Surely, someone has made a hash of the plot. Yes, he was 88, but the Czech-born, British playwright, the true 20th century heir to Oscar Wilde, would never have arranged things so banally.
“A severe blow to Logic” is how a character describes the death of a philosophy professor in Stoppard’s 1972 play “Jumpers.” But then, as this polymath wag continues, “The truth to us philosophers, Mr. Crouch, is always an interim judgment … Unlike mystery novels, life does not guarantee a denouement; and if it came, how would one know whether to believe it?”
Few people were more agnostically alive than Stoppard, who loved the finer things in life and handsomely earned them with his inexhaustible wit. A man of consummate urbanity who lived like a country squire, he was a sportsman (cricket was his game) and a connoisseur of ideas, which he treated with a cricketer’s agility and vigor.
Stoppard announced himself with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” an absurdist lark that views “Hamlet” from the keyhole perspective of two courtiers jockeying for position in the new regime. The influence of Samuel Beckett was unmistakable in the combination of music hall zaniness and existential ruthlessness that characterized the succession of early plays that merged the Theatre of the Absurd with a souped-up version of Shavian farce.
Simple wasn’t Stoppard‘s style. The Fellini-esque profusion of “Jumpers” includes warring philosophy professors, a retired chanteuse and a chorus of acrobats, set within the frame of murder mystery that owes a debt to the gimlet-eyed social satire of Joe Orton. “Travesties,” Stoppard’s 1974 play, is built on the coincidence that James Joyce, Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and Vladimir Lenin all happened to be in Zurich during World War I — a cultural happenstance that paved the way for a dizzying alternative history, in which art faces off against politics. (Art, no surprise, wins.)
Wordplay, aphorisms and bon mots were Stoppard’s signature. Not since “The Importance of Being Earnest,” a play that Stoppard revered the way a mathematician would regard the world’s most elegant proof, has the English stage experienced such high-flying chat. Yet he acquired a reputation as a dandy, a clever humorist and an intellectual showman, distinctly apolitical and seemingly a man of no convictions.
The latter charge he no doubt would have taken as a compliment. He prided himself on having a mind unstained by certainties. But he was aware of the criticism of his work as intellectually brilliant but emotionally brittle. Virtuosity, in language and dramatic structure, was his great strength. But also perhaps his weakness — a weakness for which many lesser writers would no doubt sell their souls.
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” and “Travesties were indeed master manipulations of plot and language. They were also breaths of fresh air that won Tony Awards for best play and established Stoppard as a transatlantic force. It would have been perfectly natural for him to continue in this vein, but his writing took a more personal turn in “The Real Thing,” a play about a playwright learning both to write about love and to take in and appreciate its complex reality.
New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called “The Real Thing” “not only Mr. Stoppard’s most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years.” The 1984 Broadway premiere, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close under the direction of Mike Nichols, won Tony Awards for its leads, Nichols’ direction, Christine Baranski’s featured performance and best play. It was Stoppard’s third such honor, and it would not be his last.
But the criticism didn’t end there. (Is it any surprise that in “The Real Inspector Hound,” his 1968 one-act, Stoppard imagined a scenario in which a critic is killed by the play he’s reviewing?) Stoppard’s cleverness, while the source of his fame and prestige, was intimidating to some and off-putting to others. Not everyone goes to the theater to be wowed by verbal pyrotechnics or daredevil plot high jinks. The blinding brilliance of his plays left theatergoers still squinting to see whether his work had much of a heart.
Stoppard ranged freely over a variety of dramatic modes. (It was this ability that made him such a valuable screenwriter and script doctor, earning him not only wealth but also a shared Oscar for the screenplay “Shakespeare in Love.”) But he had no interest in writing character studies. Domestic drama, with its psychological epiphanies and sentimental resolutions, repelled him. But neither was he drawn to the issue-laden work of his more politically minded postwar British playwriting peers, that new breed of dramatist unleashed by John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger.”
A born entertainer who had no ideology to sell or bourgeois morality to promote, he gravitated to theater as the most exhilarating form of debate. What he called “the felicitous expression of ideas” mattered more to him than academic point-scoring. Language was a theatrical resource that could do more than win arguments.
The comedy of ideas had become self-serious over time. Stoppard was determined to restore its fun without diminishing its substance.
His astonishing erudition encouraged him to tread where few playwrights before him had dared to go. But he was too much of a sensualist to cloister himself in the archives of the British Museum.
When I interviewed Stoppard at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater during rehearsals for his play “The Hard Problem,” he told me that he didn’t think he ever spent more than half an hour on research. He did concede, however, “I’ve spent many, many days of my life reading for pleasure in order to inform myself about something.
How else could he have pulled off “The Coast of Utopia,” a three-play creation centered on 19th century Russian intellectuals, romantics and revolutionaries against decades of geopolitical tumult? This marathon epic earned Stoppard his fourth Tony Award for best play.
“Arcadia,” perhaps his crowning achievement, may not be as sprawling but it’s just as intellectually ambitious. It’s also perhaps his most lyrically affecting.
A literary and biographical mystery play set in an English country estate in two different time zones (one in the age of Lord Byron, the other in the era of contemporary academic sleuths), “Arcadia” owes a debt to A.S. Byatt’s “Possession.” (In her mammoth biography “Tom Stoppard: A Life,” Hermione Lee reports that “Byatt has said that Stoppard told her he ‘pinched’ the plot from her.”) But the way Stoppard incorporates mathematical concepts as rarefied as fractal geometry to explore concepts of order and chaos as the characters hypothesize on the patterns of time is Stoppardian through and through.
Stoppard’s late works are his most personal. “Rock ’N’ Roll,” which he dedicated to Vaclav Havel, explores the rebellious, Dionysian force of popular music, an eternal source of inspiration for him, in a play set partly in Prague during the Communist era. “Leopoldstadt,” which won Stoppard his fifth and last Tony for best play, is the work in which the playwright grapples, from an artistic remove, with the history he was late to discover about what happened to his Jewish family during and after the rise of Hitler.
“The Invention of Love” is one of those Stoppard plays that leaves a critic feeling both rapturous and unsatisfied, a paradoxical state but then what can anyone expect from a play that makes the poet, classicist and closet homosexual A.E. Housman a theatrical protagonist?
No play by Stoppard can be fully appreciated in a single theatrical outing. The dramaturgy is too complex, the intelligence too quick-footed and the language too dazzling for instant assessment. My fear is that the plays are too expansive for the diminished scale of dramatic production today. But Stoppard has left theatrical riches that will entice audiences for generations through their intellectual exuberance, preternatural eloquence and omnivorous delight.
When photographer Peter Turnley was just 20 years old, an acquaintance from the California Office of Economic Opportunity reached out to him with a question. Would he be interested in taking four months off from school in Michigan to come out west, drive around, and take pictures of the state’s poor and working-class populations? An eager Turnley jumped at the chance and ended up spending the summer of 1975 traversing California in his tiny white Volkswagen, doing everything from spending time with migrant farmworkers in the San Joaquin valley to hopping trains with travelers looking for work to chatting up Oaklanders about how they were making ends meet.
But then his OEO contact left mid-project and, while Turnley says he submitted a set of prints to the department, they never ended up seeing the light of day. That will all change Dec. 4, when the pictures — along with others the news photographer has taken in his current hometown, Paris — will go on display at the Leica Gallery in L.A.
Why did California’s OEO think of you for this project back in 1975?
When I was a freshman in college at the University of Michigan, during the winter break, I went back to Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is where I’m from. There was a very progressive mayor in power at that point and he assembled a really interesting group of people in his city government.
When I began photography at the age of 16, I decided to use it to try to change the world, and I particularly admired photographers that had used photography to affect public policy, like the Farm Security Administration photographers in the 1930s, which included people like Dorothea Lange. So I convinced this mayor to hire me to shoot pictures for the city of Fort Wayne on the themes that the city was making policy around.
During that time, I met a woman who was the public affairs officer for the city of Fort Wayne. Unbeknownst to me, two years later she moved out to California and that’s how I got a letter at the end of my sophomore year of college asking me if I would be willing to come out to California to do a four-month road trip to document the lives of the working class and the poor of California. She explained to me that the Office of Economic Opportunity needed to make a report that underlined its efforts in trying to help the the poor of California, and that they they wanted to use these photographs as a way to illustrate that report.
I was given some very basic statistics of pockets of poverty around the state of California, but no other specific direction, and I was promised just enough money to cover fleabag hotels and diner food and gasoline. I was given access to a government darkroom in Sacramento, where occasionally I would go to develop film and make contact sheets and prints, but otherwise, I was out, driving to every corner of the state.
What were your impressions of the state before you came, as someone originally from the Midwest?
I didn’t grow up on a farm [in Indiana] but I knew a little bit about farming and what really struck me when I went out to California was what I think most of the world doesn’t really realize, and that is that [much] of the state is agricultural and rural. In many ways, the San Joaquin Valley felt a whole lot more like Indiana than almost any other place I could imagine.
What did you take away from the project as a whole?
One of the aspects of this body of work that fascinates me and that I guess in some ways I’m very proud of is that one feels in the photography and in the connection with people an almost innocent and authentic view. The pictures are very direct. They’re very human and they really deal with the lives of people, because you’re looking into their eyes and getting close to them.
Another thing that struck me was that because I was dealing particularly with people that were working class or often very poor, that there was something very similar in terms of people’s plight, whether they were living in urban areas or in the countryside. Everyone I met seemed like really decent, good, hard-working people that just wanted a better life for themselves and their family. They wanted to survive with dignity, and I felt that we all owe these people a great sense of debt.
I also remember that when I spent some time with hobos — and I’m not sure if that’s a pejorative word today, but they’re a little different category of people than simply those who are homeless. Hobos were most often men that chose this lifestyle to ride the trains and stop and work in various places. But I remember being in a boxcar with four men and all four were pretty much like everyone else. It was just that their lives had kind of crossed over a line into the margins, just by a thread. And I remember realizing at this young age just how fragile life is, or how close we can be to that line at almost any time.
Something I found striking in these pictures is how little has changed, in some ways. There have always been people working in California’s fields that are underpaid and underappreciated, and in some ways, things have only gotten worse for a lot of that population.
During COVID, I lived in New York City and every day for three months from the very first day of the lockdown, I went out and I walked. I would meet people and I would ask them three questions: What was their name, their age, and how were they making it? And then after three months, I went back to Paris, and I walked the streets there and did the same thing, ultimately making a book of the pictures I took from that time called “A New York-Paris Visual Diary: The Human Face Of Covid-19.”
But the thing that struck me during COVID was that it was the working class of New York that saved all of our lives. There were whole walls of buildings on the Upper West Side that were dark at night because everyone had gone to the Hamptons or left New York, but the people that saved our lives were cashiers, postal workers, FedEx workers, nurses, doctors, medics, ambulance drivers and mostly working-class people. And looking back, I had this hope that maybe when the COVID crisis was over, that we would rectify in a general way how we looked at our society and how we value the people that are actually doing the work in our society, but in actuality, once the lockdown was over, we just went back to being ruled and led by people that have a lot of money. And, really, the well-to-do of California and the rest of the world would never go and pick their own strawberries.
Have you kept in touch with anyone whose picture you took in 1975, or heard from anyone after the fact?
I’ve for sure wondered what happened to all the people in the pictures, but unfortunately over all these years, I’ve never had contact with anyone. It would be absolutely amazing if somebody from that time would come out of the woodwork.
You’ve been a working photographer for over 50 years now, having worked in 90 countries, taking 40 covers for Newsweek, and shooting many of the last century’s most important geopolitical events. Are there moments you still can’t believe you saw, or pictures you can’t believe you took?
Well, just this morning, I signed the prints that will be in this exhibit and they’re really beautiful. They’re made in Paris and they’re traditional silver gelatin prints, beautiful quality. But I held up one of the images from The Other California – 1975, and it was this Okie, a guy that was born during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and moved out to California. Looking at that image today, looking in the eyes and the face of this man, I really had the impression that — even though it’s my own photograph — that I was looking at one of Dorothea Lange’s photographs. I’m very proud of the fact that there’s a continuity of that kind of attention to the heart of people’s lives in my work.
In this modern era of digital photography, on the one hand I think it’s wonderful that everyone is making photographs now more than ever before. On the other hand, I think that the world of photography has moved away from real powerful, direct human connection. And to me, that’s what’s most important. I’m a lot more interested in life than I am in photography. I mean, I care a lot about photography. I love beautiful photographs, and I try to take them as well as possible, but what’s most important to me are the themes of life that I photograph and at the center of all that is emotion.
Peter Turnley — Paris-California
Where: Leica Gallery, 8783 Beverly Blvd. in West Hollywood
When: Dec. 4-Jan. 12. Turnley will present the work at the gallery Dec. 7 from 2 to 4 p.m. and sign copies of his book “The Other California – 1975.”
With Thanksgiving in the rearview mirror we are now hurtling toward Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and the New Year. December can bring stress, but it also brings the feel-good holiday shows, including “Tinselcolor,” which opens Dec. 2 at CineVita, a 15,000-square-foot double-decker Belgian spiegeltent operated by For the Record, which stages live musical revues of well-known film soundtracks.
Joey McIntyre — the youngest member of the ultra ‘90s boy band, New Kids on the Block — signed on as host of the candy-colored world-premiere extravaganza, which features an eight-piece band and 14 singers performing holiday movie music from 25 film scores including “Home Alone,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “White Christmas.”
For the Record has been putting on shows for more than 15 years, starting in a small bar and restaurant in Los Feliz and moving up to bigger venues leading to CineVita. Over the years, the company became known for attracting celebrity clientele. Quentin Tarantino and Rosario Dawson attended a performance based on Tarantino’s film scores, and Demi Moore’s daughter, Rumer Willis, once joined the troupe. Moore is now an investor.
In an email, McIntyre wrote that he saw the Tarantino show years ago and loved it.
“I knew the caliber of talent and production that this company puts up, and then I stepped foot into this unparalleled space and almost verbatim said ‘sign me up,’” he wrote. “I’m a theater kid. The venue was like Jessica Rabbit calling me in.”
The unparalleled space McIntyre is referring to contains 3,000 hand-beveled mirrors, hand-cut stained glass windows and carved wood ornamentation. It will be decorated with outsized holiday flair for “Tinselcolor,” but it will also feel cozy.
“The theater holds about 700, but it is so warm and intimate, like you’re in my living room for the holidays,” McIntyre wrote. “Our guests are going to feel that. Our director, Anderson Davis, and the creative team have been super open to making it feel authentic to me and showcasing what I bring to the table.”
Performers joining McIntyre onstage include Brian Justin Crum, who recently played the role of Annas alongside Cynthia Erivo and Adam Lambert in the Hollywood Bowl’s electrifying “Jesus Christ Superstar”; Vintage Trouble frontman Ty Taylor; Cheyenne Isabel Wells, who starred in “Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies” on Paramount+; and Dionne Gipson from “Found” on NBC and “Haus of Vicious” on BET.
McIntyre noted that he gets to sing the Andy Williams classic, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” in full holiday regalia. His favorite holiday movie song of all time, however, is not in the show. That would be “A Brand New Christmas,” which he co-wrote for last year’s Roku Original “Jingle Bell Love.”
His favorite Christmas carol of all time? “O Holy Night.”
“It sits right in my wheelhouse vocally, and it checks all the boxes: heartfelt, classic melody with a pop bluesy accessibility. And you get to ‘fall on your knees’ when you’re performing it,” he wrote.
“Tinselcolor” runs through Dec. 30. After that, McIntyre will head back to Las Vegas to continue the New Kids on the Block residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM, which was extended through 2026 due to high demand.
