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      Golden Globes 2024 Snubs and Surprises: ‘Past Lives,’ Taylor Swift and More

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      The Korean American drama from Celine Song got four nominations, while Swift’s concert film got one. “The Color Purple” was overlooked for best musical.The nominations for the 81st Golden Globes, announced Monday morning, brought good tidings for box-office titans “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” though some of the other contenders hoping to break through were dealt an early setback.This year, any discussion of Golden Globe snubs and surprises ought to start with the show itself, since this once-snubbed awards ceremony has engineered a surprising comeback.NBC dropped the 2022 edition of the show after a host of scandals involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that voted for the Golden Globes, prompted an A-list boycott. Pilloried for its lack of Black members, the H.F.P.A. resolved to clean up its act and diversify its membership. And the 2023 ceremony, hosted by Jerrod Carmichael, managed to attract a respectable guest list. (Though the eventual Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, who accused the former H.F.P.A. head Philip Berk of groping him in 2003, was a notable no-show. Berk denied the accusation.)In June, the H.F.P.A. was formally dissolved when the Golden Globes brand was bought by Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions (which is part of Penske Media, owner of many Hollywood trade publications), and the remaining voting body was further reshuffled. Once an eccentric, cloistered membership of about 85 voters, it has swelled to about 300 even as some of its longest-serving and more problematic voters were expelled. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Said to Be Returning as Oscars Host

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      It will be the late-night comedian’s fourth time as M.C. of the awards ceremony, which won back some viewers last year.Academy Awards organizers have decided to stick with a tried and true host: Jimmy Kimmel.Mr. Kimmel, the late-night comedian who has hosted the event three times, will return to the Oscars stage on March 10 to steer the 96th ceremony, according to two people briefed on the plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose it. Molly McNearney, the co-head writer and an executive producer of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on ABC, will serve as an executive producer for the 96th Oscars telecast.The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not respond to requests for comment.Seeking cultural relevancy for the ceremony following a period of plunging ratings, the academy and ABC, which broadcasts the Oscars, have bounced between formats in recent years. They tried three hosts in 2022 (Wanda Sykes, Regina Hall, Amy Schumer) and zero hosts, from 2019 to 2021. For the 2023 show, the academy returned to one host — Mr. Kimmel, who also did the job in 2017 and 2018.He delivered. Viewership rose to nearly 19 million people this year, according to Nielsen, up from 16.6 million the year before and 10.4 million in 2021, the lowest ever. Before 2018, the telecast had never dropped below 32 million.Just as important for the academy, Mr. Kimmel’s return was free of controversy, helping to restore luster to an event tarnished in 2022 when Will Smith marched onstage and slapped Chris Rock. The academy and ABC also overhauled the red carpet preshow, hiring consultants with experience at the Met Gala to make star arrivals feel less chaotic and more glamorous. The red carpet was vanquished in favor of a champagne-colored one.Hosting the ceremony was once viewed as a feather in the cap of top comedians like Billy Crystal, a nine-time host, and Whoopi Goldberg, who was M.C. four times. But many stars have become leery about the time commitment and potential backlash that hosting can bring. Trash-talking the Oscars — for its stilted banter, for the choices made by voters, for its very existence — has become a hallmark of the social media age.Hollywood’s awards season has been slow to start this time around because of the actors’ strike, which prevented stars from promoting finished work. With the strike resolved, studios and publicists have quickly ramped up awards campaigns, pushing stars like Emma Stone, a front-runner for a best actress nomination for her debauched performance in the surrealist comedic drama “Poor Things,” and films like “American Fiction,” a satire about a writer who puts together a fake memoir that turns on racial stereotypes.Other films expected to prominently figure into the 96th Academy Awards include “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” both of which were runaway successes at the global box office. If they receive as many nominations as people in Hollywood expect, it will help Mr. Kimmel: Viewership for the Oscars tends to increase when popular films are honored. More

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      John Bailey, Oscars President at a Time of Strife, Dies at 81

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      A respected cinematographer, he guided the motion picture academy at the height of the #MeToo movement and dealt with infighting around the Oscar ceremony.John Bailey, an accomplished cinematographer who was president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2017 to 2019, a tumultuous period when Harvey Weinstein was excommunicated from the group and complaints mounted about the Academy Awards ceremony, died on Friday. He was 81.His death was announced by the academy, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.As a cinematographer, Mr. Bailey collaborated frequently with celebrated directors like Paul Schrader and worked on many well-known movies, including “Groundhog Day” (1993) and “The Big Chill” (1983).Before he was chosen to head the academy, he had never held a prominent public role, and he was never nominated for an Oscar himself, though he helped others win the award. In an interview in 2020 with the publication American Cinematographer, Mr. Bailey said he generally tried to make his own work “invisible.”After the academy announced in August 2017 that he would be its next president, The New York Times reported: “Hollywood scratched its head. Who?”It took only two months for Mr. Bailey to find himself in the news. Shortly after The Times and The New Yorker published investigations revealing previously undisclosed allegations of sexual harassment against the producer Harvey Weinstein, the academy voted overwhelmingly to “immediately expel” him. It was only the second known instance of an expulsion from the academy.(The first happened in 2004, when the character actor Carmine Caridi had his membership revoked after he broke rules about lending DVD screeners of contending films. Since then, the comedian and actor Bill Cosby, the director Roman Polanski and the cinematographer Adam Kimmel have also been expelled.)In a letter Mr. Bailey sent to members of the academy days after the vote, he wrote that the organization could not become “an inquisitorial court.” But he also expressed passionate support for the decision.