Pimpinero: Blood and Oil review – road thrills with South American border smugglers | Movies
It’s called the “caravan of death” – cars speeding, Mad Max-style, across the desert on the border between Colombia and Venezuela, loaded up with jerry cans of petrol. Colombian film-maker Andrés Baiz, who previously worked on episodes of Netflix’s Narcos, has directed this crime saga inspired by the real-life “pimpineros”, smugglers who exploited dirt-cheap petrol during the presidency of Hugo Chávez. But strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.
The year is 2012, when sixpence bought a gallon of petrol in oil-rich Venezuela, leading to a boom in cross-border smuggling to Colombia. A trio of brothers, the Estradas, have been muscled out of the smuggling business by ruthless Don Carmelo (David Noreña); he’s a nothing-special villain with his wolfish grin and novelty shirts. Moises, the eldest of the Estrada clan (played by Colombian rock star Juanes), retires to open an Italian restaurant. Ulises (Alberto Guerra) joins Don Carmelo’s mob; like Fredo in The Godfather, he’s the undisciplined one. Little brother Juan (Alejandro Speitzer) decides to go it alone, smuggling with his girlfriend Diana (Laura Osma).
The movie starts off on a fun high, with beat-up old cars racing across the sun-bleached desert. But the action gets toned down in favour of sentimental melodrama as the story switches to Juan and Diana’s startup smuggling business. In this macho world the film sets up Diana as the hero, a woman among men. But still, the script can’t resist treating her like a little lady, with a plotline as conventional as it gets, in which she is trafficked into sex work. It’s a film in need of sharper writing.
Jaime Hayon Goes Bestial at His Miami Art Show
The paintings on display are brimming with dynamic energy. A whirlwind of fantastical creatures leaps off the artist’s large canvases, while in smaller, still life paintings they are transformed into decorative elements. Underpinned by his perpetual search for self-understanding, Hayon’s troupe of kooky characters conveys a range of emotions, from fear and desire, to fragility and introspection. “With this exhibition, I am returning to the origin of everything—the most visceral part of my work,” the artist reflects. “From the very depths of my being, I attempt to express my fantasy, my world, through painting—those free-flowing brushstrokes that naturally create the beastly forms of fauna and flora.”
In his still life paintings, Hayon contrasts luminous colours against shadowy or muted backdrops, an aesthetic inspired by ancient Egyptian art and Flemish flower paintings. This interplay between light and dark adds an emotional depth to the works while linking them to a broader artistic heritage. “In Bestial, I highlight the crucial role animals have played in art history, symbolizing emotions and human experiences across civilizations,” Hayon explains. “From the Egyptians who humanized animals in their gods to artists like Picasso, Dalí, and Rousseau, animals have always expressed strength, rage, and passion.” By drawing on these historical precedents, Hayon bridges past and present, using the natural world as a mirror for human emotion and societal critique.
Art Photo Collector, Ellsworth Kelly, Austin
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It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Greater Akron with lots of holiday shows – Massillon Independent
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in Greater Akron with lots of holiday shows Massillon Independent
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‘I was really not OK’: Bladee on PTSD, Charli xcx and being struck by lightning | Music
As one quarter of the Swedish underground-ish rap collective Drain Gang, Bladee (pronounced Blade) spent his 20s on the frontlines of a hyper-online youth culture. But as his 30th birthday loomed, the musician born Benjamin Reichwald started to sweat. His anxiety about ageing, a serious depressive spell, and the mixed reception to his latest album, spiralled into a crisis: were he and his Drain Gang peers “permanently frozen as 20-year-olds because we came up at a certain time of our lives”, he wondered. Was he already past it at 29?
“I got so old, I got embarrassed to be even here,” Reichwald sings on his newest album, Cold Visions. Older readers may roll their eyes, but given Reichwald has built up one of the most ardent young fanbases in music, this was a valid worry. “I had a lot to get off my chest,” he says now. “I was thinking a lot about my position and I felt stuck – do I have to be perceived as an artist to feel fulfilled? I’m chasing that and it doesn’t give me anything. So why am I doing this?”
