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      in Movies

      How the Oscars and Grammys Thrive on the Lie of Meritocracy

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      Despite all the markers of excellence, contenders like Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis and Beyoncé weren’t recognized for the highest honors. Niche awards don’t suffice.I didn’t see it coming, but maybe I should have.That refrain has been popping into my head repeatedly since learning that neither Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) nor Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) was nominated for the best actress Oscar and that Andrea Riseborough and Ana de Armas had emerged as this year’s spoilers.It came to mind again on Sunday night when the Grammys awarded Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House” album of the year, not Beyoncé’s “Renaissance.” Though she made history that night as the most Grammy-winning artist of all time, this was Beyoncé’s fourth shutout from the industry’s most coveted category and another stark reminder that the last Black woman to take home that award was Lauryn Hill — 24 years ago. This time the message was loud and clear: Beyoncé, one of the most prolific and transformative artists of the 21st century, can win only in niche categories. Her music — a continually evolving and genre-defying sound — still can’t be seen as the standard-bearer for the universal.The music and movie industries differ in many ways, but their prizes are similarly determined by the predominantly older white male members of the movie and recording academies. Though both organizations have made concerted efforts in recent years to diversify their voting bodies in terms of age, race and gender, Black women artists, despite their ingenuity, influence and, in Beyoncé’s case, unparalleled innovation, continue to be denied their highest honors.This trend is no indication of the quality of their work but rather a reflection of something else: the false myth of meritocracy upon which these institutions, their ceremonies and their gatekeepers thrive.It is true that Black women, dating to Hattie McDaniel for “Gone With the Wind” (1939), have won the Academy Award for best supporting actress. And while it took a half-century for Whoopi Goldberg to receive an Oscar in the same category (for “Ghost”), over the past 20 years, seven Black women have won in this category, including Davis, and this year, Angela Bassett is a front-runner as well.Viola Davis in “The Woman King.” Because of the film’s critical and commercial reception, Oscar watchers thought she would be nominated. Instead, she was snubbed. Sony PicturesBut, in a way, this is an example of rewarding the niche. What’s being honored is a character whose function is in service to a film’s plot and protagonist. She is neither a movie’s emotional center nor primarily responsible for propelling its narrative. Such heavy lifting is why I think it made sense for Michelle Williams, whom many considered a lock for an Oscar for best supporting actress for “The Fabelmans,” to campaign as a lead instead. “Although I haven’t seen the movie,” she told The New York Times, “the scenes that I read, the scenes that I prepped, the scenes that we shot, the scenes that I’m told are still in the movie, are akin to me with experiences that I have had playing roles considered lead.”Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.In the past, academy voters might have said there weren’t enough Black women in leading roles to consider. But “Till” and “The Woman King” disprove that. So we’re left with other, more traditionally meritocratic arguments about who deserves to be nominated for best actress — the quality of the individual performance, the critical response to a film, and a decent budget to market and campaign for Oscar consideration. Yet this year, even those measures suddenly seemed to be thrown out the window.Instead, in the case of Andrea Riseborough’s surprising nod for “To Leslie,” we saw a new Oscar strategy playing out before our eyes. A groundswell of fellow actors, including A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet and even Cate Blanchett, who would go on to be nominated herself, publicly endorsed Riseborough’s performance on social media, at screenings and even at a prize ceremony. Since only 218 of the 1,302 members of the academy’s acting branch needed to rank a candidate first to secure a nomination, in time, that momentum translated into a nomination upset. That, in turn, led to a backlash, a review by the academy to make sure none of its campaign guidelines had been violated, and a backlash to the backlash, with Christina Ricci and Riseborough’s “To Leslie” co-star Marc Maron calling out the academy for its investigation. “So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition?” Ricci wrote in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Feels elitist and exclusive and frankly very backward to me.”What fascinated me, however, was that what was being framed as a grass-roots campaign to circumvent studio marketing machines revealed another inside game. A racially homogeneous network of white Hollywood stars appeared to vote in a small but significant enough bloc to ensure their candidate was nominated.And while that explains how an Oscar campaign can be both nontraditional and elitist, it also underscores the other obstacles that Black actresses, in particular, and actresses of color in general, have to surmount just to be nominated, let alone win. Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King” was so critically praised for its filmmaking and masterly performances and was such a commercially successful film that Davis was expected (at the very least) to garner her third nomination in the best actress category.Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” The film was widely panned.NetflixIn contrast, Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde,” starring de Armas, was so heavily panned for its brutal and sexist depiction of Marilyn Monroe that I assumed the prerelease chatter about her performance would have dampened by the time Oscar voting began. For more than any other film with a best actress contender this year, “Blonde” raises the question: Shouldn’t a protagonist have depth or multidimensionality for that actor’s performance to be noteworthy? As conceived by Dominik, Monroe merely flits from injury to injury, all in the service of making her downfall inevitable.Such representations reveal another pattern: Oscar voters continue to reward women’s emotional excess more than their restraint. In most films with best actress nominations this year, women’s anger as outbursts is a common thread. “Tár” and even “To Leslie” examines the dangerous consequences of such fury; “The Fabelmans” positions it as a maternal and artistic contradiction for Williams’s character; and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” brilliantly explores it as both a response to IRS bureaucratic inefficacy and intergenerational tensions between a Chinese immigrant mother and her queer, Asian American daughter. “Blonde” is again an exception, for de Armas’s Monroe expresses no external rage but sinks into depression and self-loathing, never directing her frustration at the many men who abuse her.Within that cinematic context, I wondered if it was possible to applaud Deadwyler for playing a character like Mamie Till-Mobley. Unlike the main characters of the other films, Till-Mobley, in real life, had to repress her rational rage over the gruesome murder of her son, Emmett, to find justice and protect his legacy. Onscreen, Deadwyler captured that paradox by portraying Till-Mobley’s constantly shifting self and her struggle to privately grieve her son’s death while simultaneously being asked to speak on behalf of a burgeoning civil rights movement. If words like “nuanced,” “subtle,” “circumspect” or “introspective” garner leading men Oscar attention (how else do we explain Colin Farrell’s nod?), female protagonists are often lauded for falling apart.Deadwyler and Whoopi Goldberg in “Till.” The lead’s repressed rage stands in contrast with the emotional outbursts of the nominated performances.Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures, via Associated PressBut even that assumes that all women’s emotions are treated equally, when the truth is that rage itself is racially coded. Both “Till” and “The Woman King” depict Black women’s rage as an individual emotion and a collective dissent, a combination that deviates from many on-screen representations of female anger as a downward spiral and self-destructive.Commenting on such differential treatment, the “Till” director Chinonye Chukwu critiqued Hollywood on Instagram for its “unabashed misogyny towards Black women” after the academy snubbed her film. Likewise, in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Prince-Bythewood asked, “What is this inability of Academy voters to see Black women, and their humanity, and their heroism, as relatable to themselves?”It’s been over 20 years since Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar for her “Monster’s Ball” performance as a Black mother who grieves the loss of her son through alcohol and sex. The fact that she remains the only Black woman to have won this award is ridiculous. “I do feel completely heartbroken that there’s no other woman standing next to me in 20 years,” Berry reflected in the run-up to the Oscars last year. “I thought, like everybody else, that night meant a lot of things would change.”The difference between then and now is that there are far more Black women directors and complex Black women characters on the big screen than ever before. Maybe, next year, the academy members will get behind one of those actors. Then again, maybe I should know better. More

