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      Bert I. Gordon, Auteur of Mutant Monster Movies, Dies at 100

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      Despite low budgets and years of mostly negative reviews, he gained a cult following for his giant villains, homemade effects and preposterous plotlines.Bert I. Gordon, the professed king of the monster movies whose B pictures featured giant rats, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, giant chickens, a colossal man and 30-foot teenagers laying waste to everything in sight, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 100.His daughter Patricia Gordon confirmed the death.As anxieties over nuclear testing and the effects of radiation swept postwar America, Mr. Gordon embarked on a low-budget filmmaking odyssey that turned mutated monsters loose on the hapless world. Despite the fact that his movies featured stars like Ida Lupino and Orson Welles, and despite the eye-catching apocalyptic titles and lurid posters, he generated many flops, a few minor hits and largely negative reviews. He also generated a cult following.In the 1950s and early ’60s, his monster movies were perfect for drive-in theaters, where audiences took in wildly improbable plots, silly dialogue and crude special effects: locusts overrunning a miniature city, a gigantic rat hovering over a girl in a negligee, Ms. Lupino being eaten by vast mealworms.Filming a movie in 10 to 15 days, using rear-projection enlargements of creatures with ordinary people in the foreground, Mr. Gordon produced, directed and often wrote about 25 films over six decades starting in 1955, most of them monster movies. Among his best known were “The Cyclops” (1957), “Village of the Giants” (1965), “Necromancy” (1972), “The Food of the Gods” (1976) and “Empire of the Ants” (1977).A scene from “The Cyclops” (1957), one of Mr. Gordon’s best-known films.RKO StudiosNone came close to the quality or popularity of the classic atomic-monster films of the era: “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” (1953), directed by Eugène Lourié, about a dinosaur freed from Arctic hibernation by a nuclear test and slain amid crowds at Coney Island, and “Them” (1954), directed by Gordon Douglas, about huge radioactive ants that menace Los Angeles and are trapped and firebombed in the city’s water tunnels.Mr. Gordon’s first film, “King Dinosaur” (1955), with four actors, a seven-day shooting schedule and a $15,000 budget, was a template for his later work: When a new planet enters the solar system, four astronauts land and explore it as a possible home for humans. They battle giant insects and a prehistoric dinosaur, and they finally detonate an atomic bomb to destroy the creature.“Bert has never given much thought to social message,” Beverly Gray wrote on the Beverly in Movieland blog in 2014. “He just wants to tell stories on film.”Six months after the release of the popular “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” directed by Jack Arnold, American International Pictures distributed Mr. Gordon’s “The Amazing Colossal Man” (1957). Caught in a nuclear accident, the title character grows to 60 feet and is shot by the police in Las Vegas. Variety said the film’s technical aspects were “well handled,” and other reviews were generally positive.In “Beginning of the End” (1957), a scientist (Peter Graves) uses radiation to make giant fruits and vegetables to end world hunger, but a plague of giant grasshoppers that has eaten the food invades Chicago and starts feasting on people. Lured into Lake Michigan with an electronic mating call, the grasshoppers drown. Mr. Gordon did the special effects in his garage, filming 200 grasshoppers jumping and crawling on photos of the city. Reviewers called the special effects absurdly obvious and the screenplay ludicrous.“The Village of the Giants” was praised by a Los Angeles Times reviewer for its “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”Embassy PicturesElements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”Bert Ira Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wis., on Sept. 24, 1922, the son of Charles Abraham Gordon and Sadeline (Barnett) Gordon. He became interested in film as a boy, when an aunt gave him a 16-millimeter movie camera for his birthday. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison but dropped out to join the Army Air Forces during World War II.In 1945, Mr. Gordon married Flora Lang, who worked with him on many films. They had three daughters, Patricia, Susan and Carol, and divorced in 1979. In 1980, Mr. Gordon married Eva Marie Marklstorfer. They had a daughter, Christina. Susan Gordon, who appeared in her father’s 1960 film “The Boy and the Pirates,” died in 2011.In addition to his daughter Patricia, he is survived by his wife; their daughter, Christina Gordon; another daughter, Carol Gordon; six grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren. He died in a hospital after collapsing at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.Mr. Gordon was a production assistant on the CBS television series “Racket Squad” in the early 1950s, and in 1954 he was the producer, cinematographer and supervising editor for the adventure series “Serpent Island.”After 25 years of mostly making monster pictures, Mr. Gordon produced “Burned at the Stake” (1982), about the Salem witch trials; two sex comedies, “Let’s Do It!” (1982) and “The Big Bet” (1985); “Satan’s Princess” (1989), about a missing woman; and “Secrets of a Psychopath” (2015), about a murderous brother and sister.Called “Mr. B.I.G.,” both for his initials and for his techniques of creating movie monsters, Mr. Gordon wrote “The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G.: An Autobiographical Journey,” which was published in 2010.Alex Traub More

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      ‘Therapy Dogs’ Review: It’s Time to Be Real

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      This low-budget film by a pair of high schoolers offers a bracing, impressionistic portrait of senior year as it’s happening.What does it mean to grow up now, in a period when society is shifting at a breakneck pace? Ethan Eng’s “Therapy Dogs,” a bracing, exhilarating film that tracks one high school class’s senior year, has a simple answer: Youth is, as it always has been, about being young. Young and reckless, existential and inarticulate, hopeful and hopeless.The film, written by Eng and his co-star Justin Morrice, is mostly shot as real documentary footage, often with GoPro and cellphone cameras. The boys tell their fellow students they’re part of the class of 2019’s yearbook committee — but, they explain at the start of the film, it’s all a ruse to chronicle and reveal “the truth about high school.” It’s the kind of naïvely dramatic proclamation one expects from 17-year-olds.And yet, Eng does about as much, nimbly blending scripted scenes with vérité footage and using budget limitations to his advantage to craft a raw, impressionistic portrait of high school as it’s happening. Or, at least, as it’s experienced by teenage boys in a Canadian suburb, in all their wayward hooliganism. (Two back-to-back scenes — a fight in a parking lot, followed by a poorly communicated heart-to-heart — provide a captivating, intimate study of masculinity.)But Eng mostly doesn’t force emotional catharsis; the opening and closing scenes (a sudden, unresolved climax is the only real blemish here) are all that indicate a coming-of-age tale. The rest, structured roughly around charmingly low-grade title cards and filled with daring changes in form, sharp editing and an often affecting score, is like one long montage of the blur of senior year: the drugged-out adventures, the inadvisable stunts, the stupid and sensational moments born out of boredom.It’s remarkable that the protagonists of the film — so clearly just lost kids being kids — are the same ones who are confidently, imaginatively creating it. Watching its sequences, you can feel both the immediacy of each moment and the nostalgia that’s already seeping in — each snippet of life becoming, by the minute, just a flicker in the teenagers’ minds, like the flashes in the film’s montages, immortalizing their youth before it’s lost to time’s grasp.Therapy DogsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Inside the ‘Blood Sport’ of Oscars Campaigns

