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      Marty Callner Might Be the Most Influential Comedy Director

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      Marty Callner made the first modern special, setting the template still in use. (He was also key to hair-metal videos. But that’s another story.)Since comedy is often overlooked at the Oscars, why doesn’t it have its own awards show?It’s been tried, but the self-seriousness of such events can be an odd fit. So when Netflix started an awards show celebrating the greats in stand-up — who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame being built at the National Comedy Center — it was inevitable that a participating comic would make fun of the whole thing.At the recent Los Angeles taping of that awards show, “The Hall: Honoring the Greats of Stand-Up,” which premieres on Thursday, Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, George Carlin and Robin Williams were inducted with speeches by Dave Chappelle, Chelsea Handler, Jon Stewart and John Mulaney. When Mulaney introduced Williams by reading a letter from the late comic’s daughter, he appeared momentarily emotional before pausing to say: “I don’t want to cry at a fake awards show.”That didn’t sit right with Marty Callner, the show’s co-creator (with Randall Gladstein) and director, who cut that quip in the edit. “It’s real,” he told me in the backyard of his Malibu home. “The Hall” has been a longtime dream of his, an effort to reintroduce classic comedy to younger generations, and an honor that he says comics will appreciate and care about. “These guys are still human beings and they still have egos and they still want a legacy.”John Mulaney inducting Robin Williams into the Hall of Fame on the new special.Terence Patrick/NetflixCallner, 75, has his own complicated relationship with a public legacy since his remarkable career has largely existed in the background. In fact, he might be the most successful director you have never heard of.Over the past five decades, Callner has worked with some of the most famous brand names in popular culture — Madonna, Jerry Seinfeld, the Dallas Cowboys — and was a formative figure at the dawn of two modern art forms: the stand-up special and the music video, neither of which are known for giving much credit to the director. If that weren’t enough innovation, he also created “Hard Knocks,” a hit reality show that for 20 years, turned N.F.L. training camp into a soap opera.“The Hall,” whose inductees were chosen by a panel of comedy industry types like club owners and agents chosen by Callner, is only the latest institution he’s built, but it’s one he speaks about with personal passion, especially since he knew each of the first four comics being inducted. “Stand-up is such a part of my life that I wanted to give back,” he said.Callner was raised by a single parent (his father left when he was 2) in Cincinnati, a midcentury television hub. He credits a 1969 trip on synthetic psilocybin for awakening his previously dormant creativity, started working an entry-level job in live local news and immediately fell in love. He hung around the Cincinnati station at all hours, sponging up shot composition and camera angles. When a director suddenly left one afternoon for a family emergency, Callner got his chance, moving on to direct commercials and Boston Celtics games including their championship season in 1974. His success led to two offers: to work for NBC Sports, a national behemoth, or for a relatively unknown new cable channel called HBO, where he would be able to shape its look and style (and direct live coverage of Wimbledon). Callner bet on the option where he could have more sway. It wouldn’t take long for this to pay off in his big break.Two months after “Saturday Night Live” premiered in 1975, he directed a show that started a tradition that rivals it: “An Evening With Robert Klein” was the first HBO stand-up special. Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart had made specials for television the previous decade, but it was Klein’s hour that pointed the way to the future, even opening with a backstage scene of the comic preparing. This cold open would become such a stand-up special cliché that Callner said he wouldn’t use it again.HBO had a couple of advantages over network television: It presented longer sets, and, critically, comics could curse. The line that Klein cared most about, Callner said, came after he swore: “What a catharsis,” he quipped.Callner zoomed in on him during this moment to emphasize the point.The day after the show premiered, a positive review in The Times described the process of using five cameras to capture an uncensored long-form portrait of the comic as “innovative.”“That changed my life,” Callner said, adding that the article led HBO to sign him up for a series of specials that made the cable channel the central home for this nascent form. He directed the first specials of Robin Williams, Steve Martin and Carlin, who became a good friend and the best man at his wedding. Did Carlin give a speech? “I’m sure he did but I don’t even remember being there,” Callner said, smiling. “It was the 1980s.”The look of these early specials did not draw attention to itself. “I learned the comedy directs me,” he said. “If a comedian is doing something physical, it better be a head-to-toe shot. If he’s making a poignant point, it better be on a close shot. It was reportage. My job was to capture their genius and not take shots that were superfluous. I see all kinds of directors today making this mistake. They are cutting around to show off.”“My job was to capture their genius and not take shots that were superfluous,” Callner said, with an Emmy for “Hard Knocks” on his desk.Peter Fisher for The New York TimesBy the end of the decade, Callner had become bored with specials and excited by a flashier art form in its infancy at another young cable channel, MTV.His first video, Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take it,” was a slapstick production that leaned on his comic background. In it, a boy (played by his son) sends his angry dad out the window thanks to the power of his declaration, “I want to rock!” (which was Callner’s voice dubbed in). This proved to be a major hit and led to directing jobs on hundreds more videos, including 18 with Aerosmith and four with Cher. It was Callner’s idea to put Cher on a cannon on a Navy ship in the video “If I Could Turn Back Time.” Asked why, he said, “It was phallic,” which is hard to argue with.In these early days of MTV, the aesthetic for videos was up for grabs, said Rob Tannenbaum, who co-wrote “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution” and is an occasional contributor to The Times. He explained, “Devo wanted them to be avant-garde films; Duran Duran wanted them to be Patrick Nagel-style reveries; Marty Callner thought videos should be funny, which proved to be a more durable concept.” He added, “He understood, early on, that videos could be about more than amusement — they could be about branding and even mythology.”To be sure, they were also about scantily clad women (MTV once gave him a note that his video for the Scorpions’ “Big City Nights,” had too many women in bikinis) and hair, lots of it. As much as anyone, Callner created the visuals for the era when rock was dominated by flowing, feathered locks. The secret auteur of the genre known as hair metal was his hairdresser wife of 40 years, Aleeza Callner, who blow-dried the heads of the members of Whitesnake, Poison, Kiss, the Scorpions — not to mention Sam Kinison and Jerry Seinfeld.After a career directing television that tapped into the raw American id, Callner, who said he hated the objectification of women “even though I can’t say I wasn’t culpable,” is now looking at an unlikely new idea. He’s planning a festival called “America’s Wedding” in which 2,000 couples would get married at the same time in Las Vegas.For now, he is focused on “The Hall,” which Netflix aims to make an annual tradition. Callner, who once directed a tribute to Lenny Bruce, said that the influential stand-up received the fifth most votes, and hopes he gets inducted in a future show.Asked if it ever bothers him that his work is so much better known than he is, he said what mattered to him was the final product. “I didn’t become a household name,” he said, in front of a beautiful view of the water, “but I did become the highest paid television director in Hollywood, and the reason is: I made people a lot of money.” More