“We just announced 3 more stints for 2026. We are a blessed bunch of guys. We’ve been able to keep it fresh and exciting over all these years, and the fact that we still had Vegas on the table was something we have really taken advantage of,” McIntyre wrote about the residency. “Our diehards are genuinely blown away, and Vegas is yet another hook for folks who haven’t seen us in a while. And those newbies are loving it too. It feels like a slam dunk all around.”
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt wishing you a very happy holiday season filled with love, kindness, health and hope. Here’s your arts and culture news for the week.
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On our radar
Clockwise from bottom left: Grand Kiev Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Inland Pacific Ballet.
(Los Angeles Times photo collage; illustrations by Katie Smith / For The Times; photographs from Grand Kyiv Ballet, Cheryl Mann and Marsha McNeely Photography)
Nutcracker roundup The season of Sugar Plum Fairies is upon us. In last weekend’s holiday preview, Ashley Lee did the legwork gathering intel on productions of the holiday perennial that will be dancing their way across Southern California stages in the coming weeks. From downtown L.A. to the South Bay, Orange County and the Inland Empire, the variety of imaginative interpretations offer something for almost everybody. This week alone sees the openings of Anaheim Ballet’s “Nutcracker” (Friday and Saturday. City National Grove of Anaheim, 2200 E. Katella Ave. anaheimballet.org); American Contemporary Ballet’s “The Nutcracker Suite” (Saturday through Dec. 24. Bank of America Plaza, 333 S. Hope St., downtown L.A. acbdances.com); “Bob Baker’s Nutcracker,” a marionette version of the show (Saturday through Jan. 4. Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. sierramadreplayhouse.org); and Debbie Allen Dance Academy’s “The Hot Chocolate Nutcracker,” which subs Mariah Carey and other contemporary artists for Tchaikovsky (Thursday through Dec. 14. Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center, 1935 Manhattan Beach Blvd. debbieallendanceacademy.com).
What the Dickens!
The cast of “A Christmas Carol” at A Noise Within.
(Craig Schwartz)
Like “The Nutcracker,” the holidays are heavy with varied interpretations of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” Friday night in Anaheim, Chance Theater opens Leslie Bricusse’s “Scrooge! The Musical” (Through Dec. 21. Bette Aitken Theater Arts Center, 5522 E. La Palma Ave. chancetheater.com). Saturday night, two long-standing productions of “A Christmas Carol” make their traditional returns. In Pasadena, Geoff Elliott (who also adapted and co-directs with Julia Rodriguez-Elliott) once again steps into Ebenezer’s slippers for a night of ghostly visitations (Through Dec. 4. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd. anoisewithin.org).
Richard Doyle in “A Christmas Carol” at South Coast Repertory.
(Robert Huskey)
Meanwhile, down in Orange County, South Coast Repertory celebrates the 45th anniversary of resident dramaturg Jerry Patch’s adaptation (Through Dec. 28. Emmes/Benson Theatre Center, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scr.org). And on Dec. 5, Independent Shakespeare Co.‘s David Melville plays not Scrooge, but the author himself in “A Christmas Carol With Charles Dickens,” a solo storytelling tour-de-force (Through Dec. 22. ISC Studio, Atwater Crossing, 3191 Casitas Ave., Suite 130, Atwater Village. iscla.org).
The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY Heisenberg Paul Eiding and Juls Hoover star in Simon Stephens’ drama about a middle-woman and an older man who meet in a London railway station. Directed by Cameron Watson. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 22. Additional show 8 p.m. Dec. 18. Skylight Theatre, 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz. skylighttheatre.org
SATURDAY
Artist Drew Struzan signs his Oscar poster in 2008.
(Mark Mainz / Getty Images)
Drew Struzan Tribute The American Cinematheque salutes the artist, illustrator and designer who died in October with a triple-feature of films for which he designed the posters: “Back to the Future,” “The Goonies” and “E.T.” Struzan also designed iconic one-sheets for such films as “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Blade Runner.” 11 a.m. Saturday. Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com
TUESDAY
Tom Morello at South by Southwest in Austin in 2025.
(Jack Plunkett / Invision / Associated Press)
The REVOLUTION(S) will be Amplified Musician/activist Tom Morello joins curator Douglas Fogle for a discussion about art, activism, creativity and resistance on the occasion of the exhibition “Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images.” 7 p.m. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd. marcianoartfoundation.org
THURSDAY Children of the Winter Kingdom Orphaned twins escape a circus and encounter a king and his dragon, a wild girl, a crow, a sorceress and an ice spider in a holiday adventure filled with music and puppetry. Written by Adam Dugas & Mary Eileen O’Donnell, directed by Adam Dugas. 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 20. The Actors’ Gang at the Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City. theactorsgang.com
‘Die Heart’ Yippee-ki-yay, Heart lovers! Troubadour Theater Co. revives its holiday musical-comedy synergism of the 1988 Bruce Willis action movie “Die Hard” with the songs of the Wilson sisters. Don’t even think about asking if it’s really a Christmas movie. Dec. 4 to 21. Colony Theatre, 555 N. Third St., Burbank. troubie.com
A scene from “Putney Swope,” directed by Robert Downey Sr.
(Cinema 5 / Photofest)
Putney Swope The Academy Museum’s celebration of film preservation kicks off with the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 social satire. 7:30 p.m. Thursday Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org
Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake The Pacific Symphony and pianist Alexandra Dariescu, conducted by Tianyi Liu, perform works by Cassandra Miller, Maurice Ravel and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. scfta.org/events
Dispatch: The Butterfly Effect
Liviera Lim as Vivian Fang in “The Butterfly Effect.”
(Charly Charney Cohen)
Young local theater troupe Last Call Theater specializes in interactive, participatory productions, and its latest, “The Butterfly Effect,” is an intimate affair that encourages one-to-one and small group pairings with actors. The show examines past choices and the consequences of changing them. There’s a fantastical bent, as it’s set in a cafe that promises the ability to time travel. The decade-hopping coffee shop backdrop gives the company a chance to play with multiple storylines that touch on L.A. history, from immigrant tales of a family-run business to those often overlooked by our city’s emphasis on celebrity. The production, which opened in mid-November, runs Thursday through Saturday at Stella Coffee and closes Dec 6. ticketleap.events — Todd Martens
Culture news and the SoCal scene
Robert Therrien‘s “No title (red chapel relief),” 1991, enamel on paper and wood.
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
A place at the (big) table If you’ve ever visited the Broad, you’re quite familiar with the large table and chairs in its permanent collection that dwarf even the tallest viewer. Times art critic Christopher Knight (who is retiring as of today) calls the Broad’s new exhibition, “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story,” a “smashing retrospective” and one of the year’s best museum solo shows. Therrien, who died at 71 in 2019, was a unique talent who sits comfortably among the most significant L.A. artists since the ‘60s and ‘70s. “Whether he was making a 3D sculpture to stand on the floor, a 2D painting to hang on the wall, or a 3D sculpture attached to a wall like an ancient frieze,” writes Knight, “he managed the same uncanny result — objects where the purely visual and the utterly physical demand equal time.”
Maya Keleher in the national tour of the musical “Suffs.”
(Joan Marcus)
Suffragette City An all-female and nonbinary cast dramatizes the inspiring story of American women fighting for the right to vote in the musical “Suffs,” playing at the Hollywood Pantages through Dec. 7. Shaina Taub won Tony Awards for its book and score, while also starring as suffragette leader Alice Paul in the Broadway run. In L.A., the national tour’s Maya Keleher “lends alluring warmth to the role,” writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty in his review. “The teamwork of the performers honors the messy yet undeniably effective cooperation of Alice and her freedom fighters — women who changed the world by not staying silent in their prescribed place.”
Viola time Times music critic Mark Swed noted a recent “fall-harvesting viola bandwagon,” with multiple ensembles spotlighting the humble middle child of stringed instruments played with a bow. “The L.A. Phil began viola week with a Tuesday evening program, ‘Brahms Strings,’ as part of the orchestra’s chamber music series at Walt Disney Concert Hall that included the blazing early First Sextet and late, luminously serene Second Quintet,” wrote Swed. “As part of its chamber music series across the street in the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall, Saturday, [the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra] coincidentally held ‘A Brahmsian Affair,’ in this case featuring both the sextets.” On Saturday, recent Colburn graduate Lan Cao and current conservatory student Ran Tae performed Korean composer Isang Yun’s 1988 “Contemplation,” for two violas, “played with gripping meditative intensity” during a day-long MOCA seminar on South Korean artist Haegue Yang.
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Ray Ushikubo will play a rare 1741 Guarneri “del Gesù” violin at a free concert at the Colburn School on Dec. 3.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
History in his hands Ray Ushikubo of San Gabriel, a 24-year-old virtuoso musician, has been selected to play the Playfair violin, an ultra-rare model crafted by the famed luthier Guarneri “del Gesù.” “I’m only 24,” Ushikubo told reporter Emma Madden. “This instrument is from 1741. It’s older than the United States. I can barely comprehend that amount of history. But mostly I feel happiness. And honor. It sounds better than any violin that’s ever been made.” The musician will debut the instrument in a free concert at the Colburn School’s Zipper Hall on Dec. 3.
East L.A. Youth Orchestra gets a reprieve “After recently announcing major cuts to its youth orchestra, the L.A. Phil has secured additional donor funding to ensure the East L.A. branch of the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program will continue at full capacity until the end of the school year,” reports The Times’ Cerys Davies. The initial cuts to the programming at the Esteban E. Torres High School site included laying off teaching artists, gutting programs for younger students and reduced practices for older students. The parents of students and members of the local community responded to the cuts by organizing an Instagram campaign and town hall meeting, imploring the L.A. Phil to temporarily preserve the Torres site.
An architectural whodunit In 2013, Robert Mosher, one of San Diego’s most respected architects, called Keith York, founder of Modern San Diego, a digital archive devoted to the region’s mid-century design, asking to meet for lunch. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said. A revelation at that meeting led York and fellow architecture buff Stephen Buck to investigate the provenance of Balboa Park’s Timken Museum of Art, which opened in 1965. Did two of the biggest names in American design have a hand in it? Sam Lubell has the details on the decades-old mystery.
— Kevin Crust
And last but not least
I give you the 2025 Times holiday gift guide. Even if you don’t see anything on these carefully curated lists that you like, it’s a great inspiration starter.
Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
This week I spoke to James L. Brooks, whose legendary career includes “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News” and “The Simpsons,” about his new film “Ella McCay,” which opens in theaters Dec. 12.
The film stars Emma Mackey as a classic Brooksian heroine: a lieutenant governor of a small, unnamed state with a genuine desire to make other people’s lives better who unexpectedly finds herself thrust into the job of governor.
Albert Brooks and Emma Mackey in the movie “Ella McCay.”
(Claire Folger / 20th Century Studios)
Warm and affectionate toward its characters while also clear-eyed about their all-too-human imperfections, the film is the kind of made-for-adults dramedy that is currently out-of-favor with Hollywood.
“I don’t believe people don’t want comedy,” Brooks said. “Obviously, I hope that you have meat on the bone and that doesn’t mean you can’t do a real scene about real difficulty, especially with this picture.”
Matt Brennan spoke to Renate Reinsve, star of Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value,” while the two of them toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House. Carlos Aguilar spent time with Amy Madigan, the veteran actor enjoying renewed career energy thanks to her role as Aunt Gladys in “Weapons.”
Among the movies’ new releases, Amy Nicholson reviewed Rian Johnson’s latest Benoit Blanc story, “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” calling it the “darkest, funniest and best installment yet.”
Mila Kunis, Daniel Craig and Josh O’Connor in the movie “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.”
(Netflix)
Amy also reviewed Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet,” an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) as they grapple with the death of their young son Hamnet, a grief that results in the play “Hamlet.”
If you are really looking to get away from family this week, consider Julia Loktev’s five-and-a-half-hour documentary “My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow,” which chronicles the fall of one of the last independent news channels in Russia, largely run by women, during the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Loktev and one of the film’s subjects, Ksenia Mironova, will be at the Laemmle Royal for Q&As after certain shows on the 28th and 29th.
As Tim Grierson put it in his review, “During a year in which the worst-case scenarios of a second Trump presidency have come to fruition, ‘My Undesirable Friends’ contains plenty of echoes with our national news. The canceling of comedy shows, the baseless imprisonment of innocent people, the rampant transphobia: The Putin playbook is now this country’s day-to-day. Some may wish to avoid Loktev’s film because of those despairing parallels. But that’s only more reason to embrace ‘My Undesirable Friends.’ Loktev didn’t set out to be a witness to history, but what she’s emerged with is an indispensable record and a rallying cry.”
Also opening this week is another of the year’s most boldly unconventional films, Kahlil Joseph’s “BLKNWS: Terms and Conditions,” a dense, collage-like exploration of Black identity and history, playing at the Lumiere Music Hall. Anyone who saw the recent blockbuster exhibition of artworks by Joseph’s brother, the late Noah Davis, at the Hammer Museum will also find “BLKNWS” a worthwhile experience.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins on the future of the Coen brothers
Cinematographer Roger Deakins photographed at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Roger Deakins is among the most celebrated and best-known cinematographers of his era. A two-time Oscar winner, he has worked with filmmakers such as Joel and Ethan Coen, Sam Mandes, Denis Villeneuve and many more, on films including “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” “Skyfall,” “Sicario,” “Blade Runner 2049” and “1917.”
Deakins, 76, who often works in collaboration with his wife James Ellis Deakins, has for the past few years been hosting a podcast, “Team Deakins,” interviewing filmmakers. He has recently published “Reflections: On Cinematography,” which is part memoir and part how-to, drawing from his personal archives to explore his work on so many contemporary classics.
They recently got on a video call from their home in Santa Monica to talk about the book, their relationship and whether to expect another movie from the Coen brothers.
Javier Bardem in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 movie “No Country for Old Men.”
(Miramax Films)
One of the things that’s so striking about the book is that it is very much a memoir, the story of your life, but it is told through these movies and an exploration of your artistic practice.
Roger Deakins: Well, that was the balance. We didn’t want it to be a technical manual and we didn’t want it to be a sort of tell-all or just recounting old stories.
James Deakins: When you work in the film business, it’s so intense. Your work is your life.
Roger Deakins: Especially when I started out, shooting in documentaries for a few years, that was the life experience that opened the world to me. I didn’t see the world other than my experiences shooting films, whether it was documentaries or later fiction films, like going together to Morocco to shoot “Kundun.” The life experience actually has always been as important to me as the actual work.
Can you tell me a little bit more about just the relationship between the two of you, traveling together, working on all these different movies? What has that meant to you?
Roger Deakins: It’s all very weird. That is so not me.
James Deakins: The reason why we work so well together is Roger’s very intent on what he is doing and doesn’t particularly want to talk to other people during that time period. And I do — I love to talk to people. I love to solve problems. I love to do all that. So together we kind of make this whole. But we also have a lot of people come up to us and ask us for relationship advice.
Roger Deakins: When we met, I think I was 41 or something. We were both fairly kind of, not lonely, but we were loners, both of us. And we connected on a film. We met on a film together. James was script supervisor on a film that I was shooting. And after that film, it just seemed obvious to me that we should be together. And it’s been wonderful. We’ve just shared these life experiences together. I couldn’t really understand other relationships, which seemed to work well, where one person goes away and works on a movie for like six months and then comes back home and tries to step back into a relationship like nothing had happened. I don’t see that. So we’ve always shared things together. Doing the podcast was very much James’ idea, but I’ve kind of warmed to it.
James Ellis Deakins, left, and Roger Deakins at the 95th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in 2023.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
When people ask for relationship advice, what do they want to know?
