returning cast member Natasha Rothwell. More

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    A ‘Corpsicle’ Came Back to Life on ‘True Detective.’ Is That Possible?

    An incident involving a group of frozen bodies on the fourth season of the HBO series has raised some scientific questions.The men lay frozen naked in a ghoulish pile, with mouths agape and eyes glazed over, their hair encrusted with ice and snow. They were all dead — or so the investigators on the HBO series “True Detective: Night Country” thought.Frozen bodies are a familiar problem in this fictional Alaska town near the Arctic Circle, but this giant “corpsicle” is unusual. And so is what happens at the end of the episode, which aired last Sunday: one of the men wakes up when his arm is accidentally snapped off by an officer.The resurrection has sparked grisly speculation among some fans: How can a person be living, a viewer on Reddit asked, if that person’s limbs are so frozen? “They could have been flash frozen in a moment of terror” at the moment of their deaths, another speculated. Many were skeptical that the human body could survive such an ordeal and wondered if the show was straying into the supernatural.Doctors say that it is impossible for a completely frozen person to make a recovery. But it is possible for someone who appears frozen — limbs stiff, skin cold and hard, and without a pulse or breath — to be resuscitated, depending on how long the person has been out in the cold.“If all the tissue in your body is ice, or has ice in it, then you’re not coming back,” said Ken Zafren, a physician and a professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University, who also works in Alaska. But, he added, “I’ve seen plenty of cases in which the person really looked dead, and could come back.”During hypothermia, an adult’s body temperature can cool well below the normal average of 98.6 degrees, Dr. Zafren said. A person’s pulse and breathing slow significantly, reducing the body’s need for oxygen. Eventually, the person may go into cardiac arrest, stopping the pulse and breathing altogether. But because the brain is cold, the lack of oxygen takes longer to cause damage, he said.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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    Gordon Ramsay Isn’t Going Anywhere

    With a new season of his series “Next Level Chef,” reality TV’s most enduring antihero still reigns supreme. How long can he keep it up?Gordon Ramsay insists he never wanted to be the bad boy. His image as the brash, bellicose chef and restaurateur, as the master of the culinary meltdown, was, he said, largely a matter of getting off on the wrong foot.Ramsay was introduced to British viewers on “Boiling Point” (1999), a five-part series on Channel 4 chronicling his turbulent efforts to open his first restaurant. At around the same time, BBC Two launched “The Naked Chef,” a breezy, upbeat cooking show starring the young chef Jamie Oliver. The two shows, and the two chefs, could hardly have seemed more different.On the one hand, you had Ramsay, a surly perfectionist, firing a waiter for drinking water in view of customers. “And then literally at the same time, on another channel, there was Jamie,” he recalled in an interview last week, “this floppy-haired Essex boy, sliding down the banister doing one-pot wonders.”“The nation fell in love with him,” Ramsay said. Whereas with himself, he added, “the nation wondered what the hell was going on.”Ramsay’s explanation may not entirely account for his enduring infamy as an explosive TV tyrant — it wasn’t Oliver, after all, who named Ramsay’s signature series “Hell’s Kitchen,” and he hardly forced Ramsay to bludgeon countless chefs and restaurant owners with colorful jeremiads for the past 25 years on air. But that Ramsay still brings up old rivalries when discussing his reputation is revealing, a glimpse of the competitive intensity that has been crucial to his continuing success.That competitiveness is one reason that the host of roughly two dozen shows over the years, including “Next Level Chef,” returning on Sunday for its third season on Fox, still devotes so much of his down time to watching other food shows. It’s why, during the pandemic lockdown, he threw himself headlong into social media. And it’s also why, at 57, Ramsay has no intention of calling it quits.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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    How Frankie Grande Spends His Sundays

    The actor, singer and reality TV personality fills his day with video games, comfort food with friends and a teary trip to the movies.Frankie Grande likes to stay busy — even on Sundays.“From the moment I wake up, it’s go, go, go,” said Mr. Grande, a 41-year-old actor, singer and reality TV personality. This month, he returned to playing Victor Garber in “Titanique,” an Off Broadway parody musical of the movie “Titanic.” He first played the character in a fully staged production in 2022, and is now back for a limited run through Feb. 18.Mr. Grande, who is the half brother of the pop superstar Ariana Grande, was born in New York, grew up in Englewood, N.J., and Boca Raton, Fla., and graduated from Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Now he splits his time between a two-bedroom penthouse apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and a home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He lives with his husband of almost two years, the actor and model Hale Grande, 31, and their red toy poodle puppy, Appa.While Mr. Grande was a relative unknown when he moved back to New York City in 2005 — he said he often wandered through Times Square wearing a pair of earbuds, soaking in the scene — he’s now a YouTube, Instagram and TikTok personality with more than 3.5 million followers across all three accounts.“I definitely can’t wander now without being recognized every four feet,” he said. “But I love talking with fans.”Mr. Grande can spend hours playing video games, like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, with his husband, Hale Grande.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesHERE COMES THE SUN I don’t usually get up before 10 a.m. — my husband is in Los Angeles for work, and we’d been up all night playing the new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game — but I surprise myself and wake up at 8:45 a.m. I have a Philips alarm clock that mimics a natural 30-minute sunrise, and at the end it has birds chirping. It wakes me up like I’m on a farm with animal noises. It’s a really peaceful way to start the day.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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    ‘Ally McBeal’ Star Calista Flockhart Returns to TV

    On a chilly January weekend in Los Angeles, I turned into a truffle pig. I foraged relentlessly all over town, looking for truffle fries.By Monday, when it was time to go to my interview, the only thing in my suitcase I could squeeze into was a Spanx dress.“My sister gave me this for Christmas,” I explained sheepishly to the famously lissome Calista Flockhart as I slid into a booth on the terrace of the Georgian Hotel. “I guess you’ve never owned any Spanx.”“I love Spanx!” she said. “In fact, I just ordered — no kidding — a pair of Spanx jeans. They make really cute jeans. They’re very wide.”Seeing my skeptical look, she reminded me: “It’s not only about sucking it all in. It’s about smoothing it all the way. No panty lines.”And then, as we sat in this romantic spot, looking out at the ocean, she said the thing that made me fall in love: “Would you like to nibble on something? How about some French fries?”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