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      in Theater

      In a Chaotic Tonys Season, It Was an Honor Just to Open

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      If the roster of Tony Award nominees announced on Monday looks even odder and more random than usual, well, it’s been an odd and random season. For that matter, it wasn’t even really a season. The surfeit of nods — many categories that usually feature five nominations this year feature six or seven — pales in comparison to the scope of eligible productions, the first of which (“Girl From the North Country”) opened in March 2020, just before the pandemic blew an 18-month hole in Broadway. If my math is correct, that was 100 years ago.The pandemic that distorted the season also distorted the awards process. Of the 34 productions the 29 nominators were allowed to consider, 15 opened in April — six in the last week of that month alone. It couldn’t have been easy. I know that for critics it was a maddening game of Whac-a-Mole, trying to hit each show as it popped up before suddenly vanishing, riddled with shutdowns and star absences. In the end, I missed two: “Mr. Saturday Night,” which received five nominations, and “The Little Prince,” which was ineligible and by all accounts unintelligible.The nominators presumably missed none, and of those 34 eligible productions, they honored a whopping 29. No musical, not even the dreadful “Diana, the Musical” was skunked, even if some awfully good plays, including “Pass Over” and “Is This a Room,” found themselves forgotten. Was that because they were among the first to step up in the wishfully post-Covid Broadway reopening that began in August? Having opened perhaps too early they definitely closed too quickly.Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in the revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” which received a nomination for costume design.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut those shows are also more cutting edge than commercial awards typically know how to handle, using downtown theatrical formats to present difficult dramatic material. (“Pass Over” is a surrealist look at violence against young Black men; “Is This a Room,” a spoken transcript of an interrogation about government secrecy.) The nominations suggest a willingness to accept only one of those challenges — just as, at the other end of the spectrum, they seemed ready to welcome plays that are hackneyed in form or content but not both. The revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, received one nomination, for Jane Greenwood’s costume design.Still, poring over my personal Tonys spreadsheet, which I keep in a special air-locked safe with my original cast vinyl recordings and Playbills printed on papyrus, I am impressed with the nominators’ determination to spread the wealth.There are plenty of familiar names, of course, including the previous Tony winners Mary-Louise Parker, LaChanze, Hugh Jackman, Sutton Foster, Phylicia Rashad and Patti LuPone — the last two superlative in supporting rather than leading roles.But there are plenty of breakthrough names as well. The contest for best performance by a leading actor in a musical is likely to pit Broadway newbies Myles Frost (the star of “MJ”) against Jaquel Spivey (the star of “A Strange Loop”) — never mind Jackman or Billy Crystal in the same category. The nominees Sharon D Clarke (“Caroline, or Change”) and Joaquina Kalukango (“Paradise Square”) are likewise the pair to beat for best performance by a leading actress in a musical — never mind Foster.That those four leading contenders are Black underscores that the Tonys, like the season itself, are making some progress in their push toward greater diversity. By my count, more than a third of the 136 total nominations honored shows and people you might not formerly have seen much of on the Great White Way — which I think we can finally stop calling by that name.Not that you “see” all of that diversity even now. We are also benefiting from diversity backstage, including many of the directors and designers and choreographers behind “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” “Paradise Square” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Inclusion is insufficient if it’s merely public facing.A lot of that new-to-Broadway talent arrived not individually but en masse, thanks to Black authors, directors and producers who made diverse hiring a priority. One result is that this was a season of ensembles, including the six “thoughts” featured in “A Strange Loop,” the seven abstract nouns portrayed by the cast of “Thoughts of a Colored Man” and the seven colors of “For Colored Girls.”When the group is the star: The women of “POTUS” include, from left, Vanessa Williams, Julianne Hough, Julie White, Suzy Nakamura, Lilli Cooper and Rachel Dratch.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn some of those shows, as well as in “Six,” “The Minutes,” “Clyde’s,” “Skeleton Crew” and “POTUS,” there are no leading roles at all; the group is the star. When that’s the case, it can seem perverse to single out just one performer from a carefully balanced company, though the nominators did just that with their nods to Kenita R. Miller in “For Colored Girls,” Rachel Dratch and Julie White in “POTUS,” and John-Andrew Morrison and L Morgan Lee in “A Strange Loop.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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      in Theater