James Deakins: They’re saying, “I’ve got to travel so much. How do I keep it together?” Or: How do we work together? Just, will this work? Is it possible? It’s very strange, because we’ve just done a very technical Q&A and my head’s there, and then someone comes up to me — and I can always kind of tell because they’re bearing down on me — and they go, “I just want to ask you…”
Roger, in the book you talk about how, when you were starting out and in film school, you thought of yourself as a director. As you started shooting more for other people, did that create a sense of a path not taken?
Roger Deakins: I would be lying if I was saying there wasn’t a little bit way down deep inside of me that was saying: What if I had tried to become a director instead? But on the other hand, I’ve been part of so many movies with so many really nice, intelligent people. And I really do have a confidence problem. We did try and get together a couple of projects a number of years ago and I just don’t have the confidence. I’m terrible going into a studio and pitching a project.
I’m just not that political person. I love nothing more than being on a set with a whole group of people. I love just working with the camera crew and electricians and the grips and the painters and everybody else. I love that collaboration. And often a director is in a much more lonely place.
Do you feel like you have a signature? What is it that you bring to a project?
Roger Deakins: I hope I don’t have a signature. I hope I just have a way of relating to a story and something in front of me. Maybe there’s some sort of personal perspective.
James Deakins: Well, I think you bring a commitment to the project. And you also are so committed to creating the director’s vision as opposed to you coming in and saying, “Well, let’s make it the way that I always do it.” And so I think you allow what the director has in his head to come out.
Roger Deakins: It’s also really important that you’re not just there to create pretty pictures. Oh, that’s a great sunset, but what the hell does it have to do with this story? Or: Let’s put up five cameras and get a lot of material and we’ll cut something out of it later. That’s the extreme version of something that’s anathema to me.
You say that people confuse pretty cinematography with good cinematography. How do you define good cinematography?
Roger Deakins: Cinematography that’s not noticed. Not noticed because people are too absorbed in the story. When you go to a premiere or any screening and you come out and somebody comes out and says, “Oh, I love that shot where such and such” — that was a mistake because not one shot should stand out. Somebody said, “Oh, wasn’t that a lovely sunset?” Then you’ve taken the audience out of the film. You’ve just drawn attention to the image.
Ryan Gosling in the movie “Blade Runner 2049.”
(Stephen Vaughan / Warner Bros. Pictures)
So even for all the astonishing images you’ve created, you still think that they shouldn’t be noticed?
Roger Deakins: In a way. I mean, obviously on some films you’ve got more license than others. Obviously I could have more fun on “Skyfall” in certain instances, or “Blade Runner,” more than I could on “No Country for Old Men.” “Blade Runner,” I could do these kind of lighting things in the Wallace building because that was part of the character, that was part of his creation, not mine. So it kind of felt integral to the character. But in another situation, I’m never going to do that kind of lighting.
You haven’t shot anything for a few years now. Are you hoping to find something?
Roger Deakins: Kind of. It depends which day you ask me, really.
James Deakins: Really depends on the project. And we haven’t seen anything, really.
A lot of people are very eager for Joel and Ethan Coen to work together again. Have you had any conversations with them?
Roger Deakins: Well, Joel’s just been directing a film in Scotland, his own film. I’ve talked to Joel on and off lately and, well, actually Ethan not that long ago, but I’m not sure what their plans are now. So that’s all talk. That’s like talking about my football team, Manchester United. What’s the next player they’re going to buy? Who knows?
Points of interest
‘Coming Home’
Jane Fonda and Jon Voight in the movie “Coming Home.”
(Herbert Dorfman / Corbis via Getty Images)
On Monday, the Frida Cinema will show Hal Ashby’s 1978 “Coming Home,” starring Jane Fonda, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern. Fonda and Voight both won Academy Awards for their performances and the film was named best picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.
“Coming Home” is an exploration of the costs of war at home and also about learning to live with disability. Voight plays a Vietnam veteran who returns a paraplegic, struggling to adjust to his new life. Fonda is a woman whose husband (Dern) is deployed to Vietnam. When she begins to volunteer at the local VA hospital, she reconnects with Voight’s Luke, a friend from high school. As the two begin an affair, all three of their lives are upended.
Critic Kristen Lopez will be there to introduce the screening, as well as sign copies of her new book, “Popcorn Disabilities: The Highs and Lows of Disabled Representation in the Movies.”
Via email, Lopez explained her selection of “Coming Home,” saying “it’s one of the few movies that, I think, even though it’s not cast authentically, does illustrate the disabled experience in an authentic way. Director Hal Ashby, producer Jane Fonda and star Jon Voight did deep research into disabled veterans, specifically wheelchair users, and it’s the first movie I remember seeing that got the little bits of disabled business correct. It’s also a movie that, even today, is remarkably progressive in how it portrays disability. Luke Martin has a home and a car, he’s self-sufficient, and too often we don’t see how disabled people live.”
‘Putney Swope’
An image from “Putney Swope,” directed by Robert Downey Sr.
(Cinema 5 / Photofest)
Opening the series “Present Past 2025: A Celebration of Film Preservation” at the Academy Museum will be the world premiere of a new 35mm print of Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 “Putney Swope.” A biting satire of how corporate culture handles race, the film stars Arnold Johnson as the title character, who is unexpectedly made president of a major advertising firm and proceeds to upend all of its messaging. Paul Thomas Anderson has often spoken of Downey as an influence — an influence that can be clearly seen in the anti-authoritarian “One Battle After Another.”
In his original January 1970 review, Charles Champlin wrote, “‘Putney Swope’ is not so much a movie as a cartoon with real people. … ‘Putney Swope’ is not for anyone who demands good taste in movies, or restraint, or a presumption of dignity in the human character. But in its youthful, irreverent and uninhibited but medicinal way, ‘Putney Swope’ is shocking good fun.”
Also playing as part of the Academy’s preservation series, which runs through Dec. 22, will be world premiere restorations of William Wyler’s 1934 “Glamour,” John M. Stahl’s 1933 “Only Yesterday,” Lloyd Corrigan’s 1931 “Daughter of the Dragon” and George Marshall’s 1945 “Incendiary Blonde.” Other titles in the series include North American restoration premieres of Konrad Wolf’s 1980 “Solo Sunny” and Mikio Naruse’s 1955 “Floating Clouds,” plus the U.S. restoration premieres of Howard Hughes’ 1930 “Hell’s Angels” and Pedro Almodóvar’s 1986 “Matador.”
‘While You Were Sleeping’
Peter Gallagher and Sandra Bullock in the romantic comedy “While You Were Sleeping.”
(Michael P. Weinstein / Hollywood Pictures)
On Dec. 5, the New Beverly will screen a matinee of John Turteltaub’s 1995 “While You Were Sleeping.” (Take that extra long lunch or just knock off work early. It’s the holidays.) This winsome, utterly charming romantic comedy really helped cement Sandra Bullock’s screen persona and stardom, and deservedly so. A lonely woman (Bullock) who works in a ticket booth for the Chicago Transit Authority quietly pines for a handsome man (Peter Gallagher) she sees every day. After she helps save him from an accident, a misunderstanding at the hospital leads his family to believe she is his fiancée while he is in a coma. Then she meets his brother (Bill Pullman) and the complications really ensue.
In his original review of the film, Peter Rainer wrote, “Bullock is a genuinely engaging performer, which at least gives the treacle some minty freshness. Her scenes with Pullman are amiable approach-avoidance duets that really convince you something is going on between them. Like Marisa Tomei, Bullock has a sky-high likability factor with audiences. She can draw us into her spunky loneliness — you want to see her smile.”
Acclaimed architect Robert A.M. Stern, a prominent figure in American architecture who designed notable museums, libraries and residences, died Thursday, according to a statement from the firm he founded. He was 86.
The statement did not specify a cause of death, but said Stern “died comfortably at his home.”
“At RAMSA, we grieve the loss of our founder, mentor, and friend, and remain committed to carrying forth his ideals,” the statement from the firm’s partners said.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1939, Stern founded the Robert A. M. Stern Architects firm, now known as RAMSA, in 1969. He gained acclaim for his decades of work and style, which blended postmodernism with contextual design, drawing inspiration from historic and traditional styles.
He was widely known for 15 Central Park West, a luxury condominium featuring a recognizable limestone exterior in Manhattan bordering Central Park. The building opened in 2008 and has attracted prominent, wealthy and famous tenants.
Stern’s works also include the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan and Disney’s Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Florida. Stern also designed Cal State Northridge’s Manzanita Hall in 2003.
He served as dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1998 to 2016. He was previously the director of Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
Twenty-five years ago (25!), I was talking with John Cusack about his movie “High Fidelity,” the one where he played Rob Gordon, a record store owner and compulsive list maker. We were batting around top-fives — Rob’s top five movies: “Blade Runner,” “Cool Hand Luke,” the two “Godfather” films and “The Shining” are as good a list as any — and I asked Cusack if he, like Rob, had a funeral music top five.
“‘Many Rivers to Cross’ feels like the perfect choice at No. 1,” Cusack answered, citing the great Jimmy Cliff’s enduring anthem of perseverance.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, thankful I can see clearly now the rain is gone. Let’s look at how box-office success is all relative these days when it comes to awards season.
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With Oscar voters, box-office perception is reality
Misato Morita and Brendan Fraser in the movie “Rental Family.”
(James Lisle / Searchlight Pictures)
What movies are you seeing this Thanksgiving weekend? If you’re pushing aside the pie and leftovers, chances are you might be buying a ticket for “Wicked: For Good” or “Zootopia 2.” The “Wicked” sequel opened to an estimated $150 million last weekend, besting the original and making my optimistic forecast for its Oscar prospects look a little rosier.
Meanwhile, “Rental Family,” a sweet, superficial drama starring Brendan Fraser looking to savage your heartstrings once again, opened to just $3.3 million from nearly 2,000 screens. Even in a lead actor field that isn’t particularly deep this year, Fraser’s chances of returning to the Oscars are now pretty much nil.
“Rental Family” is the latest fall film festival awards contender starring an A-list (or A-list-adjacent) actor to disappear at the box office. The list includes “The Smashing Machine” (Dwayne Johnson), “Christy” (Sydney Sweeney), “After the Hunt” (Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield) and “Die My Love” (Jennifer Lawrence).
Going through these titles, you could make a case that moviegoers are simply showing discernment. None of the movies worked. Critics shrugged, and audiences responded in kind. Good on Johnson and Sweeney for using their star power to stretch, but when people are questioning if they can afford to eat out at McDonald’s, they’re going to need a reason to buy a ticket beyond mere curiosity.
The dead-on-arrival opening weekends of these movies have recast the lead actor and actress Oscar races, boosting anyone not stained by perception of outright failure.
But in this post-pandemic age of moviegoing, what constitutes success? Pushing through to December when the critics groups (as well as “critics” groups) start handing out awards and nominations, the goal is to convey an impression of success and hope that financial windfall might follow.
For example: Joachim Trier’s decidedly unsentimental family drama “Sentimental Value” has parlayed its strong word of mouth and critical acclaim to decent-enough ticket sales in its limited engagement the last two weeks. No one expects a Norwegian-language movie to burn up the box office. Doing fine is a victory.
Then there’s Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon,” a modest, moving portrait of legendary Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, which opened last month in five theaters, quickly expanded to nearly 700 screens before retreating to a few dozen. It didn’t flame out commercially but has grossed a mere $2 million. That’s … OK. The strong reviews for the film and its lead, Ethan Hawke, have kept Hawke in the conversation for his first lead actor Oscar nomination.
Is it fair that Hawke lives while Lawrence, Sweeney, Roberts and Johnson, whose movies opened wide to disastrous results, feel finished?
“Oscar voters aren’t going to watch a movie that has been deemed a failure,” says a veteran awards publicist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the situation candidly. “When people read those scary headlines opening weekend, they don’t forget.”
Oscar Isaac in “Frankenstein.”
(Ken Woroner / Netflix)
Netflix, which opens its contending films in qualifying releases before they land on the streaming platform, is mostly immune to this kind of negative publicity as it doesn’t report box-office numbers. But it will release the number of “views” its films rack up. Guillermo del Toro’s monster movie “Frankenstein” accumulated nearly 63 million views in its first 10 days; Kathryn Bigelow’s riveting thriller “A House of Dynamite” totaled 31.6 million in its first two weeks. (The company defines a view as the total time spent watching a movie divided by the running time.)
The movie to watch this weekend then, in more ways than one, is Chloé Zhao’s celebrated drama “Hamnet,” which has piled up audience awards at film festivals the last several weeks. Focus Features is platforming it in 100-plus theaters, and if you live in Southern California, you won’t have to drive too far to see this beautiful story of love and loss and transcendent catharsis.
What narrative will emerge? I’ll write more about “Hamnet” on Monday. For now, get thee to a theater and let me know what you think.
I’m A Celebrity will air the first elimination of the series on Friday with a group of campmates facing the public vote, as confirmed by hosts Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly
22:50, 27 Nov 2025Updated 22:50, 27 Nov 2025
I’m A Celebrity will air the first elimination of the series on Friday(Image: ITV)
As the first vote-off of this series of I’m a Celebrity draws closer, fans think they already know who will be sent home.
After a live trial on Thursday, hosts Ant and Dec confirmed which stars were up for the axe. Jack Osbourne, Alex Scott, Angry Ginge, Aitch, Martin Kemp, Ruby Wax and Kelly Brook all lost out on immunity after a series of challenges.
Controversially, Aitch and Ginge were told both of them would be up after they spilled too much liquid in the drinking challenge. In a trial that saw tension and plenty of vomit, stars including Jack and Kelly learned they could be leaving the jungle forever the next day.
But fans think they already know amid the vote opening who will leave first. Viewers repeated the same two names as the possible stars facing leaving camp.
Kelly and Alex were repeatedly named by viewers on X, with them predicted to be leaving the show. One fan said: “I think Alex or Kelly will go tbh.”
Another agreed: “I think Kelly or Alex will be the first person out,” as a third said: “Kelly out first.” A fourth viewer said: “I think it’ll be Kelly or Alex who go tomorrow,” while a further comment read: “Alex or Kelly to go first I think.”
It comes as hosts Ant and Dec commented on campmates Shona McGarty and Aitch being “very cosy” amid romance rumours. On Wednesday night, scenes saw the pair messing around, and Dec was quick to comment.
After Kelly Brook suggested a pillow fight in camp, the pair were seen rolling around and falling to the floor. Shona was leaning on Aitch as the pair laughed, with fans suggesting they were “looking into each other’s eyes”.
Aitch commented on his time in camp being “lovely” with him “seeing the beauty of it”, with a smirk on his face – just as the camera panned to him staring at Shona. Fans were sure he was talking about his time with Shona.
Speaking live on air at the end of Wednesday’s episode, Dec said to Ant: “Getting very cosy aren’t they,” before smirking. Ant then said back: “Well some of them are…”
Viewers also had their say after the playful scenes. Some fans even suggested Aitch deliberatly lost to be in the loser camp with Shona, with many viewers “rooting” for their possible romance.
One fan said: “Aitch and Shona ready for that Christmas love.” Another agreed: “Are we witnessing the chemistry between Aitch and Shona? You can feel the love.”
A third fan said: “Aitch and Shona are so cute and I am SO HERE FOR IT,” as a fourth added: “I know Aitch lost on purpose to be with Shona I just can’t prove it.” A fifth said: “I’m so rooting for Aitch and Shona.”
Another fan commented: “Aitch and Shona staring into each others eyes.” It’s not just fans who seem to be rooting for the pair though, with friends and family also commenting.
Aitch’s close pal and manager said the pair could make a “nice couple”. Shona’s sister Camila had her say too, and said: “He is a nice guy… I would definitely have him around for Christmas.”
