Academy Awards (Oscars)

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      The Oscars Are Broken. Here’s How to Fix Them.

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      The ratings flop that was the last ceremony provided useful lessons in what not to do. But there are steps the academy can take for an actually enjoyable evening.His client was having a great night. He should have been thrilled. But on the last Sunday night in April, as this year’s dire Oscar ceremony continued to deflate, a top Hollywood representative texted me about the “beyond terrible” show and fretted, “The entire country has tuned out.”Later, as the ceremony entered an even worse final act that included a flop-sweat comedy bit and a bungled best-actor reveal, I got another text from him: “This could kill the Oscars. It’s that bad.”Reviews of the show proved nearly as scathing, and the ratings released the next day were grim: The Oscars had plunged more than 50 percent from the previous year, drawing just under 10 million people, the lowest number on record since those figures had been tabulated.I’ve thought about that ratings drop (and those doom-laden texts) quite a bit in the months since, as a new awards season has begun. There is a lot of excitement in Hollywood right now, as premieres and award shows can be held in person again and the movies vying for awards feel much bigger. But behind people’s unmasked smiles, I detect some anxiety, as though there’s a question that everybody is still too nervous to pose: What if all of this is leading up to an Oscars that nobody will watch?I think it helps that the show has returned to a guaranteed 10 best-picture nominees, which should ensure that a broader cross-section of movies gets nominated, just as the academy’s laudable drives to diversify its membership ought to result in a slate of nominees that feels less out of touch. But all of those efforts could seem fruitless if the show’s audience shrinks so starkly once again. After the last ceremony tanked the Oscars’ reputation and ratings, here are four things the academy should do to fix things before next year’s show.Hire a host.The last three Oscar ceremonies have gone without an M.C., which continues to feel like a missed opportunity. The right host can help drive viewers to the show and provide memorable, viral moments: Part of the reason the Golden Globes used to gain on the Oscars is that they could promote buzzy hosts like Ricky Gervais and the ace duo of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.Hosting the Academy Awards used to be one of Hollywood’s most prestigious gigs, but the show often fumbled that privilege over the last decade: There was the James Franco-Anne Hathaway debacle (which might have worked with sharper writing and a more engaged partner for Hathaway), smarmy turns from Seth MacFarlane and Neil Patrick Harris, and two back-to-back stints from a disinterested Jimmy Kimmel. Ever since 2018, when Kevin Hart stepped down from the show after refusing to apologize for anti-gay jokes, the ceremony has decided to dispense with a host altogether.But if the Oscars are so eager to cram blockbuster content into a show that often celebrates small indie movies, why not invite some hosts from that tentpole realm? I’d rather watch Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt host the Oscars than star in something like “Jungle Cruise,” and it’s fun to imagine what a quick-witted Marvel duo like Paul Rudd and Simu Liu could do, too. I fear the Oscars might never restore the host position now that the show runs shorter without one. But on that note …Understand that shorter doesn’t mean better.In their never-ending quest to trim the Oscars to a manageable length, ABC and the academy would do well to remember one thing: It’s not about how much time the show takes, it’s about how well the show uses that time. Why not lean into the Oscars’ mammoth reputation and fill every nook and cranny with something exciting? It still boggles my mind that there isn’t a slate of movie trailers on par with the Super Bowl: Imagine how many people would tune in if the commercial breaks promised a first look at the “Black Panther” sequel, just for starters.When the show is pared down too ruthlessly, it leaves less room for the real human moments that we tune in for. Those moments don’t have to come solely from the acceptance speeches, either: I often think fondly of the 2009 show, hosted by Hugh Jackman, which made room for five former winners to present each of the acting categories. It was a lovely way to pay homage to Oscar history, and all the nominees were memorably moved by the tribute. That ceremony ran about 11 minutes longer than the one that aired this past April, but I’ll take those 11 minutes over nearly anything the shorter show had to offer.Restore the clips and performances.One of the reasons this year’s Oscar show felt so deadly dull is that nearly all the movie clips were excised from the broadcast. For casual viewers who tune into the Oscars without seeing most of the nominees, those clips create a rooting interest: Based on the glimpses of performances and craft, you can make your own armchair guess of who’ll win. And when I watched the show as a child, the movie clips offered a sneak preview of worlds, lives and people previously unknown to me. They’re essential.This year’s ceremony also punted the best-song performances to the preshow, which deprived the main event of several high-energy moments. (Can you imagine if that scorching “Shallow” duet from Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper had been booted to the preshow two years ago?) With original songs in the mix this year from Beyoncé and Billie Eilish, the Oscars would be foolish not to milk those performances for everything they’re worth. And if all those clips and performances make the show run too long, just cut the shorts already!Make peace with the Oscars’ new reality.With all that said, there’s only so much the Oscars can do to halt their linear-ratings slide. People simply consume media differently these days, and many households and younger audiences have cut the cord entirely, consuming all of their TV shows on streaming services.But the essential pull of the Oscars still remains. It’s the only awards show that generates this much chatter, and the narratives that unspool because of the show — from boundary-shattering victories like the best-picture winner “Parasite” to a cultural movement like #OscarsSoWhite — continue to ripple outward through our culture. I saw it last year, when the “Minari” star Steven Yeun became the first Asian American nominated for best actor, and when the “Nomadland” director Chloé Zhao became the first woman of color to win best director: Even though their films were hardly blockbusters, their achievements went incredibly viral on social media.That sort of engagement proves that there’s still a massive audience out there, albeit one that tunes in ever more frequently via Twitter, YouTube and TikTok. If the academy wants to lure all of those eyeballs to the actual broadcast, then it should make a more compelling play for their attention. Despite recent missteps, people haven’t lost interest in the idea of the Oscars. It’s the show itself that’s in need of a tuneup. More

