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The Oscars are now an ensemble production.Last year, after the fiasco of Kevin Hart’s dropping out as host after a backlash against his history of homophobic jokes, the Oscars went stag to its own party. The broadcast was brisk and entertaining, the ratings for the hostless event rose and the awards show decided to leave the post vacant.This can work, as it did last year, especially with clever set pieces and some awards-magic serendipity. But one thing a host can do is give the broadcast a shape and a voice when nothing else provides them.And this year’s show seemed to feel the vacuum more, turning out a grab bag of emotional high moments and perplexing uses of time.The hostless show opened with Janelle Monáe donning a Mister Rogers cardigan and belting out a medley with backup dancers and lyrics that rhymed “Parasites” and “Dolemites,” followed by a quick, hit-and-miss joint monologue by former hosts Steve Martin and Chris Rock. (“This is such an incredible demotion!” Martin marveled.)Ditching a host can help the show run on time (this one did not, and not only because of Joaquin Phoenix’s extended argument for veganism). It can leave room for unscripted awards moments. But it loses one of the functions of the awards show host in recent years: to be the elephant-in-the-room pointer, the joker, lowercase, who acknowledges the industry’s failures and embarrassments.In this case, the Oscars’ most noted offscreen controversy — the glaring whiteness and maleness of many of the major categories and movies — didn’t get quite the airing an extended monologue might have delivered.The collective did get in a few shots. Rock jibed that Cynthia Erivo, nominated for playing Harriet Tubman, must have hidden all the black nominees, while Monáe said, “We celebrate all the women who directed phenomenal films” (something the best director nominations pointedly didn’t).This anarchist collective of a ceremony ended up being a sort of anthology of mini-shows, hosted by a string of presenters. Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig won Best Audition for a Future Awards Show, nailing a tight a cappella duet medley themed to the best costume design category. James Corden and Rebel Wilson, in costume from “Cats,” spoofed the uncanny-valley horror of that movie: “Nobody more than us understands the importance of good visual effects.”There was also a string of questionable choices, starting with a bizarre Russian-doll approach in which several of the presenters were introduced by their own presenters. (The show did recognize that some stars, like the musical guest Elton John, needed no introduction.) There was, for some reason, a musical recap of the program halfway through, rapped by Utkarsh Ambudkar.In another puzzling musical decision, Eminem performed “Lose Yourself,” his nearly two-decade-old rap anthem from “Eight Mile.” (He followed a film montage, which followed an introduction by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who followed an introduction by Anthony Ramos. It was quite a journey.)It may have worked in the room, and in the living rooms of viewers who still have the song on their workout playlist. But energizing the show with nostalgia for a 2002 soundtrack feels a little passive-aggressive toward the movies of 2019.The ceremony was most effective when it simply got out of the way of its stars’ shine. Erivo burned down the house with a performance of “Stand Up,” from “Harriet” (for which she was also nominated as an actress). There was a meltingly tender Hollywood family moment when Laura Dern shared her first Oscar, for supporting actress in “Marriage Story,” with “my acting heroes, my legends, Diane Ladd and Bruce Dern.” And last year’s best actress, Olivia Colman, shared a side effect of winning a statuette: “Last year was the best night of my husband’s life.”At its absolute best, this Oscars succeeded with what you can’t script: great artists being recognized, and recognizing others. The room exploded for the surprise best-picture win for “Parasite,” the class-conscious film from director Bong Joon Ho.When Bong collected the best director award earlier in the evening, he saluted Martin Scorsese and the other nominees in the category, saying through a translator: “I would like to get a Texas chain saw, split the Oscar trophy into five and share it with all of you.”Then he switched to English to sign off: “Thank you. I will drink until next morning.” A sentiment that, at the end of a long and formless awards show, plenty of us can also share. More