“We are witnessing this venerable motion picture academy reinvent itself before our very eyes,” Mr. Bailey said to a luncheon of Oscar nominees several months later, according to Vanity Fair. “I may be a 75-year-old white male, but I’m every bit as gratified as the youngest of you here that the fossilized bedrock of many of Hollywood’s worst abuses are being jackhammered into oblivion.”In the kind of head-spinning turn of events that became familiar during the height of the #MeToo moment, Mr. Bailey himself became the subject of a sexual harassment accusation only weeks later.Variety reported that the academy had received three harassment complaints about Mr. Bailey. But the academy later announced that it had only one such accusation to look into, and within weeks it determined that there was no merit to the claim.More turmoil for Mr. Bailey’s academy lay ahead. The 2018 Oscars telecast saw a drop-off in ratings that has never been fully reversed. The comedian Kevin Hart was hired to host the 2019 ceremony, then stepped down amid criticism of jokes he had made years earlier about not wanting his son to be gay, leaving that year’s event hostless.Mr. Bailey made the case for two changes to the ceremony designed to maintain viewer interest in a new era: adding a “popular film” category, to include the kind of blockbuster movies that the Oscars otherwise overlook, and holding some award announcements during commercial breaks to shorten the broadcast. The academy encountered such severe blowback to those proposals that it scrapped both of them.In 2019, when term limits compelled Mr. Bailey to step down from his position, The Times described his tenure as “chaotic,” but in hindsight, perhaps none of the scandals of Mr. Bailey’s era rose to the level of Will Smith giving Chris Rock an unscripted slap to the face midbroadcast. (Mr. Smith received a ban of 10 years from the Oscars.)Getting embroiled in culture wars and power struggles was an unexpected career development for Mr. Bailey. He made it his modus operandi, he told American Cinematographer, to avoid “tawdry” films. Describing his youthful aspirations in a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Bailey said, referring to a long-dead French film critic, “I wanted to write — to be the American André Bazin.”Mr. Bailey in 1983 with the director Lawrence Kasdan on the set of “The Big Chill.”Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionJohn Ira Bailey was born on Aug. 10, 1942, in Moberly, Mo. He grew up in Norwalk, a city in Los Angeles County, California. He told American Cinematographer that his father was a machinist who never went to high school.He earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1964, and several years later he earned a graduate degree in cinema from the University of Southern California. He entered that program to pursue film studies, a young cinephile hoping to become a critic, but found himself drawn instead to cinematography.Early in his career, he had small jobs on several enduring films, like being the camera operator on Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven.” The beauty of Néstor Almendros’s cinematography in that movie remained an inspiration for Mr. Bailey.When Mr. Schrader was preparing to shoot “American Gigolo” (1980), he planned to find a European cinematographer. But then, American Cinematographer reported, he was introduced to Mr. Bailey, found himself impressed by Mr. Bailey’s knowledge of foreign film and decided to hire him instead. The two men would go on to work together on five movies.That same year, Mr. Bailey worked with Robert Redford on “Ordinary People,” Mr. Redford’s directorial debut, which won several Oscars, including for best director.In later years Mr. Bailey repeatedly collaborated with the directors Michael Apted (on the 1996 movie “Extreme Measures” and other films) and Ken Kwapis (on films including “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” in 2005 and “He’s Just Not That Into You” in 2009). He also wrote a blog about film for American Cinematographer.His accomplishments at the academy included expanding international membership, which he told The Times helped the South Korean film “Parasite” win the best-picture award in 2020.He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol Littleton, an Oscar-nominated film editor.At the 2018 luncheon for Oscar nominees, Mr. Bailey had some useful advice for winners, The Times reported.“Thank your mom,” he said, “not your personal trainer.” More

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      Jada Pinkett Smith on Will Smith, Chris Rock and Her New Book, ‘Worthy’

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      For decades, Jada Pinkett Smith has been plagued by misconceptions: about the dynamics of her marriage to Will Smith, about her bond with Tupac Shakur and, most recently, about the Slap at last year’s Oscars. But in her revelation-heavy 400-page memoir, “Worthy,” these discordant threads, and others, will be pinned to the ground in no uncertain terms.Even devotees of her hugely popular web series “Red Table Talk” — where she and her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, delved into all manner of personal, social and cultural issues — will realize how little they know of Pinkett Smith. The book, out Tuesday from Dey Street, offered her a chance to provide context for a layered, complex journey that can’t be mined in 45 minutes at the Red Table, she told me in September at the headquarters of Westbrook, the entertainment company she founded with Will Smith in 2019.“How do you captivate people, people who think they already know your story?” said Pinkett Smith, who turned 52 a few days after we sat there sunk into couches, looking out over an atypically drizzly Southern California sky.In the book’s second to last chapter, titled “The Holy Joke, The Holy Slap, and Holy Lessons,” Pinkett Smith chronicles that infamous Oscars night, one of the most surreal of her life — when Smith stunned the world by marching onstage and slapping Chris Rock after Rock made an unscripted joke about Pinkett Smith’s closely cropped hair. She has alopecia, a hair-loss condition, which Rock has said he was unaware of. (It was not his first joke at her expense from the Oscars stage.) After returning to his seat, Smith yelled up to Rock: “Keep my wife’s name out of your [expletive] mouth!” Minutes later, Smith won the best actor Oscar for his role in “King Richard.”She, like millions of TV viewers, scrambled to grasp what had happened. But part of her surprise came from a different place than those who’d tuned into Hollywood’s big night — it was at hearing Smith call her his wife. “Even though we hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time, I said, ‘I’m his wife now. We in this.’ That’s just who I am,” she told me, adding: “That’s the gift I have to offer, like, ‘Hey, I’m riding with you.’”Smith and Rock had decades of disrespect between them, starting in the late 1980s, before either of them knew her, Pinkett Smith points out. “I didn’t judge Chris, I didn’t judge Will,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a spiritual clash.’”