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      in Television

      Maya Rudolph’s Super Bowl Challenge: Make M&M’s Sweet Again

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      Unpopular companies and brands in trouble go with a strategy of hiring a likable celebrity and hoping for the best. But they might be better off with a puppy.There are 179 actresses who are better known than Maya Rudolph, including Whoopi Goldberg (third most famous), Lindsay Lohan (15th) and Gwyneth Paltrow (32nd). But Ms. Rudolph is more likable than those three and many others who are household names, according to the market research firm YouGov.So it made sense that M&M’s, the candy that has found itself in the cultural cross hairs, would enlist Ms. Rudolph as its corporate pitchwoman and make her the star of a commercial scheduled to air during Super Bowl LVII on Sunday.Nearly 75 percent of the people who have heard of Ms. Rudolph said they liked her, and her popularity was on an upswing in the fourth quarter of 2022, YouGov reported in its most recent ranking. Ms. Goldberg and Ms. Paltrow each came in around 55 percent, and Ms. Lohan at 39 percent.Ms. Rudolph, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 2000 to 2007, is likable enough to make the multibillionaire she plays seem down to earth on the AppleTV+ series “Loot.” She managed something similar more than a decade ago in “Bridesmaids,” winning over audiences as a bride-to-be who develops bride-zilla tendencies. Now she will attempt to do the same for a candy brand in trouble.M&M’s got some blowback from cable pundits and social media warriors after it made cosmetic changes to its long-running cartoon characters. The Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others accused the brand of “woke” advertising, arguing that the “spokescandies” had lost their sex appeal. A point of contention was that one of the cartoon candies had replaced her high-heeled go-go boots with sneakers — and at times it was hard to tell if M&M’s was trolling right-wing commentators with its promotional stunts or if it was the other way around.“M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous,” Mr. Carlson said on his show more than a year ago. He was at it again last month, saying, “The green M&M got her boots back but apparently is now a lesbian, maybe, and there is also a plus-sized obese purple M&M.”In the commercial to be shown during the second quarter of Sunday’s game, Ms. Rudolph will try to calm the brouhaha. (A spokeswoman for M&M’s “Chief of Fun” declined to comment for this article.)Marketers, especially those trying to create an appealing image for unlikable industries like pharmaceuticals and airlines, know that a bit of charm can do a lot to disarm doubters and critics. In addition to Ms. Rudolph, other “Saturday Night Live” alumni have brought some warmth to companies that could certainly use it. Amy Poehler, whose affability set the tone for the sweetly humorous sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” has taken on the challenge of making a cable, internet and phone company seem sympathetic in a series of commercials for Xfinity. Cecily Strong, who left “Saturday Night Live” in December after a 10-year run, has lent her services to Verizon.Rashida Jones, a onetime regular on “Parks and Recreation” and “The Office,” manages to make banking seem almost fun in commercials for Citi. Jennifer Coolidge, an endearingly kooky addition to the America’s Sweetheart club thanks to her performance on “The White Lotus,” was featured in two Super Bowl commercials last year: one for Uber Eats, which had faced criticism for its treatment of pandemic-shocked restaurants and gig workers, and another for FanDuel, part of a growing sports betting industry that has drawn worries about gambling addiction.Put on a happy face: Cecily Strong, Amy Poehler, Rashida Jones and Jennifer Coolidge have all appeared in commercials for brands that needed help with their public images.But companies can sometimes make a misstep in their attempts to capitalize on the amiability of certain celebrities. In 1984, Burger King introduced “Mr. Rodney,” a character based on Fred Rogers, the esteemed host of the PBS children’s show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Wearing a cardigan, Mr. Rodney addressed the camera in a gentle voice: “Hi, neighbors. Today’s new word is something McDonald’s does to every burger: Let’s call it ‘McFrying.’ Can you say that?”One call from the real Mr. Rogers got the commercial bounced from the airwaves. “Mr. Rogers is one guy you don’t want to mess with, as beloved as he is,” an apologetic Burger King spokesman said at the time.Beer companies may not need the assistance of likable celebrities as much as banks and phone companies, but Anheuser-Busch InBev is taking no chances on Sunday, with several Super Bowl commercials, including one starring Serena Williams.Likability “is paramount” in the choices of corporate spokespeople, said Shana Barry, the head of celebrity, entertainment and influencers at Anheuser-Busch. “You want to associate with a talent that is having a good time,” she said. “We want to make sure that you’re paying attention to the ads and that you can connect with them onscreen.”Social scientists who have delved into the mysteries of likability point to the mere exposure effect (sometimes known as the familiarity principle), which posits that people tend to like something the more they are exposed to it. They also cite emotional contagion, a phenomenon in which people often sync up with the emotional state of others in their orbit, meaning that viewers may get a lift when they see someone having a good time in a TV commercial. And a 2021 academic study found that experts who testify in civil and criminal trials have an easier time persuading jurors if they are perceived as likable.“The essential elements are true no matter who you are,” said Natalie Anne Kerr, a psychology professor at James Madison University. “Companies can manipulate the situation to promote liking and connection to their ambassadors, especially if they’re actors who can intentionally choose to play the role of a likable person.”Keanu Reeves appeared in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace.But being seen as trying too hard to be liked can backfire, Dr. Kerr said. Truly likable people show vulnerability (this is known as the pratfall effect) and are relatable (the similarity attraction effect). See Keanu Reeves, who appeared in a 2018 Super Bowl commercial for Squarespace, doing a motorcycle stunt while reciting the words of the 1983 cult hit “Adventures in Success” as the track played in the background. Quirkiness may also be an asset, Dr. Kerr added, noting that one of her favorite actors is Nick Offerman, who is known for playing gruff but kind loners, as well as for his good-natured appreciation of carpentry and his wife.Tone deafness can destroy likability, said Mitch Prinstein, a psychology and neuroscience professor at the University of North Carolina and the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association.“We always tell elementary school kids that they can’t walk up to a bunch of kids playing Legos and say, ‘That’s stupid; let’s play with trucks,’” said Dr. Prinstein, the author of “Popular.” “You can include your truck with the Legos, but you can’t just disregard the group norm.“The same thing applies to adults,” he continued, “whether you’re leading a boardroom or you’re a celebrity. You have to read the room.”Public figures may have a tougher time connecting with audiences when they become so famous and wealthy that they lose touch with everyday experiences, he added. An out-of-touch star is rarely likable, especially at a time when fans have grown accustomed to joining their favorite entertainers on social media as they document a date night or grocery run.Rather than relying on big stars to pitch products, some companies are tapping TikTok tastemakers and Instagram nanoinfluencers to chase niche groups. “Brands are really looking for authenticity, for somebody that can talk about the brand in a way that others might not be able to,” said Adma Ortega, who handles celebrity and influencer relations for the Wieden & Kennedy ad agency in New York. “They want to talk to a specific audience, because you can’t talk to everyone anymore.”Some companies break through the noise by ignoring likability altogether, as Samsung did in building ads around the reality TV star Christine Quinn, who once said of her role on “Selling Sunset”: “I love being the villain, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”Deciding on a spokesperson is increasingly complicated, involving metrics like social media follower counts, audience demographics, algorithmic calculations including the Klear Score, the Aspire authenticity score and E-Score polls. After the Super Bowl, Anheuser-Busch and other companies will study rankings like Ad Meter and the Super Clios to see how viewers reacted to their commercials.Some firms still use the Q Score, a nearly 60-year-old measure of appeal that costs $1,750 per name. Clients get a detailed breakdown of sentiment among different demographics, and can also buy a full work-up of more than 1,200 personalities or a ranking of celebrities customized by their appeal to a particular audience. The score is used by ad agencies, movie studios, TV networks, lawyers and estates, said Steven Levitt, the president of the Q Scores Company.The “Q” stands for “quotient” — a reference to how the rating is calculated, by dividing the percentage of respondents who say a celebrity is one of their favorite personalities by the percentage of those who have heard of the person. Another part of the rating evaluates unpopularity. The highest score ever, a 71 in 1985, went to Bill Cosby; nowadays, celebrities rarely score above the low 40s, Mr. Levitt said. Ms. Rudolph’s score is 19, three points above the average for actresses, he said.Ad makers often ignore Q Scores in favor of gut instinct, Mr. Levitt added. “A lot of decisions are not based on data,” he said. “They’re based on creative appeal, or the strength of an executive to outshoot and overpower subordinates and say, ‘No, I think this is the way to go.’”But celebrity likability may not last. It takes only one slap at the Oscars, one rude complaint about an omelet, or one too many reports that a nice talk show host with a penchant for dancing was perhaps not so nice after all.Which may be why some of the most popular Super Bowl commercials of recent years have had no recognizable celebrities front and center, according to an analysis by the measurement firm iSpot.TV. Last year, the most likable ad featured a variety of wild animals grooving to the 1987 Salt-N-Pepa hit “Push It” after sampling some Flamin’ Hot Doritos.And the stars of the most likable spot on record, a Budweiser commercial from 2014? Clydesdale horses and a golden retriever puppy. More

