“As selected by the 13,000 voting members of the Recording Academy…”
Did you notice that bit of verbiage at the 67th Grammy Awards on Sunday night? Every time someone presented one of the show’s major prizes — album of the year, record of the year, song of the year, best new artist — he or she rattled off the line before revealing the winner.
It was a small but telling detail that demonstrated how the academy wants to be perceived after years of being portrayed as a shadowy record-industry cabal. Dogged by criticism that it routinely undervalues the work of women and people of color, the group lately has sought to convey the message that decisions about the Grammys aren’t made in a smoky back room but by the thousands of music professionals who belong to the organization.
Not only that, but the academy has repeatedly emphasized — including on Sunday’s show, where Chief Executive Harvey Mason Jr. hammered the point in a speech — that its electorate has evolved by welcoming younger and more diverse members (and, by extension, by booting older and whiter ones).
Maybe it’s working.
Advertisement
On Sunday, Beyoncé finally won album of the year, the Grammys’ most prestigious award, with “Cowboy Carter,” her scholarly yet intrepid exploration of the Black roots of country music. It was the pop superstar’s fifth try in a decade and a half for a prize that Taylor Swift won an unprecedented four times in that same stretch — and the first time a Black woman has taken the award since Lauryn Hill in 1999.
“It’s been many, many years,” Beyoncé said with a knowing little laugh as she accepted the trophy, which she dedicated to Linda Martell, the pioneering Black female country singer who makes a guest appearance on “Cowboy Carter.” “I hope we just keep pushing forward, opening doors,” she added, taking her place as only the fourth Black woman to win album of the year (after Hill, Whitney Houston and Natalie Cole) in the Grammys’ 67-year-history.
Other signs of systemic change Sunday night: Kendrick Lamar’s wins for record and song of the year with “Not Like Us,” the climactic volley from the Compton rapper’s epic beef with Drake. The festive diss track, which led Drake to file a federal lawsuit last month accusing both men’s record company of defamation, is just the second hip-hop track to carry each of those categories (after Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” won record and song in 2019).
Advertisement
And then there was the academy’s highly theatrical reconciliation with the Weeknd, who’d vowed in 2021 to boycott the Grammys after his smash single “Blinding Lights” was denied even a single nomination. The Canadian pop-soul star, who’d said he was protesting a corrupt voting process, performed without advance notice Sunday right after Mason’s spiel, in which the CEO described the Weeknd as “someone who has seen the work the academy has put in.” (He’s also someone with a brand-new album to promote).
Yet the story with the night’s big winner is more complicated than a feel-good tale of institutional overhaul. As much as the Recording Academy has adapted to Beyoncé, the singer in many ways adapted to the academy in making “Cowboy Carter.”
Full of hand-played acoustic instruments and gestures toward various historical traditions, it’s a Grammy album that has far more in common than Beyoncé’s earlier work with previous album of the year winners by the likes of Norah Jones, Herbie Hancock, the Dixie Chicks, Beck — even, dare I say it, Mumford & Sons.
Granted, Beyoncé is using those sounds in service of a distinct narrative; “Cowboy Carter” is about family and lineage and who’s entitled to a sense of American belonging. (If I remember correctly, Mumford & Sons sang mostly about haberdashery.) But by taking up an explicitly roots-oriented approach, she was looking to make a point about the Grammys’ value system — daring voters, essentially, not to give her the prize so we could see the hierarchies in place.
That’s not to say she didn’t want to take home album of the year. “A-O-T-Y, I ain’t win,” she sings on “Cowboy Carter,” referring to her loss at the Grammys with 2022’s clubby “Renaissance,” “Take that s— on the chin / Come back and f— up the pen.” And nobody plans a concert as detailed as the one Beyoncé gave during halftime of a Christmas Day NFL game — just as academy members were filling out their ballots — without hoping for some kind of return on her investment. (Early Monday, the singer announced that she’ll take “Cowboy Carter” on the road, starting with four shows at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium in late April.)
Advertisement
So who precisely secured Beyoncé’s path to victory? Was it the new voters that Mason says he’s brought into the fold or was it old-timers for whom Beyoncé’s music finally made sense? I’m inclined to think it was a little of both. In addition to album of the year, “Cowboy Carter” won the country album prize Sunday — Beyoncé’s priceless surprise-face became an instant meme — which meant she had plenty of Nashville support. According to academy rules, a member can vote in only three genres, so this likely wasn’t a case of pop outsiders flooding the zone to lift Beyoncé above established country stars like Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson.
