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      Inside the Oscars’ Best-Actress Battle Royale

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      Forget the men: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Clockwise from top left, Margot Robbie in “Babylon”; Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”; Cate Blanchett in “Tár”; Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans”; and Viola Davis in “The Woman King.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures; A24; Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures; Focus Features; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures, via Amblin Entertainment; Sony PicturesBy their very nature, awards shows are designed to exclude, barring all but a few from the glory of earning a nomination.Still, this year’s race for the best-actress Oscar is so stacked with contenders that I’m ready to comb the academy bylaws for a workaround. Are five slots really enough to honor a field this formidable? Couldn’t we swipe a few more from the wan best-actor category, at least?The truth is, even 10 slots would barely scratch the surface of what the best-actress race has to offer. Many of the season’s most acclaimed films, like “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have given career-best signature roles to their leading ladies, though only one woman can collect the Oscar. Meanwhile, a vast array of up-and-comers, actresses playing against type and underdogs worth a second look will be vying simply to make the final five. Here are the women contending in this season’s most exciting category.The Front-runnersIn the fictional world of “Tár,” the conniving conductor played by Cate Blanchett has been showered with an absurd amount of awards. By the end of this season, Blanchett herself may keep pace with her character.The two-time Oscar winner’s bravura performance — she learned German, orchestra conducting and piano for the role — has netted the most notable prizes so far: In addition to nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards, Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival and a pair of leading trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The last time Blanchett triumphed with the critics groups on both coasts, she was well on her way to winning her second Oscar, for “Blue Jasmine.”If she wins her third, the 53-year-old would be the youngest woman ever to reach that milestone. (Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and Ingrid Bergman are the only other actresses to have won three Oscars each for their performances, while Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four.) But those laurels could also count against Blanchett in a race where her strongest competitor has never even been nominated and is angling for a historic win.Michelle Yeoh came close to snagging a supporting-actress nomination for “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), but this time, she’s undeniable: The 60-year-old’s leading role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” as an ordinary woman who becomes the multiverse’s last hope, should earn Yeoh her first Oscar nod.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.The role shows off everything Yeoh is capable of — including her athleticism, precise character work and sense of humor — and she has teared up in interviews while discussing how rarely a movie like that is offered to an Asian actress. In a recent awards round table, Yeoh told the other actresses, “I honestly look at all of you with such envy because you get an opportunity to try all the different roles, but we only get that opportunity maybe once in a long, long time.” Indeed, no Asian woman has ever won best actress, and after 94 ceremonies, the only winner of color in the category remains Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”Can Yeoh pull off a landmark victory? It may help that she has a more sympathetic character arc: While Blanchett’s Lydia Tár compels and confounds in equal measure, Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang learns to drop her guard and let love in. But the competition in this category is fierce, and Blanchett isn’t the only heavyweight she’ll be contending with.For playing a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans,” Michelle Williams is likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination, which puts her behind Glenn Close and Amy Adams as the three living actresses who’ve been nominated the most times without having won. That gives Williams a potent “she’s due” narrative that could siphon votes from both Blanchett and Yeoh; it helps, too, that she gives her all to the part, playing a vivacious woman whose spirit couldn’t be contained by her marriage.The “Till” star Danielle Deadwyler won the first lead-performance trophy of the season at last month’s Gotham Awards, and she’ll need that momentum to overcome striking snubs from the Independent Spirits and Golden Globes. Still, her emotionally precise performance as the mother of Emmett Till has Oscar-friendly heft, since voters often gravitate toward an actor playing a historical figure.It’s rarer that Oscar voters make room for an action heroine in the best-actress category: Though Sigourney Weaver earned a nomination for “Aliens,” Charlize Theron found no traction for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But there’s more to what Viola Davis does in “The Woman King” than just wielding a spear. Her fierce warrior is weary and her battle yells pack a cathartic punch. If the movie can make it into the best-picture lineup, Davis should be swept in.Damien Chazelle’s debauched Hollywood dramedy “Babylon” has earned wildly mixed reviews, but the director helmed two Oscar-winning performances — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash” — and that pedigree has pushed Margot Robbie into contention for her role as a fledgling actress convinced of her own star quality. Nominations for “I, Tonya” and “Bombshell” prove that voters like Robbie in ambitious-striver mode, though the movie is stuffed so full of characters that she can’t quite dominate the