“It didn’t have anything to do with Jada,” Banfield Norris told me during a video interview. “That was really Will’s pain.”And he was in tremendous pain, and fragile, Pinkett Smith said. He had recently finished filming “Emancipation,” a hellish Civil War-era drama that was psychologically tormenting for Smith, who plays an enslaved man. (Smith has said that he “got twisted up” in the role, and “lost track of how far I went.”) “I knew in my heart that he needed me by his side more than ever,” Pinkett Smith said.Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith at the Oscars ceremony in 2022. In her book, she writes, “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife.”Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesAs for Rock’s Netflix special earlier this year in which he mocks Smith and Pinkett Smith, she said she isn’t bitter, but she was hurt. “I remember my heart piercing, my heart cracking, and I remember my feelings being so hurt,” she told me. “And then I remember being able to smile and wish him well at the same time.” (Among the many tidbits shared by Pinkett Smith in her book was that Rock had asked her on a date when he thought she and Smith had split. She corrected him, and they shared a laugh, she writes. Rock’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)Pinkett Smith also unpacks the vitriol she received for rolling her eyes at Rock’s joke — a reaction that some suggested spurred Smith to storm the stage — to illustrate how women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife,” she writes. “Blaming the woman is nothing new.”“How is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and culpable at the same time?” she asks. “I had to think about the narrative out there of me as the adulterous wife, who had now driven her husband to madness with the command of one look. I had to take responsibility for my part in aiding that false narrative’s existence. I also had to chuckle at the idea that the world would think I wielded that amount of control over Will Smith. If I had that amount of control over Will, chile, my life would have been entirely different these damn near three decades. Real talk!”By adulterous, Pinkett Smith is referring to her relationship with August Alsina, which she called an “entanglement” on a 2020 episode of “Red Table Talk” where — after the information surfaced, becoming a public spectacle — she and Smith hashed out the already years-old chapter of their lives. The conversation ended with laughter and a fist-bump to their slogan: “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”The truth is the Smiths weren’t together in the traditional sense when she was with Alsina, nor are they now. But they are not in an open marriage, nor are they uncoupled, polyamorous or divorced. They are something else altogether: life partners in family and business, long maintaining an agreement they call “a relationship of transparency.” In recent years, they’ve lived separately. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she bought her own place, moving out of their Calabasas compound.In a way, her new home, also in Calabasas, closes the loop on a dream that started before they dated, when she was renovating an “old-world tiny” farmhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore that sat on an expanse of land that she envisioned filling with rescue dogs and cats, and a horse for her mother. During that time, she’d gotten a phone call from Will Smith, who’d recently split from his first wife. “You seeing anybody?” he’d asked her. “Uhm, no,” she replied. “Good,” he said. “You seeing me now.”Ultimately, it’s family that anchors their union. It’s the reason they married in 1997, while she was pregnant with their son, Jaden. “We wanted to create a family we never had, and we did that. And we enjoy our family,” she said. “For us, our marriage is like a cornerstone of that for now. Who knows in 10 years.”“We’ve tried everything to get away from each other, and we just don’t,” she added, laughing.From left, Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, Trey Smith, Will Smith and Jaden Smith in a family portrait from the early 2000s.via The Jada Pinkett Smith ArchiveShortly after that 2020 episode, Pinkett Smith, in pursuit of “clarity and emotional sobriety,” became what she calls an “urban nun of sorts.” She meditates and reads texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran or the Bible daily, and abstains from sex, alcohol, violent entertainment and unnecessary spending.Pinkett Smith is centered and self-assured, yet being hitched to Smith’s bullet train has made it almost impossible for her trajectory not to be affected by his.“That’s not unique to me,” she stressed. “That’s just a patriarchal construct.” Not to say that it hasn’t irked her, particularly when it’s interfered with her professional identity: Harvey Weinstein, for example, once wouldn’t pursue a project of hers unless Smith attached his name to it, she said. “I’m like, pause, I’ve been doing this before,” she remembered thinking. “That’s when it would bother me. It was like, I’ve been doing stuff before I married this dude.”On that Friday morning last month, Pinkett Smith seemed to be channeling her younger self, when she was a regular at Baltimore clubs like Fantasy and Signals in the 1980s, earning a reputation as a formidable battle dancer — mixing hip-hop and house, the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. With pink hair, Girbaud baggy jeans and fresh white Reebok Princess sneakers, she was “considered tomboy-cute,” she writes. “They didn’t see me coming.” When we met, she was still rocking white Reeboks, though well worn; a hot pink Telfar tracksuit; a cropped blonde pixie and an assortment of earrings framing her makeup-free face. Small in size, with an expansive presence.“Worthy” documents an eventful life, which she recounts chronologically, book-ended by a harrowing story. “This isn’t going to be a fluffy journey,” she wants readers to know. “I’m going to drop you right into one of the darkest moments of my life, and then we’ll backtrack.” In despair after her 40th birthday, in 2011, she began scouting California cliffs that might be suitable to drive off, something higher and steeper than what she’d seen on Mulholland Drive. Somewhere that would appear accidental. She’d tried to adhere to the rules of life but was empty: “Those boxes I’d been checking had not delivered the gifts that had been promised.”“There’s been so much that has gone on in Jada’s life that she kept close to the chest,” Banfield Norris said. “Most people just had no idea what was going on and the pain that she was suffering. I had no idea.”“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that,” Pinkett Smith said. “So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesA conversation with the father of two of Jaden’s friends presented Pinkett Smith with a potential new way to heal. He told her of his life-changing experience on ayahuasca, and she’d soon set out on a four-night trip. The potent psychedelic presented her with a vision of a panther that would lead her deep into the jungles of her mind. At a critical juncture, she was plunged into a pit of sneering snakes who taunted her. “Mother Aya,” she writes, “is showing me all the unloved parts of myself needing light and love.” After that experience, she’d never again contemplate suicide, she writes. Pinkett Smith continues to integrate ayahuasca into her life. About a year after the 2022 Oscars, she held a friends-and-family session — Smith included. “You’ll have to cut off your spirit’s wrist to break free of our Divine handcuffs,” he told her as it wound down.The memoir, Smith said in an email, kind of woke him up. She had lived a life more on the edge than he’d realized, and she is more resilient, clever and compassionate than he’d understood. “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life,” he wrote, “a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”The situation seems ripe for a vulnerability hangover, I suggested to Pinkett Smith.