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The 2013 Academy Awards
Though I’m a great admirer of the First Lady, I found Michelle Obama’s appearance… wildly inappropriate in its affirmation of the hard power behind the soft power—the connection of real politics to the representational politics of the movies, of the peculiar and long-standing symbiosis of Washington and Hollywood…
Richard Brody reviews the 2013 Oscars: http://nyr.kr/139DkAK
Katniss Wins! Sasha Weiss grades last night’s Oscar fashion: http://nyr.kr/13a9eNu
John Cassidy asks, “Is it rational to watch the Oscars?” http://nyr.kr/YwjPua
1. Photograph by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty. 2. Photograph by Jason Merritt/Getty. 3. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza.
(Source: newyorker.com)
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My Oscar Ballot
There’s no point to letting indignation, or even just personal preference, override the rational effort to forecast the Academy’s likely misjudgments. The Oscars are the way that Hollywood’s insiders want to be perceived by the world. The following predictions are less their view of the industry’s best achievements than of the choice of work that they’d elect to represent them; the awards are the industry’s advertisement for itself.
Richard Brody casts his Oscar ballot: http://nyr.kr/11XQz7S
(Source: newyorker.com)
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On Wednesday evening, the Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael accepted the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund Grant for Humanistic Photography in a ceremony at the School of Visual Arts. The grant is awarded to support and encourage a photographer working in the spirit of the legendary photojournlaist, and van Agtmael plans to use the thirty-thousand-dollar grant to build on “Disco Night September 11,” his ongoing project on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their consequences in the United States. “As an American of the generation shouldering these wars, I feel a strong responsibility to document their cost,” van Agtmael said.
Click-through for more from Elissa Curtis on van Agtmael, and a slide show of van Agtmael’s images, along with those of Massimo Berruti, who won the W. Eugene Smith fellowship to continue his work on Pakistan. “The Dusty Path,” Berruti said, is a project “about a nation trapped between violence and political corruption. A trembling giant on the brink of a deep abyss.” Also included is work by Michael Christopher Brown, Bharat Choudhary, Jon Lowenstein, Justin Maxon, Ami Vitale, Farzana Wahidy, and Robert Yager, who were all finalists for these grants. See the slideshow.
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Hip, hip, hooray! Trillin, the writer who put the “comic” in “comic casual,” has once again been officially recognized as a funny person. In our pages, most recently, he’s been having sport with the Presidential candidate Mitt Romney:
“President Romney’s Second Meeting With World Leaders,” April 26, 2012
“President Romney Meets Other World Leaders,” January 16, 2012
“Mitt and Ann Enjoy Breakfast at Home,” January 13, 2012
But Trillin has also written about many, many other subjects both heavy and light. Read them all in our archives. As a first course, we recommend Trillin’s bold foray onto the battlefield of Texas barbecue.
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Letter from the Pulitzer Jury, Part 2: How to define greatness?→
Yesterday, I wrote about the remarkable if agonizing experience of selecting three Pulitzer Prize nominees in fiction from over three hundred books by American writers. Today, I’d like to reflect a bit on the search for an unassailably great contemporary work of fiction, which, as I’ve learned, resembles an attempt to appreciate an entire train while you’re a passenger in one of its cars.
-Michael Cunningham, a member of the Pulitzer Fiction Jury
You can read Part One here.
Click-through for Part Two: http://nyr.kr/MYm2yu
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Cover Story: Oscar-Night Party
“The Oscar statuette is so anonymous, it’s almost sterile,” Bruce McCall says. He wanted to put vibrant human expressions on the faces of the life-size figurines in this week’s cover, but “it would have been sacrilegious to have them smile.”
- Bruce McCall on the story behind this week’s cover. For more New Yorker Academy Awards covers: http://nyr.kr/wgwBSd -
CPOY Awards: What Winning Means
The 66th annual College Photographer of the Year awards were announced last month, selected from among more than fourteen thousand submissions. What kinds of careers can the talented young winners expect?
“It’s like you’re in the whitewater,” Rita Reed, the director of the CPOY awards, told me. “You just need to paddle. There’s no time to look around and get out of the boat, just paddle!”
- Click through for more on the CPOY Awards and a selection of photographs from some of this year’s participants: http://nyr.kr/uonhGm