proceedings like some of her best-actress competition.Oscar voters might consider an ingénue like Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” NetflixThe Women Waiting in the WingsCan two Oscar favorites overcome muted streaming launches in a year when theatrical contenders reign supreme? “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” hands Emma Thompson a sexually frank showcase role that had Oscar pundits buzzing at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the film’s quiet June debut on Hulu drew fewer headlines. And despite a best-picture win this year for “CODA,” Apple TV+ still struggles to get all those “Ted Lasso” and “Severance” viewers to watch exclusive movies like “Causeway,” though the film features a strong, back-to-basics lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence.At least “Blonde” managed a streaming debut that got people talking, though the punishing Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe had some awfully loud detractors. Can its star, Ana de Armas, rise above those pans? She managed a Golden Globe nomination, at least, and Oscar voters love to single out a rising ingénue, but the film will prove a tough sit in a year with plenty of better-received options.In the first hour of “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman plays a movie-theater worker who opens herself up to an appealing romance, but in the second, the character goes off her meds and the movie goes off the rails. Even if those two halves don’t quite cohere, Colman definitely gets some big moments to play, and the actress has so quickly become an Oscar mainstay (over the last four years, she has been nominated three times and won once) that she should be considered a perennial option for the final five.Rooney Mara is spirited and sensitive in “Women Talking,” but the studio’s decision to campaign her as a lead actress is tenuous: In this ensemble drama about conflicted Mennonite women, Mara has scarcely more screen time than Claire Foy or Jessie Buckley, who are being positioned as supporting-actress contenders. Then again, Mara is no stranger to category high jinks: Six years ago, she was nominated as a supporting actress for “Carol,” even though she was clearly playing that film’s protagonist.Keke Palmer won a New York Film Critics Circle award for supporting actress for “Nope” even if it really was a lead performance. Universal PicturesThe Dark-Horse ContendersIf social media memes could be counted as accolades, Mia Goth would surely give Blanchett’s haul a run for her money: The young actress’s work in “Pearl,” in which she plays a farm girl who’d kill for stardom, has Twitter awash in Goth GIFs. Ti West’s technicolor horror drama isn’t the sort of thing that Oscar voters usually go for, but Goth is fearsomely committed, knocking out a tour de force, eight-minute monologue that’s topped only by a sustained closing shot of the actress smiling until she cries. At the very least, it’d make for one memorable Oscar clip.I hope that as the membership of the academy grows ever more international, more powerhouse performances will be recognized in languages other than English. In Park Chan-wook’s South Korean noir “Decision to Leave,” Tang Wei is a terrific femme fatale, while Léa Seydoux delivers her finest work as a single mother in the French drama “One Fine Morning.” And Oscar voters who regret snubbing Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” could make it up to her by checking out the royal drama “Corsage,” in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria with beguiling irreverence.Comedic actresses are too often undervalued by Oscar voters, but Aubrey Plaza spent 2022 proving she was capable of much more: Fans of her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus” should check out her dark, edgy work in the drama “Emily the Criminal,” which earned nominations from the Gothams and Indie Spirits. And “Nope,” which topped our critic A.O. Scott’s list of the best films of the year, boasts a charismatic star turn by Keke Palmer that recently earned a win from the New York Film Critics Circle, even if the group had to pretend she gave a supporting performance to get her out of the way of Blanchett’s leading win. Normally, I’d discourage that kind of category fraud, but in this crowded year, I sympathize with the desire to bend some rules. More

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      ‘The Fabelmans’ Is Judd Hirsch’s Latest Great Story

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      The veteran actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in Steven Spielberg’s drama. It’s the latest chapter in a long career full of anecdotes.“Have we met before?” Judd Hirsch asked enthusiastically as he strode into a French bistro last month. “I’ve met everybody before. Maybe we met when you were a baby and I said, ‘I’ll see you when you’re older.’”When you invite Hirsch, the veteran actor and raconteur, on a lunch date, you’re going to hear stories on top of stories — stories you knew you wanted and stories you didn’t know you were going to get.The instant he took his seat, Hirsch spun a tale about the afternoon’s dining spot, Boucherie West Village, whose building once housed the Off Broadway theater where he co-starred in the original 1979 production of “Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson.As the actor told it, an agent affiliated with the play wanted to replace Hirsch because his role in the hit sitcom “Taxi” was going to conflict with a planned Broadway transfer for “Talley’s Folly.”Instead, Hirsch helped bring the play to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where he performed it that summer and fall during his downtime from “Taxi.” The following winter, Hirsch said proudly, “I came back and did it on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.”Riding on similar waves of showbiz know-how and sheer bravado, Hirsch can currently be seen barnstorming his way through a crucial portion of “The Fabelmans,” the director Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama.Hirsch has only a few minutes of screen time, playing Boris, the cantankerous great-uncle of its adolescent protagonist, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). But the 87-year-old actor makes every frame count as he delivers a galvanic speech to the young Spielberg stand-in, exhorting him to commit to his artistic aspirations while warning that they will be in perpetual conflict with the needs of his family.Hirsch opposite Gabriel LaBelle in “The Fabelmans.” He’s not on the screen for long but he makes every frame count.