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    Film Academy Chief Gets a Sequel: Bill Kramer’s Contract Is Renewed

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    Amid challenges in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences renewed its chief executive’s contract a year early.In a time of flux in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, placed a bet on continuity, announcing Monday that it would extend Bill Kramer’s tenure as chief executive through July 2028.Kramer’s contract, which was up for renewal in 2025, was approved one year early “due to his exceptional leadership and significant contributions,” the academy said.“He is the ideal person to continue to broaden the Academy’s reach and impact on our international film community and successfully guide the organization into our next 100 years,” Janet Yang, the academy’s president, said in a statement.The academy has faced a number of challenges in recent years: It has worked to diversify the Oscars after nominating only white actors in 2015, faced the steep drop-off in television ratings facing award shows, struggled with the fallout after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards and opened a museum.This year’s Academy Awards drew 19.5 million viewers, a four-year high, according to Nielsen. It was the third consecutive year that Oscar viewership had grown, but it was still far below previous levels: Before 2018, the telecast never had fewer than 32 million viewers. This year’s telecast started an hour earlier than usual.Before becoming chief executive of the Academy in June 2022, Kramer served for two years as the director of its new museum, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and he was credited with helping get it open after years of delays. Kramer’s total compensation was $865,568 from the academy and related organizations in 2022, the year he started as chief executive, according to the academy’s most recent tax filing.Kramer’s contract extension comes as the Academy Museum is working to recover from criticism over how it tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who started movie studios and helped create the U.S. film industry. When the museum first opened, it was faulted for saying relatively little about them, even as it celebrated diversity in film. The museum responded by opening a permanent new exhibition highlighting the contributions of Hollywood’s Jewish founders, but when that installation was criticized by some Jewish film professionals, the museum announced that it would makes changes.Kramer now oversees all aspects of the academy, which has more than 700 employees in Los Angeles, New York and London.The academy has an annual operating budget of about $170 million, 70 percent of which comes from its Oscars broadcast deal with Disney and ABC, which runs through 2028. Last month, the Academy announced a global $500 million campaign to shore up its financial future.“Like any healthy organization or company,” Kramer said in an interview as he announced the international fund-raising effort, “the academy needs a sustainable and diverse base of support to allow for solid long-term planning and fiscal certainty.” More

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      Amid Outcry, Academy Museum to Revise Exhibit on Hollywood’s Jewish Roots

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      When the museum first opened, it was criticized for omitting Hollywood’s Jewish pioneers. Now it is under fire for what its new exhibit says about them.When the popular Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021 with exhibits celebrating the diversity of the film industry, the museum was criticized for having largely omitted one group: the Jewish founders of Hollywood.Last month, the museum aimed to correct that oversight by opening a permanent new exhibition highlighting the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating the American film industry.But the new exhibition, which turns a sometimes critical eye on Hollywood’s founders, ignited an uproar. An open letter that a group called United Jewish Writers sent to the museum on Monday objected to the use of words including “tyrant,” “oppressive,” “womanizer” and “predator” in its wall text, called the exhibit “antisemitic” and described it as “the only section of the museum that vilifies those it purports to celebrate.”In response to the growing outcry, the Academy Museum said in a statement Monday that it had “heard the concerns from members of the Jewish community” and that it was “committed to making changes to the exhibition to address them.”“We will be implementing the first set of changes immediately — they will allow us to tell these important stories without using phrasing that may unintentionally reinforce stereotypes,” the museum said.The museum announced the changes just before receiving the open letter, which was signed by more than 300 Hollywood professionals. “While we acknowledge the value in confronting Hollywood’s problematic past, the despicable double standard of the Jewish Founders exhibit, blaming only the Jews for that problematic past, is unacceptable and, whether intentional or not, antisemitic,” said the letter. “We call on the Academy Museum to thoroughly redo this exhibit so that it celebrates the Jewish founders of Hollywood with the same respect and enthusiasm granted to those celebrated throughout the rest of the museum.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-Nominated Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 80