“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that. So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true,” she said.“What people think of me as putting myself out there, I don’t think of it that way,” she added, after some contemplation. “After you’ve had two [9] millimeters to your head, and you survive that, your capacity totally just …” she paused to make an explosion sound.Pinkett Smith writes of a few brushes with death early in her life when, as a teenager in Baltimore, she found success selling drugs, with aspirations to become a “queenpin.” It was a “distorted reality,” she writes.Pinkett Smith eventually moved away from dealing and her hometown. She attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to Hollywood, where she’d become best known as an actress, starring in the “Cosby Show” spinoff “A Different World” (a role Debbie Allen wrote for her) and in movies like “Set It Off,” “Menace II Society” and “Scream 2,” then later “Collateral,” the “Matrix” sequels and “Girls Trip.”The memoir introduces people who populated her world along the way: her grandmother Marion, a world traveler and freethinker who significantly shaped young Jada; her absentee father, Robsol Pinkett, a poet and addict who zigzagged through her life; Banfield Norris, a nurse who had Jada as a teenager and would struggle with heroin addiction; and a bevy of friends, especially Tupac Shakur, whom she met at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Their friendship would be the deepest of her life, and his murder in 1996 was one in a string of sudden losses that would contribute to Pinkett Smith’s depression.She has never talked extensively about her relationship with Shakur before. People have long assumed that it was romantic, but it wasn’t. In “Worthy,” she playfully recollects a time when they’d tried to kiss as teenagers: They’d both recoiled in disgust and dissolved into laughter.A 16-year-old Jada Pinkett, right, with her friends Keesha Bond and Tupac Shakur. “We were both orphans in a certain manner,” she said of Shakur.via The Jada Pinkett Smith Archive“We were both orphans in a certain manner, and we really tried to compensate for that with one another in our relationship and really take care of each other the best we knew how,” she told me, just weeks before an arrest was made in his death. “We just had a deep loyalty.”“Pac’s whole thing was because I knew him when — when he wasn’t Tupac,” she added. “The guy who was poor, the conditions that he lived in. And I was rocking with him anyway.”In “Worthy,” she reveals that he’d proposed to her in a letter while incarcerated at Rikers in the mid-1990s for groping a fan. “Did Pac love me?” she asked. “Yeah he loved me! But I promise you, had we got married, he’d have divorced my ass as soon as he walked through them damn gates and got out.”He just needed someone to do time with him, she said, and Pinkett Smith’s ride-or-die mentality is carved in her bones. It’s the same instinct that kicked in during the Oscars debacle.Threads of loyalty, protection and safety wind their way throughout the memoir, and Pinkett Smith implores readers to learn from her hard-fought lessons. Each chapter ends with what I started to call “guidance pages.” Look inward, she urges, and ask yourself questions like: “Can you recognize patterns in your life and relationships that stem from inherited trauma cycles?” Each of these pages opens with a quote meaningful to Pinkett Smith, whether it be from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” a defining book for her; the poet Ntozake Shange; the psychoanalyst Carl Jung; or the actor Steve Martin.“My biggest hope for the book is that it’ll just be oxygen for people who need it,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in, because it’s intense stuff.”“I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in,” Pinkett Smith said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAs we prepared to say goodbye, the sun broke though, transforming the gray vista below into a California postcard. She was reminded of perhaps the wisest words passed to her, about 15 years ago, from the actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee: “Laugh now, because you are going to laugh later.”“When she said it to me, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about,” Pinkett Smith recalled. “I was like, laugh now? This [expletive] ain’t funny.”But lately, the meaning of those words hits hard. “Ruby was right,” Pinkett Smith said. “A lot of dark times that I can look at and smile at.”“At the end of the day, when you’re on your deathbed — or Chris is on his deathbed or Will is on his deathbed or whoever — all this doesn’t matter,” she said, gesturing to something beyond what was in the room. “And so just learning how to exist in that pocket right now. Not waiting until I’m on my deathbed. Let’s just do it right now.” More

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      ’12 Years a Slave’: An Oral History

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      A decade on, the Oscar-winning portrait of American slavery feels more potent than ever. The filmmakers explain its personal origins and ultimate triumph.“So, what do you want to do next?”The question shadowed the director Steve McQueen’s first tour of Hollywood, in late summer 2008. His debut film, “Hunger,” a mesmerizing and unsettling character study of the Irish revolutionary Bobby Sands, had electrified audiences in Cannes that May and won the prize for best first feature. In rounds of meetings in Los Angeles — McQueen’s first time in the city — executives and producers on studio lots and in restaurants cast themselves as allies-in-waiting, eager to help a visionary new talent mount his second picture.McQueen had thought his follow-up would tackle another formidable historical figure, perhaps the African American singer, actor and activist Paul Robeson, or the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer and political dissident Fela Kuti. But, emerging from the Hollywood meetings, he told his agent that he wanted to make a film about slavery. The decision, he said in a recent interview, had been inspired in part by the meetings themselves — an ineffable look he’d seen on people’s faces when they’d first laid eyes on him.“They didn’t know that I was Black,” said McQueen, who was born outside London to a Trinidadian mother and a Grenadian father. “I think because I had made a movie like ‘Hunger,’ these white guys didn’t think that they would be meeting with a Black person.”To McQueen, the mistaken assumption about his identity — to say nothing of the carelessness of not having bothered to look him up — was evidence of deep and unexamined prejudice. The legacy of slavery had haunted him since childhood; his mother kept a family tree that traced her ancestors back to Ghana. But, in Britain, his education on the subject had included “Roots” and little else. In America, a country with an ample history of anti-Black violence, he sensed a similar strain of mass amnesia.