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    Al Pacino Explains Awkward Oscars Moment Presenting Best Picture

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    The star, whose abrupt announcement that “Oppenheimer” had won best picture took some viewers by surprise, said the show’s producers had asked him not to name the other nominees.The actor Al Pacino sought to explain his awkward and abrupt announcement of “Oppenheimer” as the best picture winner at the Academy Awards, saying in a statement on Monday that the producers had decided he would not read the full list of nominees.“I just want to be clear it was not my intention to omit them, rather a choice by the producers not to have them said again since they were highlighted individually throughout the ceremony,” Pacino said in the statement. “I was honored to be a part of the evening and chose to follow the way they wished for this award to be presented.”Instead of the typical lead-up to the most important announcement of the night, Pacino omitted the customary “And the Oscar goes to” followed by a dramatic pause, instead opening the envelope and proclaiming: “And my eyes see ‘Oppenheimer.’ ” That prompted what appeared be a moment of uncertainty that soon ebbed as the cast and crew of the film, including its director, Christopher Nolan, realized that they had won and began to make their way to the stage.The anticlimactic end to the show became fodder for online chatter and memes on social media as viewers tried to figure out if something had gone awry. (Comparisons to the “Moonlight”/“La La Land” best picture mix-up of 2017 were perhaps inevitable, but the temporary confusion at Sunday’s ceremony was not close to reaching those levels.)In an interview with Variety, one of the show’s producers, Molly McNearney, said Pacino’s presentation was “always supposed to be fast” because the show had included video packages for each of the 10 nominees through the night, and that there had been fears that the telecast would go over its allotted time.McNearney acknowledged in the interview that the unconventional delivery had “made it a little confusing” but said that “that’s the excitement of live television.”After the ceremony on Sunday night, Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the academy, said in an interview that he had been pleased with Pacino’s performance. “Everything went beautifully,” Kramer said. “He was just having fun up there.”Pacino, who won a best actor Oscar for his role in the 1992 movie “Scent of a Woman” and has been nominated eight other times, said that he had felt it necessary to make a statement on the reaction to his delivery because he “profoundly relates” to filmmakers, actors and producers who might feel slighted.“I realize being nominated is a huge milestone in one’s life and to not be fully recognized is offensive and hurtful,” he said in the statement.Nicole Sperling More

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      Al Pacino Awkwardly Announces Best Picture Oscar for ‘Oppenheimer’

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      Al Pacino put a room full of Hollywood stars a little bit on edge to close out the 96th Academy Awards.Rather than listing all 10 nominees while presenting the best picture Oscar, or offering a conventional “And the Oscar goes to,” Pacino simply said “Here it comes” before slowly opening the envelope.“And my eyes see ‘Oppenheimer,’” Pacino said next, to tepid applause from an audience that seemed unsure whether that statement was the most important proclamation of the night.“Yes, yes,” Pacino, 83, said of the movie that was considered the favorite to win best picture and finished with a night-best seven awards.At that point, on came the music, and cheers rose from the crowd. The camera cut to Christopher Nolan, the film’s director, and Emma Thomas, one of its producers, as they stood up and made their way to the stage.Did Jimmy Kimmel see it coming? Just minutes earlier, Kimmel, the host of the ceremony, made a joke about needing to tear up the envelope that said Emma Stone had won best actress for “Poor Things,” an allusion to the epic “Moonlight”/“La La Land” best picture mix-up of 2017.After the ceremony, Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the academy, said he was pleased with Pacino’s performance. “Everything went beautifully,” Kramer said. “He was just having fun up there.”Nicole Sperling More

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      Bruce MacVittie, Ubiquitous Character Actor, Dies at 65