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      Her films centered on Latin American experiences and received wide acclaim.Lourdes Portillo, an Oscar-nominated Mexican-born documentary filmmaker whose work explored Latin American social issues, died on Saturday at her home in San Francisco. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her friend Soco Aguilar. No cause was given.One of Ms. Portillo’s best-known works is her 1994 documentary “The Devil Never Sleeps,” a murder-mystery in which she investigates the strange death of her multimillionaire uncle, whose widow claimed he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. In 2020, the Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry.“Using vintage snapshots, old home movies and interviews, the film builds a biographical portrait of Oscar Ruiz Almeida, a Mexican rancher who amassed a fortune exporting vegetables to the United States and went on to become a powerful politician and businessman,” Stephen Holden, a Times movie critic, wrote in a 1995 review of the film.The documentary had the tenor of a telenovela and presented open questions about Mr. Ruiz Almeida’s mysterious life and death and the people who could have had a motive for the murder.“The more Oscar is discussed, the more enigmatic he seems,” Mr. Holden wrote.Ms. Portillo crafted the film’s story line from the information her mother relayed over the phone while Ms. Portillo was living in New York, she said in a talk at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles last year.The museum screened the movie last year as part of a series honoring Ms. Portillo and other filmmakers who have made significant contributions to cinema.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Academy Museum to Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History After All

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      The museum was criticized earlier for failing to acknowledge the contributions of the Jewish pioneers who helped establish the American film studio system.Having initially drawn criticism for failing to acknowledge the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating Hollywood and the film industry, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday announced the details of a new permanent exhibition that will spotlight their contributions.The show, called “Hollywoodland,” is scheduled to open May 19, the museum said in its news release, and will spotlight “the impact of the predominately Jewish filmmakers whose establishment of the American film studio system transformed Los Angeles into a global epicenter of cinema.”When the museum opened in 2021, it made a point of highlighting the contributions of women, artists of color and people from other backgrounds, but there was barely a mention of the Jewish immigrants who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system — titans like Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Goldwyn and Mayer.The omission, coming at a time of growing concerns about antisemitism, drew complaints from Jewish leaders and concern from the museum’s supporters, many of whom saw it as example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history. Striving to assimilate, Hollywood’s founders feared being identified as Jews.The museum’s permanent exhibition about Jewish contributions is called “Hollywoodland.” via Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesVarious publications called out the affront, like The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”The museum said then that it had always intended to open a temporary exhibit devoted to the subject, but in response to the backlash it decided to make a permanent gallery, and it consulted rabbis and Jewish scholars on what should be included.“We learned,” Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who was then the museum’s director, said in an interview. “We took a lot of the information from the conversations that we’ve had and grew from that.“The show will be organized in three distinct parts: “Studio Origins,” which explores the founding of Hollywood’s original eight major film studios and their studio heads; “Los Angeles: From Film Frontier to Industry Town, 1902-1929,” which traces how the city evolved alongside the movie industry; and “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” a short-form documentary — narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, the TCM host and author — that looks at the Jewish immigrants and first-generation Jewish Americans who built the Hollywood studio system.The exhibition was organized by Dara Jaffe, an associate curator, with help from Gary Dauphin, a former associate curator of digital presentations, and Josue L. Lopez, a research assistant. Neal Gabler, the author and film critic who wrote “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” served as an adviser.“They were the ones who established this system,” Jaffe said of the pioneering Jewish filmmakers. “They were drawn to this industry because they were restricted from so many others.” More

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      Academy Museum Postpones Gala, Citing Israel-Hamas War

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      The star-studded Hollywood fund-raiser, which had already been complicated by the actors’ strike, was to have honored Meryl Streep and others on Saturday.It’s hard not to see the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’s attempt to put on this year’s gala — a glamorous party that raises more than $10 million for the museum and burnishes its image by drawing Hollywood A-listers — as anything but ill-fated.First the Hollywood strikes complicated efforts to hold the party, since striking actors are barred from promoting films and few would want to rub elbows socially with executives from the big studios that they are on strike against. That difficulty was ironed out after studio executives, who are among the museum’s biggest financial supporters, agreed not to come and union officials said actors could attend as long as they did not promote films.Then the Israel-Hamas war cast a shadow over the festivities, which had been scheduled for Saturday night. First the museum announced that the red carpet — where stars parade in their finery for photographers before going in — would be canceled. Then, on Thursday, the museum announced that the gala would be postponed.“Out of respect for the devastating conflict and loss of life happening overseas, we have made the decision to postpone the Academy Museum gala this Saturday,” the museum said in a statement on Thursday evening. “We look forward to rescheduling at a later date. We thank everybody deeply for their support.”The gala was to have honored Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan and Sofia Coppola. The chairs of the gala, which is raising money for exhibitions, education and public programs, are the director Ava DuVernay, the actor Halle Berry, the producer Ryan Murphy and the producer Eric Esrailian, a physician and a trustee.The museum through a spokeswoman said it had no further comment. More