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressHirsch’s unexpectedly intense performance in “The Fabelmans” — the latest in a decades-long career spanning stage, screen and a 1972 commercial for JCPenney polyester slacks — would seem to be a testament to his endurance in a singularly fickle industry.But while he is happy for the plum opportunity in a prestigious year-end film, Hirsch could not quite point to any particular reason he should be enjoying another moment in the spotlight right now.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“I have no idea why I get any part that somebody else can play,” he said. “Or why I don’t get one when I do want to play it. But I’m old enough to know that’s OK.”Approval is always nice, but Hirsch suggested that an actor’s temperament was forged in far more frequent instances of rejection. When you don’t land a role, he explained, “you can say, ‘What the hell did they see in me that made them turn me down?’ Or you can say, ‘They don’t know what the hell they’re missing.’”Though he’s long split his time between Los Angeles and New York, Hirsch was born and raised in New York, and didn’t expect much for himself after studying acting at HB Studio in the early 1960s. “I never thought I’d play anything more than a construction worker, criminal or some schlubby guy,” he said.Instead he went on to play a variety of prominent roles on television (“Taxi,” “Dear John,” “Numbers”), in film (“Ordinary People,” “Independence Day,” “Uncut Gems”) and onstage (“I’m Not Rappaport”).Presently, when Hirsch wasn’t kibitzing playfully with a waiter (“You don’t mind if I don’t speak French?” the actor said, looking over his menu. “I could say some of those words with a French accent”), he was just as fond of sharing anecdotes from an era when he wasn’t well established.There was, for instance, the fateful introduction he received while visiting Universal to audition for a TV movie in the early 1970s.Hirsch has been an awards contender before. He was up for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for work he did in 1980, and didn’t win any of the prizes.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesA woman working there began to show him around to other people in the office: “This is so-and-so,” Hirsch recounted. “And this is so-and-so. This is Mr. Spielberg, and he’s sitting behind a desk, and on his desk is ‘Jaws,’ which I had no idea was anything. And she said” — his voice dropped to a stage whisper — “‘He’s going to be very big.’”“He would not have known of me,” Hirsch said of the fleeting encounter. “Look at all the Spielberg movies since — and I’m not in any of them.”But their trajectories intersected again a half-century later on “The Fabelmans.” The dramatist Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), who wrote the screenplay with Spielberg, said that the Boris character was based on an actual member of the director’s extended family.The real-life Uncle Boris “had worked in some animal handling in the early days of Hollywood and he had been in the circus,” said Kushner, who has collaborated with Spielberg on “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story.” Kushner added that the actual Boris “had lived a wild, itinerant life, and that had made him a fearsome figure to his sister, and to his nieces and nephews.”The scene written for the fictional Boris was intended to impart a lesson about the cost of pursuing an artistic life, Kushner said: “Art has a power that one only imagines one controls. When you access it, if you’re really practicing it, it’s going to take you to the truth. And the truth is sometimes going to be very dangerous.”Hirsch, who was cast after a video conversation with Spielberg, said his preparation was far less weighty.“He said you can play it with an accent or not,” Hirsch recalled. “After I read it, I said, what schmuck would not? He’s going to have to like it this way because I’m not going to do it any other way.”Hirsch said he could channel the frantic passion of the film’s Boris, who feels frustrated that his message is not reaching young Sammy. But the actor said there was only one moment he was “truly scared to do,” when the scene required him to get physical with LaBelle.“I line the kid up against the wall and I say, ‘Look at me — look at me,’” Hirsch said. “After all that, I want him to see what I had to go through.”LaBelle said he encouraged Hirsch to “beat the [expletive] out of me.”“The moment where he pinches my face, I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me. Come on, let’s do it,’” LaBelle recalled.He added, “It’s not like I’m hanging on the side of a plane. I’m just getting my face pinched.”Whether his “Fabelmans” performance garners any attention for a year-end film award, Hirsch noted that he had been down this road before.Hirsch said the only “Fabelmans” scene that gave him pause was one requiring him to get physical with LaBelle. But the younger actor wasn’t fazed. “I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me,’” LaBelle said.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesHe pointed out that for work he did in 1980 alone, he was nominated for an Oscar (for “Ordinary People”), an Emmy (“Taxi”) and a Tony (“Talley’s Folly”) — and won none of them. Though Hirsch didn’t mention this, he did go on to win Emmys for “Taxi” in 1981 and 1983.Hirsch said he was actually relieved he didn’t win for “Ordinary People,” in which he played a psychiatrist treating a traumatized teenager (Timothy Hutton). Both men were nominated as supporting actors, and Hirsch suggested that Hutton — who ultimately won — was more deserving of the honor.