Ninety-two years of Oscar history were shattered Sunday night when the South Korean hit “Parasite” became the first film not in the English language to win the Academy Award for best picture.The class-struggle thriller faced stiff competition for Hollywood’s top trophy from movies that included Quentin Tarantino’s showbiz epic, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the billion-dollar comic-book film “Joker” and Martin Scorsese’s Netflix crime drama, “The Irishman.” But “Parasite,” directed by Bong Joon Ho, managed to pull off the final win in a moment that had audience members in the Dolby Theater leaping to their feet.The historic victories made front-page news in South Korea, where Baek Young-hoon, 50, a Seoul office worker and avid Bong fan noted, “The South Korean movie industry became 100 years old last year, and this is a momentous event that makes South Koreans proud.”In honoring the film, which also won best director, original screenplay and international feature, voters managed to simultaneously embrace the future — Hollywood’s overreliance on white stories told by white filmmakers may finally be ebbing — and remain reverential to decades-old tradition: Unlike some other best-picture nominees, “Parasite” was given a conventional release in theaters. It has taken in $35.5 million at the North American box office since its release in October. Global ticket sales stand at $165 million.“We never write to represent our countries” a beaming Bong said through a translator, as he accepted the screenwriting Oscar with Han Jin Won.The film’s seismic win came in wake of the #OscarsSoWhite protests in 2015 and 2016 that forced Hollywood to examine its systemic sidelining of minorities. Humiliated by the outrage that followed its failure to nominate any minority actors for Oscars at the time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences vowed to double minority membership by 2020. In 2015, about 8 percent of the academy’s 8,500 voters were people of color. The percentage of minority members now stands at roughly 16 percent.The comedy-thriller seemed to touch a nerve wherever it played, thanks to its tale of have-nots outsmarting the haves. At least that’s how it seems at first, when the struggling Kim family uses a variety of subterfuges to get jobs working in the household of the wealthy Park family.The cast included Bong’s frequent collaborator Song Kang Ho as the impoverished patriarch, but the lack of nominations for any of the film’s stars renewed criticism that the academy frequently overlooks Asian actors. Indeed, the best-picture win for “Parasite” was in keeping with tradition in one respect: recent best pictures set in Asia, like “Slumdog Millionaire,” won without any acting nominations.In pushing for more diverse voting ranks, the academy greatly expanded its foreign contingent, a necessity because Hollywood remains so overwhelmingly white and male. Last year, the academy invited 842 film industry professionals to become members, with invitees hailing from 59 countries. About 29 percent were people of color.The celebration of “Parasite” follows a year in which Oscar voters seemed to retrench toward their conservative past. In a choice that prompted immediate blowback — from, among others, the director Spike Lee, who threw up his hands in frustration and started to walk out of the theater — the academy gave the 2019 best-picture Oscar to “Green Book,” a segregation-era buddy film. While admired by some as a feel-good depiction of people uniting against the odds, the movie was criticized by others as woefully retrograde and borderline bigoted.Without the victory for “Parasite,” it was a rather poor year for inclusion at the Oscars. The academy barely avoided another #OscarsSoWhite debacle by nominating Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”) for best actress. (She lost to Renée Zellweger for “Judy.”) Once again, all of the nominees for best director were men, despite it having been a banner year for female filmmakers.With the awards for “Parasite,” Oscar voters slowed the rise of Netflix, which entered the night with a field-leading 24 nominations but left with only two prizes (for supporting actress Laura Dern in “Marriage Story” and the documentary “American Factory”). That was a rebuke, perhaps, to the streaming giant for spending a sultan’s ransom to campaign for votes and for largely bypassing theaters with its films. Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” relentlessly hyped by Netflix as “one of the best films of the decade,” went zero for 10.Many pundits figured the best-picture Oscar would go to the war drama “1917,” which had amassed the most significant trophies until now, including a Golden Globe for best drama and the top prizes from two major industry guilds, the Producers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America. The last film to score with all three of those groups but still miss out on best picture was “La La Land,” which fell to “Moonlight” three years ago on Oscar night.Still, “Parasite” had shown impressive strength all season, and not just at the box office. The movie won the prestigious Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the Golden Globe for best foreign film last month, the Writers Guild Award for its original screenplay, and a best-ensemble prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards — the first time in its history that the performers’ organization had given its top trophy to a foreign-language film. At that ceremony last month, the “Parasite” actors received a standing ovation when they came out to present a clip from the film, a sign that passion for the twisty thriller ran deep.Bong, whose credits include “Okja” and “Snowpiercer,” proved to be one of the season’s most popular presences: a Golden Globes party touting “Parasite” even drew well-wishers from competing films, like the “Once Upon a Time” star Leonardo DiCaprio and the “Marriage Story” writer-director Noah Baumbach.“We never expected all this,” Bong said then. But now that “Parasite” has made Oscar history, it’s clear that traditional expectations should be thrown out the window. In a post-“Parasite” world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere. More