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      Hollywood Gala Will Welcome Striking Stars, but Not Studio Bosses

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      How will the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures put on its star-studded fund-raiser this year, amid the polarizing strike? Very carefully.Meryl Streep, who was chosen to be honored at the gala next month for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, was initially under the impression that the Hollywood actors’ strike would prevent her from attending.The strike, after all, had already forced the Academy to delay one gala in November, where Angela Bassett and Mel Brooks were to receive honorary Oscars. In the case of the fund-raising event planned for Oct. 14, it was unclear at first if SAG-AFTRA, the union representing TV and movie actors, would allow striking members to attend, and, if it did, whether any would want to go.Would it be OK to appear at such a celebratory event while the industry is on the ropes? Should actors sit at tables (costing $250,000 to $500,000) that in some cases are paid for by the studios they are striking against? And what about the potential for vitriol and tension, or at least deep social awkwardness?But after negotiations and quiet diplomacy that determined who could attend and what kinds of work could be honored, the gala — which typically attracts Hollywood’s A-listers and moguls and raises more than $10 million for the popular museum — will proceed. The biggest change: Executives from the studios being struck, some of which are among the museum’s biggest sponsors, will not be there.Streep will be, though, since she has approval from her union. “I have been assured that SAG-AFTRA has encouraged members to attend the gala — that the museum deeply depends on this event for its educational and community outreach, and that no industry executives from struck companies will be in attendance,” she said in an email. “So I am steaming my dress and heading West.”Meryl Streep, armed with permission from the actors’ union to attend the gala where she is being honored, said, “I am steaming my dress and heading West.” Arturo Holmes/Getty ImagesStreep’s initial confusion is emblematic of the fraught territory that the industry finds itself in as it tries to navigate the dos and don’ts of the strike — from awards shows and fund-raisers to social events, films and television shows.It can be confusing: Some talk show hosts have stumbled in trying to do decide whether to return to the air, and the writers’ union picketed “Dancing With the Stars” although its cast had received a green light from SAG-AFTRA to work. The tentative deal reached Sunday by the Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers was a hopeful sign, but the actors remain on strike, and securing their union’s blessing was crucial for the Academy gala.“The basic guidance we’ve given people is, so long as it is not focused on a particular project or a particular struck company, it’s OK for our members to participate in those events and to acknowledge someone’s body of work,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director and chief negotiator of the actors’ union, said in an interview. “There will be members who choose not to participate in these things who don’t feel it’s the right thing to do at this point, since it is a serious time for people who work in the industry. I imagine our members will make judgments for themselves.”The gala is vital for the nascent museum, in an effort to raise millions of dollars and the institution’s profile. The event’s knack for drawing bold-faced names has led some to think of it as a West Coast