“I said, what’s the worst thing that could happen to me?” Hirsch explained. “I win this damn thing and then have to look at him and make excuse, excuse, excuse — ‘They made a terrible mistake, it should have been you.’”After a server asked him if he would like some black coffee (“That’s the usual color, isn’t it?” Hirsch replied without missing a beat), the actor resumed delving into his trove of stories from projects that did not earn him any trophies or recognition.He spoke of his performance in the 1978 drama “King of the Gypsies,” in which his character is shot by Eric Roberts and falls out an apartment window to his death.“So I said who’s going to do that?” Hirsch recalled. “They said, ‘You.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I arrive at the set and there’s one of those enormous air mattresses in the street.”Hirsch said he filmed three takes of his fatal fall, but while the finished sequence in the movie shows him taking gunfire and toppling out the window, the part where his character lands on a car was performed by a stuntman.“Luckily I didn’t have to hit a car,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I would not be talking here.” More

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      Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences

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      The kind of critically praised dramas that often dominate the awards season are falling flat at the box office, failing to justify the money it takes to make them.A year ago, Hollywood watched in despair as Oscar-oriented films like “Licorice Pizza” and “Nightmare Alley” flatlined at the box office. The day seemed to have finally arrived when prestige films were no longer viable in theaters and streaming had forever altered cinema.But studios held out hope, deciding that November 2022 would give a more accurate reading of the marketplace. By then, the coronavirus would not be such a complicating factor. This fall would be a “last stand,” as some put it, a chance to show that more than superheroes and sequels could succeed.It has been carnage.One after another, films for grown-ups have failed to find an audience big enough to justify their cost. “Armageddon Time” cost roughly $30 million to make and market and collected $1.9 million at the North American box office. “Tár” cost at least $35 million, including marketing; ticket sales total $5.3 million. Universal spent around $55 million to make and market “She Said,” which also took in $5.3 million. “Devotion” cost well over $100 million and has generated $14 million in ticket sales.Even a charmer from the box office king, Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a humdrum start. “The Fabelmans,” based on Mr. Spielberg’s adolescence, has collected $5.7 million in four weeks of limited play. Its budget was $40 million, not including marketing.What is going on?The problem is not quality: Reviews have been exceptional. Rather, “people have grown comfortable watching these movies at home,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers.“The Fabelmans,” directed by Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a slow start at the box office.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentEver since Oscar-oriented films began showing up on streaming services in the late 2010s, Hollywood has worried that such movies would someday vanish from multiplexes. The diminishing importance of big screens was accentuated in March, when, for the first time, a streaming film, “CODA” from Apple TV+, won the Academy Award for best picture. ‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.The Song of the Fall?: A 120-year-old symphony by the composer Gustav Mahler is finding new life with unlikely listeners after a star turn in the film.This is about more than money: Hollywood sees the shift as an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them, as if it were 1940. But that delusion is hard to sustain when their lone measuring stick — bodies in seats — reveals that the masses can’t be bothered to come watch the films that they prize most. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy.Sure, a core crowd of cinephiles is still turning out. “Till,” focused on Mamie Till-Mobley, whose son, Emmett Till, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, has collected $8.9 million in the United States and Canada. That’s not nothing for an emotionally challenging film. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a dark comedy with heavily accented dialogue, has also brought in $8 million, with overseas ticket buyers contributing an additional $20 million.“While it is clear the theatrical specialty market hasn’t fully rebounded, we’ve seen ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ continue to perform strongly and drive conversation among moviegoers,” Searchlight Pictures said in a statement. “We firmly believe there’s a place in theaters for films that can offer audiences a broad range of cinematic experiences.”Still, crossover attention is almost always the goal, as underlined by how much film companies are spending on some of these productions. “Till,” for instance, cost at least $33 million to make and market.And remember: Theaters keep roughly half of any ticket revenue.The hope is for results more in line with “The Woman King.” Starring Viola Davis as the leader of an all-female group of African warriors, “The Woman King” collected nearly $70 million at domestic theaters ($92 million worldwide). It cost $50 million to produce and tens of millions more to market.“The Woman King,” starring Viola Davis, is one of the few Oscar-oriented films this year that has struck a box office chord, bringing in about $70 million.Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesOscar-oriented dramas rarely become blockbusters. Even so, these movies used to do quite well at the box office. The World War I film “1917” generated $159 million in North America in 2019 and $385 million worldwide. In 2010, “Black Swan,” starring Natalie Portman as a demented ballerina, collected $107 million ($329 million worldwide).Most studios either declined to comment for this article or provided anodyne statements about being proud of the prestige dramas they have recently released, regardless of ticket sales.The unwillingness to engage publicly on the matter may reflect the annual awards race. Having a contender labeled a box office misfire is not great for vote gathering. (Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 24.) Or it may be because, behind the scenes, studios still seem to be grasping for answers.Ask 10 different specialty film executives to explain the box office and you will get 10 different answers. There have been too many dramas in theaters lately, resulting in cannibalization; there have been too few, leaving audiences to look for options on streaming services. Everyone has been busy watching the World Cup on television. No, it’s television dramas like “The Crown” that have undercut these films.Some are still blaming the coronavirus. But that doesn’t hold water. While initially reluctant to return to theaters, older audiences, for the most part, have come to see theaters as a virus-safe activity, according to box office analysts, citing surveys. Nearly 60 percent of “Woman King” ticket buyers were over the age of 35, according to Sony Pictures Entertainment.Hollywood considers anyone over 35 to be “old,” and this is who typically comes to see dramas.Maybe it is more nuanced? Older audiences are back, one longtime studio executive suggested, but sophisticated older audiences are not — in part because some of their favorite art house theaters have closed and they don’t want to mix with the multiplex masses. (He was serious. “Too many people, too likely to encounter a sticky floor.”)Grim dramas have struggled, but sparkly ones have succeeded. “Elvis,” starring Austin Butler, took in $151 million in North America.Warner Bros.Others see a problem with the content. Most of the movies that are struggling at the box office are downbeat, coming at a time when audiences want escape. Consider the successful spring release of the rollicking “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” which collected $70 million in North America. Baz Luhrmann’s bedazzled “Elvis” delivered $151 million in domestic ticket sales. .“People like to call it ‘escape,’ but that’s not actually what it is,” Jeanine Basinger, the film scholar, said. “It’s entertainment. It can be a serious topic, by the way. But when films are too introspective, as many of these Oscar ones now are, the audience gets forgotten about.“Give us a laugh or two in there! When I think about going out to see misery and degradation and racism and all the other things that are wrong with our lives, I’m too depressed to put on my coat,” continued Ms. Basinger, whose latest book, “Hollywood: The Oral History,” co-written with Sam Wasson, arrived last month.Some studio executives insist that box office totals are an outdated way of assessing whether a film will generate a financial return. Focus Features, for instance, has evolved its business model in the last two years. The company’s films, which include “Tár” and “Armageddon Time,” are now made available for video-on-demand rental — for a premium price — after as little as three weeks in theaters. (Before, theaters got an exclusive window of about 90 days.) The money generated by premium in-home rentals is substantial, Focus has said, although it has declined to provide financial information to support that assertion.Some films, like “Armageddon Time,” now become available for digital rental after they spend just three weeks in theaters.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe worry in Hollywood is that such efforts will still fall short — that the conglomerates that own specialty film studios will decide there is not enough return on prestige films in theaters to continue releasing them that way. Disney owns Searchlight. Comcast owns Focus. Amazon owns United Artists. The chief executives of these companies like being invited to the Oscars. But they like profit even more.“The good news is we’ve now got a very large streaming business that we can go ahead and redirect that content toward those channels,” Bob Chapek, Disney’s former chief executive, said at a public event on Nov. 8, referring to prestige films. (Robert A. Iger, who has since returned to run Disney, may feel differently.)Others continue to advocate patience. Mr. Gross pointed out that “The Fabelmans” will roll into more theaters over the next month, hoping to capitalize on awards buzz — it is a front-runner for the 2023 best picture Oscar — and the end-of-year holidays. Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” a drug-and-sex induced fever dream about early Hollywood, is scheduled for wide release on Dec. 23.“I think movies are going to come back,” Mr. Spielberg recently told The New York Times. “I really do.”Steven Spielberg, on the set of his production “The Fabelmans.” Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment More

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      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

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      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More

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      ‘The Whale’ Premiere in NYC Inspired Strong Reactions

