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The group that was once assailed by the F.C.C. steadily gained influence in Hollywood over the years until scrutiny of its practices and lack of diversity led NBC to say it would not air its show in 2022.LOS ANGELES — The Golden Globes were created by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1944 and quickly developed a reputation as unserious and slippery. More
His Pulitzer, in 1992, came amid controversy not of his making: A three-member jury had recommended a different work.Wayne Peterson, a prolific composer whose fraught winning of the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 stirred debate about whether experts or average listeners were the best judges of music, died on April 7 in San Francisco. He was 93.His son Grant confirmed the death, in a hospital, which he said came just seven weeks after that of Mr. Peterson’s companion of decades, Ruth Knier.Mr. Peterson won the Pulitzer for his composition “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark,” but only after the 19-member Pulitzer committee rejected the advice of the three-member music jury, which initially recommended that Ralph Shapey’s “Concerto Fantastique” receive the prize.The jury was made up of composers, who had the ability to study the scores of works under consideration, whereas the committee members, mostly journalists, had no particular expertise in music. The dust-up began when the jury submitted only one piece, Mr. Shapey’s, in its recommendation to the committee, rather than three candidates, as was traditional.The committee sent the recommendation back, demanding at least one more name. When the jury responded with Mr. Shapey’s work and Mr. Peterson’s, while indicating that Mr. Shapey’s work was its first choice, the committee awarded the prize to Mr. Peterson instead. The jurors responded with a sharply worded complaint that said, in part, “Such alterations by a committee without professional musical expertise guarantees, if continued, a lamentable devaluation of this uniquely important award.”The incident produced considerable hand-wringing over whether experts or a more general panel should determine the winner of the music prize, an issue the Pulitzers had faced before in other genres. The dispute was puzzling because, as music critics for The New York Times wrote in the aftermath, it was not necessarily a case of Mr. Peterson’s work being more listener-friendly than Mr. Shapey’s — both men wrote atonal works. Some writers suggested that the matter was simply the Pulitzer committee asserting its dominance over the jury.In any event, the controversy left Mr. Peterson in an awkward position, since he knew the jury members who had faulted the decision, and since he professed admiration for Mr. Shapey’s works.“He would have been thrilled to get second place,” Grant Peterson said.“There was no bad blood,” he added. “It was just kind of a bummer because it wasn’t of his making.”Mr. Peterson himself acknowledged that the dispute left him with mixed feelings.“I had sent the work in as a lark, and I didn’t think I had even a remote chance of winning,” he told The Times in 1992. “I have won other awards, but the prestige of the Pulitzer is greater than that of the others. The controversy has made it a little different. I just hope the pall that it has cast will not jeopardize what the Pulitzer could mean in helping circulate my music.”Grant Peterson said that, in that regard, the episode proved to be a plus — the prize, he said, did boost his father’s name recognition, and it brought him more lucrative commissions.Mr. Peterson became a professional jazz pianist at 15, and his love of jazz found its way into his compositions.via Grant PetersonWayne Turner Peterson was born on Sept. 3, 1927, in Albert Lea, Minn. His father, Leslie, was “a victim of the Depression,” he told The Associated Press in 1992, who “bounced around from one thing to another”; his mother, Irma (Turner) Peterson, died when he was young, and he lived with his grandmother after that, his son said.His musical ability, which he said came from his mother’s side of the family, manifested itself early.“I became very interested in jazz piano and was a professional jazz musician from the age of 15 on,” he said. “I put myself through college by playing jazz, through three degrees at the University of Minnesota” — a bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate, all earned in the 1950s.He became a professor of music at San Francisco State University in 1960, and taught composition there for more than 30 years. He lived in San Francisco at his death.Mr. Peterson’s career as a composer began in 1958 with the performance of his “Free Variations” by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now the Minnesota Orchestra). He composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and other groupings, sometimes unusual ones. “And the Winds Shall Blow,” which had its premiere in Germany in 1994, was described as a fantasy “for saxophone quartet, winds and percussion.” There was also his Duo for Viola and Violoncello.“A nervous, effectively written piece, filled with dark melodies well suited to these lower string instruments, the duo builds to a fast and exciting climax,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in The Times when the work was performed at the 92nd Street Y in 1988.Mr. Peterson thought it important for a composer to listen to others’ works, across a wide range.