academy of motion picture arts and sciences

In Oscar’s Home, the Ritual of Picking Its Next President Gets Under Way

But inside Hollywood’s film business, summer is the time for sly winks, silent nods and the barely visible ritual of an annual realignment of offices and membership at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This year, the process — never say “campaign,” because one is invited to join or take office — is more consequential than usual.

Under a convoluted system of term limits, the academy, which includes about 6,000 filmmaking professionals, is poised to replace a president, Hawk Koch, who could serve for only one year because he had exhausted his permitted tenure on the governing board. A successor will be selected who may be in place for as long as four years.

That should be time enough to finish a $300 million movie museum whose 200 or so employees will line up with an existing academy staff about 260; to sort out contract renewals for two top executives; and to wrestle anew with perennial questions about the sustainability of the academy’s crown jewel and primary source of income, the annual Oscar ceremony. In 2012 the awards show provided nearly 87 percent of the organization’s $103.2 million in revenue.

There will also be at least a few minutes for the new president to bask in the prestige of an unpaid position near the top of Hollywood’s highly compensated pecking order. “It’s the most glorious job there is, even though the compensation is not so hot,” said Sidney Ganis, a film producer who was the academy’s president from 2005 to 2009.

When Mr. Ganis left office, the academy had about $228.8 million in net assets. By last June, that figure had grown to about $300 million, and is likely higher now, thanks to an annual profit from the awards show, and, in the good years, hefty investment gains.

Across time, in fact, steady growth in the academy’s wealth and reach changed the character of its presidency. For years it had been a largely honorary, part-time job with periodic stress points — as when it came time to negotiate a new long-term Oscar broadcast contract with ABC, a specialty of another past president, Robert Rehme. But it evolved into a nearly full-time position that kept Mr. Koch and his predecessor, Tom Sherak, in the Beverly Hills headquarters building for days on end.

Whether the academy continues to need full-time tending is being considered anew, as its 43-member board of governors prepares to meet in late July or early August to choose between two leading prospects (never say “candidates”) for the presidency.

According to people briefed on academy politics, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the group’s bent toward privacy, one school of thought holds that a paid management team headed by the chief executive Dawn Hudson and the chief operating officer Ric Robertson, who were appointed jointly two years ago, is now solid enough to manage the academy’s day-to-day business. That would allow for the selection of a part-time president with a top-flight executive day job.

At the moment, that camp is leaning toward Robert G. Friedman, 63, currently the co-chairman of Lionsgate’s busy motion picture group, and would most likely remain at that post if elected to the academy presidency.

But others within the academy contend that Ms. Hudson, who had previously run the much smaller Film Independent nonprofit, and Mr. Robertson, a longtime academy administrator, have yet to completely find their footing after a year that brought hitches in the conversion to digital Oscar voting, and a widely criticized, though much-watched, performance by a notably rude Oscar host, Seth MacFarlane.

Some of those are more inclined toward Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ms. Isaacs, also 63, is a film marketing consultant who, like Mr. Sherak and Mr. Koch, could be expected to make the presidency her main business.

Ms. Isaacs is the academy’s first vice president, while Mr. Friedman is its treasurer. Either could stand for re-election in three succeeding years, returning a stability factor that was diminished by the one-year tenure of Mr. Koch and three-year tenure for Mr. Sherak.

Mr. Friedman brings a strong record as an executive with Lionsgate, Summit Entertainment, Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers. Ms. Isaacs, after long years of service on the academy’s boards, is seen as the consummate insider. And as an African-American, she has helped wrestle with one of the group’s thornier problems, calls for more diversity within the academy’s membership and leadership.

Whether the board chooses either, or comes up with a surprise, can be decided only after a number of retiring governors are replaced in polls now under way.

In keeping with the academy’s tradition against public campaigning, Mr. Koch, who spoke by telephone last week, said he would like to see the job go to someone “decisive” and “a leader in our industry.”

Mr. Koch said he strongly believed that both Ms. Hudson and Mr. Robertson would remain in their positions under new contracts when their current deals expire next year — though a new president will be the leading voice in any decision on that.

As for his own achievements, Mr. Koch said he was proud to have opened channels of communication with an unprecedented general meeting of the academy membership this year, and to have gotten the museum on its way to a planned opening in 2017.