Met Gala. The question this year is whether the lack of studio executives, and qualms on the part of striking actors, could make this year’s party less buoyant or its red carpet less buzzy.But assuming the honorees show up as planned, there will be guaranteed star power present: In addition to Streep, the Academy will honor Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan, and Sofia Coppola. The chairs of the gala, which is raising money for exhibitions, education and public programs, are the director Ava DuVernay, the actor Halle Berry, the producer Ryan Murphy and the producer Dr. Eric Esrailian, a physician and a trustee.Oprah Winfrey is being honored for her “exemplary leadership and support” of the museum. Roy Rochlin/Getty Images“This event is about raising vital funds to ensure that this work will go on in service to the public,” said Jacqueline Stewart, who last year became the museum’s director and president. “The work of the museum is a common ground despite the strikes.”Behind the scenes, union representatives have been in discussions with the museum to set certain ground rules: Individual actors can be honored, but not individual projects, and bodies of work can be highlighted, but not specific films, studios or streaming services. If the gala ventures out of bounds, Crabtree-Ireland said, members will be expected to get up and leave to avoid incurring disciplinary measures.Stewart said that no guests had declined invitations citing the strike as a reason. While some studios have contributed funds to the gala, she said, “given the particular circumstances this year, there will be no executives from struck companies in attendance.” The majority of table and ticket buyers are not from the studios, the museum said, but are a mix of corporate supporters, philanthropists, and museum trustees.Some union members hope that the museum gala can be an opportunity to highlight the labor dispute, which was prompted by concerns about pay, artificial intelligence and working conditions and which has halted virtually all production.“I get that the optics are bad when some of our members are walking the picket line and others are putting on black tie and jewels and walking the red carpet,” said Greg Cope White, who had to pause production on a Netflix adaptation of his memoir — for which he is also a screenwriter — “The Pink Marine,” about a gay 18-year-old who joins the U.S. Marine Corps.“The gala is an opportunity to get some attention to our cause,” White added. “Meryl Streep and Oprah are great speakers. Hopefully they’ll give passionate sound bites that will bring some light to us.”The Academy Museum opened in 2021, and has become a popular attraction. Tanveer Badal for The New York TimesEach honoree will receive a different award — Streep, for her “global cultural impact”; Jordan for “helping to contextualize and challenge dominant narratives around cinema”; Winfrey for her “exemplary leadership and support” of the museum; and Coppola for innovations that “have advanced the art of cinema.”After numerous delays, the Academy Museum finally opened in 2021, a seven-story, $484 million concrete-and-glass spherical building designed by the architect Renzo Piano that was widely welcomed as an example of the city’s cultural fertility. An exhibition dedicated to John Waters, the cult filmmaker who directed “Pink Flamingos,” “Polyester” and “Hairspray,” opened there on Sept. 17.Although the gala is approaching fast, some actors and writers remain hopeful that the strike will be resolved by the time the limousines start to roll down Wilshire Boulevard. “If I could open the envelope at the Oscars,” White said, “It would say, ‘Strike is over.’” More