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Depending on how closely you’ve been following the Oscars race this year, you may or may not know the name Andrea Riseborough. Before Jan. 24, few outside of the film industry did. An actress from northeastern England, Riseborough began her career in​ theater and has worked steadily since. At 41, she has appeared in more than 30 films, including “Birdman,” “Battle of the Sexes” and “The Death of Stalin.” People like to say that the only reason she isn’t famous is that she inhabits roles so completely, she becomes unrecognizable. But on Tuesday, Jan. 24, Riseborough was nominated for a best-actress Oscar alongside Cate Blanchett, Michelle Williams, Ana de Armas and Michelle Yeoh. No one predicted Riseborough’s nomination. She did not appear on pundits’ shortlists. There were no profiles of her in glossy magazines. “To Leslie,” the film about an alcoholic West Texas lottery winner for which she was nominated, had earned just $27,322 at the box office.Within 24 hours, the reaction to Riseborough’s nomination went from surprise to scrutiny to backlash. It turned out that a small army of movie stars had championed Riseborough. Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Paulson and Gwyneth Paltrow hosted screenings. Others praised Riseborough’s performance on social media and beyond, including Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Patricia Clarkson, Pedro Pascal, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bradley Whitford, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Kate Winslet, Alan Cumming, Rosanna Arquette and even Blanchett. The campaign was described as organic and grass roots, but some celebrities had posted suspiciously identical language, describing “To Leslie” as “a small film with a giant heart.” That Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) were not nominated despite predictions to the contrary made it look as if a bunch of actors campaigned on behalf of a white actress, leading to the exclusion of Black actresses.Andrea Riseborough in “To Leslie.”Momentum PicturesThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscars’ governing body, opened an investigation. Oscar campaign regulations forbid direct lobbying, and it turned out that some of Riseborough’s supporters, including Mary McCormack, who is married to Michael Morris, the director of “To Leslie,” had encouraged academy members to watch the film and publicly endorse Riseborough’s performance. Cynthia Swartz, an awards strategist working on films including “Tár,” “Elvis,” “Women Talking,” “Till” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” told me the campaign inspired her to look up the definition of lobbying, which is not comprehensively defined in the academy’s campaign regulations. “I don’t believe academy members should be posting about how they’re going to vote,” Swartz said, “or urging others to vote in a certain way.” Tony Angellotti, a consultant on “The Fabelmans,” put it less mildly. “There are very specific rules about direct outreach,” he said. “Clearly, here, those rules were broken.” Neither the director nor his wife are members of the academy. But consultants I spoke to said it didn’t matter. A couple joked that it was a little like the Jan. 6 insurrection: President Donald Trump may not have personally stormed the Capitol, but he encouraged others to do so.In February, the academy announced that Riseborough’s nomination would stand, promising to clarify its regulations after the awards. But the controversy reminded everyone of the reality of the Oscars: that despite the big show of sealed envelopes being delivered via handcuffed briefcases, the votes — in Hollywood as in Washington, D.C. — are a result of a highly contingent, political process, handed down not from movie gods but from the very people who stand to benefit from it. “To say that Andrea Riseborough took a nomination away from Viola and Danielle, you cannot have this conversation without having the whole conversation,” said a campaign strategist with a film in the race. “You have to look at: ‘OK, well, what money was spent on the other campaigns? And who’s spending it?’ This is just the tip of the iceberg.”Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. Sometimes several strategists work on a single film, and the war room of an Oscars campaign can grow to be as many as 10 or 20 people. All the stops along the campaign trail — screenings, events, other award shows — are an opportunity to workshop talking points and gauge the competition. And unlike the Golden Globes, which are voted on by 199 entertainment journalists, the Oscars electorate is a voting body of about 10,000 industry peers, which is nearly double what it was before the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that began in 2015.The Oscars race is split into Phases 1 and 2: before and after the nominations, which is akin to the divide between the presidential primaries and the general election. “Phase 2 is all about honing your narrative and defining yourself in the race,” Lea Yardum, who is working with a couple best-picture nominees this year, told me. “Some narratives form themselves but others are — I don’t want to say crafted by us, but they form themselves and we amplify them.”Think about everything you know about this year’s Oscar nominees and, chances are, it was proliferated by an awards consultant. “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the movie business with its nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the exuberant sci-fi romp that created some much-needed opportunities for Asian American actors. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the biggest antiwar film ever (despite still technically being a war film). Vote for “The Fabelmans” if you love Spielberg and the movies and “Tár” if you want to go with the unanimous critics’ pick.“Every year, everyone goes into a campaign armed with statistics — oh, the statistics!” Yardum told me. An Asian actress has never been up for an Oscar, so vote for Michelle Yeoh: It’s her time. Did you know Jamie Lee Curtis has never been nominated? She’s due. Spielberg hasn’t won a best picture Oscar since 1994. Is it helpful to know what gas prices were the last time he won? (A strategist has that handy: $1.11 a gallon!) Narratives don’t always work, but a good narrative can triumph over a bad movie. Just consider the moving comeback of Brendan Fraser, who was nominated for his performance in “The Whale,” a movie that was panned by critics.Negative narratives are usually attributed to the diabolical workings of rival strategists: the stories about abusive directors, overblown budgets, whether the real people behind biopics should really be celebrated. (See: “A Beautiful Mind.”) “They try to change someone else’s narrative by adding dirt to the layer,” Angellotti told me, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t really write “Good Will Hunting.” A more recent example that strategists still talk about is when “Green Book” was up for best picture in 2019. The week the nomination ballots went out, a story resurfaced about the director of the movie, Peter Farrelly, and a joke he used to play 20 years earlier that involved exposing himself. (Farrelly apologized the same day.) The film still won, but many believe another best-picture campaign planted the story.