“There was a certain sense of nonresponsibility, like it was something deep in the past,” he said. “I wanted to hold people to account, to say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute — this happened here.’”“12 Years a Slave,” McQueen’s version of a wake-up call, was released 10 years ago this month. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o — in her first feature film role — and written by John Ridley, it was based on the real-life autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped in 1841, enslaved and later escaped. (In the end, it was McQueen’s third film. “Shame,” a frank portrait of sex addiction, came out in 2011.)Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup, in “12 Years a Slave.” The film was based on the 1853 memoir of the real-life Northup, a free Black man who was kidnapped, enslaved and later escaped.Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentA serious, R-rated Black drama with no movie stars in the lead roles that would go on to gross nearly $190 million (most of it abroad) and win three Oscars (including best picture, the first for a film by a Black director), “12 Years” arrived in Hollywood like a U.F.O. landing. Its success paved the way for two other landmarks of Black cinema from the same production company, Plan B — “Selma” (2014) and “Moonlight” (2016) — and dispelled the longstanding myth that “Black films don’t travel,” one year before Disney announced “Black Panther.”The movie’s journey from gut impulse to unstoppable force was possible because of blind faith — that of an in-demand filmmaker impervious to industry dogma, and a coterie of producers who fanned his flame — and the efforts of actors and crafts people who faced the relics of human bondage, an actual lightning strike and the daily broil of New Orleans in July.These are edited excerpts from their stories.STEVE McQUEEN I knew I wanted to make a movie about a free man who got caught up into slavery.DEDE GARDNER, producer We had a subject matter before we had a narrative.JEREMY KLEINER, producer He has a kind of divining rod for taboos and just goes right to them.McQUEEN My wife [the author and filmmaker Bianca Stigter] said, “Why don’t you try to find some material instead of trying to write it?” John Ridley and I did some research and my wife did some research, and she found the book “12 Years a Slave.” When I read it, I said, This is it. This is the piece.GARDNER The urgency of John’s script, and how cinematic it was, was evident. We try to develop a film as far as we can before going to find the financing. Can we get it written? Can we get it cast? The hope is that eventually you cross a line of deniability.McQUEEN I met Brad [Pitt, co-founder of Plan B] and he was very receptive. He didn’t blink.GARDNER He loved the script and wanted to help get it made, which I think we all knew would entail his being in it. [Pitt plays a small but critical role as a Canadian carpenter and opponent of slavery who helps Northup secure his freedom.]Brad Pitt, left, a co-founder of Plan B, the production company behind the film, on set with McQueen. “I met Brad and he was very receptive,” the director said. “He didn’t blink.”Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentMcQUEEN I had wanted to do a film about Fela with Chiwetel and I had him learning to play the saxophone. I remember calling him and saying, “Actually, I want to do this slavery film instead.” [Imitating Ejiofor] “Man, I’ve been practicing for the last three months!”BRAD WESTON, former president of New Regency, co-financer The script was great and the talent was undeniable.With a budget set at $20 million, financed by River Road, Summit Entertainment and New Regency, “12 Years” began filming in New Orleans on June 27, 2012. Shooting took place on four former plantations outside the city, not far from where the real Solomon Northup had been held captive. On the first day, the temperature hit 108 degrees.SEAN BOBBITT, cinematographer How hot does hot get?McQUEEN Horses were collapsing in the fields next door to us.ADAM STOCKHAUSEN, production designer It was a battle between wanting to take off as much clothing as possible and not wanting to be eaten alive by mosquitoes.McQUEEN It was brutal, but you realize how people had to live in those conditions.BOBBITT It was very important to Steve that it look real and that it be real. We talked a lot about simplicity and truth, about not having any frippery. The book is very straightforward and honest.STOCKHAUSEN There were terrible storms. One of our sets in the wharf [where a ship carrying Northup arrives in New Orleans] blew down two weeks before we were set to shoot.BOBBITT There was one day when a lightning bolt struck the edge of the ship set and blew out all of our electronics and sound. Everyone — maybe 100 extras and the key actors — hit the ground, screamed and ran away. Luckily, no one was injured, but the E.M.T.s rushed in and checked everyone out.Among the most challenging shoots was a much-discussed scene in which Patsey, an enslaved woman played by Nyong’o, is whipped by the volatile plantation owner Edwin Epps (Fassbender). It unfolds in a single, swirling four-minute shot.BOBBITT It was three or four takes, with one camera. We never used the word “coverage.” It’s anathema to filmmaking — anyone can go out and do 20 shots on each scene, give it to a very good editor, and you’ll get a movie. Will you get a great movie? From my point of view, it’s unlikely.A serious, R-rated Black drama with no movie stars in the lead roles, “12 Years” grossed nearly $190 million and won three Oscars, including best picture.Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentMcQUEEN We did a lot of rehearsal and [Nyong’o, Ejiofor and Fassbender] were incredible. Lupita made everyone raise their game. You could put her in a dustbin bag and she would work it out. [Representatives for the actors declined to make them available for this story because of restrictions around interviews during the actors’ strike.]BOBBITT It was emotionally draining for everyone, but the idea was not to give the audience the chance to look away, to drive home the true horror of what was perpetrated on the slaves for 200 years.McQUEEN We couldn’t shy away from it, we had to go to very dark places. But in the evenings, we would all come together, we would hug each other, we would eat together, we would get drunk together, and then we would come back the next day. It was beautiful.The film had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on Aug. 30, 2013. It received a rapturous standing ovation and was instantly hailed as an Oscar contender. But an obstacle came into focus a week later, during a news conference at the Toronto International Film Festival, when a white, visibly uncomfortable moderator repeatedly emphasized how “harrowing,” “brutal” and “tricky” it was.McQUEEN We had a little bit of a … not very good press conference in Toronto. I thought the questions were a bit silly. My response wasn’t great.PAULA WOODS, McQueen’s publicist He was a bit taken aback after having such a great premiere. It fed into this whole “Is it too difficult to watch?” conversation that we were all annoyed by.HANS ZIMMER, composer It was full of injustice, but it was full of human dignity, as well.McQUEEN Cameron Bailey [then the artistic director of the Toronto festival] took me to one side and said, “You know, this movie’s more important than you.” I had to put my emotions aside and get on with the job of promoting the movie.WOODS Before #OscarsSoWhite, people would write things that would never get written today. It’s part of the greater problem of systemic racism. I remember we were in New Orleans visiting one of the plantations with a journalist, and a man who was working there sidled up to me — with one eye on Steve — and said, “You know, it wasn’t nearly as bad as they say it was.”