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      in Theater

      Billy Crudup Makes the Sale in ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

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      Billy Crudup’s father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, was a gambler, a hustler, an occasional loan shark and a bookie of questionable gift. Sometimes on the way to his son’s weekend soccer practice, he would stop the car on an interstate shoulder and deal king crab out of the trunk. He sold red-and-white-striped umbrella hats, coffee additives, Farrah Fawcett posters, an inflatable ice chest.“Which is not a flotation device,” the younger Crudup clarified in a video call on a weekday afternoon in January.Despite two and a half decades in entertainment, this Crudup, 54, has lived a somewhat more conventional life governed by rigorous professional ethics. The risks he takes are mostly artistic. To watch his early films — “Stage Beauty,” “Without Limits,” “Almost Famous” among them — is to see a performer making audacious choices, executed with deep feeling and meticulous control.He’s an indifferent gambler. (The actor Hank Azaria, a poker buddy, confirmed this: Crudup, a performer who often trades in inscrutability, apparently has no poker face.) Then again, his whole career has been a kind of gamble, a long game. Though he has movie star looks, he bet that they wouldn’t last, and so the parts he took, often character parts, were designed to secure career longevity by demonstrating his aptitude and range.In one way, he lost that bet. As I broke it to him, his looks have held up very well. “I appreciate that,” he said, strong-jawed and elfin beneath a Yankees cap. “A lot of niacin and B-root.” (Niacin and B-root? “Those are the first two things that came into my head,” he said.)But in another way, it paid off: In his 50s, he is enjoying the best roles of his life. Since 2019, he has played Cory Ellison, a bright-eyed, coldblooded network news exec in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” Now he has added Jack Billings, a fast-talking slickster who heads a lunar time-share concern in “Hello Tomorrow!,” another Apple TV+ show, which debuts on Feb. 17.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” Crudup’s character leads a team selling lunar properties in a development called Brightside. (With Haneefah Wood and Hank Azaria.)Apple TV+An evangelist, a huckster, a consummate salesman, Jack reminds Crudup of his father, who died in 2005. Traveling salesmen are akin to gamblers, Crudup argued, always playing the odds, always counting on the big win.“I get to be in some proximity to my dad, by playing a version of him,” Crudup said.There are two narratives that people like me tend to spin around Crudup: that fame has always eluded him and that he never wanted it anyway. He acknowledges that both are somewhat true. He didn’t avoid mainstream projects (see: “Watchmen”), as long as he could play flawed and fractured characters within them.But while acting is a kind of selling, Crudup has always resisted selling himself. For years, he wore his own clothes to award shows. He mostly skipped the talk show circuit. He has tried to keep his personal life private. (“Billy Crudup has a personal life?” his friend and “Morning Show” co-star Jennifer Aniston joked.) A decade or two ago, he would have submitted to an interview like this, if he submitted at all, only out of contractual obligation and under sufferance. A New York Times writer, interviewing him in 2004, wrote, “He shields his life from would-be inspectors as if it were a nuclear facility in North Korea.” This avoidance was partly in service of that gamble. He wagered that a public persona would make receding into roles more difficult. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said. Avoiding publicity was, he said, “a protective mechanism.”It was also a way to protect himself when the tabloids swarmed. In 2003, Crudup left his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, to pursue a relationship with his “Stage Beauty” co-star, Claire Danes. He has not spoken publicly about this, just as he doesn’t speak about what seems to be his current relationship, with the actress Naomi Watts. He could set a few records and Wikipedia pages straight, he said. But he prefers not to.“Because that’s a lifelong pursuit, constantly trying to manage how people think about me as opposed to thinking about my work,” he said.The work has been consistent, but in the 2010s it became less visible. In films like “Jackie,” “20th Century Woman” and “Spotlight,” he inhabited characters so fully that he didn’t seem to be acting at all. It was easy to admire his performances without thinking much about them. That changed with “Harry Clarke,” a 2017 Off-Broadway play about a diffident, pansexual con artist. The play has a dozen roles. Crudup played all of them.Leigh Silverman, who directed the play, was surprised at how much Crudup struggled during rehearsals. In his films, he had made it look so easy. “I was so captivated, really, by his suffering, and his continuing to show up every day,” Silverman said in an interview. But during previews, Crudup began to suffer less, abandoning himself to the various roles, switching fluently between them. To anyone watching him alone onstage, his reach and capacity were irrefutable, as was his charisma.“He’s both holding you at a distance and beckoning you forward, which is so sexy,” Silverman said.In “The Morning Show,” Crudup (with Jennifer Aniston) plays a charismatic news executive. “Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, said.Apple TV+One of those watchers was Aniston, who immediately turned to her producing partner, Kristin Hahn, and told her that Crudup had to be in “The Morning Show.” Cory had been originally envisioned as a 30-year-old villain. But when Crudup flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, she was quickly convinced.“Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Ehrin said.Cory is staunch in his determination to win the ratings game. But there’s a volatility to the man, an unpredictability. “The Morning Show,” like “Harry Clarke” before it, allows Crudup to live in the contradictions that have made him a thrilling performer: his boldness and precision, his childlike enthusiasm married to a coolness that borders on opacity. Crudup enjoys these tensions. His co-stars do, too.“It’s electric,” Aniston said of acting opposite him. “Every time, I’m going, Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen next?”This electricity impressed Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, the creators and showrunners of “Hello Tomorrow!” Set in a retrofuturist world in which hovercrafts are a given and travel to the moon commonplace, the show centers on a group of salesmen hawking lunar properties in a development called Brightside. They’re led by Crudup’s Jack, who attacks the project with missionary zeal. Other actors had shown interest in the role. They’d seen Jack as a smoothie, a charmer. Jansen recalled Crudup’s take: “He said, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t a salesman; he’s a priest.’”The truth about those lunar properties remains elusive though much of the season. What’s important is that Jack believes in them, and his belief is so unswerving and sincere that it has a way of inspiring those around him.“Jack’s a genuine believer that providing somebody with a little bit of hope during the day is a true commodity worth valuing,” Crudup said.Here are some of the things that make Jack a good salesman: his energy, his flexibility, his superlative people skills. These are qualities Crudup’s father shared. They are also among the abilities that make Crudup a great actor. Like an actor, Jack is selling people on a story. He believes in the dream so that others can believe it, too.Crudup has generally sought to avoid publicity. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Good salesmanship is truly believing what you’re saying,” Crudup said. And Crudup has that belief. It’s why he can deliver a line like “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine” in “The Morning Show” with absolute conviction. It’s why his Jack can conjure intimacy even when surrounded by computer-generated automatons.“Sometimes giving folks a new dream to dream can make all the difference,” Jack says. And in Crudup’s mouth it sounds just about plausible.His co-stars Azaria and Haneefah Wood noticed this early in the shoot, during a scene in which Jack delivers a seminar-style version of his moonage daydream. Even having read the script, Azaria found himself weeping during the performance. His character, an insider on Jack’s team, would not have wept.“I had to hide from the camera that he had made me cry,” Azaria said.After the director called cut, Wood, who plays the team’s savvy accounts manager, approached Crudup. “And I was like, ‘[Expletive] you, Billy,’” she recalled. “‘Now my game has to step up so far, to be on just the same level.’”“But he gives you that energy,” she added. “He gives you the desire to just want to go all the way.”Whether or not Crudup has gone all the way, he has come pretty far. His career has been the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: He put the work in early on and he kept working. It’s only now, in these rich continuous roles, that he is seeing the return on his investment. And knowing he has made good has allowed him to hold himself a little more lightly. He’ll wear anyone’s shirt to an awards show now, he told me.“I feel less protective because I’ve been able to establish the career that I hoped to,” he said. Raking in the chips feels good. Maybe not as good as cornering the highway king crab market, but pretty good all the same.“It is miraculous to me,” he said. More