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      Dawn Hudson, the C.E.O. of the Motion Picture Academy, will step down in 2023.

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      Dawn Hudson, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is beginning a long goodbye from the job she’s held since 2011.The academy announced Monday that Ms. Hudson, 65, will step down at the conclusion of her current contract. It expires at the end of 2023.In recent years under Ms. Hudson, the Academy has moved aggressively to expand and diversify its membership, a response to the #OscarSoWhite controversy that arose in 2015 after the group nominated only white actors for the Oscars. Since then, the Academy has swelled to 9,362 voting members from 6,446, 33 percent of whom identify as women and 19 percent coming from underrepresented communities. (When Ms. Hudson came aboard, Oscar voters were 94 percent white and 77 percent male.)Ms. Hudson was also integral in the opening of the Academy Museum, which debuted last month after a nearly decade-long slog and budget overruns that totaled close to $100 million.“Dawn has been, and continues to be, a groundbreaking leader for the academy,” the academy’s president, David Rubin, said in a statement. “The diversity and gender parity of our membership, our increased international presence, and the successful opening of a world-class Academy Museum — a project she revived, guided and championed — are already part of her legacy.”Ms. Hudson’s successor will face big challenges. As with all awards shows, the academy has seen the viewers for its annual telecast — which through its licensing deal with ABC generates the majority of the organization’s operating budget — decline precipitously over the years. This year brought a new nadir of only 10.4 million viewers, a decline of 56 percent from 2020. In 2012, the first year of Ms. Hudson’s tenure, 43 million people watched the show, with Ellen DeGeneres as the host.The academy said it would begin looking for Ms. Hudson’s replacement shortly and “she will have a vital role in the transition.” More

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      Vladimir Menshov, Surprise Russian Oscar Winner, Dies at 81