Asked whether he had any regrets, he gave only one: “My disappointment is that I can’t stay.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/business/media/in-oscars-home-the-leadership-jockeying-begins.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Critic’s Notebook: ‘Lincoln’ and Other Serious Films Top Oscar Nominee List

Some time in the past decade or so, the argument goes, Hollywood abandoned the grown-up audience, preferring to chase after adolescent eyeballs with fantasy blockbusters and lowbrow genre fare. Or maybe the discerning public, seduced by cable television and distracted by the Internet, gave up on moviegoing, leaving the multiplexes to the teenage mutant vampire hordes. In any case, the idea that American cinema could define and ennoble the broad middle ground of the culture — a magical place where art intersects with commerce and popularity coexists with prestige — is as dead as the old studio system.

Don’t believe it. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its nominees Thursday, it dealt a blow to this conventional wisdom. Whether ambitious mainstream moviemaking has been granted a new, long-term lease on life remains to be seen. But the Academy’s choices confirmed that 2012 was not just a strong year for movies, but also for precisely the kind of movies that are supposed to be nearly obsolete.

Look at the list of leading nominees — “Lincoln” and “Argo,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Les Misérables,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Amour,” “Life of Pi” and “Django Unchained” — and you will find a dizzying diversity of themes and styles. You may also notice a lot of big-studio releases without a superhero in sight. And, perhaps most remarkably, you will find movies that have already sparked passionate arguments and sold a lot of tickets. It would be hard to say the same about the last two best picture winners, “The Artist” and “The King’s Speech.” Both were charming, nostalgic trifles, and though “The King’s Speech” made a lot of money, it was too safe — too small — to make anybody angry.

Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” leading the pack this year with 12 nominations, is an almost too-perfect example of the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make anymore. Shot on actual film stock in somber light, it tackles weighty historical issues with a blend of gravity and exuberant theatricality that would have done the old moguls proud. But it is much more than a musty period drama, or a puffed-up, dumbed-down history lesson.

Released after a notably contentious election, “Lincoln” has proved that the public’s appetite for political battle extends beyond cable news, and that our fascination with the great leaders of the past is not confined to the nonfiction best-seller lists. The movie is entertaining enough to be a hit — its domestic grosses are currently approaching $150 million — and provocative enough to incite debate among historians and Op-Ed columnists. This kind of crossover seems to be more the rule than the exception. Ben Affleck’s “Argo” revisits the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-80 at a time of tension and turmoil in the Middle East, turning geopolitical trouble into a witty and suspenseful thriller (and earning more than $100 million at the North American box office). Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” — an episodic reconstruction of the C.I.A.’s pursuit of Al Qaeda, from the Sept. 11 attacks to the killing of Osama bin Laden — is not yet in wide release, but it has already attracted ardent critical support and equally ardent dissent from those who believe that it distorts the record on the effectiveness of waterboarding and other forms of harsh interrogation.

Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” an extremely bloody, extremely funny revenge fantasy about a former slave in the antebellum South, has stirred up a hornet’s nest because of its extreme violence and inflammatory language. But at the same time, it has pushed audiences to reckon with a legacy of brutality and racism that Hollywood has historically ignored, and to think about how contemporary popular culture can and should address the horrors of the past. It has also taken in more than $112 million domestically since it opened on Christmas Day.

Money, of course, is not a measure of quality, any more than media controversy is an index of importance. Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” a Cannes prizewinner from Austria that broke out of the best foreign film category to earn four other nominations (best picture, best original screenplay, best actress and best director) is not likely to break box office records, or to become fodder for ideological disputation. But is surely one of the best pictures of the year, a meticulous and harrowing examination of the end of life, and as such the very definition of a serious movie, especially if you take seriousness to be synonymous with unrelenting grimness.

Perhaps for that reason I’m a little surprised that the Academy showed “Amour” so much love, but maybe I shouldn’t be. What strikes me about this year’s Oscar nominees is how many of them invite, or even force, their viewers to think, and making thinking part of the pleasure they offer. This is not to say that these films are difficult or cerebral.

There are plenty of visceral jolts to be found in “Argo,” “Django Unchained” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” gasps of amazement in “Life of Pi,” tremors of terror in “Amour,” explosions of laughter in “Silver Linings Playbook” and tears in “Lincoln” and “Les Misérables.” In other words they try, with varying degrees of success, to provide the range of emotions and sensations that have always been a big reason that people go to the movies. Even grown-ups.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/movies/awardsseason/lincoln-and-other-serious-films-top-oscar-nominee-list.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In Oscar’s Home, the Ritual of Picking Its Next President Gets Under Way

Critic’s Notebook: ‘Lincoln’ and Other Serious Films Top Oscar Nominee List

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