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      Reclaiming Place in Animation History for Bessie Mae Kelley

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      The pioneers of hand-drawn animation were all men — or at least that is what historians (men, almost exclusively) have long told us.Winsor McCay made the influential short “Gertie the Dinosaur” in 1914. Paul Terry (Farmer Al Falfa), Max and Dave Fleischer (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop) and Walter Lantz (Woody Woodpecker) each made well-documented early contributions. Walt Disney hired a team that became mythologized as the Nine Old Men.Earlier this year, however, the animation scholar Mindy Johnson came across an illustration — an old class photo, of a sort, depicting the usual male animators from the early 1920s. In a corner was an unidentified woman with dark hair. Who was she? The owner of the image, another animation historian, “presumed she was a cleaning lady or possibly a secretary,” Johnson said.“I said to him, ‘Did it ever cross your mind that she might also be an animator?’” Johnson recalled. “And he said, ‘No. Not at all.’”But Johnson wondered if it could be Bessie Mae Kelley, whose name she had discovered years earlier in an obscure article about vaudevillians who became animators.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.As part of an investigation that found Johnson cold-calling people in Minnesota, digging through archives at the University of Iowa and salvaging corroded cans of nitrate film from a San Diego garage, Johnson confirmed her hunch. The woman was Kelley, and she animated and directed alongside many of the men who would later become titans of the art form. According to Johnson’s research, Kelley started her career in 1917 and began to direct and animate shorts that now rank as the earliest-known hand-drawn animated films by a woman.So much for that cleaning lady theory.“History is recorded, preserved, written about and archived from a male perspective, and so nobody had really examined the level of what women did — their contribution was often just passed off as a single sentence, if at all,” Johnson said. “Finally, we have proof that women have been helming animation from the very beginning.”Bessie Mae Kelley directed an animated short with characters from the comic strip “Gasoline Alley.”Manitou ProductionsPreviously, historians had considered Tissa David to be the earliest example of a woman who directed her own hand-drawn work. She was credited on Jean Image’s “Bonjour Paris” in 1953. (The earliest surviving animated film directed and animated by a woman would be Lotte Reiniger’s “The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart” from 1919. But Reiniger worked in silhouette stop-motion animation, which is very different from the hand-drawn variety.)Johnson will present her findings on Monday at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. The evening event will include the first public screening of two restored, previously unknown short films by Kelley. One is called “Flower Fairies” and was completed in 1921, Johnson said. It involves composite animation (live footage with hand-drawn animation on top). Sweet-natured, human-looking creatures with wings awaken flowers and dance among them. Kelley completed “Flower Fairies” through the Brinner Film Company, a small Chicago studio that became known for newsreels.Mindy Johnson spent five years searching for evidence that a woman animated and directed alongside many of the men who became titans of the art form.via Mindy Johnson“Her forms are glorious, especially when you compare it to something like Walt Disney’s ‘Goddess of Spring,’ which was about 15 years later,” Johnson said. She was referring to a Silly Symphonies short that Disney based on the Greek myth of Persephone. “Goddess of Spring” is viewed as a critical steppingstone for Disney because it was used to develop techniques for the rendering of human forms, with the groundbreaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937) as a result.Kelley’s second film had a Christmas theme and was made in 1922. It includes stop-motion animation and finds a girl reading a book beside a crackling fire, a stocking dangling from the mantel. Santa climbs out of the book and sets about his duties.“Mindy has made a significant breakthrough, filling in an important gap in our understanding about the beginnings of this industry and art form,” said Bernardo Rondeau, the Academy Museum’s senior director of film programs. Johnson’s presentation at the museum is part of a series of screenings and talks dedicated to newly preserved and restored films from the Academy Film Archive.The stash of materials that Johnson located in San Diego — in the possession of Kelley’s great-nephew — also included original rice paper drawings used in the creation of the short films; copper prints; a journal and scrapbooks; and photos with notations by Kelley. One of the cans of film included a badly damaged animated short that Kelley directed with characters from “Gasoline Alley,” the comic strip that debuted in 1918.A drawing from “Colonel Heeza Liar,” an early syndicated animation cartoon series that Kelley worked on.Bray Studios, via Manitou ProductionsJohnson also discovered that Kelley helped design and animate a mouse couple from Paul Terry’s influential “Aesop’s Fables” series (1921 to 1933). Johnson noted that Walt Disney spoke about being inspired by the series. (“My ambition was to make cartoons as good as ‘Aesop’s Fables.’”)Johnson, who teaches animation history at California Institute of the Arts and Drexel University, is known for her 2017 book “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation,” a 384-page examination of unsung female artists and writers in the early days of Walt Disney Studios. She is now working on a book and documentary about Kelley — animation’s version, perhaps, of the 2013 film “Finding Vivian Maier,” about a nanny whose previously unknown cache of photographs earned her posthumous recognition as an accomplished street photographer.“I want to help Bess reclaim her legacy,” Johnson said.“It matters, in part because the animation field is still so dominated by men,” she added. “I’ve seen the posture of my female students change when I have told them about Bess. They’re like, yes, I have a place at this table. I have a place at the head of this table.” More

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      Film Academy’s Museum Connects With Visitors in First Year