Shona broke up with her musician fiancé, David Bracken, earlier this year. Insiders say the split is amicable, and he recently wished her all the best for the jungle on social media.
Romance talk started after Aitch spoke about Shona to Ginge in the camp. He said: “I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for Shona, me.” Ginge replied: “I think she’s really nice, if that’s what you mean, yeah?” Keeping things low-key, Aitch commented: “Yeah, that’s what I mean…”
Being told at check-in your room has been upgraded is always a highlight during any trip, but as a former hotel receptionist, there’s one way that can help you secure that benefit
12:49, 27 Nov 2025Updated 12:58, 27 Nov 2025
I worked at a hotel for years and picked up some useful tips (Image: Amy Jones)
Having worked as a hotel receptionist for several years after leaving university, I picked up a few skills, whether that was answering an onslaught of calls or knowing every single room layout by memory. I also collected some rather handy tips, including how to bag that desirable free room upgrade.
One of the most sought-after requests from guests was whether they could have their room upgraded. I get it. You’re away for a romantic weekend and want to make it extra special, without forking out extra. But asking us two hours after check-in on a Friday night isn’t going to cut it.
I worked at a luxury hotel & spa comprising 35 rooms, and upgrades were typically prioritised for those celebrating a special occasion, be it a birthday or anniversary. If a higher category of room were available, we would do our very best to offer it to the lucky guest.
Another factor to note is that upgrades can be arranged the night before, so if you’re hoping to request one at check-in at 3 pm, there’s a very slim chance an upgrade will be available. While this can vary from hotel to hotel, we would know our upgraded guests well in advance of check-in time.
Despite this, there’s still a nifty way to help secure that free upgrade – by arriving early. Understandably, not everyone will want to arrive before official check-in time and potentially face a wait until their room is ready, but it could be well worth it. I’ll explain why.
While the upgrades are often in place for the next batch of arrivals, with key cards already assigned to guests, things can change. If you arrive early and inform us that it’s a special occasion, despite not mentioning it when you made the booking, we’ve got time to jiggle some rooms around – it’s surprising how many guests forget to mention the reason for their stay.
And it doesn’t need to be a special occasion. Upgrades are offered when and where they are available.
If we’re feeling extra nice, and it’s busy around the hotel, we might offer you an upgrade there and then, even if that means bumping someone’s once-upgraded room down. Our guests weren’t told if they had been upgraded until their arrival, so if anything changes, they are none the wiser, and we’d rather get you settled in your room.
Additionally, last-minute cancellations can and do happen, so if we suddenly had an empty room available that morning, you could be the one who joyfully gets to experience a two-storey suite with a roll top bath, because after all, first-come, first-served. Time is everything in the hospitality industry; it’s fast-paced and hectic, so arriving early allows us to gracefully offer that benefit before a mad rush of check-ins.
And that’s not all. Often, rooms can be ready long before 3pm, not all of them, but a vast number are waiting for their next visitors. At our hotel, if your room was ready, even if it was well before 3 pm, we would take you over. It not only helps you start your stay, but it also helps us deal with one less check-in during peak time on a Friday night.
Another perk of this is that if you arrive early and your room is ready, you have the luxury of time to check that you’re happy with your room. All of our rooms were unique with various styles, spaces, layouts and hotel views, so guests would often have a preference for what they desired after seeing photos on the website. (Side note: Photos on a hotel website do not always represent the room you will get, so be prepared).
But, if you check in early and aren’t completely satisfied with your room, we’d have the flexibility to easily move you to another one before another guest shows. After 3pm on a Friday, this is incredibly rare for a hotel of our size, but arriving just an hour or two earlier can make all the difference.
California state Senate leader Kevin de León introduced Senate Bill 54 on what was an unusually acrimonious first day of the 2017 legislative session, as lawmakers in both chambers were locked in bitter debate over the still newly elected President Donald Trump.
State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León discusses legislation that would prevent state and local law enforcement agencies from using resources for immigration enforcement. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)
The proposal, known as the “sanctuary state” bill, was sparked by the Trump administration’s broadened deportation orders. It would expand so-called sanctuary city policies, prohibiting state and local law enforcement agencies, including school police and security departments, from using resources to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect or arrest people for immigration enforcement purposes.
But as President Trump and U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions have threatened to slash federal funding from “sanctuary cities,” the state legislation is raising heated opposition from Republican lawmakers and sheriffs. They argue its provisions could strain the state’s finances and shield dangerous criminals.
1. It builds on an earlier law that provides protections to immigrants
De León has said his proposal builds on the California Trust Act, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed in October 2013. That state statute prevents law enforcement agencies from detaining immigrants longer than necessary for minor crimes, allowing federal immigration authorities to take them into custody.
Senate Bill 54 would prevent state and local agencies from complying with any “hold requests” to detain immigrants, for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It would also prohibit state and local agencies from using their facilities, property, equipment or personnel for immigration enforcement, and from spending money on it. The agencies would be barred from:
Collecting information about a person’s immigration status
Responding to notification or transfer requests from federal immigration agencies
Responding to requests for personal information that is not publicly available for the purpose of enforcing immigration laws
Arresting people based on civil immigration warrants
Giving federal immigration officers access to interview someone in their custody for immigration enforcement purposes
Helping federal immigration officers search a car without a warrant
Performing the functions of an immigration officer
Hundreds of Sacramento residents protested, listened and shouted while acting ICE Director Thomas Homan, left, and Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones held a community forum. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
2. It would establish ‘safe zones’ for immigrants
Within three months of Senate Bill 54 becoming law, the state Department of Justice would have to publish policies outlining what state and local law enforcement agencies can and can’t do to assist federal officials.
It would also create “safe zones” for immigrants by requiring all public schools, public libraries, courthouses and health facilities run by state or local government to implement those policies or “equivalent” regulations, though they would not have to be approved by the state. All other government-run organizations and entities that offer physical or mental health and wellness services, or that provide access to education, legal aid and social services, including the University of California, would be encouraged but not required to adopt the state policies.
3. Law enforcement officers would be able to work with task forces — so long as they’re not dedicated to immigration enforcement
To address some concerns from law enforcement, De León has added new amendments to his bill that would allow local and state officers to participate in task forces — and work alongside federal immigration officers — as long as their main purpose is not immigration enforcement.
Agencies that participate in a joint law enforcement task force would have to submit a report every six months to the state Department of Justice describing the types and frequency of arrests made by the task force. Within 14 months of the bill going into effect and twice a year thereafter, the state attorney general would have to publish the reports online.
4. Federal immigration officials would be notified when felons who have violent or serious convictions are released
Other changes to the bill by De León have attempted to address concerns from Republican lawmakers and sheriffs over the release of violent felons.
Federal law requires that electronic fingerprint records for all offenders booked into state prisons and local jails be sent to the FBI and to the Department of Homeland Security. ICE receives an electronic notification when DHS has previously entered an inmate’s information into its databases and determines whether the person is a priority for deportation. If so, it can request the arresting agency to hold or notify ICE before the person is let go.
Under Senate Bill 54, communication between ICE and state and local law enforcement agencies would be limited to passing on information about inmates who have previously been deported for a violent felony, or are serving time on a misdemeanor or felony and have a prior serious or violent felony conviction. State and local agencies would only be able respond to requests from ICE for other information if it is already available to the public.
Other recent amendments to the bill would require the State Parole Board or the California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation to give ICE 60-days advance notice of the release date of inmates who have been convicted of a serious or violent felony, or those who are serving time for a nonviolent crime but have a prior conviction for violent or serious crimes.
Law enforcement officers also would be allowed to contact and transfer people to ICE, with a judicial warrant, if they come into contact with someone who was previously deported for a violent felony.
5. It’s unclear how much of a financial burden the legislation will be for state and local law enforcement agencies
The Senate Appropriations Committee has determined it would take a one-time cost of $2.7 million and ongoing costs of $2.3 million per year for the state to develop compliance policies, provide training and outreach to state agencies and compile task force reports as required by Senate Bill 54.
But the costs for local law enforcement agencies to change their existing procedures — and to end contracts with federal immigration agencies, some of which generate millions of dollars in revenue from leased jail space — are unknown, as is how much it will cost state agencies including courts and schools to implement the new policies. The committee has not been able to measure the potential loss in funding from Washington should the state refuse to cooperate with federal authorities.
The state is unlikely to reimburse local law enforcement agencies for their financial losses because while the bill would impose restrictions, it would not require them to develop new policies, programs or services, according to an analysis by the Senate Public Safety Committee. But the state would probably have to foot the bill for expenses accrued by local government operations, including school districts and county health facilities, which would be asked to devise new policies that limit cooperation with immigration enforcement.
6. Many sheriffs are vehemently opposed to the bill
The bill has drawn fierce opposition from sheriffs across the state, including Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell and Sacramento Sheriff Scott Jones, who last month hosted a community forum on immigration enforcement with acting ICE Director Thomas Homan that drew a large crowd of protestors.
The sheriffs say the bill would severely limit communication and collaboration between local and federal agencies, forcing federal immigration officers to go into communities — instead of jails — when searching for immigrants who are a danger to public safety.
As the head of the nation’s largest sheriff’s department, McDonnell runs the largest jail system in the country, which houses approximately 18,000 inmates on any given day. Asst. Sheriff Kelly Harrington, who oversees the jail operation, has previously said federal immigration agents have access inside the county’s jail system every day. L.A. County jail officials last year handed over about 1,000 inmates to immigration agents — a small portion of the more than 300,000 people released from the county’s jails that year.
The sheriffs also argue the changes to the bill don’t address the potential loss of federal funding in counties that lease space to federal immigration agencies for detainees. An SB 54 opposition letter from Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Sandra Hutchens estimated that shortfall for her agency at roughly $22 million annually. Jones, who has said his department has $4.8 million in ICE contracts, insists his opposition stems from public safety concerns, not financial losses.
But no sheriff in California’s 58 counties is willing to hold inmates past their release dates for ICE, the Times has found. Several sheriffs said their defiance was not rooted in ethical or political opposition, but in concerns over federal court rulings, including a case in Oregon where a judge found that police violated a woman’s constitutional rights by keeping her in jail at the federal agency’s request.
7. Supporters argue the bill will protect vulnerable communities
Dubbed the California Values Act, Senate Bill 54 is at the center of a legislative package filed by Democrats in an attempt to protect more than 3 million people living in the state illegally. Other bills aim to protect immigrants’ religious affiliations and create a $12-million legal defense program for immigrants facing deportation who do not have a violent felony on their records.
The bill has drawn a long list of supporters, including Los Angeles County Supervisors Hilda Solis and Sheila Kuehl and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Other supporters include city officials from sanctuary cities like Santa Ana and Berkeley, immigrant advocates and Democratic lawmakers. They are urging opponents of the bill to move away from embracing Trump’s rhetoric, which they say stereotypes immigrants as criminals, and are pointing to studies that reflect low crime rates in immigrant communities.
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has said he supports with the legislation’s “underlying tenets,” but wants to ensure it does not protect criminals.
Meanwhile, some university police chiefs have supported the bill from the beginning, saying fear can keep witnesses and victims to crimes from coming forward. A 2013 study conducted by the University of Illinois found 44% of Latinos are less likely to contact police if they have been a victim of crime because they fear that police officers will ask about their immigration status.
12:01 p.m.: This article was updated to reflect that law enforcement agencies are allowed to notify immigration officials about inmates with prior violent felony convictions.
This article was originally published at 12:00 a.m.
The technologist and professor Mindy Seu was having drinks when her friend casually referred to the phone as a sex toy. Think about it, her friend, Melanie Hoff, explained: We send nudes or watch porn, it’s vibrating and touch-sensitive — it’s practically an appendage.
“What exactly is sex, and what exactly is technology?” Seu wondered. “Neither can be cleanly defined.”
Around the same time, in 2023, Seu had just published “Cyberfeminism Index,” a viral Google Sheet-turned-Brat-green-doorstopper from Inventory Press. Critics and digital subcultures embraced the niche volume like a manifesto — and a marker of Seu’s arrival as a public intellectual whose archiving was itself a form of activism. The cool design didn’t hurt. “If you’re a woman who owns a pair of Tabis or Miistas, you are going to have this tome,” joked comedian Brian Park on his culture podcast “Middlebrow.”
Still, the knot between sexuality and technology tugged at her. “Recently, my practice has evolved toward technology-driven performance and publication,” she said. “It’s not exactly traditional performance art, but I believe that spaces like lectures and readings can be made performative.” Though she wasn’t yet finished exploring this theme, she wasn’t sure how to approach it next — until an experiment by Julio Correa, a former Yale graduate student, sparked an idea. Correa had devised an Instagram Stories-based lecture format, and she immediately saw its potential. She reached out to ask if she could “manipulate” his idea into a performance piece, and would he like to collaborate?
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Thus, “A Sexual History of the Internet” was born. The work is two things at once: a participatory lecture-performance conducted through the audience’s phones, and an accompanying, palm-sized, 700-plus-page “script” examining how our devices serve as bodily extensions.
The book isn’t exhaustive but instead a curated miscellany of non-sequiturs and the kind of dinner-party lore Seu delights in. Did you know that the anatomical structure of the clitoris wasn’t fully mapped until a decade after the invention of the World Wide Web? Or that the first JPEG — introduced in 1992 at USC — cribbed a Playboy centerfold nicknamed “Lenna,” which journalist and the author of the 2018 “Brotopia” Emily Chang called “tech’s original sin.”
The metaverse, web3 and AI — none of this is new, Seu said in her loft this past Saturday, hours before her West Coast debut at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. “But understanding the arc is helpful, especially how it’s tied to militaristic origins rooted in power, and how those same people were also confronted with sexuality.”
She’s just returned from a whirlwind tour — Antwerp, New York, Oslo, Madrid — with Tokyo next month. She splits her time between L.A. and Berlin, where her boyfriend lives, but for now, she’s staying put in what she calls her “bachelor pad on the set of a ‘90s erotic thriller,” inherited from a friend, the artist Isabelle Albuquerque.
The floor-to-ceiling windows high in a historic Brutalist artists’ complex overlook MacArthur Park and the downtown skyline. She’s offset the building’s cement with a childhood baby grand piano and her grandmother’s lacquer vanity with pearl inlay. That Seu marries the feminine and the spartan in her space feels intentional — a reflection of the dualities that animate her life and work.
“A Sexual History of the Internet” by Mindy Seu
(Photography by Tim Schutsky | Art direction by Laura Coombs)
Though she moved from New York three years ago, she resists calling herself an Angeleno — partly, she admits, because she never learned to drive despite growing up in Orange County. Her parents ran a flower shop after immigrating from South Korea. The household was conservative, Presbyterian and promoted abstinence. Like with many millennials, her sexual awakening unfolded online.
“I asked Jeeves how to have an orgasm,” she writes. “I sexted with classmates on AOL Instant Messenger. Any curiosities were saved until I could sneak onto my family’s shared ice blue iMac G3 in the living room.”
At 34, the very-online academic holds a master’s from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and has taught at Rutgers and Yale before joining her alma mater, UCLA, as one of the youngest tenured professors (and perhaps the only one who has modeled for JW Anderson and Helmut Lang). Her first three years at UCLA have each had their crises — encampments, fires, ICE raids — yet her Gen Z students give her hope. “They’re so principled and motivated, even if it’s in a nihilistic way,” she said.
Online, fans declare their “brain crushes” on Seu, whose ultra-detailed spreadsheets have become unlikely catnip for TikTok. Vanity Fair dubbed her the rare cybernaut who “lands soft-focus photoshoots in niche lifestyle publications.” Her unusual power is the ability to move through different fields, Trojan-horsing her theories across academia, the art world, the lit scene, tech, fashion, et al. Seu’s notoriety continued to swell after appearing on the popular internet talk show “Subway Takes” with the standout zinger: “Gossip is socially useful, especially to women and the marginalized.”