“It was emotionally draining for everyone,” said Sean Bobbitt, the cinematographer, “but the idea was not to give the audience the chance to look away.”Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures, via River Road EntertainmentNANCY UTLEY, former co-chairman of the distributor Fox Searchlight It was challenging, but that’s part of what we thought made it special — that it was willing to take you places that are difficult to go.STEVE GILULA, former co-chairman of Fox Searchlight We had a two-pronged approach with the campaign: One was the festivals, and the other was African American opinion makers.UTLEY We did screenings with Skip [Henry Louis] Gates Jr., the Equal Justice Initiative, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Museum of Tolerance.GILULA We didn’t want it to be pigeonholed as an art film. When we opened, it performed very well at African American theaters.After winning top prizes at the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, “12 Years a Slave” entered Oscar night, on March 2, 2014, with nine nominations, close behind Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” and David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” with 10 each. The best picture race was widely considered a tossup.McQUEEN I came with my mother and sister, and when we got out on the red carpet they just burst into tears.WESTON We knew that we were in the conversation in a real way, but you don’t let yourself go further than that. You never know.KLEINER There’s an old mythology that films that are a little tougher might not be to the academy’s taste. “Ordinary People” over “Raging Bull.”Nyong’o and Ridley were early winners in the best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay categories. But, late in the night, best director went to Cuarón.UTLEY That’s when your heart goes in your stomach, because often director and picture are paired.McQUEEN Will Smith [presenting best picture] looked directly at me and said, “12 Years a Slave.” It was amazing. I slapped it out of the presenter’s hand, gave my speech and jumped as high as I could.UTLEY It was a calling card for a lot of the talent in the movie, and for us, as well. Everyone got to make more stuff.KLEINER It felt significant that when people now think about how this industry has represented that period — “Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind” — they might also think of “12 Years a Slave.”BOBBITT There are states in America where that film would be banned from schools today, but it’s there, and it will always be there.McQUEEN We made history. At that point, there was no going back. More

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      Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home

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      The plaque that McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award, bequeathed to Howard University has been missing for about 50 years. Now a replacement is on its way.After becoming the first Black person to win an Academy Award, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel called the plaque she received a cherished beacon for all that could be accomplished.McDaniel had earned the award for her portrayal of Mammy, an agreeable slave at the whim of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” a movie that arrived as a cinematic triumph but has since been rebuked for its blind eye toward slavery.Before dying in 1952, McDaniel deflected the criticism she received for taking many stereotypical roles throughout her career.“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” she would say, envisioning that her work would open better doors for future Black actors. She also had an eternal resting spot in mind for that beacon, bequeathing the Oscar plaque to Howard University in Washington.But for about 50 years, McDaniel’s plaque has been missing, a cinematic void that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now filling. The university will receive a replacement plaque this weekend in a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.”“It’s 100 percent overdue,” said Jill Watts, the author of “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.” “It was so meaningful historically as an award. Not just in the history of film, but also within American history and it was meaningful to her personally. She would be absolutely delighted to know that it’s going home to where she wanted it to be.”Kevin Goff, McDaniel’s great-grandnephew, said that his father started petitioning for a replacement plaque in the 1990s, and that the decision would help cement McDaniel’s legacy.Over the years, theories have circulated about the whereabouts of the plaque, which was given to all supporting acting winners from 1936 to 1942 rather than traditional Oscar statues. A spokesman for Howard University did not respond to a request for comment.Goff said there were rumors that the plaque was stolen during student unrest about the university’s mission in the late 1960s.“Apparently, a gentleman said he had thrown it in the Potomac,” he said. “Someone said maybe a drama professor took it with him. But none of it has been verified or proven. It’s never shown up on eBay. So, here we are 50-plus years later and no one has a clue where it is or if it still does exist.”W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, wrote a paper about the missing award more than a decade ago. Her best guess is that it may still be somewhere at Howard, misplaced during a move by the drama department.“That makes sense to me, having worked at a university, that when they moved the department, it got packed and it got lost,” Watts said. “I have this feeling that it’s probably still someplace, tucked away in a box.”Watts said she and several others approached the Academy about replacing the Oscar following her book’s publication in 2005. “We were told no,” Watts said. “Just a flat no.”That stance has shifted. The replacement plaque will soon reside at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.Jacqueline Stewart, the president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy, said in a news release that the upcoming ceremony would celebrate McDaniel’s remarkable craft and historic win.“Hattie McDaniel,” they said, “was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her.” More

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      What Would Strikes Do to Oscar Season?