Reichwald has a reputation for being elusive (this is one of the very few solo interviews he has ever done) and frequently obscures his face. Lately he has favoured corpse paint, blood-red grills for his teeth and a chaotic assemblage of bandanas, sunglasses and Oakley hats. But during a two-hour conversation in a Brooklyn hotel room, in Gucci sneakers and a T-shirt with the logo of Norwegian black metal band Satyricon, he is thoughtful and forthcoming.
Despite his worries, being 30 has treated Reichwald well. In March he released Psykos, a rock-leaning collaboration with his fellow Swedish rapper and long-term friend and collaborator Yung Lean, who also featured on Cold Visions, which was released the following month. In October, they both appeared on Charli xcx’s Brat remix album, with Bladee reworking the song Rewind. “It’s a Bladee verse, I did my thing,” is how he modestly describes his contribution, but he speaks more effusively of Charli: “I have eternal respect for her. She put me in this context with all these other people” – Ariana Grande, Lorde and Billie Eilish all appear on the remix record – “and I’m very grateful to be involved.”
It caps a big year for Reichwald. Released a decade after his debut mixtape, Cold Visions is his most fully realised project yet. Made in two weeks in his house in Stockholm, the album is, he says, “really honest, more like a diary”. In the course of 30 songs, he purges his demons over raging, blown-out trap beats. Brain cells fried into oblivion, he navigates panic attacks and self-loathing, calls himself “the king of nothing matters” and raps about “violently drug abusing weed”. In one line he’s working out and getting tanned in LA, the next “I’m crashing down some like a wave over castles made of sand.”
Cold Visions was self-released after Reichwald split from Year0001, Drain Gang’s longtime label and management company. “I don’t really care any more about being a bigger artist,” he says. “The only thing that’s important is that I’m doing something that’s true to me.”
The Drain Gang collective – Bladee, Ecco2K, Thaiboy Digital, and Whitearmor – have been best friends since their teens, playing around with Auto-Tune, and freestyling in the vein of idiosyncratic US rappers such as Lil B and Chief Keef. Early Bladee tracks – overcast cloud rap about crushed hearts, pills and dreams – were so digitally processed that they passed through the uncanny valley and ended up somewhere strangely melodic and emotive. “I hated to hear my voice without the Auto-Tune,” Reichwald says. “It’s how we found our sound. Without it we wouldn’t have committed to doing it – it sounded too bad.”
The group cycled through a number of names before landing on Drain Gang, inspired by a nihilistically gothic sentiment later articulated in Bladee’s song Be Nice 2 Me: “Take a knife and drain your life.” They quickly found kindred spirits in Sad Boys, a local crew featuring Yung Lean. In 2014, Lean’s melancholic and memeable hip-hop was taking the internet by storm, and Reichwald quit his job at a kindergarten to join him on tour.
By April 2015, barely out of his teens, Reichwald was living with Lean in Miami, where working on music came second to partying and drug use. One evening, Lean suffered drug-induced psychosis; Reichwald called the ambulance which probably saved his life. Hours later, Barron Machat, Lean’s 27-year-old manager, died in a car accident on his way to the hospital; Xanax was found in his system. “Things were building to a point where something was going to happen because of how we were living,” Reichwald says. “We didn’t think that anything could go wrong, we were so in this drugs and rock star lifestyle. Someone was probably always gonna die with how we were moving. It was very reckless, but we were so young, we just didn’t know.”
Reichwald returned to Sweden and worked at a shampoo factory while suffering from PTSD and struggling to process Machat’s death and Lean’s deteriorating mental health. “I was not really OK,” he says. Reichwald says it took him a long time to understand that he and his friends had autonomy over their surreal new lives as successful rappers. “I sometimes felt like, ‘I shouldn’t be here, so I have to do what everyone says.’ I didn’t understand that I had any value in the situation. I didn’t understand why people would like my music. I thought there must be some kind of misunderstanding. But now, I’ve done it for so long and I actually know what I’m doing. I believe more in my ability.”