“I don’t limit myself to any one group of composers,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1991. “I try to listen to everything, and if I hear anything I like, it gets distilled in my psyche and comes out somewhere in my music.”His love of jazz also found its way into his compositions, including “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark.”“There’s a lot of syncopation you can associate with jazz,” he said of that work, “but this isn’t a jazz piece.”It was given its premiere in October 1991 by the San Francisco Symphony. George Perle, the chairman of the Pulitzer jury that recommended the Shapey piece, took pains to praise Mr. Peterson’s composition even amid the controversy.“It is absolutely worthy of a Pulitzer Prize,” he said in 1992. “But the Pulitzer Prize is supposed to be for the single best work of the year, and on this occasion we felt that there was a work that was more impressive.”The controversy over his Pulitzer — which the committee awarded him instead of the composer recommended by the music jury — left Mr. Peterson in an awkward position. He knew the members of the jury and respected the composer they had recommended.Grant PetersonEven Mr. Shapey, who died in 2002 and was known for being outspoken, came to view his missed prize with a touch of humor.“A critic in Chicago started calling me ‘Ralph Shapey, the non-Pulitzer Prize winner,’” he told The Times in 1996. “They’ll have to put that on my tombstone.”Mr. Peterson’s marriage to Harriet Christensen ended in divorce in the 1970s. In addition to his son Grant, he is survived by three other sons, Alan, Craig and Drew, and two grandchildren.Grant Peterson said that since his father’s death he had been going through his papers and had been astonished at his productivity — not just his roughly 80 finished compositions, but the countless fragments.“There’s the stuff that’s bound and finished and published,” he said, “but mixed in with that is the chicken-scratch on yellow tablets. The guy was a music machine.” More
“Colette,” which was featured in the virtual-reality video game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, took home the award for best documentary short.It was a night of firsts: First Korean actor to win an Oscar, oldest performer to win best actor, first woman of color to win best director.And, for the video game industry, its first Oscar recognition for best documentary short.The statuette was for “Colette,” a short film featured in the Oculus virtual-reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is also the first Oscar for Facebook. (It owns Oculus, the virtual-reality group that produced the documentary short along with EA’s Respawn Entertainment.)The 24-minute film, directed by Anthony Giacchino and produced by Alice Doyard, follows a survivor of the French Resistance, Colette Marin-Catherine, as she returns to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II to visit a concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother, Jean-Pierre.“The real hero here is Colette herself, who has shared her story with integrity and strength,” Mike Doran, the director of production at Oculus Studios, said in a statement. “As we see in the film, resistance takes courage, but facing one’s past may take even more.”Medal of Honor, which is set during World War II and casts players as an Allied agent trying to outwit the Nazis, did not garner much acclaim as a video game. Many reviewers criticized it for its huge system requirements, which were largely the result of the inclusion of so much historical and documentary footage.But now that the film has won an Oscar — well, that might change a few minds. Or at least get it in front of the eyes of nongamers. You can watch “Colette” free online on Oculus TV or YouTube, or on the website of The Guardian, which later acquired and distributed the film.“We hope this award and the film’s reach means” that the memories of all of who resisted “are no longer lost,” Doran said. More
On social media, the director’s fans blurred out her name and turned images on their sides to evade the censors. “People should be celebrating,” one writer said. More
TV ratings for awards shows have been in free fall, especially during the pandemic, and Hollywood doesn’t want the viewing public to toss its premier showcase into the entertainment dustbin. More
From a pajama-clad Jodie Foster to the teary “Minari” child star Alan S. Kim, they managed to make their acceptance speeches work from home. More
The play is about the effect of the Flint, Mich., water crisis on three generations of women.Erika Dickerson-Despenza quit her last non-theater job in 2019, ready to pursue a full-time career as a playwright in New York. And that career was looking good: she was wrapping up a fellowship at the Lark, starting a residency at the Public Theater, and working on a play inspired by the Flint water crisis.The Public scheduled a staging of that play — her first professional production — for the summer of 2020.You can imagine what happened next.The coronavirus pandemic shuttered theaters across America, and with it, scuttled her debut. But now the play, “cullud wattah,” is being recognized with the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a respected annual award honoring work by women and nonbinary playwrights. The prize is a distinctive one — $25,000 for the winner, plus a Willem de Kooning print — and many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Wendy Wasserstein and Paula Vogel).Dickerson-Despenza, a 29-year-old Chicago native, is thrilled. “It’s a really affirming moment,” she said, “not only for me as an emerging playwright, but also for the way that I am doing my work as a queer Black woman who has intentionally decided to write about Black women and girls.”Her career, like so many others, has been upended by the pandemic. “cullud wattah” is on hold, but a spokeswoman for the Public said the theater still hopes to produce it once it resumes presenting in-person productions.In the meantime, she has been working on a 10-play cycle about the effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. The second play in the cycle, “[hieroglyph],” was staged (without a live audience), filmed and streamed earlier this year by San Francisco Playhouse and Lorraine Hansberry Theater. And next week the Public Theater will introduce an audio production of “shadow/land,” the first installment of her Katrina cycle.