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Everyone in the industry insists that negative campaigning has become less prevalent than it used to be. And yet when a veteran strategist with a client in the race told me how opportunistic it was for the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cast to visit the site of the Monterey Park shooting on the eve of the nomination announcements, I’m pretty sure I got to experience it firsthand. “Do they not know the shooter is Asian?” the strategist asked. “It’s not a racially motivated crime.”For those paying attention to this year’s narratives, it was not a mystery where the backlash to Riseborough’s nomination was coming from; or the backlash to the backlash, articulated by Christina Ricci (represented by the same public-relations firm as Riseborough) in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Seems hilarious that the ‘surprise nomination’ (meaning tons of money wasn’t spent to position this actress) of a legitimately brilliant performance is being met with an investigation,” Ricci wrote. “So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition?” Suddenly, being backed by a studio had become a negative narrative of its own. Many awards consultants spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to face repercussions from their studio bosses. Others didn’t want to be seen as taking credit. “We prefer to be invisible,” a strategist working on several films this year told me. And yet here they were, seemingly sparring out in the open.Oscars campaigning has been around as long as there have been Oscars, but the modern playbook was invented by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Weinstein popularized the practice of sending out VHS screeners, demanded that actors clear their schedules for awards season and relentlessly lobbied academy members. Studios generally held their noses at aggressive campaigning, but Weinstein, unable to compete with their budgets, wasn’t above a shameless publicity stunt.For “My Left Foot,” one of his first Oscar campaigns, he got Daniel Day-Lewis to go to Capitol Hill to speak with lawmakers about the Americans With Disabilities Act. For “Il Postino,” a 1994 Italian-language film about a mailman who befriends the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he persuaded more than a dozen celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson and Madonna — none of whom appeared in the film — to record poetry readings for the film’s soundtrack. “The thing that’s horrible when you think about it is Harvey was really persistent,” said Cynthia Swartz, who helped run Miramax’s awards campaigns for more than 10 years. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer from a celebrity to do a poetry reading or wear a Marchesa dress. Knowing what we know now, it’s chilling and frankly scary to think how far that that behavior extended. He was always asking celebrities for things and being extremely aggressive about it.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Weinstein was widely rumored to wage whisper campaigns against his competitors. The last time Spielberg won a best-director Oscar was in 1999 for “Saving Private Ryan,” which lost an epic behind-the-scenes battle for best picture to Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love.” “For Harvey, campaigning was a blood sport, and I don’t think it had ever been a blood sport before,” Terry Press, who was then Spielberg’s head of marketing at DreamWorks, told me. “Everybody wants to win. But Harvey wanted to win and kill everything else.” Many of the top consultants working today came out of the Miramax school, including Swartz, Angellotti and Lisa Taback, who went in-house at Netflix in 2018.‘Everybody hates Harvey, and he’s in jail, and he should be. He’s a criminal and he raped people. But people liked his results, and they still want them.’A number of regulations that the academy has issued since then to police campaigning have been in response to tactics pioneered by Weinstein. Today campaigners can reach out to academy voters only via approved mailing houses, and only once a week, and if a reception accompanies a screening it may only provide “nonexcessive food and beverage.” In Phase 2, no food or drink is allowed at all, including water. “I think the academy is full of it sometimes with this stuff,” a strategist with several films in the race told me. “You know, people have jobs. If you want them to see a movie at 7 p.m., and they’re coming from work, give them some popcorn and a water, my God! What are you trying to prove? I’m of the opinion that you could buy someone the most expensive lobster dinner and it is not going to change the way they vote. The only thing it might do is entice them to come see the movie — maybe.”The campaign industry that exists today has grown with and around the rules. With mailed screeners no longer permitted, films are typically uploaded to the academy’s online screening room at a cost of $20,000. Because campaigners can’t contact academy members directly, they try to reach them other ways, such as with $90,000 cover ads in the trades and paid email blasts through the guilds. Then there are the endless screenings, live score performances, dinners, trade round tables, precursor awards and special magazine issues — this publication also does one — all a part of a symbiotic ecosystem that is fed by the awards business.Once streaming platforms entered the arena and the best-picture category grew to 10 films, the campaign business expanded. Whereas a major studio might spend anywhere from $5 million to $25 million on an Oscars campaign, Netflix was estimated to deploy upward of $40 million on “Roma” in 2019, more than double the film’s production budget. The following year, Netflix spent a reported $70 million on its Oscar campaigns, which included “Marriage Story” and “The Irishman.” (A Netflix representative described those estimates as inaccurate.) Sometimes campaign spending has less to do with securing nominations than awards-hungry talent. “When there’s a race for the biggest names in the business, part of that is, ‘How are you going to support my film?’” an awards consultant told me. All of this is further reinforced by financial incentives. A nomination means that an actor’s or director’s fee goes up considerably. And the awards consultants who deliver those nominations get bonuses: upward of $25,000 for a best-picture nomination; another $50,000 for a win.“Winning awards has become the guiding principle of our industry, and it’s what’s destroying it,” Amanda Lundberg, the chief executive of 42West, which is working on the “Top Gun: Maverick” campaign, told me. (The publicity firm also consulted on “To Leslie” until December, when another firm took it over.) “It’s gotten to a place where every single filmmaker thinks their movie is an award contender.” Last year, Lundberg had a meeting with a filmmaker who wanted to discuss a best-picture campaign but hadn’t yet shown Lundberg the actual film. “It’s like we’re award fetchers,” she said. “Like you can just order that with me as if I’m 1-800-Oscar.”Lundberg worked for Miramax, starting in 1988 and again beginning in 2002. Despite all the new academy regulations, Lundberg believes the appetite for Weinstein’s tactics is as insatiable as ever. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Everybody hates Harvey, and he’s in jail, and he should be. He’s a criminal and he raped people. But people liked his results, and they still want them.” Lundberg continued: “People are desperate to win awards. And we’ve guided it here because we’ve rewarded it with money and prestige. So what happens when people want something that’s limited? Do the math. It causes all sorts of behavior, and people lose where the line is.”Riseborough may not have secured her nomination if it weren’t for the complex math behind how nominations are tabulated. In Phase 2, Oscar winners are voted on by the entire academy. But in Phase 1, with the exception of best picture, they’re selected by their peers — i.e., actors nominate actors, directors nominate directors and so on. Members of the acting branch list their top five choices in order of preference, but not all of them vote. In other words, you don’t need the whole academy to like you; only actors, and only a small fraction of them.Much of the criticism leveled at the Riseborough campaign has been about how strategic it seemed despite being described as organic. McCormack encouraged her social circle to post about the film daily, a directive that the actress Frances Fisher — she played Kate Winslet’s mother in “Titanic” — seemingly took to heart. She posted about Riseborough almost every day during the week of nominations voting. “Hello actors branch of the academy!” Fisher wrote on Instagram, addressing the voters directly. In another post, Fisher broke down the math of just how few of their votes it would take to get Riseborough nominated, citing a story in Deadline Hollywood: “#AndreaRiseborough can secure an #Oscar nomination if 218 (out 1,302) actors in the Actors Branch nominate her in 1st position for #BestActress.” (The academy disputes the accuracy of those numbers; Fisher declined to comment.) And though campaign regulations forbid mentioning competitors by name, Fisher urged the acting branch to choose Riseborough, because it “seems to be that Viola, Michelle, Danielle & Cate are a lock for their outstanding work.”A best-actress campaign can run to $5 million. There is no question that the distributor of “To Leslie,” Momentum Pictures, did not spend that. The movie itself was made for less, and Riseborough and Michael Morris helped pay for the campaign themselves. Still, P.R. firms were hired. A social-media campaign was organized. And several people worked their phones to drum up support, including McCormack and McCormack’s and Riseborough’s manager, Jason Weinberg, whose roster of clients includes some of the movie stars who endorsed the actress. “Hand-to-hand combat,” as this style of campaigning is known, is not unheard of. Everybody does it, consultants told me, but they’re usually less overt about it. “You know, it wasn’t just, ‘We’re the little engine that could,’” a seasoned strategist with a few clients in the race told me. “It was more than that.”The thing with actors is they tend to like a certain kind of performance — big, physical and full of interesting “choices,” all of which Riseborough’s is. (Kate Winslet called it the greatest performance by a female actor she had ever seen.) The actors who campaigned for Riseborough probably believed they were simply championing an overlooked and worthy performer. Is it possible that some didn’t know they were violating regulations? Of course it’s possible. Have you seen what happens when actors come together for a cause? It can be clueless, but it is usually well intentioned. (See Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video from the early days of the pandemic.) But in the process, they circumvented the vast Oscar machinery that has arisen since those early Miramax days.The academy’s regulations are a bit like the Talmud: maddeningly specific in certain places — mailings about a film may include only “an unembellished, creditless synopsis” — and vague in others. There’s even a clause that basically says, Mind the spirit of these rules, as they apply to things we haven’t even thought of yet. Every year campaign strategists call the academy, asking if certain things are OK, such as menus and party invitations. If anyone with a good Rolodex could bypass this system, then what is the point of the Oscar consultants hired to navigate it?But it also seemed to open a larger question of who the true underdog is in an Oscars race. Is it the actress without a studio or millions of dollars behind her, or the one with studio support and fewer connections? Gina Prince-Bythewood, the director of “The Woman King,” a blockbuster released by Sony, argued the latter in The Hollywood Reporter, addressing Riseborough’s nomination directly. “My issue with what happened is how people in the industry use their social capital,” she said, adding, “people say, ‘Well, Viola and Danielle had studios behind them.’ But we just very clearly saw that social capital is more valuable.” Perhaps, but surely starring in a $50 million critically acclaimed studio film is valuable too and is the entire reason that those working in obscurity make a play for an Oscar. At the end of the day, the campaign game is about finding the most compelling narrative, one that inspires people to root for you.The academy most likely upheld Riseborough’s nomination because she didn’t personally violate campaign rules. But few expected the ruling to go any other way. Penalizing those involved with the campaign would mean a move against Hollywood’s biggest names, whom the academy needs to star in their movies and show up to the awards. “This town doesn’t move without actors,” one veteran strategist told me. “If they came down on this campaign, well, that’s an indictment of Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton. But the truth is, if I did it, I would be in academy jail.”It is worth remembering that the Academy Awards were created as a marketing device to entice people to see movies and, like football, used to air on Monday nights to boost ratings. “This is not the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lundberg told me. That doesn’t necessarily stop some Oscar winners from acting as if it is. At best, a nomination can extend the theatrical release of a film and drive more people to watch it long after it has left theaters. But it is just that: an ad created by a professional organization to sell you on movies even if — and especially as — their quality is in evident decline. “Every year, everyone talks about what a magnificent year this has been for movies,” Angellotti told me, “and the public is going, ‘Really?’”Many of the films nominated this year are a product of the Covid years. Spielberg wouldn’t have made “The Fabelmans” if he wasn’t stuck at home, contemplating mortality and wondering which stories he hadn’t told yet. (The answer turned out to be his own.) “Everything Everywhere All at Once” had to shut down production early and film Yeoh over Zoom, which is also how Blanchett learned to conduct for “Tár.” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” filmed on remote islands with a small cast, was an especially pandemic-friendly production. Movie theaters, meanwhile, have closed faster than audiences could keep track of, and 2022 box-office numbers fell short of the year’s meager predictions. (Theatrical attendance has shrunk by half in the last four years.) All of this is a reason to ask just how much Oscars drama, this year or any other, is manufactured by the very people whose job it is to get us to watch. The Riseborough controversy, though unpleasant for those involved, has ultimately led to many more people seeing “To Leslie.” (Momentum Pictures re-released the film in select theaters.)Looking ahead, some wondered if the only way to save the movie business from itself is to go back to the innocent pre-Miramax days of more restrained Oscar campaigns. If running a rule-abiding campaign can’t be done without millions of dollars, then the next logical step would be addressing those inequities. But instituting spending caps is a nonstarter, as it would mean big losses for the trades, screening rooms, caterers, consultants, stylists and any other entity that benefits from awards business. “Who’s going to call The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter and say we can’t take out ads anymore?” Angellotti said. “That’s called restriction of trade. I don’t see it as a viable situation.” Not to mention that many Oscar strategists are themselves voting members of the Marketing and Public Relations branch of the academy.This year, Terry Press is once again working with Spielberg, who has a well-documented aversion to Oscar campaigning. She admitted that spending limits were an intriguing if unrealistic idea. “I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face here,” she said, “but I would love to see somebody go all the way and spend nothing on any of this.“Because then,” she added, “it’s really going to be about the movie.”Irina Aleksander is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last feature article was about Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian filmmaker navigating widespread calls for a boycott of Russian culture. Javier Jaén is an illustrator and a designer based in Barcelona, Spain. He is known for his translation of complex ideas into simple images, often with a playful tone. More

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      How an Apology Creates a Turning Point in ‘Women Talking’

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      The screenwriter and director Sarah Polley narrates a sequence from her film, which is nominated for best picture and adapted screenplay.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In this scene from the drama “Women Talking,” the words “I’m sorry” take on tremendous weight.The film, which is Oscar-nominated in the best picture and adapted screenplay categories, follows a group of women in an isolated religious community who have been the constant victims of sexual assault by men in their compound. The women are faced with a pivotal decision: do nothing, stay and fight the abusers or leave the community altogether.In this sequence, Mariche (Jessie Buckley) is arguing to stay and fight, but that leads to conflict with Ona (Rooney Mara).The tense exchange leads to an apology, first from Ona, then from Greta (Sheila McCarthy), Mariche’s mother, who expresses regret for not protecting Mariche from abuse and instead encouraging her to forgive her abuser.Discussing the scene in an interview, the screenwriter and director Sarah Polley said, “This apology and the receiving of it is, in fact, the climax of the film, and it’s what allows the group to move together into a different future.”Polley said that when shooting the scene, she spoke with a crew member who had a parallel experience to Mariche’s, growing up in a religious community and suffering abuse and feeling his parents weren’t protective of him in the way they should have been. She noticed that the crew member wasn’t responding to the apology as scripted.The two sat down and she asked him what Greta would need to say for the moment to have meaning.“We realized that what we hadn’t scripted was her saying the words, ‘I’m sorry,’” Polley said. She worked with the crew member and actors to build the most meaningful approach to this moment. “So it turned into a very collective expression of something,” she said.Read the “Women Talking” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more.2023 Oscar Nominations: Full BallotHere’s every nominee. Cast your vote and predict the winners. More

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      Twenty Years Later, ‘Irreversible’ Still Shocks

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      A look back at Gaspar Noé’s brutal told-in-reverse drama, which has been rereleased in a “Straight Cut” version.In bed with her lover, Alex (Monica Bellucci) recounts a dream: “I was in a tunnel. All red. And then the tunnel broke in half.” In any other thriller, this uncanny vision would play like a warning for things to come. But in “Irreversible,” the moment arrives toward the end, well after Alex enters the red tunnel and is brutalized by a random man — an indelible scene at the heart of Gaspar Noé’s infamous rape-revenge film, released 20 years ago this week.“Irreversible” envisions the night of Alex’s assault in reverse chronological order. First, her boyfriend, Marcus (Vincent Cassel), goes on a rampage through the streets of Paris in search of the culprit. Then the tunnel. Then the party that Alex will decide to leave by herself. Then the couple’s cozy, Edenlike apartment — a space that will never be the same.“By reversing the formula, ‘Irreversible’ strips away the unspoken logic that dominates these kinds of films. It forces us to question the entire relationship between rape and revenge,” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a critic and the author of numerous books on rape-revenge movies, wrote in an email.Though the film was always conceived as a story in reverse, it was shot chronologically, which allowed Noé to assemble a new version, the “Straight Cut,” that flips the order of events into linear time. “Irreversible: Straight Cut” is currently playing in theaters in the United States, and will be released, along with the original cut, on Blu-ray in July thanks to the cult distributor Altered Innocence. “In a way, the new version is both more sentimental and darker,” Noé said in a video interview, explaining that it emphasizes the pointlessness of Marcus’s vengeance-seeking.When “Irreversible” came out in 2003, Noé had already made a name for himself as a provocateur who liked his films mean and loud. His debut feature, “I Stand Alone” (1998), revolves around an incestuous horse-meat butcher with a murderous streak. Noé’s films — like “Enter the Void” (2010) or “Climax” (2019) — are descents into gruesome hells featuring extreme body horror, abrasive techno-tunes, and delirious whirligig camera movements.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.With “Irreversible,” Noé took several of his formative influences — taboo titles like “Deliverance” and “Taxi Driver,” which hinge on the male crusade for retribution — and cranked them up to match the immersive feel of reality-bending epics like “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For Noé, some acts of violence are as equally capable of shattering worlds as glitches in the space-time continuum.Vincent Cassel in “Irreversible: Straight Cut.” A wild-eyed, macho intensity — the actor’s trademark — is on full display in the film.Emily De La Hosseray/Altered InnocenceSet in then-modern-day Paris, the film also starred some of the country’s biggest talents. Bellucci and Cassel, a couple at the time, were like the French equivalent of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; Albert Dupontel — who plays Pierre, Alex’s bookish ex-boyfriend, witness to Marcus’s spiraling rage — was beloved for his popular comedies. Without their involvement, Noé noted, the film wouldn’t have received funding.Plus, their participation bolstered the movie’s shocks — who could imagine the steely Italian supermodel-turned-actress so graphically pulverized? Dupontel snapping and beating a man to a pulp? Cassel — well, his unhinged Marcus made sense. In “La Haine” (1996), the modern classic about police brutality in the Parisian banlieues, Cassel played a wannabe gangster, in one scene pointing a finger-gun at himself in the mirror à la Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” This same wild-eyed, macho intensity — the actor’s trademark — is on full display in “Irreversible.”