“Mindy’s really good at bridging different audiences who might not read an academic text about the history of the internet but are interested in Mindy’s practice,” said Correa, Seu’s student-turned-collaborator. When the two workshopped their performance last year on their finsta (a.k.a. fake Instagram), they encountered one major hurdle: censorship. They had to get creative with their algospeak (like changing “sex” to “s*x”) to keep from getting banned.
Mindy Seu in her MacArthur Park loft.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“A Sexual History of the Internet,” designed by Laura Coombs, carries that collaborative ethos into its financial structure. Seu’s first book went through traditional publishing, where authors often receive about 10% and contributors receive fixed fees. This time, she wanted a citation model that compensated the 46 thinkers who shaped her understanding of the subject.
She approached Yancey Strickler, director of Metalabel, “an indie record label for all forms of culture,” and co-founder of Kickstarter. Seu’s original proposal waived all profits to collaborators. “Everyone got paid but her,” Strickler said. If she wanted the model to be replicated, he told her, it needed a capitalist backbone.
They landed on Citational Splits, where everyone who was cited joined a 30% profits pool, in perpetuity, across future printings (27 opted in). The remaining 60% goes to Seu and five core collaborators. Strickler likened it to music royalties or company shares: “Your presence increases the project’s value, and some of that value should flow back to you.”
Neither can name a publishing precedent. “It shows a profound, practical morality that underlies her work,” he said.
At MOCA, about 300 Angelenos braved an atmospheric river to sit in the darkened former police car warehouse bathed in red light. No projector, no spotlight. A pair of Tabis winks at her all-black-clad friend; a couple holds hands as Seu moves through the room. (“I intentionally wear very noisy shoes,” she said earlier.)
With the calm cadence of a flight attendant, Sue instructs everyone to put their phones on Do Not Disturb, sound and brightness to max and open Instagram to find @asexualhistoryoftheinternet.
The audience reads in unison when their designated color appears. What follows is a chorus of anecdotes, artworks and historical fragments tracing the pervasive — and sometimes perverted — roots of our everyday technologies. Hearing men and women say “click and clitoris” together is its own spectacle.
“From personal websites to online communities, cryptocurrencies to AI, the internet has been built on the backs of unattributed sex workers,” one slide notes. Sex work has long been an early adopter of emerging technology — from VHS to the internet — and the present is no exception. Two years ago, OnlyFans creators made more money than the total NBA salary combined; today, the company now generates more revenue per employee than Apple or Nvidia.
Seu ends with the widely known dominatrix Mistress Harley’s concept of data domination, a subset of BDSM in which her “subs” (a.k.a. submissives) grant her remote access to their machines. Seu tells the crowd that she has essentially done the same, “viewing the voyeurs” and taking photos of us throughout the performance, which are already posted to Instagram.
We walk out into the dark rain, wondering what exactly we witnessed — and realizing, perhaps, we’ve been witnessing it all along.
The Huntington has acquired a rare Civil War-era painting by American master Winslow Homer. “The Sutler’s Tent” was made in 1863 when Homer was traveling with the Union Army as an illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. The title refers to a type of transitory store that sold goods to soldiers when they were out in the field, and the canvas shows a soldier eating bread and cheese while another soldier rests beside him.
The acquisition is the Huntington’s first oil painting by Homer. The museum’s other holdings include his watercolor, “Indians Making Canoes (Montagnais Indians)” (1895), and several prints, including “The Life Line” (1887). The pieces show the artist’s journey from commercial illustrator to celebrated painter.
“The Sutler’s Tent” will be unveiled to the public on Dec. 7 in the Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. It was acquired through a partnership with the Ahmanson Foundation — which seeks to help boost the notable holdings of the museum — and marks the fifth major acquisition made through the program.
The gift is intended to honor the country’s upcoming semiquincentennial, and will anchor an ongoing reinstallation of the galleries as the Huntington seeks to expand the multicultural narrative of American art. It will also be integral to the Huntington’s “This Land Is …” initiative, which works to examine the country’s history through its metaphorical and literal landscapes as it approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
“The Sutler’s Tent” will be placed in conversation with works about the Civil War and Reconstruction, including Eastman Johnson’s “Sugaring Off” (1865), Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s “Why Born Enslaved? “(1868, cast 1872), and a signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation.
“The Ahmanson Foundation’s partnership with The Huntington has allowed us to bring works of profound artistic and historical resonance into our collections and into public view,” said Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence, in a statement. “Winslow Homer’s ‘The Sutler’s Tent’ — a meditation on the experience of war — embodies our mission to connect art, history, and literature in ways that deepen understanding of the American story.”
The Huntington Library is known for its vast scholarly trove of Civil War ephemera. Its United States Military Telegraph archive includes ciphered communications between Abraham Lincoln and the Army command, and soldiers’ letters and diaries. It also holds the James E. Taylor Collection of scrapbooks documenting the war through photographs and newspaper clippings, and two of the most significant known Lincoln archives.
The art museum’s director, Christina Nielsen, said in a statement that the acquisition of “The Sutler’s Tent,” “deepens our representation of the Civil War era and expands the dialogue between our art and library collections. As we look toward the 250th anniversary of the United States, the painting invites reflection on a pivotal chapter in our nation’s history — one that continues to shape the American experience.”
I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt, looking forward to taking a deep dive into all that can be learned about our present from our past. Here’s your arts and culture news for the week.
Dispatch: Pulitzer Prize-winning Times art critic Christopher Knight to retire
Times art critic Christopher Knight.
(Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times)
After 45 years, 36 of them at The Times, art critic Christopher Knight is retiring from daily journalism. His final day at The Times is Nov. 28. In 2020, Knight won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, and was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Art Journalism from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.
It’s impossible to overstate the loss Knight’s departure represents for the paper and Los Angeles, or what a tireless, generous, inspiring colleague he is. He possesses a quiet, encyclopedic knowledge of art, and in column after column he connected the dots of culture, history, folklore, civics and psychology in razor-sharp assessments of what a piece of art really means, or how a particular exhibition is poised to change the narrative around a longstanding or misguided idea. In short, he is everything a truly excellent critic should be.
He is also endlessly supportive of arts writers like me who look up to him — will always look up to him.
Thank you, Christopher, for all your words.
On our radar
Janai Brugger as Mimi and Oreste Cosimo as Rodolfo in L.A. Opera’s 2025 production of “La Bohème.”
(Cory Weaver)
La Bohème Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera remains one of the most popular works in the Italian canon. Its doomed romanticism among struggling artists in 1830s Paris has a particular appeal to young people and became the inspiration for Jonathan Larson’s musical “Rent.” Lina González-Granados conducts the L.A. Opera orchestra. Brenna Corner directs this revival of the late Herbert Ross’ enduring production. Saturday through Dec. 14. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laopera.org
Roberto González-Monjas conducts the L.A. Phil this weekend at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
(L.A. Phil)
Elgar’s Enigma Roberto González-Monjas conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a program featuring Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s “Themes and Variations, Op. 42,” Edwin Elgar’s “Enigma Variations, Op. 36,” and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s performance of the world premiere of an Edmund Finnis concerto. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. laphil.com
Robert Therrien, “No title (plaster snowman),” 1982-98, plaster
(Douglas M. Parker Studio)
Robert Therrien: This Is a Story A quintessential artist’s artist, internationally admired Los Angeles sculptor Robert Therrien (1947-2019) made eccentric objects in two and three dimensions that seem strangely familiar when they are wholly abstract, and strangely abstract when they are instantly recognizable as representations of known things — a tall pillar of giant dinner plates, for example, or a simple little snowman. Often the materials are unusual, like zinc over bronze, buffed plaster or tempera on silver, adding to the sense of mysterious specificity. With more than 120 works spanning five decades, this should be the most compelling museum solo show of the season. — Christopher Knight Saturday through April 5, 2026. The Broad, 221 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. thebroad.org
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The week ahead: A curated calendar
FRIDAY Fall of Freedom In a unified act of creative resistance, hundreds of galleries, museums, libraries, comedy clubs, theaters, concert halls and individuals across the nation will host exhibitions, performances and public events, asserting the power of free expression to mount a response to escalating authoritarian threats and censorship in the U.S. Friday and Saturday. There are dozens of local events in Southern California, please check the website for details. falloffreedom.com
¡Cómo el Grinch robó la Navidad! The Old Globe Theatre will present two performances of the world premiere of a new version of the Dr. Seuss classic with your favorite songs in Spanish. And for the 28th year, the Old Globe will also be doing its traditional holiday musical of “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” Nov. 21-28. 7 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. Saturday. Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, San Diego. theoldglobe.org
From “The Dying World” by Lauren Tsai.
(Josh White)
The Dying World Lauren Tsai’s solo exhibition, an installation utilizing drawing, painting, sculpture, puppets and projected stop motion imagery, explores the liminal space between worlds: subject and object, fiction and maker. Final two nights. 6-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Hollywood Forever, the Cathedral Mausoleum Courtyard, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. hollywoodforever.com
Amy Engelhardt in “Impact,” a solo one-act at the Fountain.
(Peter Serocki/peterserockivisuals.com)
Impact Composer/lyricist/performer Amy Engelhardt’s one-act solo show (with musical accompaniment) probes the 1988 terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Los Angeles. fountaintheatre.com
SATURDAY Animal Instinct Chinese American artist Kristen Liu-Wong’s solo exhibition of vibrant paintings with slightly macabre narratives highlights her varied influences from American folk art, the cartoons she watched as a kid, Japanese erotic art and an appreciation for architecture. Opening reception, 7-11 p.m. Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, through Jan. 3, 2026. Corey Helford Gallery, 571 S. Anderson St., Los Angeles. coreyhelfordgallery.com
A Brahmsian Affair The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra presents a program featuring two sextets by Brahms, plus the world premiere of Julia Moss’ “(Please Don’t) Look Away.” 7:30 p.m. Saturday. Zipper Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.; 4 p.m. Sunday. The Wallis, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. laco.org
Corita Day Corita Art Center celebrates L.A.’s favorite artist/nun with an afternoon of art activities for all ages, live screen printing by Self Help Graphics, holiday shopping, food, music by KCRW, and a performance by Bob Baker Marionette Theater at 2 p.m. Visitors can also reserve spots from 11 a.m.-6 p.m. to see the exhibitions “Corita Kent: The Sorcery of Images” and “Irregularity: Corita and Immaculate Heart College’s Rule Breaking Designs.” 1-4 p.m. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. marcianoartfoundation.org
Grief Bacon and Other Holiday Treats Melanie Mayron and Sandra Tsing Loh deliver “old and new humor for trying times.” Part of the Odyssey’s “Thresholds of Invention” series. 8 p.m. Saturday. Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd. odysseytheatre.com
Tom Wesselman, “Bedroom Face,” 1977, color aquatint
(Palm Springs Art Museum)
Mapping the Female Body: Tom Wesselmann and Mickalene Thomas An unexpected juxtaposition of two very different painters from the end of one century and the beginning of the next is set to consider dissimilar representations of the contemporary female nude. In the 1960s, the famous “Great American Nude” series by Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) applied commercial advertising techniques to painterly traditions in Western art familiar since the Renaissance. Fifty years later, Mickalene Thomas applies commercial craft techniques to vibrant paintings of queer Black women — a subject previously absent from Western art history. Questions of gender, sexuality and their depictions are the exhibition’s focus. — Christopher Knight Through April 6, 2026. Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 Museum Drive. psmuseum.org
Venice Winter Fest Chill out SoCal-style with artisan markets, hot cocoa, live music, festive bites and interactive winter-themed activities for all ages. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. 12257 Venice Blvd. thevenicefest.com
SUNDAY Habsburg Harmonies: Haydn, Ligeti, and Brahms Violinist Martin Beaver, flutist Demarre McGill, cellist Clive Greensmith and pianist Fabio Bidini team up for an evening rooted in Austro-Hungarian musical tradition. 4 p.m. Thayer Hall, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. colburnschool.edu
TUESDAY Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern Three adventurers need your help on an epic quest to save the world in this interactive fantasy inspired by the immensely popular role-playing game. Through Jan. 4, 2026. The Montálban, 1615 Vine St., Hollywood. broadwayinhollywood.com
Culture news and the SoCal scene
The Palm Springs Art Museum, founded in 1938, has a small board of 22 trustees.
(Lance Gerber / Palm Springs Art Museum)
Speaking of Christopher Knight’s tremendous skills as a critic, did I mention he’s also a phenomenal reporter? In one of his final columns, Knight chronicles the many financial travails of the Palm Springs Art Museum based on internal documents obtained by The Times. “Recent developments have opened a Pandora’s box,” Knight writes of an accounting firm’s annual audit of the museum’s 2024 books. The audit revealed that there is a “reasonable possibility that [the museum’s] internal financial statements are significantly out of whack,” Knight wrote before detailing the fallout leading to a trustees revolt.
Knight also delighted us with a list of “22 essential works of art at the Huntington and the surprising stories behind them.” No one can highlight what should be considered essential viewing at a museum quite like Knight, who takes readers on a virtual tour of the storied San Marino museum and its exquisite holdings, including Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “Portrait of Samuel Johnson (‘Blinking Sam’),” which Knight writes was not favored by its famous subject.
Cher Alvarez, who reprises her role at the Ahmanson, in “Paranormal Activity” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
(Kyle Flubacker)
Closer to home, McNulty reserved high praise for the spooky “Paranormal Activity,” now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre. “I caught myself wondering during the first act, ‘Is this the best staged production of the year?’,” McNulty writes of the show, which is based on the horror film franchise of the same name and just completed a run at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Director Felix Barrett, playwright Levi Holloway and Tony Award-winning illusion designer Chris Fisher are “masters of misdirection,” McNulty concludes.
I had a great Zoom call with Shaina Taub about the inspiration behind her musical, “Suffs.” Taub is only the second woman, after Micki Grant, to star in a Broadway musical for which she also wrote the book, music and lyrics. The show is about the women’s suffrage movement leading up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment. It opened earlier this week at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre as part of the show’s inaugural national tour.
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(Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack / Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo by Tomasa Calvo.)
Interdisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack is staging a solo exhibition, “You Can Hate Me Now,” at Night Gallery. This marks the artist’s second solo show at the space. Much of the new work was informed by Gaitor-Lomack’s life in his MacArthur Park neighborhood. A rep for the gallery wrote in an email that Gaitor-Lomack describes the exhibition “as a kind of ceremony, a gathering of ideas and emotions that have been unfolding across his work over the past three years. Guided by intuition and lived experience, he continues to use found and everyday materials to reflect on the innumerable systems of the world around. The exhibition’s title, long held in his mind, frames the presentation as a meditation on anticipation, transformation, and resilience.” The show will be at Night Gallery through Feb. 14.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has made what it is calling the first-ever restitution of artwork to the descendants of an enslaved artist. The artist, David Drake, was born around 1800 in Edgefield, S.C. He is known for signing his vessels and inscribing them with poetic verses, including one that read, “I wonder where is all my relations.” Fifteen of Drake’s descendants recently traveled to Boston from various states for a ceremony during which MFA returned one of Drake’s stoneware jars to them, and purchased a second back. An L.A.-based attorney named George Fatheree represents Drake’s family and help shepherd the transaction. “This is a day we hoped and prayed for,” said Pauline Baker, the third great-granddaughter of Drake, in a news release. “To see it realized is almost overwhelming. On behalf of our family, we express our deepest gratitude to the Museum of Fine Arts for its courage and integrity. Most importantly, this ceremony restores not just his work, but his humanity.”