His music remained dark and dissociative for a good while, but the clouds began to part around 2020. While Reichwald’s persona had long swung between mall rat and mystic, his spiritual side became more pronounced as his music grew brighter. Fans started to wonder if he had experienced some sort of transformative near-death experience because, in 2019, he had mentioned that he’d been struck by lightning in Thailand. Or at least he thinks that’s what happened. “Either I had a random seizure from seeing the lightning or I got struck by it.” Whatever it was, “something definitely changed around that time”.
Drain Gang’s angst once enticed a considerable number of nihilistic, male online edgelords, but their fanbase has evolved as their music has become more euphoric, frequently going viral on TikTok during the pandemic. Most of the crowd at a recent show were dressed in distressed black clothes like Reichwald; they were mainly so young that fans older than 26 were given their own fast-track queue as if they needed elderly care.
Reichwald says that he is uncomfortable with being idolised, but understands the way that belonging to a subculture can be life-affirming. Even before his teens, he formed a punk band with Ecco2K after seeing someone with a studded leather jacket and thinking: “I want to be like that. But,” he adds, “you need to find yourself within all that.”
He allows himself a little pride in the way Drain Gang have built and maintained their singular corner of music. “We still don’t feel like someone is doing what we’re doing, better,” he says. “I would love to hear someone take it to the next level with a new perspective, someone young. I feel like that’s the point of it – you can keep the idea going.”
He’s now looking beyond Cold Visions to his own future. “I want to become a better person,” he says with a sweetly earnest laugh. “I want to have a brighter outlook and work on liking myself more. I’m sick of thinking about myself; I would like to be more outside my head.” After several years spent getting “sick all the time”, he is “trying to be sober and healthy”. Lately he’s been experimenting with songwriting in Swedish, and working on abstract paintings in his art studio. Ultimately, he finds solace in the act of creating. “Even in my sadder music,” he says, “I’m striving for joy.”
Russian ballet star Vladimir Shklyarov dies at 39
The ballet world is mourning the death of Vladimir Shklyarov, one of its leading male dancers.
Shklyarov, a principal with the prestigious Mariinsky Theatre, was an “extraordinary artist” who inspired fans worldwide, one tribute said.
His death, announced by the St Petersburg company on Saturday, is being investigated by federal authorities, according to Russian media reports.
Mariinsky representatives told media he had fallen from the fifth floor of a St Petersburg building while on painkillers.
“This is a huge loss not only for the theatre’s staff but for all of contemporary ballet,” the company said in a statement on Saturday.
“Our condolences to the artist’s family, loved ones, friends and all the numerous admirers of his work and talent.”
Shklyarov was married to fellow company dancer Maria Shklyarov, with whom he had two children.
Born in Leningrad, he studied at the famed Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet, graduating in 2003.
He joined the Mariinsky Theatre the same year, becoming a principal in 2011.
Over 20 years with the company, he danced leads across several productions, including Giselle, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote, Swan Lake and Romeo and Juliet.
He performed at prestigious venues around the world, including the Royal Opera House in London and Metropolitan Opera in New York.
In 2014 and 2015, he featured as a guest artist at the American Ballet Theatre. The company issued a statement on Sunday mourning his “tragic loss.”
“We mourn the tragic loss of Vladimir Shklyarov, an extraordinary artist whose grace and passion inspired audiences worldwide.
“Your light will continue to shine through the beauty you brought to this world,” the company wrote on Instagram.
Shklyarov received several accolades during his lifetime, including the Léonide Massine International Prize in 2008. He was also appointed an Honoured Artist of Russia in 2020.
“He forever inscribed his name in the history of world ballet,” the Mariinsky Theatre said.
