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There’s been much ado about this year’s Oscar nominees for directing — a list devoid of any women for the second straight year. But in other categories honoring roles behind the camera, according to a new study, women are making some strides toward recognition from the academy.The overall percentage of female nominees in nonacting categories rose five percentage points from last year, according to the Women’s Media Center report, released Thursday ahead of Sunday’s awards ceremony.Still, though, women make up only 30 percent of Oscar nominees for nonacting awards. Men held the majority of nominations in these categories by a wide margin, 70 percent.More female producers were nominated this year for best picture, according to the study, and there was an increase in women nominated for film editing, animated feature, makeup and hairstyling, original score and documentary short. Four of the five nominated documentary shorts have at least one woman at the helm, and in the best score category, the “Joker” composer Hildur Gudnadottir — the first woman nominated for that award in three years, and only the ninth in Oscars history — is favored to win.In the other 13 categories, including best director and both adapted and original screenplay, the number of female nominees remained the same or dropped. And in some of those fields — cinematography, sound mixing and visual effects — there were no women nominated at all.As one of the Oscars’ more prominent categories, the all-male directing field has garnered the most attention, especially after a successful year for women-led films, including Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” Lulu Wang’s “The Farewell,” Lorene Scafaria’s “Hustlers,” Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart” and Melina Matsoukas’s “Queen & Slim.”But in the documentary categories, female filmmakers are prospering. In addition to the women leading the pack for documentary short nominations, four of the five documentary feature nominees have at least one female director: Julia Reichert for “American Factory,” Tamara Kotevska for “Honeyland,” Waad Al-Kateab for “For Sama” and Petra Costa for “The Edge of Democracy.” (The fifth nominated film, “The Cave,” has two female producers — Kirstine Barfod and Sigrid Dyekjaer.)The success women have experienced behind the camera this year aligns with a steady increase in onscreen representation for women as well as for people of color. Women were the lead or co-lead in 43 of 2019’s top 100 grossing films, up from 39 the previous year, according to an annual study from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.But more women working offscreen doesn’t necessarily mean their accolades will match up when awards season comes around. While women directed 15 percent of the year’s top-grossing films — a number that has steadily grown over the decade, a different report from the University of California, Los Angeles, found — they were still overlooked by the Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs.Whether women collect more trophies onstage Sunday or not, there’s good news off the awards stage: Another composer, Eímear Noone, will make some Oscars musical history herself, as the first woman to conduct the ceremony’s orchestra. More

Orson Bean, the free-spirited television, stage and film comedian who stepped out of his storybook life to found a progressive school, move to Australia, give away his possessions and wander around a turbulent America in the 1970s as a late-blooming hippie, died on Friday in Venice, Calif. He was 91.His death was confirmed by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office on Saturday, which said it was investigating his death as an accidental vehicle accident. Mr. Bean was struck and killed by a car on Friday while crossing the street, Capt. Brian Wendling of the Los Angeles Police Department was quoted as telling reporters.Early in his career, in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Bean, a subtle comic who looked like a naïve farm boy, was ubiquitous on TV, popping up on all the networks as an ad-libbing game-show panelist (a mainstay on “To Tell the Truth”), a frequent guest of Jack Paar and Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” a regular in playhouse dramas and, in 1954, the host of his own CBS variety show, “The Blue Angel.”He also starred on Broadway and Off Broadway, made Hollywood films, founded a society of Laurel and Hardy aficionados, amassed a fortune and was blacklisted briefly as a suspected Communist.In 1964, captivated by a progressive-education theory, he created a small school in Manhattan, the 15th Street School, that made classes and most rules optional, letting children run, scream and pretty much do as they pleased. For the remainder of the decade, Mr. Bean devoted himself to the school, paying its bills, covering its deficits and working harder and harder.He often performed in five television panel shows a week, squeezed in nightclub acts and a Broadway show, married a second time and added more children to his growing family. But he felt overwhelmed by the trappings of success and by turmoil in a nation caught up in conflicts over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of leaders and a political drift to the right.“We were having babies and the money was rolling in so fast we had to push it out,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times years later. “We had a four-story townhouse and a live-in maid. We loved it, but I was starting to freak out. I became convinced that the country was going fascist.” Believing America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (The orgone was a pseudoscientific theory about a universal life force.) When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children and for years led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and “househusband,” casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.