A Gustav Klimt painting, “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” recently sold for $236.4 million, including fees, making it the most expensive modern work to be sold at auction. The 71-by-51-inch painting, created between 1914 and 1916, portrays the 20-year-old daughter of the Viennese art collectors who commissioned the work. The portrait was sold during a Sotheby’s auction in New York and was part of the private collection of cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder, who died in June. According to the Washington Post, a 19-minute bidding battle catapulted the painting “far beyond its $150 million estimate, with two bidders competing over the phone via their auction representatives.”
To get it out of the way: Yes, Tobias Jesso Jr. has heard about gooning.
“Somebody put me up on it and said it was about masturbation?” says the 40-year-old singer and songwriter, which is about half-right: As detailed in an essay in Harper’s that went viral last month, to goon — a term heretofore associated with Jesso thanks to his cult-fave 2015 album “Goon” — means in Gen Z parlance to masturbate at such great lengths that the act leads to a kind of trance state.
“Well, I’ve never done that,” Jesso says. “‘Goon’ I got from ‘The Goonies’ — it’s just a brilliant movie.” He laughs. “But I don’t care. If it sells more records, sure.”
That Jesso has a record to sell at all might take some by surprise. Though “Goon” thoroughly charmed critics and fellow musicians with its early-’70s-balladeer vibe — many said he evoked the glory days of Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson and beard-and-shearling-coat-era Paul McCartney — Jesso didn’t cotton to the life of a sort-of-famous performer and almost immediately walked away from his solo career to write songs for other singers instead.
He’s thrived in that role, penning hits for the likes of Adele, Niall Horan, Harry Styles and Dua Lipa. In 2023, he was named songwriter of the year at the Grammy Awards; this month he was nominated for that prize for a second time, with the Recording Academy citing his work with Justin Bieber (“Daisies”), Haim (“Relationships”) and Olivia Dean (“Man I Need”), among others.
Yet now he’s back with an unexpected follow-up to his debut called “Shine,” which came out Friday. Stripped back for the most part to just voice and piano, it’s an earnest work of introspection from a guy who knows how to make tenderness feel like strength.
Jesso, who grew up in Vancouver and lives in Los Angeles, announced the album just last week with a music video for his song “I Love You” that features the actors Riley Keough and Dakota Johnson, with whom he’s been close since he first touched down here around 2008.
“I hit them up and was like, ‘You girls think it’s about time I use your fame to get some extra clicks?’” he says on a recent morning at his place in Silver Lake. “The video opens up on them, then it pans away and it goes to me and you never see them again.”
Says Keough, a former girlfriend: “It was a very Tobias ask.”
So why return to the spotlight? According to Jesso, he wouldn’t have had it not been for a breakup that left him “the most depressed I’ve ever been in my life, by far.” We’re sitting in a cozy den that looks out over a lush hillside garden; a bowl of persimmons sits on a coffee table while a copy of “McCartney II” peeks out from a stack of LPs.
Jesso, whose mop of curly hair has begun ever so slightly to gray, says that when he enters a songwriting session with another artist, “I leave my worries and woes outside the door. I’m there to serve you — to write the song you want to write.” It’s an approach that’s endeared him to his star collaborators and yielded songs as deep as Adele’s “To Be Loved,” a stunning meditation on the costs of divorce from her 2021 album “30.”
But earlier this year, for the first time in Jesso’s decade of behind-the-scenes work, he found himself struggling to deliver. “I was feeling so in the dumps that I’d be choking on a line that I didn’t even want to say because if I say it, I’ll start crying,” he recalls.
He cleared six weeks from his busy schedule to process his emotions; the result was a set of songs for himself about heartache — “I can see the love leaving from your eyes in the form of a tear,” he sings in “Rain” — but also about his mom’s experience with dementia and about the young son he shares with his ex-wife.
To record the music, Jesso’s instinct was to go big. “I’m a dreamer, so I was like, ‘Imagine all the people I could have help me now that I didn’t have 10 years ago,’” he says. “I went from so-and-so to so-and-so, trying out studios, making promises I couldn’t keep. But all that stuff over the weeks just kind of flaked away.”
What remained was the beautifully mellow sound of a vintage Steinway piano he’d had restored after buying it on Craiglist for $800. He keeps the piano in a small, uncluttered studio upstairs from the den at his house; that’s where he cut “Shine,” singing live as he accompanied himself in real time.
A small handful of other players appear on the album, most prominently in “I Love You,” which erupts near the end with a wild drum fill performed by Jesso’s old pal Kane Ritchotte. The idea for the percussive outburst came to Jesso after he’d consumed “a s— ton of mushrooms,” he says. “I turned to my assistant at the time — I wonder if I have it — and I said, ‘Record me right now.’ She started recording me, and what came out was that fill.”
He picks up his phone and scrolls for a moment. “Look at this,” he says, turning the screen my way: There’s Jesso in the same room we’re in right now, staring wide-eyed into the camera as he mouths the drum sounds Ritchotte would later replicate exactly.
“That song is about somebody’s inner child being in the middle of a labyrinth, and you’re trying to find them so you can convince them that you’re in love,” Jesso tells me. “You can’t get there and you’re wishing that the whole labyrinth would just be destroyed. So when it gets to that part — ‘Shatter the cracks wide open / And say, “I love you”’ — the drums are the walls coming down. That’s the shattering.”
Tobias Jesso Jr. at the 65th Grammy Awards in 2023.
(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Drum theatrics aside, Jesso’s singing is the album’s clear focal point; his pleading, slightly unsteady tone gives the music an emotional intimacy that makes you feel as though you’re sitting right next to him on the piano bench.
Jesso describes his voice as something of a liability, which Keough says has been true since he was ducking the frontman’s job in the various bands he played in when he was in his early 20s. “I always loved his voice, and he just didn’t feel that way for whatever reason,” she recalls. “I don’t know if he felt a sort of shyness, which is really interesting because as a person he’s not shy whatsoever.”
Asked whether Jesso’s decision to follow up “Goon” surprised her, she says, “I was surprised he released ‘Goon’ to begin with.”
The way Jesso sees it, “My voice isn’t good enough for the songs I write, which is why I’ve chosen to work with all these other people.” What he’s comes to realize, though, is that “my voice is perfect for my songs.”
Which doesn’t mean it’s easy for him to hear it. Once he’d finished recording, Jesso asked his friend Shawn Everett to mix “Shine”; what he got back — with every imperfection of his voice under a virtual magnifying glass — terrified him. “It felt way, way, way too vulnerable,” Jesso says.
He texted Everett and said he was sorry but that he couldn’t put out the record like this. “I told him, ‘You just brought out more of me than I’m willing to share,’” he says now. “Then I got home, I smoked a big fat joint and I sat on the couch. I was like, I’m gonna wait until I’m high enough that I can press play and pretend this isn’t me.” He laughs. “I put on the headphones, and I have never in my life had such a profound experience with music.”
Who’d you imagine was singing? I don’t know — like a 50-year-old dude or maybe a 20-year-old girl who’s got a low voice? It didn’t matter — it wasn’t me, so I wasn’t listening with judgmental ears.
The paradox is that “Shine” feels like the you-est possible album. There’s no tricks. I didn’t auto-tune, I didn’t cut anything together, I didn’t do any of that. It’s me singing a take, and it’s the best take I got. Whereas with “Goon,” there were a lot of elements that maybe weren’t possible for me to do.
“Goon” was a little more elaborate — more players and producers. Which was tortuous because I’m like, “How do I recreate this thing that I didn’t even fully make myself?”
Given the unhappiness of your experience after “Goon” came out, I wondered whether this time you’d put certain restrictions on what you’re willing to do. I’ll say right off the bat: I’m not touring — no way. I’ve met enough artists who say, “I feel totally myself onstage,” to know that there’s a natural state in which people feel comfortable up there. And I’ve tried every which way — by which I mean drinking and not drinking — and I just can’t. It’s not me.
Maybe this is something I still need to work on in therapy, but by being onstage and singing, I’m basically saying, “I’m a singer,” and I’m not comfortable saying that. I’m comfortable saying, “I’m a songwriter.” So there’s this weird shame that comes in where I’m presenting myself beyond what I know my ability to be.
One of the benchmarks I needed to hit on this record was to be comfortable that I’m not misrepresenting myself, which is why I’m OK if there’s an out-of-tune note here and there or if it’s a little bit fast or slow. But even knowing that I can perform it exactly like it is on the record, there’s nothing drawing me to the stage. I don’t really want to have a relationship with fans in that way. I feel very privileged that this is not my main job.
Between “Goon” and now, songwriting became your main job. So I don’t have to take this as seriously. The parts I do take seriously — the art — I’m willing to put in the work for.
But not for success per se. Exactly. This is weird to say, but there were moments where I was toiling over this record — listening to Take No. 73 and being like, “Wait, what was the other one?” — and the thought would occur to me: I could go to work today instead of do this and potentially create much more wealth for myself than this album could ever do.
I mean, that’s almost certainly the case. In comparison, “Shine” is meaningless in terms of success and potential. And yet I was still drawn to doing it, which made me feel like I was making the right choice for myself. But when it comes to the stuff I don’t think is important, just try to get me to do it. It ain’t happening.
I went back and looked at something I wrote about a show you played at South by Southwest in 2015 where you had to start your song “True Love” five times. Oh God.
But it’s not like anybody in the crowd was mad about it. People thought it was cute. I feel like if I was onstage now — and everything’s pointing to I probably should play a show or two — I’d be able to see the value in vulnerability. It’s human, and I like that about it. But at the time I wasn’t able to cope with the people who wouldn’t see it that way. Because I wasn’t seeing it that way. I was seeing it as: I’m trying to pretend I’m OK with this, but I’m actually forgetting my song because I’m such a s— performer. Yeah, the crowd loves it, but I go offstage and I’m not looking for the comments saying, “It was so funny.” I’m looking for the ones that are like, “This guy’s a joke.” And I’m like, f—, I knew it.
Keough shares Jesso’s assessment of what’s put him in a different position today versus 10 years ago.
“With ‘Goon,’ he would have put pressure on himself” to jump through the hoops required of a performer, she says. “He was a barista straight out of the coffee shop. ‘Shine’ is straight off all his Grammys and his big songwriting career. He’s able to be more free as an artist now because the stakes are lower.”
Yet not so long ago Jesso reckoned he might be close to burning out in the pop realm. “I was kind of getting ready to dip,” he says, “because I don’t like going into a room and saying, ‘Oh, this song is blowing up — let’s do the same thing.’”
Tobias Jesso Jr. at home in Silver Lake.
(Ian Spanier / For The Times)
He clarifies that he’s not talking about working with an artist like Dua Lipa, who recruited him as a writer for her 2024 “Radical Optimism” LP. “Dua was great,” he says. “I’m talking about going into pitch sessions and sitting with a bunch of writers and figuring out how to get a song pitched. That’s never really worked for me, and the higher you get with producers, the more into that formula you’re putting yourself.”
What he found with Bieber earlier this year was nothing like that. “It was balls to the wall, ideas just flying around,” Jesso says of the roving sessions for the pop superstar’s experimental “Swag” and “Swag II” albums, which took Jesso and the rest of Bieber’s crew to France and the Bahamas and Iceland before Jesso began work on “Shine.”
“I nearly wept on more than one occasion because of how moved I felt about what Justin was doing,” Jesso says. “It was raw emotion without any tricks, without any wordplay, without any of the stuff that I’d been so jaded by in the industry.” The experience, he adds, “reinvigorated my belief in pop music.”
Which makes it an interesting time to move to Australia, as Jesso plans to do soon in order to be close to his son, Ellsworth, who’s there with Jesso’s ex-wife, the Australian singer and songwriter Emma Louise.
“D-I-V-O-R-C-E, you know — it’s always give and take to meet each other’s needs,” he says. “And one of the things was Australia. She really wants Ellsworth to go to school there, which makes sense in one sense — and professionally makes no sense at all. But I committed to it, and I want to at least give it a try and see it through.
“This album coming out and moving to Australia within the same couple months — it feels like a big moment of change,” Jesso continues. “Maybe I’m letting go of some old things, like music being scary, and embracing some new scary things. I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna do over there. Hopefully I get busy doing something. Otherwise I’ll be pitching the groundskeeper ideas for TV shows the whole time.”
How you answer may be the key in how much you enjoy the sequel, “Wicked: For Good,” which opens today and is on track to sell more tickets in its first weekend than its predecessor.
Will the new movie once again cast a spell at the Oscars? The answer, for the moment, is confusifying.
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope newsletter and someone hoping to see a movie at the Village before the Olympics land in L.A. in 2028. Which film should they book to kick off its revival?
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Cynthia Erivo, left, and Ariana Grande perform at the 97th Academy Awards in March.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Who wasn’t charmed by the first “Wicked” movie last year? Film critics gave it more than a pass, with reviews scoring a respectable 73 grade on aggregator site Metacritic. Audiences loved it, powering the film to a $758 million worldwide box office haul. And Oscar voters fell in line, rewarding “Wicked” with 10 nominations and wins for production design and costumes. Gratitution abounded.
Repeating success is a taller order, our beloved Dodgers notwithstanding. As noted, multiplexes should be full this first weekend and, you’d expect, the lucrative Thanksgiving weekend as well. But the reviews haven’t been as kind this time around. “Wicked: For Good” sits at a 60 on Metacritic. Empire magazine’s review sums up the sentiment: “‘Wicked: For Good,’ sure — but not quite Wicked: For Great.”
Sequels rarely land as well as the original film, so the drop-off isn’t surprising. And, if you’ve seen the Broadway musical, you already knew this was coming. All the best songs are packed into the show’s first act, culminating in the soaring, sustaining final notes of “Defying Gravity.” But you can only beat that gravitational force for so long before you fall flat on the ground.
Which brings me back to the question I first asked you: What are you looking for in a “Wicked” movie? I enjoyed all the spirited dancing and singing and, yes, the bright, candy colors of the first movie. You want a slog? The sequel takes almost an hour to bring together the two characters you truly care about — Elphaba and Glinda.
To get to that moment, you have endure a lot of filler, as if the musical doesn’t have enough material to sustain two movies totaling nearly five hours. (It doesn’t.)
The so-so critical reaction shouldn’t keep “Wicked: For Good” from picking up a best picture nomination, provided the movie’s fans keep showing up at theaters through the end of the year. With so many high-profile festival films — “The Smashing Machine,” “After the Hunt,” “Die My Love” among them — failing to connect with audiences and critics, there’s room at the inn. Academy voters will likely keep the light on.
Equaling the first film’s 10 nominations will be difficult. Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande opened the Oscars ceremony last year in spectacular fashion, but a reunion might not be in the cards. The pair were arguably co-leads in the first movie. “For Good” belongs more to Glinda than Elphaba, charting the Good Witch’s journey from complacency and compliance to … less complacency and compliance. Maybe Glinda’s going to learn from all this and take principled stands moving forward, though the movie doesn’t do enough to convince me. Grande’s dimple has more depth.
Still, Grande figures to score another supporting actress nomination and, who knows, she may well win. Voters love big theater-kid energy in this category, giving Oscars to Jennifer Hudson (“Dreamgirls”), Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables”), Ariana DeBose (“West Side Story”) and Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez”) in recent years.
Erivo, placed in the more competitive lead class, might not be as fortunate, as she no longer centers the movie. She still masterfully conveys Elphaba’s vulnerability and sadness, but she’s also saddled with a chemistry-free love story with Capt. Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). I won’t count her out. But Erivo could well lead the “snubs” and surprises list come nominations morning.