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      in Movies

      The Oscars’ Andrea Riseborough Controversy, Explained

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      You’ve got questions about the surprise best-actress nominee, and our awards columnist has the answers (and a few more questions).The seismic Will Smith slap? The jaw-dropping “La La Land”-“Moonlight” mix-up? You can have ’em. I like my Oscar controversies like I like my “Curb Your Enthusiasm” plot lines: small, petty and a little bit deranged.That’s why I’ve been gripped by all the new developments surrounding Andrea Riseborough, who managed a surprise best-actress nomination last month that quickly turned from boon to boondoggle. It’s the story everyone in Hollywood is talking about, though you’d be forgiven for wondering what exactly has gone down or why any of it matters. With that in mind, let’s see if I can find the answers to your questions:Who is Andrea Riseborough?The 41-year-old Brit is a real actor’s actor, the sort of committed thespian who is well-respected by her peers but has mostly flown under the pop-cultural radar. Without even clocking that it was the same actress, you might have seen Riseborough playing Nicolas Cage’s wife in the hallucinogenic “Mandy”; seducing Emma Stone in “Battle of the Sexes”; covering up an accidental death in an episode of “Black Mirror”; or exploring a ruined Earth with Tom Cruise in “Oblivion.”Because Riseborough has played such a wide variety of roles without developing a tangible star persona, she is often described as a “chameleon” or even “unrecognizable,” which is Hollywood-speak for an actress who doesn’t wear eye makeup. Still, the woman is damn castable: She appeared in four movies last year alone, including “To Leslie,” the tiny indie at the heart of this Oscar controversy. Spot the chameleonic Riseborough: Clockwise from top left, in “Oblivion,” “Mandy,” “Black Mirror” and “Battle of the Sexes.”What is “To Leslie”?Directed by Michael Morris, “To Leslie” stars Riseborough as the title character, a hard-drinking West Texan who won the lottery years ago but has blown through her money and torpedoed her relationships in the time since. As her frustrated family and friends wonder what to do with the belligerent Leslie, big questions are bandied about: Is it better to let an addict hit rock bottom or to extend a helping hand? Does there ever come a time when severing family ties should be done for your own good? And hey, is that Stephen Root, the stapler nerd from “Office Space,” playing a leather-daddy biker? (Alongside a glowering Allison Janney, no less!)The film debuted at South by Southwest last March alongside a much more high-profile Oscar contender, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and though “To Leslie” received mostly positive reviews, it earned less than $30,000 during its October release. In a year when many specialty films struggled to find an audience in theaters, that box office total was still so low that Riseborough’s co-star, the podcaster Marc Maron, accused the “To Leslie” distributor, Momentum Pictures, of “gross incompetence” on Twitter, then blasted the studio for failing to submit the film for awards consideration by most industry guilds. That sort of negligence might make people want to take matters into their own hands … but we’ll get to that.How is Riseborough’s performance?Though Leslie is a scrappy slip of a person, Riseborough makes a lot of big choices while playing her. It’s a pugnacious, eccentric performance, and though I’m an on-the-record fan of maximalist acting, I should let you know that if this were measured on a scale of 1 (utter naturalism) to 10 (Kristen Wiig as Liza Minnelli trying to turn off a lamp), Riseborough would be pulling an awfully high number.In other words, it’s the sort of big, actressy transformation that awards voters flock to like catnip, and if someone like Charlize Theron or Michelle Williams had de-glammed to play Leslie, there likely would have been Oscar buzz from the beginning. But without box office success or a big name, Riseborough appeared to be a non-starter.What was unusual about her Oscar campaign?A typical Oscar race plays out like a couture-clad season of “Squid Game,” where a large number of hopefuls are winnowed down to a surviving few. To stay in the conversation until the very end, it helps to win critics awards and earn nominations at televised awards shows, and Riseborough lagged on both counts: She hadn’t mustered much more than an Independent Spirit Award nomination and had no deep-pocketed distributor ready to buy For Your Consideration ads on her behalf. By most pundits’ estimation, she was not a serious contender, nor even an on-the-bubble dark horse.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.But during the second week of January, just days before voting for the Oscar nominations began, a cadre of movie stars suddenly took to social media on Riseborough’s behalf. Edward Norton was the first big booster, telling his two million Twitter followers that Riseborough gave “the most fully committed, emotionally deep … physically harrowing performance I’ve seen in a while.” The next day, Gwyneth Paltrow announced on Instagram that “Andrea should win every award there is and all the ones that haven’t been invented yet.”As the week wore on, at least two dozen more celebrities climbed aboard the Riseborough Railroad — from A-listers like Amy Adams, Kate Winslet and Jennifer Aniston to random stowaways like Jenny McCarthy and Tan France — and award watchers started to wonder what the hell was going on. The answer that emerged is that a late-breaking campaign had been waged by Riseborough’s manager, Jason Weinberg, and the actress Mary McCormack, who is married to Morris, the “To Leslie” director, to get the film in front of as many of their famous industry friends as possible.Riseborough, opposite Owen Teague in “To Leslie,” wasn’t even a dark-horse contender until mid-January. Momentum Pictures“The movie cannot afford any FYC ads, so this letter and invitation will have to do instead!” McCormack wrote in one of her mass emails, which were published by Vanity Fair. In a later missive, she said movies like “To Leslie” were an endangered species in need of support, writing, “I worry that unless we all support small independent filmmaking, it’ll just get eaten up by Marvel movies and go away forever.”With those entreaties, McCormack, Weinberg and Riseborough assembled a starry battalion of boosters that eventually included even her best actress competitor Cate Blanchett, who gave Riseborough a shout-out during her televised acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards. (This begs the question: Would Lydia Tár have been Team Riseborough? I don’t think the fictional conductor could ever bring herself to endorse