“We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,” he wrote in a 1977 Op-Ed in The Times. “We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.”In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another. When he had to, Mr. Bean scratched out a living by making commercials and animated film voice-overs.By 1980, he was bored with inactivity. Moving back into the public spotlight, he reappeared in television movies, soap operas, game shows and episodic series. Over the next three decades, he took recurrent roles in “Murder, She Wrote,” “Normal, Ohio” and “Desperate Housewives.” He also appeared in many movies, including “Being John Malkovich” (1999).While he eventually performed in some 50 television series and 30 films, he is often remembered for early panel shows, which, in contrast to the culture of greed, noise and kitsch of modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated.“We were much more intelligent then,” Kitty Carlisle Hart, a frequent panelist with Mr. Bean, told The Times in 1999. “It sounds like an awful thing to say, but it’s true.”Mr. Bean was born Dallas Frederick Burrows on July 22, 1928, in Burlington, Vt., to George and Marian Pollard Burrows. His father, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, was a Harvard campus police officer. His mother, a cousin of President Calvin Coolidge, killed herself when Mr. Bean was a teenager.Mr. Bean graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 1946, was drafted into the postwar Army and served with occupation forces in Japan. He was an accomplished magician, and after being discharged changed his name to Orson Bean and worked Boston nightclubs with tricks and gags that evolved into comedy routines.He was blacklisted for attending two Communist Party meetings, but it blew over and hardly slowed his career. Nightclub work in Baltimore and Philadelphia finally landed him in New York at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard, where the pantheon included Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Woody Allen.Fame followed him onto the Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen and Merv Griffin shows. He was on “The Tonight Show” so often that he became a vacation substitute for Mr. Paar and Mr. Carson. He appeared on “Playhouse 90,” “Studio One” and other television dramas, and starred on Broadway with Jayne Mansfield in the 1955 comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and with Melina Mercouri in the 1967 musical “Ilya Darling.”Mr. Bean married the actress Jacqueline de Sibour in 1956. They had a daughter, Michele, and were divorced in 1962. He and his second wife, Carolyn Maxwell, were married in 1965, had three children, Max, Susannah and Ezekiel, and were divorced in 1981. He married the actress Alley Mills in 1993, and lived for many years in Venice, Calif. His son-in-law was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who died in 2011. Taken with the unorthodox ideas of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in England, Mr. Bean, who never got beyond high school, bought a building in Chelsea in 1964, hired four teachers and opened the 15th Street School with 40 pupils in nursery, kindergarten and lower elementary grades. It taught self-reliance by making lessons and most rules optional, hoping to instill responsibility. In 1964, Mr. Bean also helped found the Sons of the Desert, an international fraternal organization devoted to the films and lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Named for the duo’s 1933 movie, it has a Latin motto: “Duae tabulae rasae in quibus nihil scriptum est.” (“Two blank slates on which nothing has been written.”)Mr. Bean wrote a memoir, “Too Much Is Not Enough” (1988), and a humorous book, “25 Ways to Cook a Mouse for a Gourmet Cat” (1994), which included recipes for Corned Mouse and Cabbage, Burritos con Raton, Mouse Bourguignon and Souris Printemps.Elian Peltier and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting. More

On Wednesday night, at a house party high in the Hollywood Hills, Alfre Woodard was trying to gather some of the world’s most talented black actresses for a group picture.“This is what we’re going to do,” she told a bustling crowd that included Cynthia Erivo, S. Epatha Merkerson, Lorraine Toussaint, and Tiffany Haddish. As Woodard surveyed all the women, her eyes landed on the 21-year-old actress Amandla Stenberg, who had been chatting nearby with fellow ingénues Laura Harrier and KiKi Layne.“Amandla! Hi, darling,” Woodard cooed to her, before joking to the rest of the crowd, “We’re going to have a kids’ table.”For the last 11 years, Woodard has been throwing this pre-Oscars party, which she named the Sistahs’ Soirée. “I’m gathering women who have been nominated in the acting category by the academy,” she explained over champagne, “as well as those who, in a perfect world, should have been.”That imagined world is often at odds with the real one, where two straight years of all-white acting nominees at the Oscars prompted the academy to launch a 2016 initiative meant to diversify its membership. Progress has come in fits and starts: Though a record number of black people took home Oscars at last year’s ceremony, the only actor of color nominated this year was Erivo, for her performance in the slavery drama “Harriet.”At the BAFTA Awards in London earlier this month, where Erivo was snubbed and all 20 acting slots were given to white actors, best-actor winner Joaquin Phoenix even used his acceptance speech to challenge audience members about the ways they benefit from and perpetuate a system of white privilege. “I’m ashamed to say that I’m part of the problem,” Phoenix said, in remarks that went viral on social media.