      James Ijames on Winning a Pulitzer and Making ‘Hamlet’ a Comedy

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      The 41-year-old playwright’s show “Fat Ham,” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the pandemic.The play “Fat Ham,” a comedic riff on “Hamlet” set at a Southern barbecue, hasn’t even had an in-person production yet because of the coronavirus pandemic.But on Monday, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, based on its script and following a streaming production mounted last year by the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. And on Thursday, performances of the first production before live audiences are scheduled to begin Off Broadway at the Public Theater, in a coproduction with the National Black Theater.“Fat Ham” was written by James Ijames, 41, who grew up in Bessemer City, N.C., and was educated at Morehouse College and Temple University (he studied acting). He now lives in Philadelphia, where he is one of several co-artistic directors experimenting with a shared leadership model at the Wilma Theater; his other notable works include “Kill Move Paradise,” “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” and “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington.”About an hour after the Pulitzers were announced, I spoke to Ijames (his surname is pronounced “imes”) about the play and the award. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From left, Kimberly S. Fairbanks, Brennen S. Malone and Lindsay Smiling in the Wilma Theater’s streaming production of “Fat Ham.”via The Wilma TheaterSo for those of our readers who have never heard of “Fat Ham,” what’s it about?“Fat Ham” is a very loose adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that has been transported to the American South, and it takes place in the backyard of a family that owns a barbecue restaurant. At its core, the play is about how this Hamlet character, whose name is Juicy, is meeting and undermining his family’s cycles of trauma and violence. It’s really about how he brings the rest of his family with him to that realization that they don’t have to continue these cycles of abuse and violence, and that they can do something completely different with their lives. It’s a comedy in the end, so I take “Hamlet” and I essentially make it not tragic anymore.Where did the idea come from?I just have always loved “Hamlet.” When I was in college, I did a truncated production of it. And the scene when we first meet Hamlet, in the court, I did that scene, and it was just like, “This is such a great scene. I think the whole play could exist inside of this moment. All of the players are in the same room together, and what if everything just erupted in this court in this moment, so the whole sweep of Hamlet was in one scene?” And I wanted to take that and bring it a little closer to my experience by putting it in the mouths of people that look like me and sound like me, that have my rhythms and eat the kind of food that I grew up eating. And I think it illuminates something about the original.Obviously, we’ve been living through a pretty unusual period, and you have won this prize after a virtual production. Tell me about that.We basically got Airbnbs and put all of the cast and the crew in a bubble, and they filmed it over the course of a month. It turned out really beautifully, and we were all really proud of it. And I’m really thrilled for people to see an in-person performance of it.How do you think the in-person experience will be different from the streaming experience?The actors can feed off of the reactions from the audience that they hear. So I’m really excited about having that experience. I also did a few tweaks on the play because it’s moved from the digital format to the live format. So I’m curious to see how that meets audiences.Why are you a playwright?When I was about 13, my parents split up and I had a lot of anger and frustration, and one of the ways that my family tried to encourage me to work through that was to write. And so I started writing little skits and plays, and I just have been writing in dramatic form ever since. I think it’s a way for me to metabolize all the things that I’m thinking about or curious about.The 2022 Pulitzer PrizesCard 1 of 12The awards. More

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      in Music

      Dolly Parton Voted Into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

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      The country singer had objected to being included, but will join a class that includes Carly Simon, Duran Duran and others from across genres.Despite a last-minute plea to “respectfully bow out” of consideration for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the country singer Dolly Parton made it in anyway, joining a musically diverse array of inductees for 2022 that also includes Eminem, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Eurythmics, Duran Duran and Pat Benatar.The honorees — voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals — “each had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture and helped change the course of rock ’n’ roll,” said John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock Hall, in a statement.Parton, 76, had said in March that she was “extremely flattered and grateful to be nominated” but didn’t feel that she had “earned that right” to be recognized as a rock artist at the expense of others. Ballots, however, had already been sent to voters, and the hall said they would remain unchanged, noting that the organization was “not defined by any one genre” and had deep roots in country and rhythm and blues.In an interview with NPR last week, Parton said she would accept her induction after all, should it come to pass. “It was always my belief that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was for the people in rock music, and I have found out lately that it’s not necessarily that,” she said.But she added, “if they can’t go there to be recognized, where do they go? So I just felt like I would be taking away from someone that maybe deserved it, certainly more than me, because I never considered myself a rock artist.”Following years of criticism regarding diversity — less than 8 percent of inductees were women as of 2019 — the Rock Hall has made a point in recent years to expand its purview. Artists like Jay-Z, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson have been welcomed in from the worlds of rap, R&B and pop, alongside prominent women across genres like the Go-Go’s, Carole King and Tina Turner.This year, Eminem becomes just the 10th hip-hop act to be inducted, making the cut on his first ballot. (Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording.)Parton, Richie, Simon and Duran Duran were also selected on their first go-round, while fresh nominees like Beck and A Tribe Called Quest, who had been eligible for more than a decade, were passed over. Simon, known for her folk-inflected pop hits like “You’re So Vain,” was a first-time nominee more than 25 years after she qualified. Benatar and Eurythmics, long eligible, had each been considered once before.Those passed over this year also included Kate Bush, Devo, Fela Kuti, MC5, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Dionne Warwick.Judas Priest was on the ballot, but will instead be inducted in the non-performer category for musical excellence, alongside the songwriting and production duo Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis. Harry Belafonte and Elizabeth Cotten will be recognized with the Early Influence Award, while the executives Allen Grubman, Jimmy Iovine and Sylvia Robinson are set to receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award, named for the longtime Atlantic Records honcho and one of the founders of the Rock Hall.The 37th annual induction ceremony will be held on Nov. 5, at Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, and will air at a later date on HBO and SiriusXM. More