“I am interested in what we learn, and do not learn, and what history has to teach us,” she said.She said she had been following the news out of Flint for some time before deciding to write “cullud wattah”; for a while, she said, she just made notes about the crisis and posted them on her wall. The play imagines the effect of the water crisis on three generations of women.“I had a wall full of Flint, and I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. “The play is not so much about Flint, as it is about how an apocalypse makes everything else bubble to the surface.” More
For Sara Krulwich, who has shot productions for The New York Times for more than two decades, a series of recent assignments hinted at an industry revival.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On the first evening in April, Sara Krulwich, a New York Times photographer, visited the Kraine Theater in the East Village, where Mike Daisey, an actor and monologuist, was rehearsing a show for which the seating capacity would be limited to 22. The restriction, Mr. Daisey said, reminded him of his earliest days as a performer, when he was thrilled if even a handful of people were in the audience.For about 20 minutes, Ms. Krulwich photographed Mr. Daisey, adjusting her shutter, she later said, to ensure that “the theater lights and my camera were going to talk to each other in a kindly way.”The next day, Ms. Krulwich photographed part of a performance at the Daryl Roth Theater at Union Square. And on Saturday, she shot a 36-minute performance at the historic St. James Theater in Midtown. Those assignments added up to her busiest stretch of theater work in more than a year.Theatrical productions, dormant since last spring, are resuming in New York City, the first tentative steps toward what actors, directors and others hope will be a strong comeback by the fall. And many in the theater world may see Ms. Krulwich’s presence as a reassuring sign.For more than two decades, she has been a Broadway and Off Broadway fixture, photographing about 100 shows a year, a body of work that led to her receiving a Tony Honor in 2018.After a yearlong absence, Ms. Krulwich began photographing performances and rehearsals, feeling her way back into familiar tasks and reflecting on early traces of a theatrical revival, which, she said, mirrored the stirrings of spring.“The blooms are beginning,” she said by phone. “Even if we’re not seeing the full flowering just yet.”Ms. Krulwich joined The Times as a staff photographer in 1979, working for the Metro, National and Sports desks before becoming the paper’s first culture photographer in 1994.At that time, she said, it was common for news organizations to run theater photographs handed out by producers that tended to present reality in the light most favorable to them. Ms. Krulwich, however, wanted to cover theater with the same journalistic approach that the paper employed while reporting on other events.Ms. Krulwich said that her approach was direct, telling producers that theater was looked upon as news inside The Times and should be documented that way. Eventually, she obtained access to almost every production in the city.Over the years, Ms. Krulwich has captured moments that have become a part of theater lore. She photographed developmental work on the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s masterwork, “Angels in America.” In 1996, she took what is believed to be the last picture of Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of “Rent,” hours before his death the night before the show’s first Off Broadway preview.Her Tony, in 2018, made her the first journalist recognized for excellence in the theater, an honor given to people, organizations and institutions that have contributed to the industry but are not eligible to win in other Tony categories.Returning to work inside venues she’s accustomed to, Ms. Krulwich said she took delight in seeing people she has known for many years and looked forward to a time when everyone connected to productions will, once again, be able to make a living.“It’s a small group of people,” she said. “Almost an extended family.”The day after photographing Mr. Daisey, Ms. Krulwich wore an N-95 mask and climbed a ladder at the Daryl Roth while shooting about 20 minutes of a performance of “Blindness,” an audio adaptation of the dystopian novel of the same name by the Portuguese writer José Saramago.And then, the following day, at the St. James, she photographed the dancer Savion Glover and the actor Nathan Lane at the 36-minute event they performed in front of a masked audience of 150.It was, noted Michael Paulson, a Times theater reporter, the first time in 387 days that there was activity inside a Broadway house.Ms. Krulwich said the performance was not the same as one that would have taken place before the coronavirus pandemic, but she added that she felt at home back inside the St. James and appreciated the hints of what is to come.“I must say, it felt familiar to me,” she said. “It’s just a little bit. It’s a tiptoe. It’s the doors opening a crack.” More