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      A co-founder of the Naked Angels troupe in New York, he was a familiar face in Off Broadway theater, in movies and on TV, often playing tough guys with tormented souls.Bruce MacVittie, one of New York City’s quintessential character actors, who made his Broadway debut in David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” opposite Al Pacino in 1983 and was a mainstay on Off Broadway stages for over 40 years, as well as a familiar face on television and in film, died on May 7 in Manhattan. He was 65.His wife, Carol Ochs, confirmed the death, in a hospital, but said the cause had not been determined.Mr. MacVittie excelled at playing tough guys with tormented souls, revealing a tenderness at the heart of his characterizations. His casting type was low-life and street-smart, but he himself ran in rarefied acting circles. In the mid-1980s, he helped found Naked Angels, a troupe of young film and theater hipsters (including Matthew Broderick and Marisa Tomei) who immediately dazzled New York with the celebrity wattage and social conscience of their theatrical endeavors.“Naked Angels was the club that was too cool to let me in,” the actress Edie Falco recalled in an interview. “I was just hanging around on the fringes, dying to get my foot in the door, but Bruce was already in. Bruce and I traveled through our actor travails together. We were young together and got less young together.”Mr. MacVittie in the thriller “Killer Among Us” (2021), one of his numerous film roles.Vertical EntertainmentMr. MacVittie’s career began in 1980 at Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan with a lead in Edward Allan Baker’s “What’s So Beautiful About a Sunset Over Prairie Avenue?”In 1988, after bit parts on the series “Barney Miller” and “Miami Vice,” he got his first big television job, partnering with Stanley Tucci in “The Street,” a vérité slice of blue-collar cop life set in the Newark Police Department. Claiming to be “the first television series shot entirely in New Jersey,” the show churned out 40 episodes in 40 days but lasted only a season. Still, it cast a stylistic shadow over future TV crime dramas.“Bruce’s background was working class, like me,” said Frances McDormand, another longtime friend. “There was something about celebrating this in our work that was important to both of us. Bruce had a pride about where he’d come from that he carried with him and was even cocky about. It was very charismatic.”Bruce James MacVittie was born in Providence, R.I., on Oct. 14, 1956. His father, John James MacVittie, was a worker at the Narragansett Electric Company; his mother Olive (Castergine) MacVittie, was a homemaker.Bruce grew up in Cranston, R.I., where he began to act in high school, and went on to graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He moved to New York in 1979. Four years later, after understudying for the role of Bobby in the Pacino revival of “American Buffalo,” Mr. MacVittie took over the part on Broadway and ultimately performed it on a national tour and in the West End of London.“Bruce carried this currency, especially for young actors then, like me, that he’d worked onstage with Pacino,” recalled the actor Bobby Cannavale. “The fact that he’d elevated to that role as a ‘cover’ made it even more heroic.”In 2011, after over 75 film and television appearances, including 11 different roles on various “Law and Order” franchises, guest spots on “The Sopranos,” “Sex in the City” and “Homicide,” innumerable theatrical roles, like his acclaimed performance as a displaced Cuban immigrant in Eduardo Machado’s “Havana is Waiting,” 10 seasons at the Eugene O’Neill Center Playwrights Conference in Connecticut and an equal number of summers at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Mr. MacVittie set aside his acting career to train as a nurse. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Hunter College in Manhattan in 2013.In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Sophia Oliva Ochs MacVittie. His first marriage ended in divorce. He lived in Manhattan.Mr. MacVittie returned to acting in his last years, including in a featured role on Ava DuVernay’s lauded Netflix series, “The Way They See Us.” He confined his nursing activities to the palliative care of friends in need.“I loved Bruce MacVittie,” Mr. Pacino said in an interview. “His performances were always glistening and crackling; a heart and a joy to watch. He was the embodiment of the struggling actor in New York City, and he made it work. We will miss him.” More

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      'American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally' Review

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      Meadow Williams plays Mildred Gillars in this plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie.Mildred Gillars was an American woman who propagandized for the Nazis on German state radio for much of World War II. While not as well known as her Pacific counterpart “Tokyo Rose,” she acquired enough of a cachet to be nicknamed “Axis Sally” by contemporary troops who weren’t buying what she was selling.Directed by Michael Polish from a script by Polish, Vance Owen and Daryl Hicks, “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally,” a fictionalized version of her story, was executive produced by Meadow Williams, who plays Gillars. The movie begins with her arrest in Germany after the war. Gillars is extradited to Washington and indicted on many counts of treason and conspiracy. Her case is dumped in the lap of the gruff lawyer James Laughlin, played, well, gruffly by Al Pacino.As the case moves to trial, the movie intercuts flashbacks detailing Gillars’s distinctly nonbrilliant career in Germany, from meeting with a condescending Joseph Goebbels to bedroom strategizing with her lover, who’s also her radio producer. Williams plays Gillars as a not particularly clever or sympathetic tough cookie doing what she needs to do to “survive.” The argumentation conveyed through both the performance and the script is weak.This is a plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie. Its special pleadings are all over the map. And to make them, the filmmakers distort truth; for instance, mangling a famed Ernest Hemingway quote on the nature of war to make it specific to World War II. If Mildred Gillars has a story worth telling in a feature film, this isn’t it.American Traitor: The Trial of Axis SallyRated R for language, violence. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In select theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More