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      The delay of some big titles, like “Dune: Part Two,” has ramifications for coming releases like “May December” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.”Three years after the pandemic forced the majority of Oscar season to take place on Zoom, Hollywood may be facing another circumscribed awards circuit.Dual strikes by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America have already had a significant effect on this year’s movie calendar: Studios have opted to push several big theatrical releases like “Dune: Part Two” to 2024, since SAG-AFTRA is prohibiting its members from promoting major-studio films amid the walkout. That same ban could radically reshape the Oscar season landscape, since awards shows and the media-blitz ecosystem built around them depend on star wattage to survive. (The strikes have already prompted the Emmys to move from September to January, and other ceremonies could be delayed, too.)So what will the season look like if the strikes continue into late fall or winter? Expect these four predictions to come to pass.Streamers will be at a major advantage.The post-pandemic theatrical landscape is already difficult enough for prestige titles: Last year, best-picture nominees “The Fabelmans,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Tár” and “Women Talking” all struggled to break out at the box office. Subtract the months of press that the stars of contending films are called upon to do, and the financial forecast for specialty films grows even more dire. If striking actors aren’t available to promote this season’s year-end titles, many studios will think twice about releasing them.Streamers don’t have the same problem, since they worry more about clicks than box office numbers. So far, Netflix, Apple and Amazon have been proceeding full speed ahead with their awards-season slates: Though the actors in streaming films like “Nyad” (with Annette Bening as the long-distance swimmer); “Saltburn” (a thriller about obsession); and “Killers of the Flower Moon” (a historical drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio) may not be free to do much press, there’s ultimately no more effective advertisement for a streamer than simply throwing big pictures of a movie star on the app’s home page.Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Because of the strike, they can’t promote the film.Apple TV+, via Associated PressDirectors are the new stars.The monthslong awards circuit can raise a filmmaker’s profile considerably: Near the end of their seasons, auteurs like Bong Joon Ho (“Parasite”) and Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) were as recognizable as movie stars, and often just as mobbed at awards shows. Still, if the actors strike continues for several more months, studios will need to rely even more on their directors, since they may be the sole representatives of their films who are available for big profiles, audience Q. and A.s and ceremonies.Well-established auteurs like Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”) will be at a particular advantage here, as will new-school academy favorites like Greta Gerwig (“Barbie”) and Emerald Fennell (“Saltburn”). The latter two have a significant side hustle as actors, which may prove appealing in a season that will lack thespian faces, though their fellow actor-turned-director Bradley Cooper will be in a bit of a bind: How can he promote “Maestro,” his forthcoming Leonard Bernstein movie, if he also stars in it?‘Barbenheimer’ could rule again.The dual release of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” proved to be the cinematic event of the summer, as Gerwig’s doll comedy broke box-office records and Nolan’s biopic defied the doldrums that have recently plagued prestige dramas. Both films were already poised to be major awards contenders, but the decimation of the year-end theatrical calendar will only reinforce their dominance.For old-school voters who still prefer to support theatrical releases instead of streaming films, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” might as well be running unopposed. The punt of “Dune: Part Two” to 2024 will only further help those two films’ awards cases, as the craft categories where the first “Dune” dominated — like production design, sound, editing and visual effects — are now decidedly up for grabs.“Barbie” may have an advantage with Oscar voters who prefer to support films released in theaters.Warner Bros.Up-and-coming actors may miss out on breakthroughs.Awards season can sometimes feel like a glamorous grind, requiring stars to commit to months of near-constant interviews, actor round tables, audience Q. and A.s, and hotel-ballroom hobnobs. Still, the season is invaluable when it comes to raising an actor’s profile. Up-and-comers become A-listers through their sheer ubiquity, and some of this season’s rising stars will miss out on the career glow-up that’s possible from a prolonged awards press tour: I’m thinking of people like “May December” actor Charles Melton, who nearly steals the movie from its leading ladies, Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (who play an actress and a Mary Kay Letourneau-like teacher, respectively).Though it would be a fine line to walk, it’s possible that some of the smaller studios may seek interim agreements with SAG-AFTRA that would allow actors to do Oscar-season press. For example, A24 has secured interim agreements with SAG-AFTRA to continue shooting films since it is not among the studios the guilds are striking against. Could the company secure a similar carve-out that would allow the cast of its summer hit “Past Lives” to become awards-show fixtures? If the strikes continue and no such arrangements are possible, Oscar voters may be forced into an unprecedented position: Without all the usual noise that surrounds an awards contender, they’ll simply have to decide whether to nominate a performance based on its merit alone. What a concept! More

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      Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter, Dies at 90