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      More than 100 actors, singers and creative professionals attended the New York premiere of Darren Aronofsky’s new film at Alice Tully Hall this week. Some of them shared their thoughts.The carpet was blue. The poster was blue. The suits were blue.That is, until the actor Ty Simpkins arrived at the New York premiere of “The Whale” at Alice Tully Hall this week — in a magenta suit.“I want the summer weather back,” Mr. Simpkins, 21, explained of his choice to break with the otherwise muted palette of the film’s cast and creative team, who arrived on the red carpet — well, oceanic blue carpet — in navy suits and black dresses.The moment of levity was at odds with the character Mr. Simpkins plays in the director Darren Aronofsky’s somber new film, adapted from the play by Samuel D. Hunter and produced by A24. The movie centers on Charlie, played by Brendan Fraser, a reclusive, morbidly obese gay man trying to reconnect with his teenage daughter (Sadie Sink) after the death of his lover. (Mr. Simpkins plays a young evangelical missionary who tries to convert Charlie — and wrestles with some of his own demons in the process.)“The Whale” has received rapturous reviews at film festivals — including a six-minute standing ovation in Venice — and has been hailed as a comeback role for Mr. Fraser, whose career faltered in the years after his success in the “The Mummy” (1999). Though Fraser is regarded as a front-runner to win his first Oscar for his performance, and the film will most likely be nominated for best picture, it has also been criticized for Mr. Aronofsky’s decision to put Mr. Fraser in a so-called fat suit rather than cast an obese actor. The director has said that doing so would have been difficult.When asked about his choice to use a “fat suit,” Mr. Aronofsky objected to the phrasing. “I wouldn’t use that word,” he said. “It’s prosthetics and makeup.”The film’s makeup artists, he said, “were able to create this incredible illusion that not only works with the audience but I think helped Brendan inhabit his character and bring it to life.“That you can be transported into the life of someone who seems incredibly different than you and still learn something about yourself is why I love movies,” Mr. Aronofsky continued.On the carpet and at the after-party, the film’s cast and creative team discussed the themes the film tackles, the emotions it raises and what they hoped audiences would take away.The writer and playwright Samuel D. Hunter, left, with the actor Brendan Fraser and the director Darren Aronofsky at La Grande Boucherie after the New York premiere of “The Whale.”Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesMitch Bukhar, left, a talent agent, with Ty Simpkins, who played a young evangelical missionary in “The Whale.”Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesMr. Fraser gained weight for the role, in addition to wearing the prosthetics, which added as much as 300 additional pounds to his frame. He has said that he prepared for the part by speaking with people who have struggled with eating issues, asking about their diet and the impact of their weight on their relationships.“Very often people who live with severe obesity are disregarded and shut away and silenced,” said Mr. Fraser, 53, who attended the premiere with two of his sons, Holden Fraser, 18, and Leland Fraser, 16. “So it was my obligation — my duty — returning dignity and respect and authenticity.”He continued: “The creative choices we made — the makeup, the elaborate costuming that I wore — with the help of the Obesity Action Coalition, I’m pretty sure that we came really close to creating a film with a main character who hasn’t been seen in this way, as authentically before, and I’m proud of that.”The film, which shows Charlie inhaling whole buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken and double-stacked slices of pizza — with ranch dressing added on top — and being subjected to relentless verbal abuse by his teenage daughter, can at times be hard to watch. But stories that push and challenge audiences remain essential, said Mr. Hunter, who wrote the film.“In academia, there’s kind of a push for no more trauma-based stories, and I struggle with that,” said Mr. Hunter, 41, after posing for photos next to his husband, the dramaturge John Baker, on the carpet. “Not only because that is discounting a broad swath of world literature — maybe the majority of it, certainly the Bible — but also because I think there’s utility in looking at dark things through the lens of fiction.”Mala Gaonkar and David Byrne at the after-party for “The Whale.”Jackie Molloy for The New York TimesBut Mr. Aronofsky wanted to be clear: The film is not meant to induce two straight hours of waterworks. “What’s surprising to many people is how funny it is,” he said. “I think when people see the heartfelt material, there’s a lot of laughs.”At an after-party at the heated outdoor atrium of the upscale French brasserie La Grande Boucherie on West 53rd Street, where sliders, artisanal cheeses and wine were served, David Byrne, the former Talking Heads frontman, said it wasn’t the humor that had surprised him, but the humanity.“It’s surprising, the amount of heart in it,” Mr. Byrne, 70, said.Over by a gleaming Christmas tree, the comedian Jim Gaffigan was still processing what he had just experienced.“A film that moves you that much, you want to give a standing ovation to,” Mr. Gaffigan, 56, said, clutching a glass of wine. “But I feel like the audience was so emotionally drained that we needed the walker.”“Darren always does that,” he continued. “He accesses emotions that are very credible, very personal. It’s going to take a while to process.”Quick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More

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      Gotham Awards: ‘Everything Everywhere’ and Adam Sandler Grab Spotlight

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      The film’s Ke Huy Quan also won the supporting-performance trophy at the season’s first big ceremony, where honoree Adam Sandler brought down the house.The hit sci-fi comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once” earned top honors at the Gotham Awards on Monday night, taking the ceremony’s best-feature prize as well as a supporting-performance trophy for the actor Ke Huy Quan.