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      The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures attracted about 20 percent more people than it expected since opening in September 2021. Now it needs to keep the momentum going.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has been something that almost no one in Hollywood expected: an instant hit.After an almost comical series of setbacks, the Academy Museum opened in Los Angeles in September 2021 and has since attracted more than 700,000 visitors, about 20 percent more than its pandemic-adjusted goal, according to Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (For months, gallery capacity was limited.) Half of the museum’s visitors have been under 40, he added, citing attendee surveys, and half have self-identified as being from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities. Adult tickets cost $25.“There was perhaps a slight concern, and I’m choosing my words carefully, that young people, people under the age of 40, might not be interested in film history or a cinema museum because they are streaming movies in different ways now,” Kramer said. “It has not been true, not even remotely. One of the many success stories of the museum is that it’s helping to cultivate a new generation of cinephiles.”The bad news? The academy now has to keep the momentum going, and with a potential recession on the horizon.“I’ve been thinking a lot about how to encourage repeat visitors — building a sense of community so that, not only do people see new things when they come back again, but they also feel that they’re participating with us in creating this experience,” said Jacqueline Stewart, the Academy Museum’s president. “Our museum depends in a lot of ways on breaking down some of the barriers I think that people might have felt when they hear the term academy. There’s an assumption that it’s an elitist institution.”The museum has sold 24,000 memberships, which cost between $100 and $1,000 annually. Additional revenue has come from hosting more than 100 private events; renting out the glass-domed terrace atop the museum’s spherical theater building runs $50,000 on top of a corporate membership, which starts at $10,000. Fanny’s, the museum’s well-reviewed restaurant, has served more than 150,000 people, according to the academy. Dishes range from $16 to $90.The museum’s gift shop has generated more than $6 million in sales, an amount that Kramer called “beyond our wildest expectations.” An Oscar made out of Legos, which sells for $500, and the $50 catalog for the museum’s Hayao Miyazaki exhibition have been among the top sellers.Add in philanthropic contributions and additional revenue — an opening gala generated $11 million — and the Academy Museum is comfortably covering annual operating costs while delivering returns that will ultimately be used to pay down hundreds of millions of dollars in construction debt, Kramer said.At the very least, the museum’s rosy first-year financial picture makes it something of a rarity among nonprofit cultural institutions, many of which are still reeling from the pandemic.By the time the seven-story museum opened last year, it was four years behind schedule. Its cost had ballooned by 90 percent, to about $480 million. Setbacks included the discovery of mastodon fossils by excavation crews, sparring architects, internecine warfare over the curatorial focus and, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, academy leaders became known for one blunder after another regarding their most high-profile undertaking, the annual Oscars ceremony.While the museum’s first-year financial picture is rosy, it will soon face fresh competition for visitors.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“Many began to wonder if the Academy Museum, rising as box office fell, was some bizarre hoax that would never actually be finished,” Mary McNamara, a Los Angeles Times columnist and critic, wrote last year.Soon after opening, the museum was hit with accusations of antisemitism. While taking great care to honor the contributions of women and artists of color to the cinematic arts — achievements long overlooked in an industry historically dominated by white men — curators had excluded the mostly Jewish immigrants, white men all, who founded Hollywood. To rectify the matter, curators announced a new permanent exhibition, “Hollywoodland,” about the founding of the American film industry, specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders; it will open next fall.Other upcoming exhibitions include “Director’s Inspiration: Agnès Varda,” and “The Art of Moviemaking: ‘The Godfather.’” “Casablanca,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “The Birds” will be showcased in smaller galleries.But visitors were plentiful from the start. The museum’s retrospective of Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like “Spirited Away” (2001), was a major draw, Stewart said. The museum also offers extensive public programs — 137 in year one, including onstage discussions with filmmakers like Spike Lee and actors like Denzel Washington. The institution also operates a separately ticketed cinematheque; more than 500 films were shown in its first year.“I met a guy a couple of weeks ago who said it was his 83rd visit to the museum and was committed to reading every label,” Stewart said.If nothing else, Angelenos now have somewhere to take Hollywood-fascinated visitors that does not involve the dreaded Hollywood & Highland shopping mall or the sticky, stinky Walk of Fame.What the future holds is anyone’s guess. Tourism officials hope that 2023 will mark a full recovery for Los Angeles, which would benefit the museum; the number of visitors to the area, particularly from overseas, is still far behind prepandemic levels. But a recession could just as easily stymie growth.The Academy Museum will also face increased competition in the years ahead. The adjacent Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the middle of a colossal expansion. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from “Star Wars” and other movies.For the academy, the continued financial health of its museum is of crucial importance. The construction debt is secured by the academy’s gross revenues, the vast majority of which come from the annual Oscars telecast. But awards revenue — after rising for decades — declined 10.8 percent in the academy’s 2021 fiscal year, reflecting plummeting Oscars viewership. Kramer, facing the likelihood that broadcast rights for the ceremony will continue to decline in value, perhaps dramatically, is scrambling to diversify the organization’s revenue streams.“It’s what any healthy nonprofit needs to do and should do,” Kramer said, “and the museum is helping us greatly with that.” More

