Author: Max Rider

Judy Holliday and William Holden in Born Yesterday (1950). Holliday’s performance as the sharp-witted Billie Dawn earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1951, beating Hollywood legends Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson in one of the most surprising upsets in Oscar history. Getty Images Mikey Madison’s surprise Oscar win over Demi Moore has reignited the conversation about historic upsets at the Academy Awards. But long before this year’s surprise, there was an even bigger shock at the Academy Awards, which changed Hollywood history: the 1951 Best Actress race, where an up-and-coming starlet named Judy Holliday bested two screen…

Dancers Daisy Jacobson and Miriam Gittens. Courtesy Twyla Tharp Dance It started sixty years ago with a ragtag troupe of dancers performing in the streets, long before site-specific was a thing. Back then, Twyla Tharp Dance was just “a bunch of broads doing God’s work,” as Tharp put it. Today, with a shelf full of accolades—a Tony, MacArthur Genius Grant, Emmy, Kennedy Center Honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship—she’s a household name among modern dance fans, ranked with icons like Duncan, Graham, Balanchine, Robbins and Cunningham as one of the medium’s most vital practitioners. While those other legends have passed, Tharp remains…

An Oscar statue is pictured at the red carpet of the 97th Annual Academy Awards. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images) After a rollercoaster awards season, the best and brightest of Hollywood and beyond came together last night to celebrate 2024’s most impactful films. While some predicted winners like Kieran Culkin, Zoe Saldaña, and Adrien Brody came out on top in their respective categories, there were still plenty of surprises across the board in other categories. It was an uneven show overall thanks to questionable production decisions and notable technological failures, but the competition stayed heated for the most…

Films like Anora, The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Conclave (clockwise from top left) will duke it out at the 97th Academy Awards. Film stills courtesy of NEON, A24 Press, Philippe Antonello/Focus Features, Page 114 WHY NOT Productions/Pathe Films/France 2 Cinema. Academy Award image by Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images With the 97th Academy Awards just days away, pundits can confidently say that this has been one of the wildest awards seasons in recent memory. Rarely (if ever) have Best Picture predictions fluctuated this much, and perhaps no campaign in history has imploded quite like Emilia Pérez—but more…

Among the highlights of the spring opera and dance seasons (from left): Moby Dick at the Metropolitan Opera, MOMO at BAM, Cécile McLorin Salvant at Zankel Hall, and Boy Blue at the Rose Theater. Zenith Richards; courtesy of MOMO; Karolis Kaminskas; Camilla Greenwel Dark times, friends. If it’s not deadly weather, it’s the politics of cruelty, or online brainrot, or a dozen other catastrophes. Who can focus on getting tickets to this dance concert or that opera premiere? But if you’re reading this preview, you know, culture matters. It makes humans human. After we’ve dug ourselves out of this obscene…

From left: Scott MacArthur as Ness, Kate Hudson as Isla and Drew Tarver as Sandy in Running Point. Katrina Marcinowski/Netflix © 2024 Running Point is a show that thrives on familiarity. Plotwise, it’s Ted Lasso meets Succession sprinkled with some elements of the life story of executive producer-slash-Lakers president Jeanie Buss. In terms of behind-the-scenes personnel, the series touts names like Mindy Kaling and Ike Barinholtz. On camera, cameos abound alongside a cast made up of big names and comedic character actors. As both a workplace comedy and a family sitcom, the show mashes together tried and true story elements;…

Among the highlights of the spring theater season (from left): Smash, Two Sisters Find A Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, Class Dismissed, The Employees. Jenny Anderson; Lee Rayment; Suzanne Fiore; Natalia Kabanow Let’s unpack that headline. This season on Broadway you can see musicals based on actual events from circa 1911, 1925 and 1943 (Smash only feels like a throwback to pre-pandemic camp). As for canonical plays, writers and directors tinker with great dramas by Arthur Miller, Anton Chekhov and T.S. Eliot. Finally, there’s a healthy sampling of the Weird: absurd or surreal takes on space travel, academia,…

All artists struggle with focus, fantasizing and faith, and these books share insight into exactly what it takes to make art. Courtesy the publishers In a culture inundated with the best of the best, the top ten of anything, the latest and greatest, blockbusters and bestsellers, it is difficult to find books that can teach and inspire an artist and an art lover alike. There are books about art history, art theory, biographies of great artists from the past, opinions about good and bad art, technical books about making art—it goes on and on. Books that delve into the making…

Elle Fanning. AFP via Getty Images Awards season marches on, and the next stop on the circuit brings us back to Los Angeles. The 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards kick off this evening (Sunday, Feb. 23) at the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall, honoring the best acting in film and television, as voted on by SAG-AFTRA members. The SAG Awards have historically not featured a single host; Kristen Bell became the first-ever host in 2018, and is returning to take over host duties for the second time this evening. Wicked leads the nominations on the film side, with five nods,…

Caroline Aaron and Matt Doyle in Conversations with Mother. Carol Rosegg Conversations with Mother, a new off-Broadway play by Matthew Lombardo at Theatre 555 on 42nd Street, is an entertaining, often touching two-hander about a combative relationship between a troubled gay man and his aggressively obnoxious but deeply devoted mother that spans five decades. It is both sweet and tender, noisy and unsettling, and since Harvey Fierstein got there first, scarcely original. Color it likable but uneven. The operative word is uneven.   No matter how much you root for mother and son, the bitchy punchlines are inescapably reminiscent of the…