“This time last year, all I was hoping for was just a job,” said an emotional Quan, who starred in “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” as a child actor but then found work hard to come by. “Just when I think it can’t get any better, it does.”The Gothams are the first big show of awards season, handing out prizes before the Screen Actors Guild and the Oscars have even announced their nominees. Though the winners are chosen by a jury made up of only a handful of film insiders, the Gothams can still provide momentum and a clutch of positive headlines for the contenders who triumph there.One such victory came for lead performance. Since the Gothams have adopted gender-neutral acting categories, three significant contenders for the best-actress Oscar — Cate Blanchett (“Tár”), Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) — faced off against “The Whale” star Brendan Fraser, the presumptive front-runner for the best-actor Oscar. And in that star-packed battle royale, Deadwyler, a rising actress, prevailed for her performance as Mamie Till-Mobley, who becomes an activist following the racially motivated murder of her son, Emmett Till, in 1955.That will help Deadwyler earn more eyes for her movie, though she was absent from the ceremony, as was Steven Spielberg. He had been booked to present an honorary award to his “Fabelmans” star Michelle Williams but was forced to cancel after contracting Covid. Williams, another significant best-actress contender, took the stage to deliver a moving tribute to Mary Beth Peil, who played her grandmother on “Dawson’s Creek,” the teen drama in which Williams got her start.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Aiming for the Oscars: At a screening meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender, actors and directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.“Whenever something good happens in my life, I can draw a straight line” back to Peil, said Williams, who credited the older actress with patiently teaching her lessons about the craft when Williams was still finding her way. “I wasn’t an artist or a mother, I wasn’t even a high school graduate,” Williams said. “But I was Mary Beth’s girl, and that made me a somebody.”As an Oscar predictor, the Gotham Awards can be spotty: “Nomadland” kicked off its juggernaut run by winning the Gothams’ best-feature prize for 2020, though the Gothams victor for 2021, “The Lost Daughter,” didn’t manage to crack the Oscars’ best-picture lineup. And since the Gothams restrict eligibility to films made in the United States for less than $35 million, the ceremony spotlights a narrower slice of films than the Oscars do.Still, it’s a great barometer for industry enthusiasm: At last year’s Gothams, the winning “CODA” star Troy Kotsur delivered such a well-received acceptance speech that future victories, including the Oscar, seemed almost assured. This year, enthusiasm was high for “Everything Everywhere,” directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, which earned big cheers for its best-feature win but even bigger cheers for the endearing Quan, who plays Michelle Yeoh’s husband in the film and could be poised for a Kotsur-like sweep of the televised awards shows.“Oftentimes, it is in independent films where actors who otherwise wouldn’t get a chance find their opportunities,” said Quan, who had spent decades behind the camera until “Everything Everywhere” revived his career. “I was that actor.”Earlier in the show, held at Cipriani Wall Street, honorary awards were given out to “The Woman King” director Gina Prince-Bythewood and to the actor Adam Sandler, who brought the house down with a self-deprecating speech that he claimed had been written by his teenage daughters.But the most thoughtful comment came from the writer-director Todd Field, who picked up a best-screenplay prize for “Tár” and used his acceptance speech to take aim at the entire notion of awards shows.“‘Best.’ We all know that word is a cartoonish absolute with no place in any conversation about creative endeavors,” Field said. “But we campaign for it, we show up for it, we pray for it, if only so the thing we made will be seen and heard and not forgotten in this noisy world.” More

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      Sacheen Littlefeather and the Question of Native Identity

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      The actress, who died Oct. 2, became famous for a protest at the 1973 Oscars. Now a researcher and Littlefeather’s own sisters dispute her claims that she was Native American. Her defenders say Indian identity is a complex matter.Two days after the death of Sacheen Littlefeather, her estranged sister was angrily scrolling Twitter.She was furious, she said in an interview this week, at the outpouring of praise for Littlefeather, the actress and activist who became famous when Marlon Brando sent her to the 1973 Oscars to refuse his best actor award and denounce Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans.“I was reading what all these people were saying: ‘Oh, rest in peace and she was a saint, and she sacrificed herself,’” the sister, Rozalind Cruz, said. The sisters had been estranged for about 13 years for a variety of reasons, Cruz said, but at that point she still believed her family had Indian ancestry.Then she saw tweets by the writer Jacqueline Keeler, a citizen of Navajo Nation who has stirred controversy with her efforts to expose what she calls “pretendians.” Keeler was disputing Littlefeather’s claims that her father was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui.Cruz replied to Keeler on Twitter on Oct. 4 that her grandmother was of “Yaqui and Spanish” descent. Cruz herself had tried to enroll in the White Mountain Apache Tribe. But over the next few weeks, Cruz said, Keeler showed her genealogical research that traced her father’s family back to Mexico in 1850 and said there was no evidence of Native ancestry.Cruz and the middle sister of the family, Trudy Orlandi, were both persuaded by the research. Last Saturday, less than a month after their sister’s death at age 75, The San Francisco Chronicle published an opinion column by Keeler under the headline, “Sacheen Littlefeather was a Native American icon. Her sisters say she was an ethnic fraud.”The column unleashed an intense response in Native American circles on social media.Some condemned Littlefeather, saying she had fabricated an identity to promote her Hollywood career. But others strongly objected to Keeler’s investigation, saying it ignored the complicated ways Native identity can be formed, particularly for those who do not meet the formal criteria for tribal membership. Enrollment typically requires proof of tribal ties, often described in terms of one’s percentage of “Indian blood,” or “blood quantum.”