Gone are the days when high-profile movies from the likes of Fellini and Bergman won the statuette. “Some Oscar-nominated foreign titles from the past decade will leave even committed art-house audiences drawing a blank.” Due to the Academy’s Byzantine nominating process, the category has also become notorious for glaring omissions.
Tag: 01.31.10
A Lost Tati Script Arrives On Screen At Last
“An unfilmed Jacques Tati screenplay, L’illusionniste, will finally make it to the screen after 54 years, when director Sylvain Chomet’s animated version has its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, Berlinale, next month. But the occasion threatens to be overshadowed by a story of pain and scandal from the real life of the French comedian.”
On Broadway, The Days Of Applauding Fabulous Sets Are Over
“For the big Broadway musical, surviving the recession often means that the sets are rarely stars anymore. You don’t hear many audible gasps these days when the curtain rises, or when scenery transforms to reveal a theatrical vision.”
Feeling Uneasy About Fela! And The M-Word (Minstrelsy)
Charles Isherwood: “As much as I enjoyed the show, directed and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, it left me with lingering questions about the depiction of the African milieu it evoked. In short, the emphasis in Fela! on the spectacle of African culture tilted the show a little too closely toward minstrelsy. It evoked an unsettling feeling I can’t say I ever had before at the theater.”
Medieval Trial By Ordeal – Did It Actually Work?
Throw the suspect into a pool: if he floats, he’s guilty; if he sinks, he’s innocent. Or make the perp hold a red-hot iron, and if God heals the burn in three days, she is blameless. Today such methods of justice are dismissed as ignorant and barbaric, but a U. Chicago professor argues that, by leveraging defendants’ own superstitions, trial by ordeal made it “possible to secure criminal justice where it would have otherwise been impossible to do so.”
An Opera House In Ouagadougou
“A leading German operatic director, Christoph Schlingensief, 49, is to lay the foundation stone on February 8 in Burkina Faso for an ‘African Opera Village,’ a Berlin-funded aid project to encourage musical theatre.” The project aims to establish an annual opera festival in the Burkinabe capital, one that will “will mobilize and support the indigenous cultural energies.”
Richard Wright: Friendship With Turner Judge Irrelevant
“The 49-year-old painter from Glasgow said there was nothing ‘dubious’ about his relationship with Charles Esche, one of the four [Turner Prize] judges, and that there was no way he could have decided the result. Last week, critics claimed the pair’s friendship undermined the integrity of the £25,000 prize.”
Cameron Mackintosh To Endow His London Theatres
“He plans to use some of his estimated £635m fortune to endow each of his seven London playhouses with enough cash to keep them open after his death, staging only musicals and plays. The move throws down a challenge to his friend and rival Andrew Lloyd Webber to follow suit.”
Easy Going (Why Our Brains Like It)
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.
The Musician’s Path To Success?
“The path used to be clear — you got a major-label deal, they got you on the radio, you toured and recorded albums. Now all that has changed, really, and the new path is . . . well, what is it? And where does it go?”