But I also suspect that among those 13,000 were many musicians who’ve grown up in Beyoncé’s shadow and simply felt that it was her time — that she’d been denied the flagship Grammy on too many occasions and that the historical record needed to be set straight.
Which indeed it did. “Cowboy Carter” is not Beyoncé’s finest album; it’s not my favorite of her albums, either, although it does get wonderfully weird near the end in songs like “II Hands II Heaven” and “Sweet Honey Buckiin’” that imagine country music as a kind of celestial trance experience. But it is an album, as Beyoncé suggested in her acceptance speech, that opens doors. I’d bet Martell, who’s 83, took some pleasure in the shout-out.
You can call me one-track-minded or say that I focus on the wrong things, but do not include an element that I am then expected to forget. Especially if that “element” is an animal – and a dog, even.
In No More Time, we meet a couple, and it takes quite some time before we suddenly see that they have a dog with them. It appears in a scene suddenly, because their sweet little dog has a purpose: A “meet-cute” with a girl who wants to pet their dog.
After that, the dog is rarely in the movie or mentioned. Sure, we see it in the background once or twice, but when something strange (or noisy) happens, it’s never around. This completely ruins the illusion for me. Part of the brilliance of having an animal with you during an apocalyptic event is that it can help you.
And yet, in No More Time, this is never truly utilized. It feels like a strange afterthought for that one scene with the girl to work, but as a dog lover, I am now invested in the dog. Not unlike in I Am Legend or Darryl’s dog in The Walking Dead. As such, this completely ruined the overall experience for me.
If it were just me, I could (sort of) live with it. But there’s a reason why an entire website is named after people demanding to know whether the dog dies, before they’ll decide if they’ll watch a movie.
Scarlett Johansson wasn’t on the hunt for a feature film to direct when she was sent “Eleanor the Great,” about a 90-something woman who reminded Johansson of her own sparky grandmother. But Tory Kamen’s script arrived with a cover letter from Oscar nominee June Squibb.
“I was really interested in what, at this stage, June wanted to star in,” she says. “I was compelled to read it because of that.”
What Johansson also learned is that Squibb, star of last year’s acclaimed caper “Thelma” and the voice of Nostalgia in “Inside Out 2,” adds extra gloss to a project and is genre-adaptable. Since “Eleanor,” she’s wrapped shooting on an indie mockumentary called “The Making of Jesus Diabetes,” starring and produced by Bob Odenkirk. (“Bob and I know each other from ‘Nebraska,’” she says. “He asked and I did one scene.”) Currently, she’s in the play “Marjorie Prime,” her first appearance on Broadway since “Waitress” in 2018, when she stepped into the role of Old Joe, previously occupied by Al Roker. (“They made [the character] into a lady for me.”)
Recently, Johansson and Squibb got together via Zoom to discuss lurching process trailers, how Squibb bonded with co-star Erin Kellyman (who plays Nina, Eleanor’s college-age friend), and the trick to playing a character who tells a whopper at a Holocaust survivors’ support group based on her dead best friend’s experience.
Squibb, left, Erin Kellyman and Chiwetel Ejiofor in “Eleanor the Great.”
Advertisement
(Jojo Whilden / Sony Pictures Cla)
What does a first-time director plan for Day One of a wintertime shoot in New York?
Johansson: The first thing we shot was [Eleanor and Nina] arriving at Coney Island. It wasn’t easy. We were outside. It was cold. It was a little hectic, but we figured it out. Then we had to do this thing in a car, and it was just miserable. Nobody wants to shoot a scene being towed in a car. There are all these stops and starts. You get nauseous. I felt terrible about that. But it was good for June and Erin.
Squibb: We had a lot of time that day together and we liked who each other was. It was just easy.
Advertisement
June, you believe in showing up fully prepped, on script. Did you and Scarlett talk a lot about Eleanor?
Squibb: I’m sure we talked over that first two weeks, but I think we started delving when we started shooting. I can’t say this enough, but her being the actress she is? It just helped me tremendously. I felt so relaxed, like she knew what I was doing.
A less charismatic actor might have trouble pulling off this character. Eleanor can be so impertinent, yet the audience still has to like her.
Johansson: The tightrope June walks is that she’s able to be salty, inconsiderate and rude as the Eleanor character, then balance it out with quiet moments where you see the guard slip. You see the vulnerability of [Eleanor]. June plays that so beautifully.
