Seriously, WTF, 2020 awards season? Last year, 2019, was “a year in which a slate of female-driven and directed movies topped the box office – Hustlers, directed by Lorene Scafaria, raked in over $156m this fall – or received critical acclaim and attention (Lulu Wang’s The Farewell, Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood). And yet the pillars of acclaim in the industry – awards, at once irrelevant and its own cottage industry of symbolic importance – still almost never reward female-directed films, or films about women at all.” – The Guardian (UK)
Author: ArtsJournal2
After 15 Years, The New York Musical Festival Has Shut Down For Good
Debts, staff resignations, and what the board described as a “national arts funding crisis” meant that the festival – which premiered more than 400 musicals in the summer, some of which made their way to Broadway – not only shut down immediately, but also declared bankruptcy. The artistic director and other staff had been working without pay since August and said they were not informed in advance of the board’s decision. – The New York Times
The End Of A Decade-Long Music Project That Was Originally Meant To Be A One-Off
The Green Mountain Project, which has been devoted to producing end-of-year concerts of Monteverdi’s 1610 “Vesper of the Blessed Virgin since 2010, is coming to an end this year in New York – and then heading to Venice. Jolle Greenleaf: “Ending this project needed to be done in a way that really honored everything that everybody did over the years. It feels like the crowning glory — we are going to do it where Monteverdi flourished and was buried. But it’s a little crazy. There’s so many pieces to the organization. There are no cars; there are so many rules. Getting a chamber organ meant renting it from pretty far away and then putting it on a boat.” – The New York Times
What Happened When A Dancer Witnessed Abuse At His Dance Company And Reported It
He was fired, and, to his knowledge, nothing was done to protect the kids from the abuse he saw. The dance company didn’t have an HR team, for one thing. All of this brings up many questions that dancers need to consider: “What protocols are in place to protect dancers at companies that are too small to have a human resources department. Even beyond issues of abuse, how should dancers voice concerns about more routine dysfunction, like late paychecks or unsafe working conditions?” – Dance Magazine
Smartphones Changed The Way We Document Our Lives
And that’s a good thing, not something we should be worried about. Having a camera in your pocket all of the time is “an opportunity to capture your own life more honestly—a way to remember what you were really like in one season of life, the mundane food photos alongside shots of scenic vacations or birthday parties. The mundane things you use your phone to document are the details that add up to a full life, what it was like to be alive right then.” – Slate
Prolific Movie Producer David Foster Has Died At 90
Foster, who served in the Korean War and helped produce movies including the Oscar-nominated McCabe and Mrs. Miller, “was part of the migration from New York to L.A. where Hollywood was Shangri La. He was a classic poor kid from an immigrant family and he always felt really privileged and couldn’t believe he was in Hollywood.” – Los Angeles Times
On The Internet, Anyone Can Be A Catfish
But a new show (not so ironically called the same thing as Dave Eggers’ book satirizing social media) displays exactly how much we’re all implicated in a world filled with flurries of hashtags, emojis, and GIFs. – The New York Times
At The Beginning Of The Decade, Celebrities Were Worried About Paparazzi
In 2011, “the industry itself was broken, transformed from a system of honor and veneration into one of shame and denigration, which treated its products as little more than commodities to be bought and traded.” Then Instagram happened. “In the end, the solution was so straightforward. Celebrities simply became their own paparazzi.” – BuzzFeed
Are These Los Angeles Stereotypes A Silly Pastiche Or An Affectionate Sendup That Goes Deep?
On the Netflix show You, a character from New York moves to L.A. – and you can guess what happens next. (Macrobiotic coffee shops! Stand-up comedy moments! “Aspiring Instagrammers live-streaming on the streets!”) – Los Angeles Times
French Theatre’s Conflicts Are Starting To Fray The Humans On All Sides
This is bad. “From Bethune to Dijon, noted directors landed in the National Drama Centers – devoted to theatrical creation – thinking they were touching the Grail: a place and means to make their work exist on a large scale in the service of the greatest number. They discovered companies that were cumbersome to maneuver, using tools that were often obsolete or to renovate, and subsidies at half mast.” Now it’s all lawyers and consultants. – Le Monde