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      in Movies

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

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

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      in Theater

      The Folger Library Wants to Reintroduce You to Shakespeare

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      After an $80 million expansion, the Folger Shakespeare Library is reopening with a more welcoming approach — and all 82 of its First Folios on view.Social media is awash with pictures of jaw-dropping libraries, elaborately styled home bookshelves and all manner of drool-worthy Library Porn. But for understated dazzle, it’s hard to compete with a wall in the new basement galleries of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.For decades, the library’s 82 copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio — the largest collection in the world — were locked away in a vault, with access granted only to select scholars. But now, anyone can enter the public galleries and see them displayed in a special wall case, laid flat with spines out.In the dim, curatorially correct lighting, they glow like some kind of mysterious dark matter. But during a preview of the building, which reopens this weekend after a four-year, $80 million expansion, the Folger’s director, Michael Witmore, reached for a sunnier metaphor.Six of the Folger Shakespeare Library’s copies of the First Folio. The library has placed all 82 of its First Folios — the largest collection in the world — on permanent display.Justin T. Gellerson for The New York TimesThe Folio — a collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, published by his friends in 1623, seven years after his death — is “the ultimate message in a bottle.”“And the miracle is that every generation opens up the bottle and it turns out the plays, the message, was addressed to them,” Witmore said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

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

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

    • 175 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Wu-Tang Clan Album ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ Will Be Played in Tasmania

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      The sole known copy of the album “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” was not to be heard by the public until 2103. Some fans will be able to hear a selection of the 31 tracks at a museum in Hobart, Tasmania.A decade ago, the Wu-Tang Clan issued a sole copy of a CD-only album, secured it in an engraved nickel and silver box, locked it away in a vault and said it could not be heard by the public until 2103.The move was seen as a protest against the devaluation of music in the streaming era. But a year later, the album, “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” got caught up in the very capitalistic endeavors that Wu-Tang had tried to avoid, when it was purchased by Martin Shkreli, the disgraced pharmaceutical speculator who was convicted of fraud in 2017.He bought the album at auction for $2 million, only for it to be seized by the government and sold in order to pay off Mr. Shkreli’s nearly $7.4 million debt.As these things go, an NFT collective purchased the album for $4 million in 2021. And soon, if you can get yourself to the island of Tasmania off the southern coast of Australia in two weeks’ time, you might be able to hear what RZA and the producer Cilvaringz created 79 years before it was meant to go public — or a part of it anyway.From June 15 to June 24, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, will host a series of private listening events where visitors will be able to “experience” a selection of the 31 tracks from the group’s seventh studio album. “You hear talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities,” the museum wrote on the exhibit page. “This is probably one of them.”Free tickets, “if you are lucky enough to secure” them, the museum said, can be reserved starting Thursday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Excavating Jerry Garcia’s Crucial Bluegrass Roots

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      In 1964, the guitarist took a road trip, hoping to become Bill Monroe’s banjo player. The journey, and his longtime love of the genre, shaped the Grateful Dead.Just off the lobby of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum is the “picking room” — a cozy, glass-enclosed corner where visitors are encouraged to grab any of the guitars, banjos and fiddles hanging on the wood-paneled walls and play. Located on the Ohio River 35 miles northwest of Rosine, the small farming community that produced the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, the museum’s readily available instruments and neighborly spirit are no surprise.What is unexpected? The 1961 Chevy Corvair sticking out of a wall upstairs in the museum’s main hall and the newly unveiled exhibit it anchors: an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia’s long and often intense love affair with bluegrass music.Best known as the standard-bearer for San Francisco’s psychedelic sound and the house band for Ken Kesey’s storied Acid Tests, Grateful Dead concerts were not a big draw in the beating red heart of bluegrass country. Of the more than 3,500 shows Garcia played with the Dead and his own bands, only seven were in Kentucky. But the subsequent emergence of the “jamgrass” scene — a bluegrass cousin to the bands who take a cue from the Dead in emphasizing extended improvisations — is one of the ways that time and a widening appreciation have proved the Dead to be one of the most American of bands. It’s also given Garcia a new kind of cultural heft and near-mythological status, 28 years after his death.The new exhibit “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey” will run for two years at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.Chris StegnerMusicians and listeners alike have long singled out “Old & in the Way,” a 1975 LP from one of Garcia’s side projects, as the gateway recording that introduced them to bluegrass. But much of “Jerry Garcia — A Bluegrass Journey,” the imaginative and carefully curated show that recently began a two-year run at the museum, is built around an intriguing and less well-known event in Garcia’s career: Before forming the Grateful Dead, he aspired to a career as a bluegrass musician and undertook a 1964 cross-country musical pilgrimage, largely in the hope of landing a job as Monroe’s banjo player.“I’ve been with the museum for 13 years and an exhibit on Jerry Garcia has always been on the back burner,” said its curator, Carly Smith. Those discussions were pushed to the forefront when the museum moved in 2018 to a new 64,000-square-foot home that enhanced its ability to present detailed exhibits and includes superb indoor and outdoor performance spaces. Though the pandemic necessitated a two-year delay, the show is an ambitious bid to highlight a little-known connection and build bridges between genres and audiences. Mounted with the cooperation of Garcia’s family, it includes a dozen of his instruments, numerous clippings, artifacts and mementos and a well-researched narrative of Garcia’s formative years on the Bay Area’s folk scene.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      At SFMOMA, Music is More than Just Sound