June, in 1953, you converted to Judaism. Scarlett, how important was it to have Eleanor played by a Jewish actress?
Advertisement
Johansson: It was definitely important to me, and it became important to the production too. We had tremendous support from the Jewish community. We brought the script to the Shoah Foundation and they helped us craft [Eleanor’s best friend] Bessie’s survivor story.
(The Tyler Times / For The Times)
Did they also help you find real-life Holocaust survivors — like Sami Steigmann —that you cast as support group members?
Johansson: It was a real group effort. Every time someone joined, it was a huge celebration. We got another one! At the time there were, like, 225,000 [survivors] worldwide. It gets less every year. I think only two of [the survivors in the group] knew each other previously. None of them had ever been on a film set before, and they were so patient with us.
Squibb: We just sort of passed the time of day. Sami, who was sitting next to me, and I chatted. It was all very relaxed. They were having a good time. They were interested in lunch. I remember that.
Advertisement
Johansson: I talked to everyone individually. Quite a lot of them are public speakers and share their stories. It’s amazing. You’re talking to people in their 90s about an experience they had when they were 7. Their stories are so vivid in their minds. Sami told June that sharing the story is part of the healing.
June, for a bat mitzvah scene you memorized a complicated Torah portion. How did it go?
Squibb: It wasn’t easy to learn. I didn’t do it overnight. But we were in a beautiful synagogue, and it was great to stand there and do it. I enjoyed it.
Talk about finding out that it didn’t make the final cut.
Squibb: I think the first thing I asked [Scarlett was], [sounding peeved] “Where did my Torah portion go?” [laughs]
Advertisement
Johannson: It was, like, “What the hell happened?” [laughs, then winces] I really struggled. But every way I cut it, it didn’t work so it just had to go. I was pretty nervous to show it [to June]. I said to Harry, my editor, “She worked so hard on it.”
How about that five-minute standing ovation when “Eleanor” has its world premiere at Cannes?
Squibb: It was just terribly exciting. We hugged each other a lot. And Erin was there, and she was in our hug too. I kept thinking, “We’re not even at a lovely theater in America. My God, this is an international audience here and they’re loving it.” And they did.
The Timothée Chalamet movie that’s arriving on Christmas Day is “a 150-minute-long heart attack of a film,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In “a career-best turn” that’s “a feverish go-for-broke tour de force,” Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis champ in 1950s New York City who’s ready to lie, cheat, and steal for the chance to become the best in the world. This first film from director Josh Safdie since 2019’s Uncut Gems turns out to be a character study that “doubles as a cracked American success story,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Marty is a scrawny kid with a pathetic mustache, but he’s also a fast-talking grifter with supreme self-confidence, and his game earns him a trip to London and the world championship tournament before a humbling stokes his hunger for a comeback.
Surrounding Chalamet is “a supporting cast you’d swear was assembled via Mad Libs,” because it features Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette, Tyler the Creator, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and—as a faded movie star Marty sweet-talks into an affair—Gwyneth Paltrow, “reminding you how good she was before Goop became her full-time gig.” To me, it’s the story beneath the story that makes Safdie’s “nerve-jangling, utterly exhilarating” movie one of the best of the year, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “It’s about a Jewish kid who knows just what kind of antisemitism and finely stratified racial dynamics he’s up against in postwar America, and who is using every means at his disposal to smack back.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Advertisement
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week’s Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
‘Is This Thing On?’
Directed by Bradley Cooper (R)
★★★
Advertisement
“There are far worse things that a gifted filmmaker could offer an audience these days than a feel-good divorce comedy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But it’s still slightly disappointing that screen star Bradley Cooper has followed up A Star Is Born and Maestro with this minor work, due Dec. 19, about a father of two who starts doing stand-up in New York City to cope with the likely end of his marriage. With Will Arnett and Laura Dern as its co-stars, Is This Thing On? is “an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie,” but it’s also so eager to hide the agonies of divorce that it “can feel like it’s cutting corners.”
The 124-minute film “doesn’t really get going until hour two,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Until then, it’s “lethargic and listless,” slowed by long takes “that drag on and on.” Fortunately, Arnett and Dern have real chemistry that kicks in when Dern’s Tess accidentally catches Arnett’s Alex performing his bit about their sidelined marriage and sees him with new eyes. Good as Arnett is, “it’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants and is figuring it out in real time,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Cooper, playing a reprobate friend of Alex’s, gives himself the script’s biggest laughs. More importantly, he proves again to be a director with “a real flair for domestic drama.”
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