“The film is testosterone-phobic. It shows men as beasts,” Noé said. Indeed, the world of “Irreversible” is one of primitive brutes. In one scene, Marcus enters Rectum, a hardcore gay club, tumbling down a crimson rabbit hole filled with leather-clad men, bondage swings and chain restraints, maniacally searching for the assailant. His madness is infectious, inciting Pierre into action, which results in an innocent man’s face turned to bloody mush. They’re in a B.D.S.M. club — a real one whose clients served as extras — so the onlookers watch in fascination and shout excitedly as the two men attack. It’s an unforgettably sinister moment, one that the director Damien Chazelle pays homage to in his latest film, “Babylon,” when Tobey Maguire’s drug-addled criminal kingpin leads a tour through a cave of depravities. “He told me he needed to meet me because he copied me!” Noé said, referring to an encounter with Chazelle in Paris.But for many people, nothing in “Irreversible” surpasses the horrors of its most talked-about scene. Shot on location in a real underpass frequented by prostitutes at the outskirts of Paris (the passage has since been demolished), the rape sequence is like the eye of a storm in a film distinguished by its frenzied visuals. “Moving the camera around would have felt like it was participating in the violence, like it was the ghost of some other complicit man,” Noé said. The rapist (Jo Prestia) puts a knife to Alex’s throat, forcing her to comply over the course of nine excruciatingly long minutes. The mostly static camera makes us hyper-aware of our passivity as spectators; but unlike the faceless figure in the distance whom we briefly see stumbling upon the rape and choosing to walk away, we’re forced to watch.No intimacy coordinators were involved on set — in the early 2000s, the profession was nonexistent — but the scene was actively rehearsed, with all the actors’ movements mapped out to create the illusion of a beating. “It was kind of like a dance,” Bellucci said over the phone, emphasizing how empowering it felt for her to be able to enact the experience from a place of total control.The cinema of toxic masculinity long precedes the current era, though discourses around gender and the various institutional reckonings with sexual violence allows us to consider films like “Taxi Driver,” and, indeed, “Irreversible,” with fresh eyes. Recent films like “The Northman” — a brutal Viking thriller keenly aware of the delusions that underpin the hero’s quest for vengeance, and Patricia Mazuy’s “Saturn Bowling,” a serial-killer movie in which femicide is treated like a sport — seem to have taken up the mantle, critiquing the patriarchy by presenting it at its most monstrous.“I couldn’t make ‘Irreversible’ today,” Noé said, adding that he believes financiers are more inclined to support movies about sexual violence by women filmmakers. Noé praised up-and-comers in the art of subversion, namely the Swedish director Isabella Ekloff. Her film “Holiday” is an unconventional rape-revenge film itself, its centerpiece also a disturbingly lengthy assault.“I grew up watching transgressive movies because I saw them as a challenge from men to see if I was tough enough,” Heller-Nicholas wrote. “Now, I’m blown away by the number of sexual assault survivors I’ve encountered who find these movies cathartic.”Rape-revenge movies like “Irreversible” show that there can be more to the depiction of gendered violence than the easy thrill of looking at brutalized female bodies. Nothing about the “Irreversible” rape scene feels exciting or titillating; and nothing about Marcus’s actions feels powerful or heroic.“Today, the new generation feels more comfortable talking about issues like rape and violence,” Bellucci said, adding that her days of acting in transgressive movies are behind her now that she’s a mother. “‘Irreversible’ is about our reality in a very painful way, and you don’t have to like it, but like the best films, you watch it and you come out a different person.” More

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      A24, the Indie Film Studio, Buys New York’s Cherry Lane Theater

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      The studio’s first venture into live performance follows the move by Audible, Amazon’s audio subsidiary, to stage works at the nearby Minetta Lane Theater.A24, the independent film and television studio barreling into next weekend’s Academy Awards with a boatload of Oscar nominations, is making an unexpected move into live performance, purchasing a small Off Broadway theater in New York’s West Village.The studio, which until now has focused on making movies, television shows and podcasts, has purchased the Cherry Lane Theater for $10 million, and plans to present plays as well as other forms of live entertainment there, in addition to the occasional film screening.A24, whose films include the leading Oscar contender “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” is not the first film studio to make such a move: the Walt Disney Company has been presenting stage productions at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theater, which it leases from the state and city, since 1997. But Disney, of course, is an entertainment industry behemoth that has mastered the art of multiplatform storytelling.A more comparable move, perhaps, was that by Audible, an Amazon audio subsidiary that since 2018 has been leasing the Minetta Lane Theater, in Greenwich Village, for live productions which it then records and offers on its digital platform. And Netflix, the streaming juggernaut, has in recent years taken over several cinemas, including the Paris Theater in New York, as well as the Egyptian and Bay theaters in Los Angeles.The A24 acquisition, coming at a time when many theaters are still struggling to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, suggests a vote of confidence in live performance. A24 plans to present some events celebrating Cherry Lane’s centennial this spring, and then to close the theater for renovations before beginning full-scale programming next year.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Much remains uncertain about how the company intends to use the theater. A24 declined to make anyone available to speak on the record about the acquisition, but an official there said that the company had not yet decided whether it would develop work for the stage, or present work developed by others. The official, who was granted anonymity to describe the company’s plans, said that the studio hoped the theater would allow it to strengthen existing relationships with writers and performers who work on stage and screen, and to develop new relationships with comedians and theater artists.A24 plans to retain the theater’s existing staff while adding to it with its own team, the official said, and as part of the renovation it plans to install technology so the theater can be used for film screenings.The official said A24’s theater venture is a partnership with Taurus Investment Holdings.“I really believe my theater is going into the right hands,” said Angelina Fiordellisi, who has owned the theater since 1996. “They love to develop and produce the work of emerging writers, and a lot of their writers are playwrights. I can’t imagine a better way to bring future life to the theater.”Fiordellisi, 68, has been trying to sell the theater for some time. “I don’t want to work that hard anymore,” she said, “and I want to spend more time with my family.”The purchase, which was previously reported by Curbed, includes three attached properties, including a 179-seat theater, a 60-seat theater and eight apartments, on the Village’s picturesque, curving Commerce Street. The Cherry Lane, in a 19th-century building that was a brewery and a box factory before being converted to theatrical use in 1923, bills itself as the city’s longest continually running Off Broadway theater.In 2021, Fiordellisi agreed to sell the property to the Lucille Lortel Theater for $11 million, but the sale fell apart. Last week, Lortel announced that it had spent $5.3 million to purchase a three-story carriage house in Chelsea, where it plans to open a 61-seat theater in 2025. The Lortel organization also has a 295-seat theater in the West Village.The Cherry Lane will now be a for-profit, commercial venture; Fiordellisi had operated it through a nonprofit, occasionally presenting work that she developed and more often renting it to nonprofit and commercial producers. Fiordellisi said she will convert her nonprofit to a foundation that will give grants to playwrights and small theater companies. More