Repeat nominations in production design and costume design, the two Oscars the first movie won, seem safe bets. Hair and makeup does too, as does sound since voters love movies heavy on music. “Wicked: For Good” might pick up another nomination in the newly created casting category, as it won’t be a spot where voters feel like they’re repeating themselves. And while the first movie didn’t have any new songs, “For Good” sports two. Look for “The Girl in the Bubble,” sung by Grande, to pop.
Eight nominations? That’d be a win. The loss would be if “Wicked: For Good” followed the path of the two “Black Panther” movies. The first, a critical, commercial and cultural sensation, earned seven nominations, including best picture, and won three Oscars. The less-regarded sequel picked up five nods, winning one. It was not nominated for best picture.
The United States has revealed all 28 points of its proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine war to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The plan, which has been heavily criticised as far too favourable to Russia by many observers, is in its draft stage and has yet to be made public. However, a Ukrainian official is understood to have provided the details to international media.
Here is a closer look at the points and the significance of this plan.
What are the 28 points of Trump’s proposal for Ukraine?
1. Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.
2. A comprehensive, non-aggression agreement will be concluded between Russia, Ukraine and Europe. All ambiguities of the last 30 years will be considered settled.
3. It is expected that Russia will not invade neighbouring countries and NATO will not expand further.
4. A dialogue will be held between Russia and NATO, mediated by the US, to resolve all security issues and create conditions for de-escalation to ensure global security and increase opportunities for cooperation and future economic development.
5. Ukraine will receive reliable security guarantees.
6. The size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be limited to 600,000 personnel.
7. Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.
8. NATO agrees not to station troops in Ukraine.
9. European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland.
10. The US security guarantee will have the following caveats:
The US will receive compensation for the guarantee;
If Ukraine invades Russia, it will lose the guarantee;
If Russia invades Ukraine, in addition to a decisive coordinated military response, all global sanctions will be reinstated, recognition of the new territory and all other benefits of this deal will be revoked;
If Ukraine launches a missile at Moscow or Saint Petersburg without cause, the security guarantee will be deemed invalid.
11. Ukraine is eligible for European Union (EU) membership and will receive short-term preferential access to the EU market while this issue is being considered.
12. A powerful global package of measures will be provided to rebuild Ukraine, including but not limited to:
The creation of a Ukraine Development Fund to invest in fast-growing industries, including technology, data centres and artificial intelligence.
The US will cooperate with Ukraine to jointly rebuild, develop, modernise and operate Ukraine’s gas infrastructure, including pipelines and storage facilities.
Joint efforts to rehabilitate war-affected areas for the restoration, reconstruction and modernisation of cities and residential areas.
Infrastructure development.
Extraction of minerals and natural resources.
The World Bank will develop a special financing package to accelerate these efforts.
13. Russia will be reintegrated into the global economy:
The lifting of sanctions will be discussed and agreed upon in stages and on a case-by-case basis.
The US will enter into a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centres, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.
Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8.
14. Frozen funds will be used as follows:
$100bn in frozen Russian assets will be invested in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine;
The US will receive 50 percent of the profits from this venture. Europe will add $100bn to increase the amount of investment available for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Frozen European funds will be unfrozen. The remainder of the frozen Russian funds will be invested in a separate US-Russian investment vehicle that will implement joint projects in specific areas. This fund will be aimed at strengthening relations and increasing common interests to create a strong incentive not to return to conflict.
15. A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.
16. Russia will enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine.
17. The US and Russia will agree to extend the validity of treaties on the non-proliferation and control of nuclear weapons, including the START I Treaty.
18. Ukraine agrees to be a non-nuclear state in accordance with the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
19. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant will be launched under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the electricity produced will be distributed equally between Russia and Ukraine, 50:50.
20. Both countries undertake to implement educational programmes in schools and society aimed at promoting understanding and tolerance of different cultures and eliminating racism and prejudice:
Ukraine will adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities.
Both countries will agree to abolish all discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education.
All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited.
21. Territories:
Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognised as de facto Russian, including by the US.
Kherson and Zaporizhia will be frozen along the line of contact, which will mean de facto recognition along the line of contact.
Russia will relinquish other agreed territories it controls outside the five regions.
Ukrainian forces will withdraw from the part of Donetsk oblast that they currently control, and this withdrawal zone will be considered a neutral demilitarised buffer zone, internationally recognised as territory belonging to the Russian Federation. Russian forces will not enter this demilitarised zone.
22. After agreeing on future territorial arrangements, both the Russian Federation and Ukraine undertake not to change these arrangements by force. Any security guarantees will not apply in the event of a breach of this commitment.
23. Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnipro River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.
24. A humanitarian committee will be established to resolve outstanding issues:
All remaining prisoners and bodies will be exchanged on an “all for all” basis.
All civilian detainees and hostages will be returned, including children.
A family reunification programme will be implemented.
Measures will be taken to alleviate the suffering of the victims of the conflict.
25. Ukraine will hold elections in 100 days.
26. All parties involved in this conflict will receive full amnesty for their actions during the war and agree not to make any claims or consider any complaints in the future.
27. This agreement will be legally binding. Its implementation will be monitored and guaranteed by the Peace Council, headed by President Donald J Trump. Sanctions will be imposed for violations.
28. Once all parties agree to this memorandum, the ceasefire will take effect immediately after both sides retreat to the agreed points to begin implementation of the agreement.
How has Ukraine reacted to these proposals?
Zelenskyy met with US Army officials in Kyiv on Thursday to discuss the proposals, which have been drawn up by US and Russian officials without any input from Ukraine or its European allies.
After the meeting, Zelenskyy said in an address: “The American side presented points of a plan to end the war – their vision. I outlined our key principles. We agreed that our teams will work on the points to ensure it’s all genuine.”
Zelenskyy added, “From the first days of the war, we have upheld one very simple position: Ukraine needs peace. A real peace – one that will not be broken by a third invasion. A dignified peace – with terms that respect our independence, our sovereignty and the dignity of the Ukrainian people.”
The Ukrainian president said that he will now discuss the proposals with Ukraine’s European allies.
Does this mean Ukraine and its allies will accept the proposal?
No.
“Zelenskyy had a nuanced response – he said ‘We will work on it’,” Keir Giles, a Eurasia expert at the London political think tank Chatham House, told Al Jazeera.
However, he added that agreeing to the terms of the plan in its current form would be “catastrophic” for Ukraine because of the heavy concessions Kyiv is being asked to make.
While European leaders have not reacted to the 28-point plan, they have indicated that they would not accept a plan that requires Ukraine to make such concessions.
“Ukrainians want peace – a just peace that respects everyone’s sovereignty, a durable peace that can’t be called into question by future aggression,” said French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot. “But peace cannot be a capitulation.”
For now, Ukraine’s allies are not commenting. European Council President Antonio Costa said that the EU has not yet been officially informed about the US plan, so “it makes no sense to comment” on it.
More reactions from Europe might come starting from Saturday, when Costa and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will speak at the G20 summit.
“A 28-point plan was made public. We will discuss the situation both with European leaders and with leaders here on the sidelines of the G20,” von der Leyen said, according to UK media.
What are Russia and the US saying about this plan now?
The US has not made details of the plan public, and officials from Washington have not commented on it.
Russia has denied that there have been formal consultations between the US and Russia on a peace plan.
“Consultations are not currently under way. There are contacts, of course, but there is no process that could be called consultations,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
Meanwhile, Hungarian PM and close Trump ally Viktor Orban seemed to back the plan on Friday.
In an X post, Orban wrote that Trump’s plan had “gained new momentum”.
“The American President is a persistent maverick. If he had been President at the time, the war would never have broken out. It is clear that once he sets his mind on something, he does not let it go, and he has certainly set his mind on ending the Russian-Ukrainian war,” Orban wrote.
President @realDonaldTrump‘s peace initiative has gained new momentum. A 28-point peace plan is on the table, an American negotiating delegation is in Kyiv, and expectations are high worldwide. The American President is a persistent maverick. If he had been President at the time,… pic.twitter.com/J2cagATvc5
Experts said the terms of the 28-point plan and how they would be implemented are far from clear.
“The terms are unenforceable, nonsensical and vague that they cannot be enforced without months of wrangling,” Giles said.
For instance, he said, point 9 states that European fighter jets will be stationed in Poland. However, it is unclear what “European” or “fighter jets” mean.
Giles said “European” could mean the European Union or European countries. “‘Fighter jets’ is a militarily meaningless term, which provides plenty of room for argument,” he added.
How would the US be ‘compensated’ for security guarantees?
It is unclear what security guarantees the US is offering Ukraine. Further details of these have not been released.
Point 10 states that the “US will receive compensation for the guarantee”. While it is unclear what the specific compensation would be, experts suggest that point 14 may shed some light on this.
Point 14 of the plan states that $100bn in frozen Russian assets plus $100bn from Europe would be used for Ukraine’s reconstruction.
The plan further states that the US will receive 50 percent of the profits from the reconstruction of Ukraine. It is not specified how these profits would be generated.
The plan also states that remaining Russian funds would go into a joint US-Russia investment vehicle for projects to build ties and deter future conflict, again with little detail.
Giles said this likely refers to about $300bn in Russian Central Bank assets, which have been frozen by the US and European countries since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In October this year, EU leaders suggested a “reparations plan” under which it would use frozen Russian assets to lend Ukraine $164bn to buy European weapons, and for reconstruction.
Giles said that the point about Russian frozen assets was likely deliberately added by negotiators from Moscow because “Russia has already written off frozen assets abroad, and now is dangling that as a carrot in front of the US”.
Giles added that, according to earlier plans, however, “those funds were supposed to rebuild Ukraine”.
However, now we don’t know whether the reconstruction will be of a “free Ukraine or Russian efforts of Russification in occupied Ukraine”, he said.
Would the proposal give Russia amnesty for war crimes?
Point 26 of the plan states that all parties involved in the conflict will receive “full amnesty for their actions during the war”.
In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia.
The US cannot unilaterally grant amnesty to an individual convicted of war crimes by an international organisation.
“Writing off the war, pretending it never happened, rolling back sanctions and ignoring war crimes is just one of the elements of this draft list where the US is assuming the cooperation of the rest of the world,” Giles said.
He added that a large number of countries across the world strongly believe in international law, and are likely to push back on this point.
“If a negotiation like this were to be enforced, then it is the US endorsing the seizure of territory through open arms aggression, and it will be encouragement to other aggressors around the world that they have the US blessing,” Giles warned.
What territory would Ukraine have to concede?
The plan says that Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk would be considered Russian territory.
Donetsk and Luhansk are collectively called the Donbas region.
Crimea was seized by Russia from Ukraine in 2014 and remains a matter of dispute.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, overall, Ukraine still controls 14.5 percent of the territory in the Donbas, including parts of Donetsk around the cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Russia also controls 75 percent of Zaporizhia and Kherson in southern Ukraine, bordering the Black Sea. The plan says that the current battle lines will be frozen in these regions.
(Al Jazeera)
How would Russia be brought back into the international fold?
Parts of the proposal aim to bring Russia out of the isolation imposed on it by the Western world since it started the Ukraine war.
Point 12 states that Russia will be invited to rejoin the G8.
The G8 – currently the G7 – was an unofficial forum for the leaders of eight major industrialised nations: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US.
Russia was part of the G8 but was ejected following the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The plan also mentions the establishment of a US-Russian investment vehicle that would implement joint projects in specific areas. However, further details about this have not been revealed.
The plan also mentions the formation of a joint US-Russian working group on security issues to ensure compliance with the plan.
Will the proposal end the war in Ukraine?
Analysts are doubtful. “This agreement is not going anywhere – similar to the previous ones,” Giles said.
He called it “another iteration of the merry-go-round that we’ve been on many times before”.
He said he believes the plan will receive pushback from Ukraine and Europe, which will want to negotiate changes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he’s willing to work with the United States on a plan to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, despite pushback from European allies who say that the US-backed plan heavily favours Russia.
Zelenskyy’s office on Thursday confirmed that he had received a draft of the plan, and that he would speak with US President Donald Trump in the coming days.
His office did not comment directly on the contents of the plan, which has not been published, but the Ukrainian leader had “outlined the fundamental principles that matter to our people”.
“In the coming days, the President of Ukraine expects to discuss with President Trump the existing diplomatic opportunities and the key points required to achieve peace,” Zelenskyy’s office said.
Several media outlets reported that the 28-point plan involves Ukraine ceding territory and weapons. Citing an unnamed US official with “direct knowledge”, Axios reported the plan would give Russia parts of eastern Ukraine that Moscow does not currently control, in exchange for a US security guarantee for Ukraine and Europe against future Russian aggression.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US special envoy Steve Witkoff have been quietly working on the plan for a month, receiving input from both Ukrainians and Russians on terms that are acceptable to each side, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed on Thursday.
She declined to comment on details of the emerging proposal, but said Trump has been briefed on it and supports it.
“It is a good plan for both Russia and Ukraine, and we believe it should be acceptable to both sides. And we are working hard to get it done,” Leavitt said.
Zelenskyy confirmed later that he discussed the plan with US Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll in Kyiv.
“Our teams – Ukraine and the USA – will work on the points of the plan to end the war,” Zelenskyy wrote on Telegram without commenting directly on the plan. “We are ready for constructive, honest and prompt work.”
Russia appeared to play down any new US initiative.
“Consultations are not currently under way. There are contacts, of course, but there is no process that could be called consultations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
While Zelenskyy has signalled he is willing to work with the Trump administration on a ceasefire, Kyiv’s European allies have expressed scepticism.
“Ukrainians want peace – a just peace that respects everyone’s sovereignty, a durable peace that can’t be called into question by future aggression,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said during a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels. “But peace cannot be a capitulation.”
EU foreign policy head Kaja Kallas said any peace proposal would need support from Europe and Ukraine to move forward, with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski saying that Europe – whose security is “at stake” – expects to be consulted on any potential deal.
“I hope it’s not the victim that has restrictions on its ability to defend itself put on, but it’s the aggressor,” he said.
Fighting continues despite peace talks
Zelenskyy is facing pressure to join the US-backed diplomatic initiative as Ukrainian troops continue to lose ground to Russian forces in the country’s east.
Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in October that Russian forces had seized almost 5,000 square kilometres (1,930sq miles) of Ukraine this year.
On September 25, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, independently assessed the real figure to be closer to 3,434sq km (1,325sq miles).
Russia’s General Staff said Thursday that Moscow’s forces had seized the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kupiansk and controlled large sections of the towns of Pokrovsk and Vovchansk – a claim Ukraine vigorously denied.
“The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces hereby announces that Kupiansk is under the control of Ukraine’s defence forces,” the Ukrainian General Staff said in a late evening bulletin.
“Also untrue are statements suggesting that 80 percent of Vovchansk in the Kharkiv region has been captured and 70 percent of the city of Pokrovsk.”
This week, a devastating Russian aerial assault on Ternopil in western Ukraine killed at least 26 people and wounded dozens more, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko confirmed Thursday.
Zelenskyy said on Thursday that 22 people were still missing at the site of Wednesday’s attack on Ternopil when Moscow unleashed 476 drones and 48 missiles across Ukraine. The attack damaged energy infrastructure across seven Ukrainian regions, prompting nationwide restrictions on power consumption.
“Every brazen attack against ordinary life indicates that the pressure on Russia [to stop the war] is insufficient,” Zelenskyy said on Telegram.
The bombardment coincided with Zelenskyy’s visit to Turkiye aimed at reviving peace talks with Russia following his European diplomatic mission.
“We count on the strength of Turkish diplomacy, on [how] it’s understood in Moscow,” Zelenskyy said after his meeting on Wednesday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Kevin Spacey is reportedly homeless after facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault.