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      His “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” was named best foreign-language film in 1980, beating Truffaut and Kurosawa. U.S. critics demurred.Vladimir Menshov, a prolific Soviet actor and director whose film “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” won the Academy Award in 1980 for best foreign-language film, surprising the many American critics who had panned it, died on July 5 in a hospital in Moscow. He was 81.Mosfilm, the Russian film studio and production company, said the cause was complications of Covid-19.“Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,” a soapy, melodramatic crowd-pleaser, attracted some 90 million moviegoers in the Soviet Union even after it had been broadcast on television, not long after it was released theatrically in 1980. Its theme song, “Alexandra,” written by Sergey Nikitin and Tatyana Nikitina, became one of the country’s most beloved pieces of movie music.Even so, when “Moscow,” only the second film Mr. Menshov had directed, won the Oscar, many moviegoers and critics were taken aback, given the competition that year. It was chosen over François Truffaut’s “The Last Metro” and Akira Kurosawa’s “The Shadow Warrior” as well as the Spanish director Jaime de Armiñán’s “The Nest” and the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s “Confidence.”“There was more condescending good will than aesthetic discrimination behind the Oscar voted to ‘Moscow,’” Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote when he reviewed the film, which was released in the United States after its Oscar victory.The film follows three girls quartered at a Moscow hotel for young women in the late 1950s as they hunt for male companionship, and then revisits them 20 years later. It starred Vera Alentova, the director’s wife and the mother of their daughter, Yuliya Menshova, a television personality. They both survive him, along with two grandchildren.From left, Aleksey Batalov, Vera Alentova and Natalya Vavilova in “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.”SputnikMr. Arnold noted that Mr. Menshov’s movie “revives a genre Hollywood has failed to sustain, reliable as it would seem: the chronicle of provincial girls, usually a trio, in pursuit of careers and/or mates in the big city” — a genre that ranged chronologically at the time from “Stage Door” (1938) to “Valley of the Dolls” (1967).Vincent Canby of The New York Times conceded that the film was “decently acted” but wrote that at two and a half hours, it “seems endless.”“There are suggestions of social satire from time to time,” Mr. Canby wrote, “but they are so mild they could surprise and interest only an extremely prudish, unreconstructed Stalinist.”While he considered it understandable that “Moscow” was one of the Soviet Union’s most successful films, Mr. Canby concluded, “One can also believe that portion of Mr. Menshov’s biography (contained in the program) that reports he failed his first three years at the Cinema Institute in Moscow and wasn’t much more successful as an acting student with the Moscow Art Theater.”He added tartly, “I assume we are told these things to underscore the lack of meaning in these early failures, which, however, appear to be summed up in his Oscar winner.”Vladimir Valentinovich Menshov was born on Sept. 17, 1939, to a Russian family in Baku (now in Azerbaijan). His father, Valentin, was an officer with the secret police. His mother, Antonina Aleksandrovna (Dubovskaya) Menshov, was a homemaker.As a teenager, Vladimir held blue-collar jobs as a machinist, a miner and a sailor before being admitted to the Moscow Art Theater School. After graduating from the school in 1965 and from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in 1970, he worked for the Mosfilm, Lenfilm and Odessa Film studios.He had more than 100 credits as an actor, including in the hit “Night Watch” (2004), and was also a screenwriter. He made his debut as a director in 1976 with the film “Practical Joke.” More

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      Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