“What many people don’t understand about Native existence is that some Natives aren’t enrolled,” Laura Clark, a journalist who is Muscogee and Cherokee, wrote in Variety in response to Keeler’s column.“Some Natives are reconnecting with their tribes,” Clark wrote. “Some Natives don’t have enough ‘Indian blood’ to register because of blood quantum minimums. And some Natives have had their tribes nearly erased to the point that organized citizenship records simply don’t exist.”The Shoshone poet nila northsun, a friend of Littlefeather’s from their college days in the 1970s, said this week that she was not surprised that Keeler had failed to find tribal affiliations in family records.Native Americans, she said, might have hidden their backgrounds to avoid discrimination or were misidentified.“It’s what you feel in your heart, and what your belief system is,” said northsun, who lowercases her name. “Just because she’s not enrolled or can’t be identified in records doesn’t mean she’s not Indigenous.”In an interview on Wednesday, Keeler rejected such assertions, saying she and volunteer researchers had reviewed records for hundreds of Littlefeather’s relatives. None identified as Native American, nor did they live with or marry members of any Apache tribe or anyone identifying as Yaqui, according to a summary of the research she published on Substack.“Could their family have some distant drop of Indigenous blood from hundreds of years ago?” she wrote in the column. “It’s possible; many people of Mexican descent do. But Indigenous identity is more complicated than that. A U.S. citizen of distant French descent does not get to claim French citizenship. And it would be absurd for that person to wear a beret on stage at the Oscars and speak on behalf of the nation of France.”It was not known if Littlefeather had ever tried to enroll in a tribe. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe in Arizona said in a statement that Littlefeather was not an enrolled member of the tribe, and neither were her parents.“However,” the tribe said, “that does not mean that we could independently confirm that she is not of Yaqui ancestry generally, from Mexico or the Southwestern United States.”The White Mountain Apache Tribe in Arizona did not immediately release a statement.Littlefeather was born Marie Cruz in 1946 and said in interviews over the years that her father, Manuel Ybarra Cruz, was White Mountain Apache and Yaqui and had abused her and her mother, Geroldine Cruz, who was of French, German and Dutch lineage.Rozalind Cruz, 65, of Big Arm, Mont., and Orlandi, 72, of San Anselmo, Calif., have strongly disputed their sister’s accounts of their father’s alcoholism and abuse. He died in 1966 at age 44, when Littlefeather was 19.At the 1973 Academy Awards, Sacheen Littlefeather refused the Academy Award for best actor on behalf of Marlon Brando for his role in “The Godfather.”BettmannBy age 26, Littlefeather was fully identifying as Native American when she protested at the Oscars, wearing a buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties. She spent the next five decades as an activist in the Native American community and was married to Charles Johnston, a member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma, who died last year.She became a revered figure for some. In August, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it had apologized to Littlefeather, calling her treatment at the Oscars, where she was booed, “unwarranted and unjustified.”In a statement on Thursday, the Academy Museum, which hosted an event honoring Littlefeather in September, said that it was aware of claims going back decades about her background but that “the Academy recognizes self-identification.”Cruz said that her father, who was deaf and communicated with sign language or a chalkboard, had never told her about Native American relatives.She said she had grown up knowing she had Spanish and Mexican heritage but also believed for most of her life that she was “probably about a quarter” Native American because of her older sister’s professed identity.Cruz said she had even applied last November to become a member of the White Mountain Apache Tribe but was denied because the tribe could not find records to support her claim. But that all changed after her sister’s death. She recalled telling Keeler on the phone: “You’re right. She’s a fraud. She’s a phony.”Some scholars agree, saying Keeler’s research was persuasive.“Keeler proves Littlefeather was a troubled woman who made the stories of others her own,” said Liza Black, an associate professor of history and Native American and Indigenous studies at Indiana University, and a citizen of Cherokee Nation.She said that many Native people understand the complexity of identity because of multiple tribal affiliations, blood quantum restrictions and adoptions, but that “Littlefeather does not fall into any of these true, real and complex Native identities.”Keeler’s research to prove that people are faking Indian identities has prompted blowback from critics who said that her work casts a cloud of suspicion over all Indigenous people.It suggests that “Native people need to create a system where they have to prove who they say they are,” said Andrew Jolivétte, the director of Native American and Indigenous studies at the University of California San Diego, who describes himself as Creole of Opelousa, Atakapa Ishak, French, African, Irish, Italian and Spanish descent.“Why do American Indians have to do that and not other people?” he added.For Keeler, to be Native American or American Indian is to be part of a clearly defined political group that existed before European colonial contact.“We’re not just an identity,” she said. “We are actually a political class. We are citizens of nations. We are sovereign.” Her goal, she said, is to stop non-Indians from profiting off false claims of being Native American.“We want real change and we want real justice, and that’s not going to happen when it all comes down to actors playing us,” she said.For her part, Cruz said she had no regrets.“All I did was, I put a pebble out there,” she said. “And I let the water rip.” More