The “House of Cards” actor told the Telegraph in an interview published Wednesday that he is currently “living in hotels [and] living in Airbnbs” near wherever he can find work because his current financial situation is “not great.”
“I literally have no home, that’s what I’m attempting to explain,” Spacey said.
The actor, who used to live in Baltimore, said he lost his house “because the costs over these last seven years have been astronomical.”
“I’ve had very little coming in and everything going out,” Spacey said. But “[y]ou get through it. In weird ways, I feel I’m back to where I first started, which is I just went where the work was. Everything is in storage, and I hope at some point, if things continue to improve, that I’ll be able to decide where I want to settle down again.”
Spacey swiftly fell from grace in 2017 after actor Anthony Rapp alleged that the two-time Oscar winner had made sexual advances toward him in the 1980s when he was a teenager. Additional accusations of sexual misconduct or assault by more than 30 men followed. Spacey has denied all allegations, and the various lawsuits that stemmed from them ended up being dropped, dismissed, or resulted in his acquittal.
Spacey previously addressed his mounting debt in a 2024 interview with Piers Morgan. After admitting that he was unable to pay the bills that he owed, he said he had considered filing for bankruptcy but had so far “managed to sort of dodge it.” He also revealed that his Baltimore home was facing foreclosure and would be “sold at auction.”
The actor has since attempted to make a comeback. In 2021, he landed his first acting job since the misconduct allegations: an Italian indie movie. He has appeared in other projects, including on stage.
While Spacey has yet to return to Hollywood, he remains hopeful about his future.
“We are in touch with some extremely powerful people who want to put me back to work,” he told the Telegraph. “And that will happen in its right time. But I will also say what I think the industry seems to be waiting for is to be given permission — by someone who is in some position of enormous respect and authority.”
Almost a million young people are still out of work, education or training, new data suggests.
The number of so-called Neets – those aged 16-24 who are unemployed or economically inactive in the UK – had fallen slightly to 946,000 between July and September, down from 948,000 in the three months before, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
This latest figure equates to one in eight young people.
Announcing a scheme to help young people get access to paid work, education, and apprenticeships, the government said Neet numbers had been “Far too high for too long”.
The numbers of young people who are Neet have been consistently above 900,000 since early 2024 and reached an 11 year high of 987,000 earlier this year.
Young people not in employment can be unemployed – which means they are actively seeking work – or defined as economically inactive – meaning they are not seeking work.
The majority of young people (580,000) who are Neet fall into the economically inactive category, compared to 366,000 who are unemployed.
A rise in long-term sickness among young people has been one of the main causes of economic inactivity over the past three years, according to research by the Youth Futures Foundation.
Nathan wants to find a stable job and eventually open his own business
Nathan, 21, is currently Neet and is on a six-week employability course in Leeds, run by The Spear Programme, a charity that supports young people across the country by giving coaching them in communication and interview skills.
Working with the charity has helped build his confidence in job interviews, Nathan told the BBC.
“I’ve gone into a good few interviews now, not knowing what to say,” he added.
“They [The Spear Programme] help you build your confidence going into interviews, so that you are speaking clearly with a meaning of why you’re there.”
Around half of the charity’s referrals come from the job centre, and all the young people on the course have at least three barriers to work, which could include having been in care, having fewer than five GCSEs or mental health challenges.
Nathan was excluded from five schools as a child, but now he wants to move on and build a future.
“You don’t realise between 16 to 21, those ages are when you have to start thinking about what you want to do with your life. The school years matter,” he said.
Nathan’s dream is to open his own gym business, and he wants a stable job to help him achieve that. Businesses should do more to take chances on young people, he said.
Historically, more women than men have been Neet, but in recent years that trend has reversed.
In July to September 2025, an estimated 512,000 of all male 16-24-year-olds were Neet, compared with 434,000 of young women.
In 2023, almost one out of every five (19.5%) young people who were Neet had a mental health condition, according to the Department for Education.
Megan Williams runs a charity which helps young people with skills coaching
Megan Williams runs the Spear Programme and has worked with Neets for 20 years. She says the charity is seeing increasing numbers of young people who are struggling with their mental health and isolation.
“A lot of them are struggling to do day to day tasks like get out of bed, get washed, get dressed,” she said.
“Engaging with work and education feels very far away for a lot of them.”
But employers should take chances on people with less work experience or qualifications because “there are really work-ready motivated young people out there” she said.
In response to today’s figures, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Pat McFadden said a planned “Youth Guarantee” scheme would ensure young people “have access to education, training, an apprenticeship – or ultimately guaranteed paid work if they cannot find a job”.
McFadden said the government wanted to make sure “every young person has the chance to succeed, no matter where they are from or what their background is”.
Meanwhile, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to lay out more details in the Budget of plans to offer a guaranteed work placement to young people who have been on Universal Credit for 18 months without “earning or learning”. Those who refuse to take part may risk losing benefits.
Former Health Secretary Alan Milburn will lead an independent investigation into what is behind the rise in youth inactivity, the department for Work and Pensions recently announced, with a particular focus on the impact of mental health conditions and disability.
The largest quarterly Neets total was recorded in July to September 2011, when the number peaked at over a million after the 2008 financial crisis.
If you agree with filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu that Tom Cruise “doesn’t just make movies — he is movies,” then the Oscar that Cruise received at the motion picture academy’s annual Governors Awards wasn’t just long overdue. It was a restoration of balance, a necessary correction, not to mention a nod to the sheer weight of Cruise’s body of work in the collective imagination.
When multi-hyphenate Debbie Allen, herself an honoree, worked in a reference to the “tighty-whities” Cruise wore sliding across the floor in “Risky Business” into her own acceptance speech, you could understand why he received the night’s longest ovation. He really is movies. In one way or another, he completes us.
Cruise, 63, was still shaking hands and posing for pictures long after the ceremony ended Sunday night. He may in fact still be in the Ray Dolby Ballroom, listening to people tell him giddy and sometimes teary stories of when they first saw him in a movie. After Iñárritu introduced him, Cruise delivered a gracious, cinema-booster speech, at one point asking everyone in the room who had worked with him to stand.
“I carry you with me, each of you, and you are part of every frame of every film I have ever made or ever will make,” Cruise said. And yes, he was in alignment with Iñárritu. “Making films is not what I do. It’s who I am.”
Trailblazer Wynn Thomas, widely recognized as the first Black production designer in film, and Dolly Parton also received Oscars at the Governors Awards ceremony. These honorary Oscars, once part of the televised Academy Awards, were spun off into their own event in 2009.
Parton, 79, was given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Health issues, which led to a postponement of her December Las Vegas residency, prevented Parton from attending in person. But she thanked the academy by video, saying, “We didn’t have too much to share, but my mama and daddy showed me that the more you give, the more blessings come your way. And I have been blessed more than I ever dreamed possible, like with this award tonight.”
Lily Tomlin, Parton’s “9 to 5” co-star, gave a delightful, digressive introduction. Capping the presentation, Andra Day sang a spine-tingling cover of Parton’s classic “Jolene.”
The Governors Awards are not televised and, as Will Arnett, introducing the evening, noted, “There are no commercial breaks. The orchestra is not waiting to play anybody off. There is nothing stopping us from doing this until the sun comes up.” The relaxed nature of the show gives honorees room to roam with their speeches and also offers current Oscar contenders a chance to schmooze with voters.
In one corner of the ballroom, you might find filmmakers Richard Linklater, Noah Baumbach and Joachim Trier engaged in a debate over who is better, Jean-Luc Godard or Francois Truffaut, a French New Wave throwdown inspired by Linklater’s sly homage “Nouvelle Vague.” Across the room, Sydney Sweeney, meeting Cruise for the first time, compared notes on broken bones. Outside, Iñárritu told director Ryan Coogler (“Sinners”) about his upcoming movie, starring Cruise. (“It sounds crazy,” Coogler said.)
Cruise was on everyone’s mind, except perhaps Spanish filmmaker Oliver Laxe, director of the superb thriller “Sirāt,” who did not know the actor was receiving an honorary Oscar. People offered me their favorite Cruise movies. Director Eva Victor (“Sorry, Baby”) went with “Edge of Tomorrow.” Shih-Ching Tsou (“Left-Handed Girl”) chose “Top Gun.” (“I fell in love,” she says.) And Coogler went with a wild card, picking the compulsively rewatchable 1988 comedy “Cocktail.”
“It was my parents’ favorite movie, so I saw it all the time,” Coogler says. “I know it’s nonsensical.”
Ethan Hawke, who made “The Last Movie Stars,” a six-part documentary on Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, recalled how Newman didn’t want his honorary Oscar in 1986. He hoped to win one outright. A year later, he took the lead actor trophy for “The Color of Money,” which, yes, co-starred Cruise.
“Cruise should have won for ‘Magnolia,’ one of the best performances of my lifetime,” Hawke told me. “My suspicion is that this will be the first of many Oscars for Tom Cruise. He’ll get this honorary one and then four more in the next 20 years.”
Thomas, it could be argued, should have won a competitive Oscar years ago for any number of movies, including his striking work creating the single block setting in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood for Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing.” Relating his journey to becoming a visual storyteller, Thomas recalled growing up in “one of the worst slums of Philadelphia,” sitting on his front stoop reading Shakespeare, James Baldwin and Tennessee Williams, immersed and transported.
“The local gangs looked down on me and called me sissy,” Thomas said. “But that sissy grew up to work with some great filmmakers.”
Presenting Allen with her Oscar, “Wicked’s” Cynthia Erivo said “to know Miss Debbie is to know that she refuses to let dreams fade and has a determination to make them happen.”
“I myself am fortunate enough to consider her my auntie,” Erivo added.
Allen’s five-decade career includes choreographing the Oscars seven times, as well as films including “Forget Paris” and “A Jazzman’s Blues.” Her producing credits include Steven Spielberg’s 1997 historical drama “Amistad.” She’s probably best known as an actor on the ’80s television series “Fame,” for which she also served as a choreographer. Her nonprofit dance academy is a Los Angeles institution.
Allen namechecked the Dodgers, her husband (the Los Angeles Lakers legend Norm Nixon) and, of course, Oscar.
“It’s like I got married … sorry, Norm,” she said, cradling the statue. “I’m definitely taking him to work with me and keeping him close to remind me, not of what I’ve done, but what I get, need and have to do.”
How do you find inspiration? Say you’re doing your holiday shopping and you’re struggling to find the perfect gift for that difficult person on your list — parent, partner, paramour. How do you let your mind drift to a place where the clouds part and you achieve a sort of awakening?
I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of The Envelope newsletter, back in your inbox for the next few months as we sail through the atmospheric river of awards season. Climb aboard.
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Cover story: The best six minutes in movies this year
(Bexx Francois / For The Times)
You might remember how much I love “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s audacious, genre-defying blockbuster that explores the intrinsic power of American blues music and Black life in the Jim Crow South within the context of a vampire horror movie.
So I was thrilled to talk with Coogler and his longtime department heads — a movie family that includes Oscar winners who have been with him since his 2013 debut, “Fruitvale Station” — for The Envelope’s first cover story of the season. There were a dozen different ways I could have gone with the piece, but our conversations kept coming back to the scene in the juke joint when young Sammie (Miles Caton) conjures spirits from the past and future onto the dance floor.
How did Coogler summon this scene? It goes back to that question I asked at the outset: How do you find inspiration?
For Coogler, “Sinners” began on Nov. 17, 2021, a date fixed in his mind because it was the day one of his favorite rappers, Young Dolph, was murdered. Coogler was devastated. And his mind drifted back to Nipsey Hussle, the L.A. rapper gunned down outside his South L.A. clothing store in 2019. Coogler was living in Los Angeles at the time, trying to get a “Space Jam” sequel off the ground.
“I felt like I had my heart ripped out, bro,” Coogler told me. “I have two younger brothers I’m really close with, and I remember reading an article in the L.A. Times about his older brother recounting what happened. It just broke me. And then I get the news that Dolph’s been killed in his hometown, and I just remember feeling, ‘I’m done with rap, man.’”
Later, Coogler spoke with his friend, “Black Panther” producer Nate Moore, lamenting that rappers who talk about their lives, beating the odds and escaping hardship, sometimes end up succumbing to the thing they thought they left behind. Moore isn’t a rap guy, but told Coogler that his favorite music, grunge, was just like that — in this case, artists addressing their struggles with depression and addiction and then, on occasion, overdosing or taking their own lives.
Toward the end of that day, Coogler was driving back from the set of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” Passing through Byron, Ga., the Oakland native looked out his window and saw, for the first time in his life, a cotton field. During our interview, Coogler pulls out his phone and finds a video his sister-in-law shot of him taking it all in and picking a sprig of cotton. Coogler kept it, eventually putting it on his work desk at home.
“That was a part of finding ‘Sinners,’” Coogler says. “The other thing that happened was I started listening to grunge music, taking a break from rap. And as soon as I put the music on, I was like, ‘Yo, this feels like my uncle’s. It led me right back to his record collection.”
That uncle, James Edmonson, loved the blues. Coogler’s cousin, Edmonson’s youngest daughter, told the filmmaker about a Bill Withers’ song, “I Can’t Write Left-Handed,” written from the perspective of a Vietnam veteran. Coogler listened to it, and it reminded him of “Rooster,” the Alice in Chains song written by guitarist Jerry Cantrell for his father, who served in Vietnam.
“So I’m playing these two songs one after another, and I’m like, ‘These genres that you wouldn’t find next to each other at a Tower Records back in the day, they’re so close,’” Coogler says. “And studying the history of it, it’s people playing it different, but it’s the same idea.”
“And that’s when I realized I had to make ‘Sinners.’”
Coogler scrolls through his phone and shows a picture of the cotton sprig on his desk. He dedicated “Sinners” to his uncle, who died about a decade before it arrived in theaters.
“So many cosmic moments came together for this movie,” Coogler says. “I was always like, ‘All right. I just gotta make sure I don’t f— it up.’”
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Trump indicated Sunday that he plans to meet with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and said they’ll “work something out,” in what could be a detente for the Republican president and Democratic political star who have cast each other as political foils.
Trump has for months slammed Mamdani, falsely labeling him as a “communist” and predicting the ruin of his hometown, New York, if the democratic socialist were elected. He also threatened to deport Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and became a naturalized American citizen, and to pull federal money from the city.
Mamdani rose from an obscure state lawmaker to become a social media star and symbol of the resistance against Trump during his mayoral campaign. He ran on an array of progressive policies and a message that was stark in its opposition to the aggressive anti-immigrant agenda Trump has pursued in his second White House term.
The 34-year-old appealed to a broad cross-section of New Yorkers and defeated one of its political heavyweights, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by nearly 9 percentage points.
In his election night victory speech, Mamdani said he wanted New York to show the country how to defeat Trump. But the day after, while speaking about his plans for “Trump-proofing” New York once he takes office in January, the incoming mayor also said he was willing to work with anyone, including the president, if it can help New Yorkers.
Representatives for Mamdani did not have an immediate comment Sunday night on the president’s remarks, but a spokesperson pointed to the mayor-elect’s remarks last week when he said he planned to reach out to the White House “because this is a relationship that will be critical to the success of the city.”
Trump expressed a similar sentiment Sunday.
“The mayor of New York, I will say, would like to meet with us. We’ll work something out,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to fly back to Washington after spending the weekend at his Florida estate.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified shortly afterward that Trump was referring to Mamdani, who assumes office in January, and said no date had been set for such a meeting.
“We want to see everything work out well for New York,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments came as he also said the U.S. may hold discussions soon with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, after a military buildup near the South American country: “I’ll talk to anybody,” Trump said.
Price and Megerian write for the Associated Press and reported from Washington and West Palm Beach, respectively. AP writer Jake Offenhartz in New York contributed to this report.