“It needed to be said,” Erivo told me at the Sistahs’ Soirée. “And it needed to be said by someone like him, because people like me are saying it all the time and it doesn’t get heard.”An Oscar nominee herself for the 1983 film “Cross Creek,” Woodard is no stranger to the joys and frustrations of awards season: She co-starred in the 2014 best-picture winner “12 Years a Slave” and earned Oscar buzz this past year for her lead performance in the death-row drama “Clemency.” Woodard was pleased that “Clemency” earned nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards, but when I asked how she felt about her performance being excluded from this year’s Oscar lineup, she demurred.“You know, it’s something entirely separate from what we do,” she said. “I liken it to the baby contests back in the Southwest when I was growing up. It was kind of a hilarious thing: ‘Look at this baby with the nice plump legs!’”Though the Sistahs’ Soirée orbits the Oscars, Woodard said that her goal was to foster camaraderie, not competition. “It’s important to me that when we hear our sisters’ names, we think good thoughts and feel protective of them,” she said, “so that we don’t get into that bogus sense of competition that the business wants to put you in by saying, ‘Too bad there’s only three roles for black women this year,’ and then they send everybody from KiKi Layne to Cicely Tyson up for the same role.”Sipping a glass of champagne, Woodard noted that Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for “12 Years a Slave” six years ago, was not handed a starring role until the horror film “Us” last year. “She is still the great mahogany hope, but you’ve seen Lupita more on magazine covers than you have onscreen,” Woodard said. “Every time out, Lupita is fabulous, but look at what she’s done since she won that Oscar and then look at the opportunities of a Scarlett or a Charlize.”To change the system, Woodard said, a black actress will need not just fierce advocates but also the sort of support that the Sistahs’ Soirée is uniquely positioned to provide. “If there’s 100 roles in a year for women on film, we should be up for 99 of those roles,” Woodard said. “We’ll let the Cates have the queens of England.”The next day, at a luncheon thrown by Essence to celebrate black women in Hollywood, Woodard was still beaming. She watched from her front-row table as one of the honorees, the “Queen & Slim” director Melina Matsoukas, told the crowd, “It feels incredible to be seen, respected, and have your work valued. It means more when that acknowledgment comes from your own community.”And when “Pose” actress Mj Rodriguez began to cry onstage, Woodard darted out of her seat to sneak a tissue into the younger woman’s hand.When Woodard took the stage herself to introduce the “Captain Marvel” actress Lashana Lynch, she paused for a moment to once again survey the crowd of black women. For them, the 67-year-old actress had one simple commandment.“Stay busy, my daughters,” she said into the microphone. “Stay busy, and especially stay joyful doing it.” More

Kevin Conway, who brought intensity to roles large and small on the screen and the stage, including memorable turns in the 1970s in the plays “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?” and “The Elephant Man,” died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 77.Geraldine Newman, his longtime partner, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Conway got a late start on his acting career, but by 1969 he was making his Broadway debut in Arthur Kopit’s “Indians.” His first significant film role was in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” George Roy Hill’s adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, in 1972.Early on, he often played explosive characters and tough guys. In 1978 he worked opposite Sylvester Stallone in both “F.I.S.T.,” a tale of organized labor and organized crime, and “Paradise Alley,” in which he played a hoodlum in the mean streets of 1940s New York. Mr. Stallone, he said, had suggested that he get a tattoo of an eagle on his forehead to make the character more memorable.“I told him I wasn’t crazy about the idea,” Mr. Conway told People magazine. “A thing like that could cut down your employment opportunities.”Mr. Conway was also seen on TV in numerous series and mini-series. In 2007 alone he appeared in the short-lived NBC series “The Black Donnellys,” about Irish brothers caught up in organized crime in New York, and the mini-series “The Bronx Is Burning,” about the 1970s Yankees, in which he portrayed the team executive Gabe Paul.He made good use of his compelling, slightly raspy voice as well, providing narration for television shows and commercials. He warned New Yorker subway riders to say something if they saw something. He was the voice of Mark Twain in a 2001 Ken Burns documentary. At about the same time, he was the creepy Control Voice for a remake of the science-fiction anthology series “The Outer Limits.”“There is nothing wrong with your television,” he advised viewers as eerie static materialized. “Do not attempt to adjust the picture.”Kevin John Conway was born on May 29, 1942, in Harlem to James and Margaret (Sanders) Conway. His father was a mechanic, and his mother worked for the telephone company.After graduating from Bishop Loughlin High School in Brooklyn in 1959, he spent time in the Navy and then took a job at IBM, starting in the mailroom and working his way up to sales. On a whim he enrolled in nighttime acting classes. Eventually, he said, he asked IBM to fire him so that he could collect unemployment while pursuing an acting career.He began getting stage roles and delivering charged, attention-getting performances.In the early 1970s he was in a long-running Off Broadway revival of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel about an asylum, playing the wildly disruptive McMurphy, the role played by Kirk Douglas in 1963 on Broadway and by Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film.In 1973 he had another Off Broadway success in Mark Medoff’s “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?,” playing an amped-up man with a gun who disrupts a diner.