Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave leads the field with seven nominations, followed by Alexander Payne’s Nebraska with six. The two films face each other in the best feature, director, lead actor, and supporting male and female actor categories.
Author: Matthew Westphal
So What’s In That Long-Lost Orson Welles Film Discovered In Italy This Summer?
Richard Brody: “The film was intended to serve as prologues to the three acts of Welles’s stage production of the play Too Much Johnson … [It] is far more than a curiosity; it’s a major rediscovery, one that deeply traces the roots of Welles’s art, both stylistically and thematically.”
Funding Cuts Lead Southwest German Radio To Merge Its Two Orchestras
As of 2016, “the SWR Symphony Orchestra, based in Freiburg and Baden-Baden, is merging with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, thanks to a combination of budgetary cuts at the radio organisation that pays for both of them and what musicians in Germany call the ‘cultural barbarity’ of the radio bosses.”
Leonard Slatkin On The Detroit Symphony’s Concert Webcasts
“How does this new technology help solve the so-called ‘crisis’? Clearly, the age of this audience is mostly younger. We know this through the comments we receive each week. They love, not only the programs, but also the additional content.”
Georges Lautner, 86, Popular French Filmmaker
“[His] illustrious career took off in the 1960s with the crime comedy Monsieur Gangster(Les tontons flingueurs) … His films were generally commercial hits in France” – and are still frequently shown on French television – “so outside the country he wasnt as well known as the [art-house] auteurs.”
William Tell, Cyborg Comic Book Superhero
“In the comic Tell, the legendary nationalist has returned as a towering cyborg who protects a crumbling future Switzerland from villains sowing anarchy in once-pristine Zurich. Tell’s digital eyes identify foes, and his trademark crossbow shoots radiation-tipped arrows.”
Romanian Art Thieves Get 6+ Years In Prison For Rotterdam Heist
“Radu Dogaru, 29, had admitted planning the three-minute heist of works by Picasso, Monet and Gauguin in October 2012 at the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam, dubbed the ‘theft of the century’ in the Netherlands.” Accomplice Eugen Darie received the same sentence. Dogaru’s mother faces trial for allegedly burning three of the stolen canvases.
Chaos At The Rome Opera: Bankruptcy, Layoffs, Strikes, Cancelled Shows
“Massive job losses are expec ted at Rome Opera after it was announced that the theatre would go into receiv er ship after debts of 29 mil lion euros ($39m) at the end of 2011 were [revealed].” Union reps have announced that there is “zero chance” that this week’s season-opening production of Verdi’s Ernani (conducted by Riccardo Muti) will proceed.
The Next Generation’s Larry Gagosian?
Watching art dealer David Zwirner at work.
Vladimir Putin’s Dead Poets Society
“Putin apparently decided recently that it was time for him to take over literature, and he reached for the only kind of literary legitimacy he understands: the great names.” Masha Gessen visits the University of the Friendship of the Peoples in Moscow for the All-Russian Literary Gathering, packed with namesakes and relations of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Solzhentsyn, etc.