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      in Television

      Ariana DeBose to Host This Year’s Tony Awards Ceremony

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      The nominees are to be announced on Monday, and the awards ceremony is to take place on June 12.Ariana DeBose will host this year’s Tony Awards.The Broadway League and the American Theater Wing, the two organizations that present the awards, announced the choice on Wednesday. The Tony Awards, which honor plays and musicals staged on Broadway, will take place on June 12.DeBose, 31, in March won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her performance as Anita in last year’s Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation of “West Side Story.”She has appeared in six Broadway shows, including “Hamilton” (in a dance number, she portrayed the bullet that killed the title character). She was nominated for a Tony Award in 2018 for her work in “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” (she played “Disco Donna,” representing one of three stages of the singer’s career).The Tony Awards will be DeBose’s second high-profile hosting gig this year; in January she hosted “Saturday Night Live.”This year’s Tony Awards ceremony will take place at Radio City Music Hall, and is scheduled to last four hours. DeBose will host the three-hour televised segment, broadcast on CBS from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern; that segment, which is likely to be dominated by performances, will be preceded by a one-hour segment, streamed on Paramount+, at which many of the awards are likely to be announced. The streaming portion will have a different host who has not yet been named.The nominations for this year’s Tony Awards are to be announced on Monday. More

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      in Theater

      Benedict Lombe Wins the Blackburn Prize for ‘Lava’

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      The British Congolese playwright earned the $25,000 prize for her memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.For the first time in the 44-year history of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, awarded annually to a female, transgender or nonbinary playwright who writes for the English-language theater, the honor has gone to the writer of a debut play.Benedict Lombe, 30, a British Congolese playwright based in London, received the award on Monday for “Lava,” a one-woman memoir-monologue that deals with Black identity and displacement.“It feels incredible,” Lombe said in a phone conversation on Monday evening en route to the award ceremony at the Globe theater in London. “It’s a huge play that allows me to create a space where Black people can leave taller than when they walked in.”The Blackburn Prize comes with $25,000, as well as a signed print by the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. Many of its recipients have gone on to great acclaim (among them, the Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Baker, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Marsha Norman, Lynn Nottage, Paula Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein).Lombe’s “Lava” was commissioned by the Bush Theater in London, and debuted there in July 2021. Ronke Adékoluejo starred in the one-woman show, directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike. In reviewing the work for The Guardian, Kate Wyver praised Adékoluejo’s indefatigable charisma, writing that she “controls the stage with such ease, oozing charm and confidence.”But under the bright joy of Adékoluejo’s performance, Wyver wrote, “fury rumbles in Lombe’s text.”“With hindsight, she takes us through incidents and aggressions from her life, each one being pushed into the pit of her stomach, gnawing at her, getting heavier as she carries the cumulative weight,” Wyver wrote.“Lava,” which Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out London characterized as a “freeform poetic eruption,” tells the story of a British Congolese woman who discovers a tale of quiet rebellion when she has to renew her British passport and wonders why her South African passport — a country she is also a citizen of — does not carry her first name. It takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, during the time of Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship; post-apartheid South Africa; Ireland; and London.“It was gratifying to be able to celebrate Black people in fullness,” said Lombe, who wrote the play in the summer of 2020, “and to uplift us when so many people were feeling the opposite when they walked in.”Along with Lombe, the nine other finalists for the Blackburn Prize were honored. They received $5,000 each, and included Zora Howard, who was honored for her play “Bust.” One of Howard’s previous works, “Stew,” was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.Last year, Erika Dickerson-Despenza won the Blackburn Prize for her play “cullud wattah,” a look at the water crisis in Flint, Mich., through the lens of one family. It went on to be produced at the Public Theater last fall.Is a New York run also in the cards for “Lava”?“I mean, fingers crossed,” said Lombe, who is in residence with the National Theater Studio in London and working on new commissions. “I hope so. We’ll see what happens.” More