During the commercial break that came after Cynthia Erivo’s performance at the Academy Awards Sunday night, audiences watching at home got their first taste of one of Erivo’s upcoming projects: Her portrayal of Aretha Franklin in the National Geographic series “Genius.”A teaser trailer for the series’s third season that aired during the Oscars telecast begins in what looks like a recording studio, with Erivo asking “Do you want to take it from the top?” But the video largely focuses on Erivo’s Franklin outside the studio and offstage, offering up flashes of her dancing, posing and, in one instance, shoving, generally doing all it can to hint that there will be high drama ahead. It includes a handful of shots that appear to be scenes of Franklin as a child.[embedded content]What it doesn’t include is any instance of Erivo singing in character. That is the exact opposite of the approach that another upcoming Franklin project, the biopic “Respect,” took when it released its own, exclusively singing-oriented teaser late last year. That movie, which stars Jennifer Hudson in the lead role, is also due out this year.“Genius” is an anthology series, with each season centered on a different historical figure. The previous, second season cast Antonio Banderas as Pablo Picasso; the first gave Geoffrey Rush a mane of gray hair, a busy mustache and a big brain (yes, he was Albert Einstein).The third season of “Genius,” with Erivo as Franklin, is set to debut on Memorial Day, and will air over four consecutive nights.The trailer ends with Erivo’s Franklin saying “I want to make hits, Mr. Wexler,” apparently addressing the record producer Jerry Wexler, who will be played in the series by David Cross. We know that she succeeded; expect the series to showcase how it was done. More

LOS ANGELES — The long-delayed Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will open on Dec. 14, completing a nine-decade quest by the Hollywood establishment to celebrate itself year-round.Tom Hanks announced the opening date during the 92nd Academy Awards on Sunday night. “It’s going to be a very big deal,” he said. “We’ll see you there.”The museum was initially scheduled to open in 2017 and cost $250 million. Setbacks have included sparring architects, a ballooning budget (now at least $388 million), construction difficulties and the forced departure of the institution’s inaugural director, Kerry Brougher, last summer.The academy recently announced that it had reached 95 percent of its fund-raising goal; Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, has overseen the campaign. The museum is also working on another bond offering of roughly $100 million, according to Deadline, an entertainment news site, that would push the project’s cost to around $450 million, unless some new money is used to retire debt.The museum could attract in the vicinity of 1 million visitors annually. It is next to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and features a 1,000-seat theater inside a spherical building designed by Renzo Piano that has been likened to the Death Star. (Piano prefers to think of it as a “soap bubble.”)Anchoring the six-floor Academy Museum will be a 30,000-square-foot exhibition tracing the artistic and scientific history of cinema from a filmmaker’s perspective, starting in the late 1800s in France, and including an array of movie installations. Galleries will focus on early female directors, international silent film, Soviet cinema, the Hollywood studio system and Indian independent film, among other topics. The museum will also feature temporary exhibitions, starting with a retrospective on Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like ‘’Spirited Away’‘ (2001) and ‘’The Wind Rises’‘ (2013).The motion picture academy will have local competition. The Los Angeles County Museum has its own film program and has hosted popular movie-related exhibitions like one on the filmmaker Tim Burton. Well-established local organizations like American Cinematheque already coordinate public screenings of significant art films. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from ‘’Star Wars’‘ and other movies. The Lucas Museum, shaped (without question) like a ‘’Star Wars’‘ vessel, and its surrounding campus will cost an estimated $1 billion.But the motion picture academy — with a collection that includes 190,000 film and video assets and 61,000 posters — has wanted its own museum for decades. More