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      This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.The flute music was, you know, good flute music. But for the hushed audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s kickoff event in February of its “Art of Noise” exhibition, the breathy scales constituted only part of the experience.The colorful outfit belonging to the flutist (who was André 3000, by the way) was the experience, too. The crisp speakers were the experience, the smoke machine was the experience. And the two lasers passing through a glass of water balanced atop a traffic cone center stage — André 3000 has a growing interest in traffic cones, he had announced earlier — was the experience.Music is music. But music is also the stuff surrounding the music.From May 4 through Aug. 18, SFMOMA will illustrate this truism with an exhibition of visual and technological artifacts, plucked from music’s low orbit. “Art of Noise” comprises more than 800 pieces — among them early listening devices, cutting-edge speakers and iconic album covers — loosely grouped under the heading of design. Four more sound installations generate some artful noise all their own. But the show’s true subject might be our very relationship to music.Mathieu Lehanneur’s music player Power of Love, 2009 at SFMOMA.Mathieu Lehanneur; Photo by Don RossBeethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “The White Album,” Coltrane live at Birdland: On their own, these are but air molecules vibrating across our eardrums. Music becomes sacred partly through the material culture it inspires.And just as music shapes design — think jazz album cover versus metal album cover — design also codes how we hear music. In an old Xeroxed flyer for a punk show was information on how to absorb those songs; in an iconic ad for Maxell cassette tapes lurked signals about the spirit of rock.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      What to See, Eat and Do in New Haven, Conn.

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      Though the academic scene continues to imbue this coastal Connecticut city with a certain gravitas, surrounding neighborhoods are showing off their own cultural capital in the realms of art, food, music and more.The 75-foot-long brontosaurus at the newly reopened Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Conn., is the same dinosaur that the natural history museum has had on display since 1931. Yet it looks different. A fresh pose. New front ribs. The head is repositioned at a more inquisitive angle. The museum’s four-year renovation not only refreshed the nearly 100-year-old building, but also included an overhaul of the fossil mounts that research has proved to be inaccurate.Yale Peabody Museum’s four-year renovation focused not only on the physical space of the nearly 100-year-old building, but also the museum’s fossil mounts, including this brontosaurus skeleton, which has been repositioned, with some parts restored.Philip Keith for The New York TimesThe Peabody’s update — 15,000 square feet were added, creating more spacious galleries and dynamic displays — was a long time coming. Like other Yale museums, it is now free, offers more Spanish-language programming, and is inviting more voices into the conversation, with some exhibits being interpreted by students and artists, opening the lens on how visitors might respond to what they’re seeing.“We want to give the signal that there’s not just one way to react to and interpret what you’re seeing,” said the museum’s director, David Skelly.The concept of change that threads through the Peabody’s 19 galleries is symbolic of what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Over the centuries, New Haven has had chapters devoted to maritime trade, railroads, industrial manufacturing and — as home to Yale University and other institutions of higher learning — education and health care.Now, New Haven — which was among The Times’s 52 Places to Go in 2023 — is going through a chapter driven by creativity and ingenuity. Though Yale continues to imbue New Haven with a certain gravitas, the surrounding city is showing off its own cultural capital in the realms of art, food, music and more.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More