a movie about West Texas — they eat too much barbecue there — though I could imagine a scene where she receives McCormack’s mass email, grimaces and then orders an underling to delete it.)Why were people so upset?This was hardly the first time that a contender had taken Oscar promotion into her own hands: Who can forget Melissa Leo’s iconic “Consider” ad campaign, in which the eventual Oscar winner donned furs and posed among pillars like a Blackglama model prowling Hearst Castle? But Riseborough’s team bypassed the FYC-ad industrial complex entirely, opting to wage a weeklong war powered mostly by word of mouth instead of an expensive, multi-month campaign that would have involved round tables, parties, red-carpet appearances, film-festival tributes and endless press hits.It was an unprecedented awards-season gambit, and it worked: When the presenter Riz Ahmed read Riseborough’s name out loud during the Jan. 24 announcement of the Oscar nominations, the journalists in attendance gasped, giggled and oohed like a scandalized sitcom audience. They knew that Riseborough had just pulled off something crazy, and it didn’t take long before rival awards strategists began working the phones, suggesting that her grass-roots campaign may have run afoul of Oscar rules.And as the Riseborough surge sunk in, her surprise nomination was weighed against the snubs of the “Woman King” star Viola Davis and the “Till” lead Danielle Deadwyler: If those two Black actresses had been nominated alongside the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star Michelle Yeoh, as many pundits were expecting, it would have been the first time in Oscar history that the best actress race featured a majority of women of color.Viola Davis’s performance in “The Woman King” was snubbed in the nominations.Sony Pictures, via Associated PressIn an essay for The Hollywood Reporter published Tuesday, the “Woman King” director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, did not mention Riseborough by name but alluded to the “social capital” that had helped propel her to a nomination. “Black women in this industry, we don’t have that power,” Prince-Bythewood wrote. “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.”Did the campaign break any rules?In a statement released on Jan. 27, the academy announced it would review the campaign procedures of the year’s nominees to make sure none of its guidelines were violated. Though Riseborough and “To Leslie” weren’t mentioned specifically, a reference to grass-roots campaigns in the statement all but confirmed that her nomination was the subject of investigation.Which aspects of the campaign might have earned scrutiny? Online sleuths noticed that a slew of copy-paste phrases — including the description of “To Leslie” as “a small film with a giant heart” — had appeared in social-media posts from the unlikely likes of Mia Farrow, Meredith Vieira and Joe Mantegna. And there was an eyebrow-raising Instagram post from the actress Frances Fisher, soon to be seen tightening Kate Winslet’s corset in the “Titanic” rerelease, who encouraged voters to select Riseborough because “Viola, Michelle, Danielle & Cate are a lock,” though it’s generally forbidden to mention specific competitors in that way.As the controversy began to heat up, wild rumors flew that Riseborough’s nomination could be rescinded. Puck News even wondered, “Was the Andrea Riseborough Oscar Campaign Illegal?” — a headline so breathless that you’d half-expect someone like Paltrow to be hauled before The Hague as an accomplice. (Hey, if you can’t lock someone up for selling jade vagina eggs, maybe they could be arrested for the lesser charge of Oscar meddling. Isn’t that how they got Al Capone?)Have Oscar nominations ever been rescinded before?Rarely, but the last two times it happened, the cause was improper campaigning. In 2014, the academy rescinded Bruce Broughton’s extremely “huh?” original-song nomination from the obscure faith-based film “Alone Yet Not Alone” because he’d leaned on his influence as a former academy governor when soliciting consideration. And in 2017, the academy yanked the nomination for the “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” sound mixer Greg P. Russell because he had engaged in “telephone lobbying.” It was tempting, then, to wonder if a Riseborough rebuke might change the entire makeup of the best actress race: After all, the Emmys rescinded Peter MacNicol’s 2016 nomination for guest actor in a comedy after learning he had appeared in too many “Veep” episodes to qualify, and then his replacement, the “Girls” guest star Peter Scolari, actually went on to win in the category. But even if the academy had seen fit to give Riseborough the hook, there would be no one to take her place. According to the academy’s bylaws, the race would simply be reduced to the remaining four nominees.So what happens now?On the last day of January, the academy’s chief executive, Bill Kramer, released another statement about the investigation, and though this statement did mention the “To Leslie” awards campaign by name, it concluded that Riseborough’s nomination would not be rescinded. “However, we did discover social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern,” Kramer wrote. “These tactics are being addressed with the responsible parties directly.”It’s unclear who those parties are: The academy didn’t name names, Riseborough hasn’t given an interview since the morning of the nominations, and Fisher’s Instagram post was still up last time I checked. But even if the terms of the scolding are unclear, the far-reaching effects of Riseborough’s curveball campaign have the potential to change the way we think of awards season.For one, a new spotlight has been put on the academy’s vaunted diversity efforts: Is it enough to simply recruit more members of color when so many of the voters remain obstinate, older white people who, for example, told Prince-Bythewood that they’d had no interest in seeing her movie? Of the four acting categories, the best-actress race has proved most hostile to recognizing people of color, and that won’t change until voters recognize the biases they hold when determining whose stories matter.But it also means that next season, just when we think the amount of viable Oscar contenders has shrunk to almost five, a surprise could come from nowhere that completely changes the race. Riseborough pioneered a risky new tactic that other would-be contenders could use to slingshot themselves back into viability. All they’ll need is patience — well, and an improbably starry Rolodex that hopefully has little overlap with Riseborough’s. After all, if Winslet has already called Riseborough “the greatest female performance onscreen I have ever seen in my life,” will we believe her when she says the same thing next year about M3gan? More