“Mr. Conway lights up the stage with his half-amused, half-vicious personification,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Rarely can alienation have been exposed so mercilessly and, this is revealing, so understandingly.”An entirely different sort of role came his way in 1979, when he played Frederick Treves, the doctor who befriends the title character in “The Elephant Man,” Bernard Pomerance’s play about a Victorian-era Englishman with deformities. Treves was nothing like the brash extroverts Mr. Conway usually played, and nothing like Mr. Conway himself.“Treves is much more uptight than a modern character,” Mr. Conway told The Times. “He’s a guy who tends to sit on his emotions, whereas my instinct is to let them go.”He reprised the role in a 1982 television version of the play.Relatively early in his career, though, Mr. Conway realized that he wasn’t destined to be a marquee star. “I don’t envision posters of me hung on the walls of bedrooms of young girls,” he told The Boston Globe in 1978.“Yet,” he added, “someone like Laurence Olivier gets better as he gets older.”As Mr. Conway got older, the fiery young characters gave way to more mature ones, requiring a restrained bluster or even pathos.In a 1995 attempt to adapt the 1954 film “On the Waterfront” into a stage play, he was the racketeering boss Johnny Friendly, the role played by Lee J. Cobb in the movie. The Broadway production closed quickly, but Mr. Conway drew praise. “Easily the most riveting contribution is Mr. Conway’s as the murderous union boss,” Vincent Canby wrote in an otherwise unenthusiastic review in The Times.In the film “13 Days” (2000), about the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Conway was the hawkish Gen. Curtis LeMay, who locks horns with the Kennedy brothers. In “Invincible,” a 2006 movie about Vince Papale, who made the roster of the Philadelphia Eagles as a 30-year-old rookie, he played Papale’s father, a man who is not used to showing emotion but who chokes up with pride at his son’s accomplishment. (Mark Wahlberg played Vince.)Mr. Conway also directed plays, including several productions of Jerry Sterner’s “Other People’s Money,” in which he starred when it played Off Broadway in 1989.Mr. Conway’s marriage to Mila Burnette ended in divorce. Ms. Newman said that in addition to her, Mr. Conway, an animal advocate, would have listed his survivors as his three beloved pets: a cat, Chico, and two dogs, Cotton and Dorothy.Decades earlier, when appearing in “The Elephant Man,” he would sometimes think of another pet dog, Jingles, when conjuring up the tenderness his character was feeling toward Merrick, the Elephant Man.“It’s not that the relationship is that of dog and master,” he explained to The Times, “but that a pet will sometimes do something that really pleases you. Well, Merrick occasionally does things that surprise and delight Treves.” More

The 92nd Academy Awards take place Sunday. If you’ve been too busy to pay attention to the race (and who hasn’t?), here’s a primer to get you up to speed for Hollywood’s big night.When are the Oscars? Sunday, starting at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific.Where can I watch? ABC is broadcasting the ceremony in the United States. It will be livestreamed on abc.com or via the ABC app, providing you signed up with a participating TV provider (like a cable company). Depending on where you live and your equipment, there’s also Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV, AT&T TV Now or YouTube TV, which all require subscriptions.Will there be a host? Nope. The lack of an M.C. seemed to work out well enough last year: ratings were up 12 percent over the previous ceremony (though the numbers still weren’t great).Who’s nominated? You can check out our complete ballot, but there are a couple of headlines to know: “Joker” topped all other films with 11 nominations, while “1917,” “The Irishman” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” each drew 10. Women were completely omitted from the best director race. And the acting slate was almost completely white, with the exception of the best-actress nominee Cynthia Erivo (“Harriet”).Who will win? We’d love to know, too. Our awards-season expert, Kyle Buchanan, has made his Oscar predictions, and the short answer is that the World War I drama “1917” is well-positioned. Then again the South Korean thriller “Parasite” could pose strong competition. Buchanan also expects the quartet of Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”), Renée Zellweger (“Judy”), Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”) and Laura Dern (“Marriage Story”) to take home acting trophies, as they have all season long.Who will be presenting? The academy has announced a long list of household names, including Will Ferrell, Gal Gadot, Salma Hayek, Mindy Kaling, Spike Lee, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Keanu Reeves, Maya Rudolph and Timothée Chalamet.What else should I expect? There will probably be remembrances of Kirk Douglas, who died on Wednesday, and Kobe Bryant, the basketball star who won an Oscar for a short film made after he retired. And there will reportedly be a “special performance” by Janelle Monáe with Elton John and Randy Newman. What about the red carpet? You have some options. E! will begin its red carpet coverage with a countdown show at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, seguing to live coverage at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. And there’s an official academy preshow from the red carpet that starts at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, 3:30 p.m. Pacific. It will be broadcast on ABC.Now you’re all caught up! More