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      Review: Chris Rock’s ‘Selective Outrage’ Strikes Back

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      A year after Will Smith slapped him at the Oscars, Rock responded fiercely in a new stand-up special, Netflix’s first experiment in live entertainment.One year later, Chris Rock slapped back. Hard.It was certainly not as startling as Will Smith hitting him at the Oscars, but his long-awaited response, in his new Netflix stand-up special “Selective Outrage” on Saturday night, had moments that felt as emotional, messy and fierce. It was the least rehearsed, most riveting material in an uneven hour.Near the end, Rock even botched a key part of one joke, getting a title of a movie wrong. Normally, such an error would have been edited out, but since this was the first live global event in the history of Netflix, Rock could only stop, call attention to it and tell the joke again. It messed up his momentum, but the trade-off might have been worth it, since the flub added an electric spontaneity and unpredictability that was a drawing card.At 58, Rock is one of our greatest stand-ups, a perfectionist whose material, once it appeared in a special, always displayed a meticulous sense of control. He lost it here, purposely, flashing anger as he insulted Smith, offering a theory of the case of what really happened at the Academy Awards after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair, and in what will be the most controversial part of the set, laid much of the blame on her. This felt like comedy as revenge. Rock said he long loved Will Smith. “And now,” he added, pausing before referencing the new movie in which Smith plays an enslaved man, “I watch ‘Emancipation’ just to see him get whooped.”One of the reasons Netflix remains the leading stand-up platform has been its ability to create attention-getting events. No other streamer comes close. Through a combination of razzle dazzle and Rolodex spinning, the streaming service packaged this special more like a major sporting event than a special, a star-studded warm-up act to the Oscars next week.It began with an awkward preshow hosted by Ronny Chieng, who soldiered through by poking fun at the marketing around him. “We’re doing a comedy show on Saturday night — live,” he said, before sarcastically marveling at this “revolutionary” innovation. An all-star team of comics (Ali Wong, Leslie Jones, Jerry Seinfeld), actors (Matthew McConaughey) and music stars (Paul McCartney, Ice-T) hyped up the proceedings, featuring enough earnest tributes for a lifetime achievement award. As if this weren’t enough puffery, Netflix had the comedians Dana Carvey and David Spade host a panel of more celebrations posing as post-show analysis.This was unnecessary, since Netflix already had our attention by having Rock signed to do a special right after he was on the receiving end of one of the most notorious bad reviews of a joke in the history of television. Countless people weighed in on the slap, most recently the actor and comic Marlon Wayans, whose surprisingly empathetic new special, “God Loves Me,” is an entire hour about the incident from someone who knows all the participants. HBO Max releasing that in the last week was its own counterprogramming.Until now, Rock has said relatively little about the Oscars, telling a few jokes on tour, which invariably got reported in the press. I’m guessing part of the reason he wanted this special to air live was to hold onto an element of surprise. Rock famously said that he always believed a special should be special. And he has done so in previous shows by moving his comedy in a more personal direction. “Tamborine,” an artful, intimate production shot at the BAM Harvey theater, focused on his divorce. This one, shot in Baltimore, had a grander, more old-fashioned vibe, with reaction shots alternating with him pacing the stage in his signature commanding cadence.Dressed all in white, his T-shirt and jeans hanging loosely off a lanky frame, and wearing a shiny bracelet and necklace with the Prince symbol, Rock started slowly with familiar bits about easily bruised modern sensibilities, the hollowness of social media and woke signaling. He skewered the preening of companies like Lululemon that market their lack of racism while charging $100 for yoga pants. Most people, he says, would “prefer $20 racist yoga pants.”Rock’s special, shot in Baltimore, had a grander, more old-fashioned vibe.Kirill Bichutsky/NetflixIf there’s one consistent thread through Rock’s entire career, it’s following the money, how economics motivates even love and social issues. On abortion, he finds his way to the financial angle, advising women: “If you have to pay for your own abortion, you should have an abortion.”A commanding theater performer who sets up bits as well as anyone, Rock picked up momentum midway through, while always hinting at the Smith material to come, with a reoccurring refrain of poking fun at Snoop Dogg and Jay-Z before making clear it’s just for fun: “Last thing I need is another mad rapper.” Another running theme is his contempt for victimhood. His jokes about Meghan Markle are very funny, mocking her surprise that the royal family is racist, terming them its originators, the “Sugarhill Gang of racism.”On tour, his few jokes about Smith were once tied to his points about victimhood. But here, he follows one of his most polished and funny jokes, comparing the dating prospects of Jay-Z and Beyoncé if they weren’t stars but worked at Burger King, with a long, sustained section on the Oscars that closes the show. Here, he offers his theory on Will Smith, which is essentially that the slap was an act of displacement, shifting his anger from his wife cheating on him and broadcasting it onto Rock. The comic says his joke was never really the issue. “She hurt him way more than he hurt me,” Rock said, using his considerable powers of description to describe the humiliation of Smith in a manner that seemed designed to do it again.There’s a comic nastiness to Rock’s insults, some of which is studied, but other times appeared to be the product of his own bottled-up anger. In this special, Rock seemed more raw than usual, sloppier, cursing more often and less precisely. This was a side of him you hadn’t seen before. The way his fury became directed at Pinkett Smith makes you wonder if this was also a kind of displacement. Going back into the weeds of Oscar history, Rock traced his conflict with her and Smith to when he said she wanted Rock to quit as Oscar host in 2016 because Smith was not nominated for the movie “Concussion” (the title that he mangled).That her boycotting that year’s Oscars was part of a larger protest against the Academy for not nominating Black artists went unsaid, implying it was merely a pretext. Rock often establishes his arguments with the deftness and nuance of a skilled trial lawyer, but he’s not trying to give a fair, fleshed out version of events. He’s out for blood. There’s a coldness here that is bracing. Describing his jokes about Smith’s wife at the ceremony in 2016, he put it bluntly: “She started it. I finished it.” But, of course, as would become obvious years later, he didn’t.Did he finish it in this special? We’ll see, but I think we’re in for another cycle of discourse as we head into the Academy Awards next week.At one point, Rock said there are four ways people can get attention in our culture: “Showing your ass,” being infamous, being excellent or playing the victim. It’s a good list, but this special demonstrates a conspicuous omission: Nothing draws a crowd like a fight. More