Benedetti unwraps detailed plans for RIBA House of Architecture – Architect's Journal
Benedetti unwraps detailed plans for RIBA House of Architecture Architect’s Journal
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The intensely felt art of Elisabeth Frink
From the September 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Elisabeth Frink said that her sculptures are ‘about what a human being or animal feels like, not what they necessarily look like’. This quotation appears on the wall of a new exhibition of her work in the Weston Gallery of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In the centre of the room are four monumental heads that dominate the space, but when I visited my eye was drawn to a small cluster of her earlier works from the 1950s and ’60s. These are tortured, desiccated forms, seemingly in a state of decay. They have an anthropomorphic quality – Vulture (c. 1952), for instance, is hunched and human-like, while Cat (1953) is an unsettling work; the body of the cat is contorted as if in pain, its face is arrestingly half-human, with enlarged, open eyes and an unfeline mouth like a letterbox. If Frink’s work is about what it feels like to be one of these creatures, we can only wonder what torment they have suffered.
It’s tempting to think that these sculptures, created in the decade after the end of the Second World War, are the work of an artist for whom the collective trauma of conflict was still fresh. This was, of course, the period in which a group of young British sculptors, including Lynn Chadwick and Eduardo Paolozzi, came to be labelled the ‘Geometry of Fear’ school. Frink was younger than these artists, but there is a noticeable difference between the work she made in the years after the war and the gentler, more pedestrian forms of the middle part of her career, such as Dog II (1980), a life-like, somewhat anodyne sculpture of a Vizsla.
Cat (1953), Elisabeth Frink. Photo: Jonty Wilde; courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Frink made her pieces by building up plaster on a wire armature and then working it with a chisel – or in some cases an axe – once it was dry. The finished piece was then cast in bronze. In the earlier forms, the bronze holds the shapes of sticky clumps of plaster and in places is hacked and scored. Later on, the work is often smoother, with a softer silhouette. As a way of working, this practice is both constructive and destructive – about the drama of presence and absence; layering material, but also hewing away at it, risking the loss of previously worked shapes and forms.
Frink is perhaps most famous as a sculptor interested in raw masculine strength, in brutality and in power, but a less well-known aspect of her oeuvre is the narrative work, much of it on paper. In etchings and screenprints, Frink took on the tangled webs of mythology, folklore and English literature, as in The Canterbury Tales (1972) – her first etchings – and the Children of the Gods series (1988). The female body is rare in her work (I’ve yet to see a three-dimensional female form in her corpus), but when pushed by the demands of a narrative, Frink did occasionally depict women. It’s wonderful, then, to see her etching and aquatint of Hades and Persephone (1988) in the exhibition. The image is dominated by the horse drawing Hades’ chariot. In the upper part of the composition is Hades, his eyes blacked out, recalling Frink’s famous series of sculptures of men with goggles. He holds the naked, fragile form of Persephone like a rag doll. Frink is at her most unsettling when depicting the power imbalances between men and women. Persephone is helpless, as the god of the underworld thunders back to his realm holding her in his clutches.
Ganymede (1988), Elisabeth Frink. Photo: © Frink Estate; courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
One of the joys of this exhibition is the way it presents work from different points in Frink’s career, across different media. We can see the breadth of her interests, from images of animals and insects, such as Carapace II (1963) to works on Christian religious themes, alongside figures from legend and history. Indeed, it is a striking feature of her work that she was so open to stories from such differing traditions. The show was put together from a large bequest to Yorkshire Sculpture Park from the artist’s late son, Lin Jammet. The exhibition in the Weston Gallery is accompanied by a display of Frink’s characteristic bronzes outside in the park itself. These are the life-size male figures for which Frink is most famous. Protomartyr (1976) has slender limbs, the figure’s arms half raised as he reaches his face skyward, his eyes closed in beatific calm. It is Saint Stephen who is often called the protomartyr or first martyr of Christianity (he died in c. AD 34). He is frequently depicted with a clutch of stones, alluding to his death by stoning. Nothing about this figure by Frink, however, suggests Stephen’s martyrdom. What did it feel like to be the first martyr? Transcendental, Frink seems to say. There is a marked difference between this work and Judas (1963), made more than 13 years earlier. While Protomartyr is smooth and sleek, Judas is clumpy and half-formed, with bulky shoulders and spindly legs. His head is helmet-like; his eyes are covered. Here – as in other works – figures with obscured eyes seem to symbolise some kind of ethical blindness.