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      John Cleese to Reboot ‘Fawlty Towers’ With His Daughter Camilla Cleese

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      Mr. Cleese will write and act alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese in a revival of the renowned BBC comedy.“Fawlty Towers,” the renowned 1970s British sitcom that starred John Cleese as a surly and snobbish hotel owner, will be rebooted with Mr. Cleese returning alongside his daughter Camilla Cleese, Castle Rock Entertainment announced on Tuesday.The original show, which Radio Times declared the best British sitcom of all time in 2019 after a survey of comedy experts, ran for two seasons of six episodes each, in 1975 and 1979. Mr. Cleese, now 83, played Basil Fawlty, who was forced to contend with disasters and ludicrous situations while displaying all the kindness and hospitality of sandpaper.In the reboot, Mr. Cleese’s character will open a boutique hotel with his daughter, whom he has just discovered he had, and deal with a more modern set of problems.Mr. Cleese, an original member of the Monty Python comedy troupe, has recently been dealing with a more modern set of problems in his real life as well.On social media, he has frequently railed against “cancel culture” and what he has deemed “woke” behaviors. He has signed up to host a show on GB News, a British right-wing television network, in which “no one will be canceled — and no topic will be too controversial for discussion,” the network said.In 2020, an episode of “Fawlty Towers” was removed from some streaming services because it contained racial slurs. Mr. Cleese called the decision “stupid,” telling the newspaper The Age that “if you put nonsense words into the mouth of someone you want to make fun of you’re not broadcasting their views, you’re making fun of them.”Some fans have also accused him of transphobia for his comments in support of J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series.As with other British series in the 1970s, the original “Fawlty Towers” was shown in the United States on PBS. Despite interest from American broadcasters, the show’s small number of episodes and half-hour run time, without commercials, made it unable to fit American TV schedules.Castle Rock Entertainment did not say where the new series would air.Mr. Cleese said in a statement that he and his daughter developed the concept for the reboot with one of its executive producers, Matthew George, a producer of the films “Wind River” and “A Private War.”“When we first met, he offered an excellent first idea, and then Matt, my daughter Camilla, and I had one of the best creative sessions I can remember,” Mr. Cleese said. “By dessert, we had an overall concept so good that, a few days later, it won the approval of Rob and Michele Reiner. Camilla and I look forward enormously to expanding it into a series.”Mr. George, the Reiners and Derrick Rossi are the executive producers of the new “Fawlty Towers” series.“John Cleese is a comedy legend,” Mr. Reiner said in a statement. “Just the idea of working with him makes me laugh.”Amanda Holpuch More