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      in Television

      How to Watch the Critics Choice Awards 2022: Date, Time and Streaming

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      It could be a big night for “Belfast” and “West Side Story” — and might finally bring some clarity to the best actress race at the Oscars.If Peter Dinklage’s Cyrano stirred your soul, you’re a fan of Lady Gaga’s over-the-top accent in “House of Gucci,” or you fell hard for “Belfast” cutie Jude Hill, you’ll want to catch the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday night to see if any of them get their due after they were snubbed in the Oscar nominations last month.Postponed from their original Jan. 9 date, the 27th annual Critics Choice Awards will now take place on two continents, with the main ceremony at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and a simultaneous, late-night celebration at the Savoy Hotel in London. That is the organization’s way of dealing with the fact that the EE British Academy Film Awards, or BAFTAs, are the same night. And with less than two weeks before the Oscars, the outcome of the Critics Choice may provide some clarity on the most hotly contested races at the Academy Awards.Will Jessica Chastain or Penélope Cruz rise to the top of the best actress pool? Can Troy Kotsur continue building Oscar momentum by notching a win in the best supporting actor category? Will “Belfast” or “West Side Story,” both of which have a pack-leading 11 nominations, pull off a win for best ensemble?There’s drama on the TV side, too, with Emmy favorite “Mare of Easttown” squaring off against “The Underground Railroad” and “WandaVision” for best limited series, and contenders like “Squid Game,” “Succession” and “Yellowjackets” duking it out for best drama series.Here’s a look at how and what to watch for on Sunday night (and, if you have five hours, how to watch both the Critics Choice Awards and the BAFTAs).What time do the Critics Choice Awards start?The three-hour broadcast begins Sunday at 7 p.m. Eastern simultaneously on the CW and TBS. It will be delayed on the West Coast, so check your local listings. If you’ve cut the cord, you can also stream it on Hulu with live TV, FuboTV and Sling TV.Is there a red carpet?Yes. Your best bet for catching all the looks is social media, but many CW stations will be broadcasting a red-carpet show before the ceremony. Check your local listings.Who votes on the awards?Critics of course; also entertainment journalists. They’re all members of the Critics Choice Association, which has a little more than 500 members.Who will be hosting?Taye Diggs, the “Empire” actor and Broadway star has been the host for the last three years. This time he will team up with Nicole Byer, a judge on the Netflix competition series “Nailed It!,” to lead the show from Los Angeles.Who will be presenting?Of course, there’ll be the usual slate of film and television notables — Ava DuVernay, Carey Mulligan, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Mayim Bialik, to name just a few — but look for some big stars from the sports world this year, too. Serena Williams, whose story is featured in the biopic “King Richard,” and Sean McVay, the Los Angeles Rams coach whose team won the Super Bowl last month, will also hand out awards.Who will receive special awards?The Critics Choice Association gives out the #SeeHer Award each year, which honors a woman who pushes “boundaries on changing stereotypes” and furthers “authentic portrayals of women across the entertainment landscape.” This year’s honoree is Halle Berry, who 20 years ago became the first — and only — Black woman to win an Academy Award for best actress. The comedian Billy Crystal will also receive the Lifetime Achievement Award.What should I watch for?With the Oscars just around the corner, on March 27, films will be looking to bolster their cases for best picture — or make them. “Belfast,” whose cast hasn’t taken home many prizes during awards season so far, could mount a best picture comeback if it wins big at the Critics Choice Awards. The best actress category is once again a tossup — as it has been at every awards show this year — with the potential for Jessica Chastain to build momentum after her big win at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”On the television side, the hit Netflix series “Squid Game” is up for both best foreign language series and best drama series, though it’ll have stiff competition in the latter category from “Succession,” which leads all shows with eight nominations.Who do we think will win?Ariana DeBose, who played Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” is essentially a sure thing for best supporting actress. In the supporting actor category, it’s a two-man race between Kotsur and Kodi Smit-McPhee of “The Power of the Dog.” And best picture? It’s probably between “Belfast” and “The Power of the Dog.”Why are the Critics Choice Awards happening the same night as the BAFTAs?Well, the BAFTAs got here first. But after the pandemic forced the Critics Choice Association to scrap the January date, Joey Berlin, the organization’s chief executive, said at the time that there was only one Sunday between the Super Bowl and the Oscars that the show could move to and still honor contractual obligations with networks, sponsors and venues.Aargh, I want to watch both!You’re in luck! (Thank you, time difference.) The BAFTAs, which will take place at 5 p.m. London time at the Royal Albert Hall and be hosted by Rebel Wilson, will be streamable for American audiences on BritBox beginning at 2 p.m. Eastern, giving you plenty of time to watch before the Critics Choice Awards.Approximate time investment: five hours. More