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      An Oscars Apology for Sacheen Littlefeather, 50 Years After Brando Protest

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      The Apache activist and actress was booed onstage in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on Marlon Brando’s behalf and criticized Hollywood for its depictions of Native Americans.The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologized to Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache and Yaqui actress and activist who was booed onstage at the Oscars in 1973 after she refused the best actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando.The Academy said in a statement on Monday that it had apologized to Ms. Littlefeather, 75, in June, nearly 50 years after Ms. Littlefeather pierced through the Academy Awards facade of shiny statues and bright lights in 1973 and injected the ceremony with criticism about Native American stereotypes in media.Her appearance at the ceremony, the first time a Native American woman stood onstage at the Academy Awards, is perhaps one of the best-known disruptive moments in the history of the award ceremony.When Ms. Littlefeather, then 26, spoke, some of the audience cheered her and others jeered. One actor, John Wayne, was so unsettled that a show producer, Marty Pasetta, said security guards had to restrain him so that he would not storm the stage.Ms. Littlefeather said she was “stunned” by the apology in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this, experiencing this,” she said.“When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood there alone,” she added.Ms. Littlefeather also brought attention to the federal government’s standoff at Wounded Knee with Native Americans in the 1973 speech, which she came up with shortly before being called onstage on behalf of Mr. Brando, who was to receive the best actor award for his performance as Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.”Ms. Littlefeather said in an interview with the Academy, which was published on Monday, that she had been planning to watch the 45th Academy Awards on television like everyone else when she received a call the night before the ceremony from Mr. Brando. The two had become friends through her neighbor, the director Francis Ford Coppola. Mr. Brando asked her to refuse the award on his behalf if he won.Ms. Littlefeather arrived at the ceremony with only about 15 minutes left of the official program, wearing a glimmering buckskin dress, moccasins and hair ties. Ms. Littlefeather said she had little information about how the night would work, but Mr. Brando had given her a speech to read if he won.That plan evaporated when a producer for the Oscars saw the pages in her hand and told he she would be arrested if her comments lasted more than 60 seconds, she said.She introduced herself, then explained that Mr. Brando would not be accepting the award because of his concerns about the image of Native American people in film and television and by the government. She paused when a mix of boos and cheers erupted from the audience.“And I focused in on the mouths and the jaws that were dropping open in the audience, and there were quite a few,” she told the Academy. “But it was like looking into a sea of Clorox, you know, there were very few people of color in the audience.”The crowd quieted, and Ms. Littlefeather mentioned the Wounded Knee standoff and then left the stage without touching the golden Oscars statue. She said some audience members did the so-called “tomahawk chop” at her and that when she went to Mr. Brando’s house later, people shot at the doorway where she was standing.“When I went back to Marlon’s house, there was an incident with people shooting at me,” she said. “And there were two bullet holes that came through the doorway of where I was standing, and I was on the other side of it.”Ms. Littlefeather, who was not available for an interview on Tuesday, told the Academy that speaking about these events in 2022 “felt like a big cleanse.”“It feels like the sacred circle is completing itself before I go in this life,” said Ms. Littlefeather, who told The Guardian in June 2021 that she had terminal breast cancer.The former president of the Academy, David Rubin, wrote in the apology to Ms. Littlefeather that the abuse she faced because of the speech was “unwarranted and unjustified.”“For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged,” Mr. Rubin wrote. “For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”Mr. Rubin’s letter will be read next month at a program at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, “An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather.”The Academy described it as an event of “conversation, reflection, healing and celebration.” Ms. Littlefeather said in a statement that she was looking forward to the Native American performers and speakers at the event, including Calina Lawrence, a Suquamish singer, and Bird Runningwater, the co-chair of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance, who is Cheyenne and Mescalero Apache.“It is profoundly heartening to see how much has changed since I did not accept the Academy Award 50 years ago,” she said. “I am so proud of each and every person who will appear onstage.” More