On my way home, I kept thinking about a plaster work called Green Man (1991) in the Weston Gallery. It’s a haunting piece, created after Frink had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. The Green Man, or the Woodwose, is an ancient English folkloric symbol of nature, fertility and renewal. Appearing carved into misericords and as a heraldic motif, and often composed of leaves, he is a creature of the woods, a bringer of chaos but also hope. Outwardly the form at Yorkshire Sculpture Park looks like a familiar Frink figure – big eyes, heavy chin, bald head. But up close, in the white plaster, you can see tendrils of greenery growing from his mouth and up over his head. This Green Man also appears in two screen prints from 1992. In both images the men cast their eyes towards the sky. The series was to be Frink’s last; she died in April 1993. In her final works, Frink reached back into the distant past to create images filled with quiet promise.
Green Man (blue) (1992), Elisabeth Frink. Photo: © Frink Estate; courtesy Yorkshire Sculpture Park
‘Elisabeth Frink: Natural Connection’ is at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 23 February 2025.
From the September 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
NYC Fans: Invitation to Meet the Artists Behind the Toy Art at MEET
To all our NYC fans, our sister company, MEET, is launching The Lamp Art Series. Join us Tuesday July 19th at 6:30pm as we welcome three very special toy art designers to curate our lamps at MEET on Chrystie.
Meet the artists behind our curated lamps. If you've ever visited our MEET on Chrystie location, you've probably noticed our much-talked-about Favorite Things Lamps. Our beautiful pendant lamps showcase MEET's eclectic treasured objects.
This summer, we have partnered with three incredible illustrators and sculptors who are curating the lamps with unique toy art: Justin Alan Volpe, kaNO, and Brent Nolasco. Enjoy an evening of wine and discussion with the artists.
We're keeping our promise to find exciting ways to include art and design at the heart of the types of projects we support.
All pieces will be available for purchase.
We hope to catch you there.
Location: 195 1/2 Chrystie Street Suite 200 New York, NY 10002
Date: Tuesday April 19th, 2016
Time: 6:30pm
Here's a special sneak peek at the works:
Brent Nolasco
Justin Alan Volpe
kaNO
Sallyann Corn on Independent Bookstores, Saunas + More
Sallyann Corn always knew that she would end up in a profession where she could utilize her imagination and translate ideas into forms. Growing up in a small town, however, meant that she had only heard of three potential tracks: art, architecture, and fashion. Her interest in clothing then led to an exploration of visual merchandising. But when she switched to an industrial design program in college there was an immediate click. “I knew that was exactly the path meant for me,” Corn says. “It felt so all-encompassing, and it has allowed me the freedom to pursue many mediums, scales, and project types.”
In 2008, Corn founded the Seattle-based studio fruitsuper with Joe Kent. Partners in business and life, the duo’s collaboration emphasizes playful simplicity, spanning a range of arenas from products to physical environments and curation.
Yet the pair not only caters to individual clients, they also welcome the public to join in and experience the energy for themselves. Their retail space and wine bar in Pioneer Square serves as a neighborhood hub, featuring fruitsuper’s signature items alongside pieces by other makers from across the United States. It is here that the team hosts rotating exhibitions, panel discussions, gatherings, and private events. These endeavors are part of fruitsuper’s ultimate mission – to celebrate a diverse and growing independent creative community.
With jobs and the day-to-day often intertwined, at times it has been challenging to maintain a healthy balance, especially when Corn and Kent had one shared space for all of their activities. Even with the separate studio they have today, the couple still finds easy ways to help make the switch from work mode to down time, like lighting candles or changing outfits.
There’s one element, however, that remains essential, and offers endless inspiration. “Travel is imperative to our practice, because it immediately makes us see the everyday in a new way,” Corn notes. “Objects as simple as toothpaste, traffic signals, and garbage cans surprise and delight us.”
Today, Sallyann Corn joins us for Friday Five!