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      in Music

      Dolly Parton, Eminem and A Tribe Called Quest Are Rock Hall Nominees

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      This year’s slate of 17 acts eligible for induction span rap, country, folk, pop and more.Dolly Parton, Eminem, A Tribe Called Quest and Beck are among the first-time nominees on the ballot for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year, the organization behind the museum and annual ceremony announced on Wednesday.Spanning rap, country, folk, pop and more, the list of 17 potential inductees includes seven acts appearing for the first time — Duran Duran, Lionel Richie and Carly Simon also among them — plus 10 repeat nominees who have not yet been voted in: Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Devo, Eurythmics, Judas Priest, Fela Kuti, MC5, New York Dolls, Rage Against the Machine and Dionne Warwick.More than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals will now vote to narrow the field, with a slate of inductees — typically between five and seven — to be announced in May. Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first commercial recording.Voters for the Rock Hall are asked to consider an act’s music influence and the “length and depth” of its career, in addition to “innovation and superiority in style and technique.” But the hall’s exact criteria and genre preferences have seemed to expand in recent years, in part in response to frequent criticisms regarding its treatment of female and Black musicians. In 2019, a look at the organization’s 888 inductees up to then found that just 7.7 percent were women.Among the recent boundary-pushers to be elected are Jay-Z, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, the Notorious B.I.G. and Janet Jackson.In a statement, John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, called the latest nominees “a diverse group of incredible artists, each who has had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture.”But in a universe of snubs, surprises and also-rans, there is a cottage industry of music obsessives dedicated to parsing who is recognized when — and who continues to be overlooked.A Tribe Called Quest, the influential hip-hop group from Queens, has been eligible for nearly a decade, but just received its first nomination, while the white rapper Eminem, who is among the genre’s best-selling artists of all time, made the ballot in his first year of eligibility. Simon, the 1970s folk singer known for hits like “You’re So Vain” and “You Belong to Me,” is a first-time nominee more than a quarter-century after she qualified.Back from last year’s ballot are the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, the rap-rock group Rage Against the Machine, the new wave band Devo, the early punk act New York Dolls, the experimental pop singer Kate Bush and the best-selling vocalist Dionne Warwick. Returning after some time off the ballot: Pat Benatar, Eurythmics, Judas Priest and MC5, now on its sixth nomination.This year’s induction ceremony is planned for the fall, with details about the date and venue to be announced at a later date, the hall said. More