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      He was a struggling writer when he won an Academy Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He won another for “Melvin and Howard.”Bo Goldman, one of Hollywood’s most admired screenwriters, who took home Oscars for his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “Melvin and Howard” (1980), died on Tuesday in Helendale, Calif. He was 90.A son-in-law, the director Todd Field, confirmed the death. He did not specify a cause.Mr. Goldman was struggling to make a living as a writer until the director Milos Forman saw the script he had written for a project called “Shoot the Moon” — his first screenplay — and, impressed, invited him to take a crack at adapting Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” for the screen.The resulting movie, which starred Jack Nicholson as a rebellious new patient who disrupts a psychiatric ward, came out in 1975 and was a career maker. Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, who shared screenwriting credit, won the Oscar for best screenplay adapted from other material; the movie was also named best picture and earned Oscars for Mr. Forman, Mr. Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, who played the fierce Nurse Ratched.“Even then I hung my head,” Mr. Goldman wrote in a 1981 essay for The New York Times about the insecurities of a writer’s life. “After all, I had adapted somebody else’s work; was it really mine?”It may not have helped that Mr. Kesey denounced the adaptation.If that doubt had nagged him, it had certainly been dispelled when his original screenplay for “Melvin and Howard” (1980) won him his second Oscar, this time for best screenplay written directly for the screen. That movie was based on the story of Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who claimed that Howard Hughes, in a handwritten will, had left him a share of his vast fortune.Vincent Canby, writing in The Times, called it “a satiric expression of the American Dream in the closing years of the 20th century.” The New York Film Critics Circle named it the best movie of the year and gave Mr. Goldman its best-screenplay award.Mr. Goldman’s screenplay for “Melvin and Howard,” with Jason Robards, left, as Howard Hughes, and Paul Le Mat as Melvin Dummar, earned him his second Oscar.UniversalMr. Goldman worked with the director Martin Brest on two films, “Scent of a Woman” (1992) and “Meet Joe Black” (1998).“People call him the screenwriter’s screenwriter,” Mr. Brest said in a phone interview. “I called him the man with the X-ray ears, because he had a pitch-perfect recall of the nuances of a comment that someone made to someone 50 years prior — he could reproduce the tone, and the reason he remembered it is because the tone told the whole story.”Mr. Goldman would draw on those memories to shape characters, as he did for “Scent of a Woman,” the story of a blind retired Army officer and the prep-school student hired to take care of him, for which he received another Oscar nomination. Al Pacino played the blind man; Mr. Goldman told The Times that he borrowed aspects of his father, one of his brothers and his Army first sergeant in writing the part.Mr. Brest said that Mr. Goldman was an adept collaborator, not only with other screenwriters but also with directors and others involved in the moviemaking process.“He thought of himself as a filmmaker rather than a writer,” he said. “He was part of the creation of a film.”Mr. Brest recalled that for “Scent of a Woman,” which was based on an Italian movie, “Profumo di Donna,” he and Mr. Goldman began by just having long, meandering chats.“Finally I said to him, ‘We’ve been talking for two weeks and having the greatest time, but shouldn’t we get to work?’” Mr. Brest recalled. “And he said that Mike Nichols told him, ‘The digressions are the work, or part of the work.’”Sure enough, much of what they had talked about — childhood memories, people they’d known — ended up being reflected in the script.“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” won the Academy Award for best picture, and Jack Nicholson was named best actor. Its other Oscars included one for Mr. Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, for best screenplay adapted from other material.United ArtistsRobert Spencer Goldman was born on Sept. 10, 1932, in New York City. His mother, Lillian (Levy) Goldman, was a millinery model, and his father, Julian, operated Julian Goldman Stores, a clothing chain that had 42 stores in 11 states at one point but was derailed by the Depression. Four months before Mr. Goldman was born, the company filed for bankruptcy.“I was the son of this kind of displaced merchant prince,” Mr. Goldman told The Times in 1993.Though the family fell on hard times, Mr. Goldman was able to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and then Princeton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953.At Princeton, he participated in shows of the Princeton Triangle Club, a college theater troupe. “I learned how to write there,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Writers Guild Foundation.While writing for the college newspaper as Bob Goldman, a typesetter accidentally left off the second “b” in his name. Mr. Goldman liked it and later legally changed his name to Bo.After three years in the Army — he was stationed in the Marshall Islands, where tests of nuclear bombs were being conducted — he became an assistant to Jule Styne, the composer. He also wrote introductory patter and other tidbits for live television programs.He aspired to a playwriting career and earned a Broadway credit in 1959 as one of the lyricists for “First Impressions,” a musical based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” that Mr. Styne’s company produced. The show had a starry cast that included Farley Granger, Polly Bergen and Hermione Gingold, but it lasted only 92 performances.Mr. Goldman continued working in television, including as a script editor and associate producer on the anthology series “Playhouse 90.” But success as a writer proved elusive.He had married Mabel Rathbun Ashforth in 1954, and they eventually had six children. He credited her with keeping the family afloat in the lean years by opening a nursery school in their home and then running a food store called Loaves and Fishes in Sagaponack, N.Y., on Long Island.He said that in this period — the late 1960s and early ’70s — he saw families of his contemporaries falling apart and was moved to write his first screenplay, “Shoot the Moon,” about a marriage in crisis because of the husband’s affair. It won many admirers — including Mr. Forman — but no producers wanted to make it because, Mr. Goldman often said, the story struck too close to home for them.After his success with “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Rose” (1979) and “Melvin and Howard,” however, “Shoot the Moon” finally did get made, by the director Alan Parker in 1982. Diane Keaton and Albert Finney, as the struggling couple, were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards.Mr. Goldman’s other screenwriting credits include “The Flamingo Kid” (1984), “Little Nikita” (1988) and “City Hall” (1996).In 2017, when New York magazine asked working screenwriters to discuss the best screenwriters of all time, Eric Roth (“Forrest Gump”) singled out Mr. Goldman’s “audacious originality, his understanding of social mores, his ironic sense of humor, and his outright anger at being human, and all with his soft-spoken grace and eloquent simplicity.”Mr. Goldman lived in Rockport, Maine. His wife died in 2017. A son, Jesse, died in 1981. He is survived by another son, Justin Ashforth; four daughters, Mia Goldman, Amy Goldman, Diana Rathbun and Serena Rathbun; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.Mr. Brest said Mr. Goldman was able to create memorable characters through small details.“His remembrance of nuances, things that people don’t know they’re revealing but that reveal volumes — that was his art form,” he said.He also said he has often repeated something Mr. Goldman once told him: “Your life,” Mr. Goldman said, “is what’s not in the obituary.” More