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      His movie producing career consisted of just seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, three for “Midnight Cowboy” and three for “Coming Home.”Jerome Hellman, who produced “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Academy Award, and who went on to solidify his reputation with other tough-minded dramas, like the Oscar-winning “Coming Home,” died on May 26 at his home in South Egremont, Mass., in the Berkshires. He was 92.The death was confirmed by his wife, Elizabeth Empleton Hellman.Almost no one at the 1970 Academy Awards ceremony expected “Midnight Cowboy” to win. The movie was the gritty urban story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young, handsome, naïve and not particularly bright Texan who decides to start a new life in New York City as a male hustler catering to wealthy older women, and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a grubby Bronx con man with a debilitating limp who becomes Joe’s unlikely ally.Shot with an initial budget of only $1 million, the movie included straightforward but far from pornographic depictions of straight and gay sex, prostitution and gang rape. The film’s rating was later upgraded to R.Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times seemed hesitant to overpraise the film, which was based on James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel of the same name. It was “tough and good in important ways,” Mr. Canby wrote, “slick, brutal (but not brutalizing)” and “ultimately a moving experience.”Mr. Hellman didn’t even bother to write an acceptance speech.“I probably only said 10 words” after Elizabeth Taylor handed him the trophy, Mr. Hellman told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. “It must have been the shortest speech in the history of the Oscars.”Mr. Hellman’s entire movie producing career consisted of seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, not to mention an additional 11 nominations. Three Oscars were for “Midnight Cowboy”; John Schlesinger also won as best director and Waldo Salt for best adapted screenplay.The other three — for best actor, best actress and best original screenplay — were for “Coming Home” (1978), an ambitious drama directed by Hal Ashby. Mr. Voight and Jane Fonda starred in the film, he as a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran with a social conscience, and she as a military wife who becomes his lover while her conservative straight-by-the-book husband is deployed in the same war.Jon Voight, left, and Dustin Hoffman in a scene from the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Oscar.United ArtistsBetween those two successes, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), also directed by Mr. Schlesinger, was another story altogether. Based on Nathanael West’s novel, set on the fringes of 1930s Hollywood, it was a depressing tale of a seductive but tainted promised land where some people came to fail and some to die. William Atherton, Donald Sutherland and Karen Black starred, respectively, as an Ivy League designer, a sexually repressed accountant and an untalented starlet.Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.Mr. Hellman’s last film was “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), directed by Peter Weir from Paul Theroux’s novel about an inventor who moves to a tropical island with his family, tries to create a utopia and fails. Harrison Ford starred.Mr. Hellman in 2009. At one point he described his earlier films as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesMr. Hellman was married to Joanne Fox from 1957 to 1966 and to Nancy Ellison, a photographer, from 1973 to 1991. In addition to his third wife, a film promoter whom he married in 2001, his survivors include a son, J.R.; a daughter, Jenny Hellman; and a grandson.Authors and commentators considered Mr. Hellman a driving force in the creation of what some called the New Hollywood of the 1970s, where power shifted from big-studio committees to independent filmmakers with purpose. But the era didn’t last long. In 1982, in an interview with The New York Times, he described the films he had made up to that point as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”“People just can’t believe that after the success of ‘Coming Home,’ I couldn’t just do what I wanted,” Mr. Hellman observed. But the studios, he said, were now run by business types who needed every film to be a blockbuster.“All that my success has won me is the luxury of immediate access to top executives,” he said. More

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      'Colette,' From the Video Game Medal of Honor, Wins an Oscar

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      “Colette,” which was featured in the virtual-reality video game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, took home the award for best documentary short.It was a night of firsts: First Korean actor to win an Oscar, oldest performer to win best actor, first woman of color to win best director.And, for the video game industry, its first Oscar recognition for best documentary short.The statuette was for “Colette,” a short film featured in the Oculus virtual-reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is also the first Oscar for Facebook. (It owns Oculus, the virtual-reality group that produced the documentary short along with EA’s Respawn Entertainment.)The 24-minute film, directed by Anthony Giacchino and produced by Alice Doyard, follows a survivor of the French Resistance, Colette Marin-Catherine, as she returns to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II to visit a concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother, Jean-Pierre.“The real hero here is Colette herself, who has shared her story with integrity and strength,” Mike Doran, the director of production at Oculus Studios, said in a statement. “As we see in the film, resistance takes courage, but facing one’s past may take even more.”Medal of Honor, which is set during World War II and casts players as an Allied agent trying to outwit the Nazis, did not garner much acclaim as a video game. Many reviewers criticized it for its huge system requirements, which were largely the result of the inclusion of so much historical and documentary footage.But now that the film has won an Oscar — well, that might change a few minds. Or at least get it in front of the eyes of nongamers. You can watch “Colette” free online on Oculus TV or YouTube, or on the website of The Guardian, which later acquired and distributed the film.“We hope this award and the film’s reach means” that the memories of all of who resisted “are no longer lost,” Doran said. More