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      in Theater

      On ‘Pictures From Home’ on Broadway, a Family Portrait Full of Secrets

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      The actor Nathan Lane had been planning to play the American anti-father Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” (1949) when that production fell apart. Restless during the pandemic and casting about for his next project, he read a draft of Sharr White’s “Pictures From Home,” which recalled “Salesman” to him: The two scripts share an almost incessantly angry, backward-looking gaze at the glory days of midcentury American masculinity, embodied by a discontented businessman. Now, as White’s play opens on Broadway this week, Lane, 67, will star as Irving Sultan, a former Schick razor executive who’s supported both emotionally and financially by his doting if frustrated wife, Jean Sultan (Zoë Wanamaker), while sparring with their childish 30-something son Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein, also doting, also frustrated), both of whom tend to Irv in their artichoke-colored Southern California ranch home even as he struggles to return their affection.The show, says Lane, is “about parents and mortality,” the latter of which has been on the actor’s mind since his 2020 cancer treatment. “They’re all fighting to tell their own story, and certainly Irv is fighting to protect this fantasy of his success.” Indeed, many arguments unfurl over 100 or so minutes, often in the form of direct audience address — it’s “part family dramedy, part documentary, part three-way TED Talk,” as Lane describes it — and the sorts of overlapping conversations native to people, like the Sultans, with Brooklyn roots and Palm Springs aspirations.Jennifer LivingstonWhat moves the play beyond that living room drama tradition is the source material: It’s based on Larry Sultan’s 1992 photo memoir of the same name, which the Bay Area-based artist published after dozens of visits to his parents’ San Fernando Valley home in the 1980s. Sultan then combined a decade’s worth of staged photographs and recorded interviews of his mother and father, both of whom died soon after the book’s release, with stills from home movies taken during his childhood to create a vulnerable family portrait that’s as much about aging as it is about accountability — and loyalty — to those we care about most. Photographers like Alec Soth and Stephen Shore still venerate the project, a longer version of which was republished in 2021; White discovered it in 2015, six years after the photographer’s death, as part of Sultan’s first career retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Afterward, the playwright contacted the artist’s widow, Kelly Sultan, and, over dinner, convinced her to let him option the book. She also agreed to open the archives so that White might achieve a new kind of bioplay, one that its director, Bartlett Sher, signed on to for its “multivariable potential,” he says, using found footage from the Sultans’ garage and photographic projections that, onstage, heighten the divide between truth and fiction.White, who also writes for television and has had two other plays on Broadway, both in different styles, says the half-decade he spent finishing this script was, from the start, an “investigation” into the Sultans’ power dynamics. In memoir and play alike, Jean and Irving are willing subjects … until they become skeptical co-conspirators, wondering why their son seems obsessed with chronicling them so harshly. “There’s lots of conflict, but it’s not the end,” adds White, 52, who had a strained upbringing with his own parents and is now raising two teenage sons in New York’s Hudson Valley with his wife, Evelyn Carr White, an artist and interior designer. “I was fascinated by this idea that you can say the worst thing, and ultimately nothing breaks.”And yet it’s Irv — depicted by Lane with jocular, egotistic bravado that barely masks his deep fear of irrelevance — who always seems to get the last word: “I’ll tell you about mess, Larry,” he says near the show’s conclusion. “You know what mess is? It’s intimacy. Intimacy is a big fat [expletive] mess. But I’ll tell you another thing. It’s love, too. OK? This thing you think you’re capturing. This evidence? This mess? It’s love.” More

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      Jesse Tyler Ferguson Tips His Cap to ‘Take Me Out’