Photo: Kunihiro Fukumori
1. Independent bookstores
To label us “Book Lovers” would be an understatement. We love to scour, hunt, and bury ourselves in local bookstores, no matter what city we’re in. We find that a small, independent bookstore with teetering stacks and narrow paths truly showcases the unique voice of each store owner and their city. We never shy from purchasing books while traveling, as we’ve found some of our absolute favorite literary treasures around the globe. A few of our favorites: Arcana Books (Los Angeles), Book/Shop (Oakland), Books & Things (Kyoto), Booklarder (Seattle), Casa Bosques (Mexico City), and Monograph Bookwerks (Portland).
Photo: Courtesy of Baisikeli
2. Bicycle Rental
We’re less spandex-wearing and gear-focused and more the bells and baskets, stop-when-we-see-a-wine-bar type of bicycle riders. But we find nothing more exciting than renting bikes to explore new areas. During travel and at home, we love to find a neighborhood spot that provides bicycle rentals; as they’re almost always far better quality bikes than hourly rentals and often come with personalized route suggestions, bike adjustments and favorite neighborhood tips. Renting a bike for a day allows us to cover so much more ground and explore more than we ever could on foot. And always provides a much deeper connection to new neighborhoods than jumping in a car or on public transportation.
3. Saunas & Soaking
From a dry cedar sauna to natural hot springs, inside or outside, we love a soak/steam it out session. It’s such a meditative and restorative activity! We love that it essentially forces you to be nothing but present; no phones, books or other distractions can be involved. So your only focus is on your breathing, your sweat, your thoughts and your company. It’s incredibly invigorating!
4. Walking
For years I was foolish enough to not make time for walking. But now that I’m in the habit, I find myself less able to focus and be productive if I haven’t gone on at least two long walks each week. My commute from home to our studio or shop is around 3 miles and takes me about one hour. I’m not a headphone wearing person, so this hour of solitude is fantastic and now integral to my creative practice. I’ve found that I now arrive at work with a clear head and I’m much more prepared and ready to start my day. Between weather shifts and route options, it feels like endless choose-your-own adventure paths that lead me to new observations in places I’ve walked by dozens of times before. Two favorite walking spots that provide endless inspiration are the Myrtle Edwards Park/Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle and the Highline in NYC.
Photo: Studio Fræ
5. Small(er) Art+Design Festivals
For the past 3 years we’ve been fortunate to participate in DesignMarch in Reykjavik. We’ve fallen in love with smaller (by comparison to Milan, NYC, etc.) art and design festivals. The scale of these smaller/shorter festivals feels far more manageable and the work feels less dominated by large corporations and budgets and instead filled with young, independent, fresh work. We love seeing what can be created and presented with the constraints of smaller budgets and limitless enthusiasm.
Works by fruitsuper:
fruitsuper SHOP 2019-present A gift shop and wine bar Photo: Brooke Fitts
Cedar Hall 2023 A curation of PNW artists. Collection title: All Along. Photo: Chris Gunder
Solids and Voids 2019 An exhibition of 2D and 3D abstractions Photo: Christina Marie Hicks
Solids and Voids 2019 An exhibition of 2D and 3D abstractions Photo: Christina Marie Hicks
Sculptures for Books 2024 A collection of objects designed for page holding, placemaking, and in celebration of books. Photo: Brooke Fitts
A Painting Today: “In Shape”
5 x 5″
oil on panel
sold
I do a lot of small studies, mostly to keep painting while I’m think about my next piece and to feel out how a photograph or featured artwork translates into a painting. A generous Instagramer, Cilia, sent me the photo I used on this new painting, one of her viewing Henri Matisse’s Blue Nudes in the Kunsthaus Zurich Museum in Zurich, Switzerland.
Matisse completed a large series of ‘cut-outs’ after a surgery which left him in a wheelchair with a limited ability to paint on canvas. He painted sheets of paper with various, solid colors of gouache, some more opaque than others, cut out organic shapes, overlapping and glueing, and created some of the most famous works of art in his lifetime. Proving that adversity can take you to unexpected places you may not have gone before.
Stars lead emotional tributes to Quincy Jones at Oscars Governors awards | Movies
Quincy Jones died too soon to accept an honorary Oscar at the Governors awards on Sunday night – so the ceremony in Los Angeles became a moving celebration of the life of a music legend.