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      Two Histories of the Scandal-Soaked Academy Awards

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      On the eve of Hollywood’s big, if diminished, night, two deeply researched books dig into the scandal-soaked history of the Academy Awards.Are the Oscars history?What else to conclude from the recent publication of two erudite if waggish books about this somewhat deflated annual pageant: Michael Schulman’s OSCAR WARS: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears (Harper, 589 pp., $40) and Bruce Davis’s THE ACADEMY AND THE AWARD (Brandeis University, 485 pp., $40)? Pile these on the even fatter “Hollywood: The Oral History,” by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson (Harper, 748 pages), and you’ll have jury-rigged something like a Norton Anthology of American Moviedom.There have been plenty of Academy annals before, of course: detailed compendiums, official and not; glossy adornments for the coffee table; and at least one prose investigation of its increasingly byzantine fashion system. But these often felt like sideshows, guidebooks: boosterish accessories to a main event that is now struggling to regain and maintain its centrality in international culture.With fewer than 10 million people in 2021 watching a telecast that once commanded five times that (a few more did tune in last year; viewership spiking after The Slap), and the box office for art films hardly afire, the new books land more like crisis management briefings.Things in the film industry have been bad before, they remind, and might yet get better again.There was, for example, 1934. In the middle of the Depression, reports Davis (a former Academy executive director who retired in 2011 and promptly plunged into its archives), the organization was forced to take up a collection from members, as if passing the plate in a church pew, so that the ceremony could go on.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Or 1989, widely and unfairly remembered as the Worst Oscars Ever, which Schulman, a staff writer for The New Yorker, dissects like a forensic pathologist hovering over an overdressed corpse.The ceremony had become “a big, embarrassing yawn,” and Allan Carr, the caftan-wearing producer of “Grease” known as “Glittermeister, ” was hired to zhuzh it up, which he did with a caroming live-action Snow White — uncleared with Disney — singing “Proud Mary” with her Prince Charming, played by Rob Lowe, then a leader of the Brat Pack. The gaudy opening number, with stars ducking for cover as Snow roamed the aisles, ruined Carr’s career and possibly his life. The unfortunate actress, Eileen Bowman, was coerced into signing a nondisclosure agreement that forbade her to talk about the Oscars for 13 years.“Never trust a man in a caftan,” Lowe had, in fairness, warned her.Davis, whose book is subtitled “The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,” focuses on the organization’s formative years, “an early life that deserves a bildungsroman.”But he is less Thomas Mann than diligent mythbuster, calling, for example, Susan Orlean’s assertion in her biography of Rin-Tin-Tin that the dog got more votes than any other male actor at the first Awards (repeated in this newspaper) “nonsense of a high order, now inserted into the historical record utterly without evidence.” In the ballot box Davis uncovered at the Margaret Herrick Library, there were no votes for the pooch.Davis also dispels the belief that the statuette was originally nicknamed by Bette Davis — no relation — because its backside resembled that of her then-husband Harman Oscar Nelson. He makes the case rather to credit a secretary of Norwegian descent, Eleanore Lilleberg, who was tired of referring to the “gold knights in her care” as “doodads, thingamajigs, hoozits and gadgets” and mentally conjured a military veteran with dignified bearing she’d known as a girl.This version of events, if true, is apt, for in Schulman’s framing, the Oscars have long been no mere contest but brutal hand-to-hand combat. He chronicles the 1951 best actress race between Davis (for “All About Eve”) and Gloria Swanson (for “Sunset Boulevard”); they lost to Judy Holliday (“Born Yesterday”) but the first two performances both proved more enduring, show business loving no subject better than itself.He retraces the long exile of the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, perhaps the most prominent of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted and driven behind pseudonyms for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee; credited and awarded for “Roman Holiday” only posthumously (his widow’s cat, satisfyingly, scratched up the thingamajig’s head).And no book called “Oscar Wars” could neglect how Harvey Weinstein, currently facing life in prison for his sex crimes, made the campaign nuclear in 1999 with “Shakespeare in Love.” The reign of this titan (and his eventual topple) was for the nation-state of Hollywood as consequential as Nixon’s for the U.S. government.He “made the Oscars dirty,” Schulman writes, using tricks like buying ads suggesting Miramax’s “The Piano” had won best picture at the preliminary critics’ awards (with “runner-up” in tiny print); relentlessly wooing senior citizens; parties, swag, ballot-commandeering and bad-mouthing his opponents. He even brought Daniel Day-Lewis to Washington to help get the American With Disabilities Act passed as a boost for “My Left Foot.”Along with the envelope, some context, please: Scandal has always beset Hollywood. Indeed, both authors note that the Academy was founded to raise the tone after a series of them, most notoriously the arrest of the Paramount actor Fatty Arbuckle after a starlet died in his hotel room following an orgy. Both in their own way document the race and gender inequity endemic to the institution, and its often ham-handed attempts to course-correct.And both conjure how exciting and special this event used to feel, with all its warts and overlength, like Christmas and New Year’s rolled into one.Now, as Oscar totters toward his 95th birthday, in a ceremony to be aired Sunday, March 12, going to a theater to see something screened feels fun but increasingly antique, like hopping on a wooden roller coaster (when I suggest it as a recreational activity to my teenagers, they look at me like I’m the MGM lion).It’s not just the pictures that have gotten small, as Swanson playing Norma Desmond declared — they’ve gotten really small, as we’re all Ernst Lubitsches now with cameras and flattering filters in our back pockets. The ceremony to commemorate them has shrunk as well.“I’m not sure I see a way to re-establish the Academy Awards as an experience for a wide swath of the country’s, or the world’s, population,” Davis writes. “It isn’t hard to see the Oscars on a track to becoming something like the National Book Awards” — heaven forfend! — “with way more glamorous presenters.” More