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      The actor, who won a Tony Award for playing a baseball star’s business manager in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, called the role the most personal of his career.At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday night, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, standing in front of the black outline of a baseball stadium silhouetted against a pink, orange and yellow sky, closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the lights went dark.“Right before that moment, I was like, ‘If I say these last words, it’s really over,’” Ferguson said later, after returning to his fifth-floor dressing room after his final performance in the Tony Award-winning revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “Take Me Out.” “And that hit me hard. I was just trying to hold it together.”The sold-out show capped a 15-week return by Ferguson to the role that won him a Tony Award last spring, for best featured actor in a play.The curtain call on Sunday evening at the final performance of “Take Me Out.”George Etheredge for The New York TimesFerguson played Mason Marzac, a business manager for a player portrayed by Jesse Williams.George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s definitely the most personal role of my career,” said Ferguson, 47, who played Mason Marzac, a fanboy business manager for a player (Jesse Williams) who comes out as gay. “It’s a role that meant something to me before I started learning it myself.”The revival, which was originally slated to debut in spring 2020, finally opened last April at the Helen Hayes Theater and ran through June 11. It received near-universal acclaim from critics and won two of the four Tonys for which it was nominated (it also took home best revival of a play).After the initial run, which was produced by Second Stage Theater, the producers Barry and Fran Weissler announced in August that they would bring it back for a limited encore at the Schoenfeld starting last October, with most of the original cast of the revival — giving Ferguson his first chance to walk onto a Broadway stage as a Tony winner.“We just felt like there was unfinished business with this play,” Ferguson said in a conversation in the Blue Room at the Civilian Hotel before his final performance, surrounded by Broadway memorabilia like a pair of women’s Emerald City boots from “Wicked.” Ferguson saw the play during its original Broadway run in 2002, with Denis O’Hare in his role. “To take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special,” he said.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThough Ferguson is best known for playing the high-strung lawyer Mitchell Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” he was a regular on New York’s Off Broadway stages before turning to the small screen.“I just love the intimacy of an audience,” he said. “I love being in a room and whatever happens, happens that day, and it’s just for these people.”In conversations before his final performance and then after the curtain call — life-size cutouts of the show’s cast lined the stairwell up to his dressing room — Ferguson discussed the role’s personal meaning, how the show changed his relationship with baseball and what’s next for him. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.How are you feeling? I’m having a lot of heartbreak right now, being done. And Mason is not — he’s the opposite of heartbreak, his heart’s been cracked open. So I was fighting against this thing happening inside me, with what my character needs. In a few hours, I’m probably going to have a really good cry about this.How did you first become involved with “Take Me Out?”I was approached almost three and a half years ago. I was getting ready to do my last season of “Modern Family,” and it worked out that I was going to go right from that into this show.What appealed to you about it?I saw this play 20 years ago, and Denis O’Hare, who originally played the part, was so wonderful and spectacular in it, and that performance reinforced my desire to be a theater actor. So to take the reins 20 years later and get to try my own version of this guy is really meaningful and special.“I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had,” he said of the show’s second engagement.George Etheredge for The New York TimesHow has your performance changed in the encore run?When we all came back, the performances were so much richer and deeper. I’ve never peeled back the onion this far with a character, and it’s just because of the luxury of all this time we’ve had.Did you play or watch baseball growing up?No, though I certainly appreciate it more from working on this. It’s an infectious thing, and I’ve fallen in love with it in a way I never anticipated.Your character’s sudden baseball fandom is largely a means of redirecting an impossible crush. What is a time you’ve similarly become obsessively devoted to something?I’ve felt that way about theater, certainly. I sometimes use that as a replacement when I’m doing a show. I think about being on the stage at the Delacorte Theater, and I can replace that with being on a field by myself and looking at all these empty seats.It’s hard to believe this play was written more than 20 years ago. Are you surprised it’s still so relevant?It’s heartbreaking that it feels so relevant. We all kind of assumed that this play was going to feel like a relic after a while because it was like, “Oh, 20 years from now, that’s not going to be a thing, and people are going to be very open about who they are in professional sports.” And we haven’t gotten there yet. So few professional athletes have come out of the closet. The actor Eduardo Ramos joined Ferguson on the fire escape of the Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday in order to greet the actor Bill Heck who was unable to perform that night.George Etheredge for The New York TimesBecause the play has nude scenes, audience members were required to lock their phones in pouches during the performance. Have you noticed that people are more attentive?I do notice that, in the second act, they’re immediately with us because they haven’t been spending 15 minutes scrolling through Instagram. They’ve spent that time discussing the play with the people they’ve come with and just staying in the moment. I wish more theaters would do this.You are one of the few cast members who remain clothed in “Take Me Out.” But have you ever been naked onstage?When I was 21 or 22, I did a production of “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told,” which is a Paul Rudnick play. It was terrifying, and the internet wasn’t what it is now and social media didn’t exist. I really look up to these guys who are doing this. It takes a lot of bravery. There’s three actors in this show who don’t have to get naked and we’re all looking at one another like, “Oh, we can have carbs!”What have you learned about yourself through this role?My last few times on Broadway, I played a kid in a spelling bee, or I did this quirky one-man show about reservations. I just never thought of myself as an actor who had the ability to take on a part as meaty as this.You recently became a father to your second son, Sullivan, in November. And your oldest, Beckett, is 2. How are you sleeping?My kids are in Los Angeles right now. So I’ve been going back and forth to see them in L.A., which has been a series of red-eyes to get back in time for the Tuesday night shows. And that’s been taxing. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this without the support of my husband.What’s next for you?I’m in “Cocaine Bear,” which is my first studio film. I saw a screening of it a few weeks ago, and it’s absolutely bonkers. I’m so excited to see it with a big audience. And they’re talking about doing “Take Me Out” as a mini-series or an ongoing series, so we’ll see if that gets any traction.OK, before I let you go get some food, let’s do a quick round of confirm or deny.OK!Next up for Ferguson is a role in the film “Cocaine Bear,” which is scheduled to be released later this month.George Etheredge for The New York TimesYou know all the lyrics to “Miss Saigon.”All the lyrics? There was a time when I did. I don’t know if I still have it in my head. So what is that, a confirm and a deny?“Shake It Off” is the best Taylor Swift song.No, though I love “Shake It Off.” My favorite changes daily, but I’m currently obsessed with “Champagne Problems.”If your options to save your life were to either hit a Major League fastball or fight off a cocaine bear, you would —I don’t think I’d survive either. But because I have been mauled by a cocaine bear, I’m going to have to try the baseball.You own a pair of dad shoes, a.k.a. white New Balance sneakers.(Sighs) Yes, I can confirm that.New York is basically Los Angeles now.Deny. There are a lot more juice bars, but beyond that — I don’t think so.If you could guest star on either “The White Lotus,” “Schmigadoon!,” “Yellowjackets” or “The Gilded Age,” you would choose — Oh, shoot! [thinks for a minute] “Schmigadoon!”You can also throw in a wild card if you want —“Severance!” Something dark or different — I need to crawl out under the rock of Mitchell Pritchett and surprise people. More

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      in Movies

      Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids

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      The campaign on behalf of Andrea Riseborough is the latest to provoke controversy, but it’s hardly the most memorable.When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.1961Chill Wills, ‘The Alamo’After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”Variety refused to run it, and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company were in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.1974Candy Clark, ‘American Graffiti’Candy Clark with Charles Martin Smith in “American Graffiti.”Universal PicturesThe nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)1975Liv Ullmann, ‘Scenes From a Marriage’The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)1986Margaret Avery, ‘The Color Purple’Margaret Avery with Bennet Guillory in “The Color Purple.”Warner Bros.After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)1988Sally Kirkland, ‘Anna’Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”1991Diane Ladd, ‘Wild at Heart’After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”2011Melissa Leo, ‘The Fighter’Melissa Leo, fourth from right, in a scene from “The Fighter.”Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesUnlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.2013Ann Dowd, ‘Compliance’Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”) More