Jones, who died on 3 November aged 91, was one of five Hollywood luminaries due to be honoured at the 15th Governors awards. In his absence, his daughter Rashida Jones read the speech he had drafted, alongside a spirited performance by Jennifer Hudson.
Flanked by three siblings, the actor and director recounted her father’s words: “I was always keenly aware of the enormous power that we possessed as film-makers, that the art we created, the stories we told, if we were lucky, had a chance to move people in ways that they could never imagine, to make society and the world a more understanding and embracing place for us all to exist.”
Describing her father, she said: “He had this preternatural gift with people. He knew how to stay present, stay curious and stay loving.” It had been “a difficult decision for our family to be here tonight, but we felt like we wanted to celebrate his beautiful life and career”.
The event, presented by the Academy’s board of governors, honours lifetime achievement in the film industry, often lauding those who haven’t won the traditional statuette. This year’s recipients were the screenwriter and director Richard Curtis, for his humanitarian work; the casting director Juliet Taylor, who, like Jones, received an honorary Oscar; and the James Bond producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, who received the Irving G Thalberg Memorial award.
The ceremony is a magnet for A-listers and Oscar hopefuls. Those gathered at tables in the Ray Dolby Ballroom included Saoirse Ronan, Jennifer Lopez, Paul Mescal, Lupita Nyong’o and Angelina Jolie, among many others. The actor, writer and director Colman Domingo gave an opening speech reflecting on the national moment: “What a time to create meaningful art, what a time to be in this room with you all. Tonight, we will inspire each other to just keep going,” he said. “Let’s keep telling the most complex stories that can show us that we’re more alike than unalike.”
Daniel Craig presented the award to Broccoli and Wilson, siblings who have produced the Bond films since 1995, when they took over from Cubby Broccoli, Barbara’s father and Wilson’s stepfather. Nicole Kidman presented the award to Taylor, whose credits range from Annie Hall to The Birdcage.
“The work of the casting director is always seen but it is often overlooked,” Kidman said, noting that Taylor was the first person in the job to be recognised by the Academy. “This woman was at the centre of American film-making from the 70s through the end of her career. She was more than professional. She defined the profession.”
After Taylor, Hugh Grant begrudgingly presented Curtis’s “better-than-nothing Oscar”, needling his friend for an initial resistance to casting Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Then, “not content with saving the British film industry, he decided he also had to try and save the whole bloody world,” Grant said, referring to Comic Relief, Make Poverty History, and Curtis’s other humanitarian endeavours. “There I would be in one of the lulls in my career – because of some flop or some arrest or whatever – and I’d be frankly desperate for Richard’s next film, and I’d be told, ‘I’m sorry, he’s away for a year in Africa, saving starving children.’
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“I found that annoying and frankly selfish.”
In his own speech, after remarking on Grant’s “infamously unsatisfactory character”, Curtis praised his colleagues for making films with potent messages but urged them not to stop there. “Powerful films and TV shows are made, and everyone just sort of hopes they’ll help change things, and they don’t take the final step to create a mechanism in the actual production that helps to change things,” he said. They should appoint “impact producers” who would use the films “for campaigning, for targeted education, for changing laws. When films get shown to the right people in power at the right time, when films are linked to the right charities, amazing things can happen.”
The night ended with Jones’s award, presented by Jamie Foxx in a speech that included startlingly accurate impressions of Jones and of Donald Trump – whose re-election was obliquely and mournfully referenced several times throughout the evening. Foxx recalled working with Jones on the film Ray and hailed the composer’s “fearless and tireless” work for disabled people, including people with Down’s syndrome like Foxx’s late sister. “Thank you for giving the world music, thank you for giving the world light, thank you for giving the world an example of what a great human being is supposed to be,” Foxx said.
Closing her speech at the end of the evening, an emotional Rashida Jones urged the crowd to listen to her father’s music on the way home. “There’s an entire universe waiting in his seven decades of music. And while you listen, hear him, hear how he imbued love into every single second of music he made. That was his real legacy, love,” she said.
“In honour of our dad, we hope you will do the same. Live with love, lead with love. Bring love to everything that you do.”