#academy of motion picture arts and sciences

[apicturewithasmile]

Russia is “ethnically cleansing” (= genociding) non-white and non-Christian ethnic minorities both in their own country (through forced mobilisation)  AND in the occupied territories of Ukraine. The Crimean Tatars have been subject to Russian terror more than once in the 20th and 21st century. Russian propaganda, their justifications for the war, their attempts to discredit the Jewish president of Ukraine are very often VERY antisemitic. Until they reached an agreement about grain exports, Russia blocked shipments of grain to put pressure on Ukraine and their allies by causing a food crisis which would affect predominantly people of colour in the global south. And there is no guarantee that Russia won’t break their end of the deal whenever they see fit because they are not a reliable partner.

But the Oscars don’t want to give Ukraine a stage because “everyone affected by the conflict is white”. Ummm.... okay?!

[ilikethisacompletelynormalamount]

Andrew Scott (wearing Givenchy) attends the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' 14th Annual Governors Awards January 09, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (📷 Emma McIntyre, Chris Pizzello 🎥 Charles Kim)

[sdaedal]

The Academy nominating Ken for Barbie without nominating Barbie for Barbie is literally the point of Barbie ahhfhaksjfjfhskxnjsndhr

[citizenscreen]

In January 1941, Bette Davis became the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She resigned after two months. #DailyBette

[slowsweetlove]

Congratulations to Austin for being invited to the Academy !

[brian-in-finance]

Vanity Fair Oscars Party • 2017 • Designer: Alberta Feretti

Vanity Fair Oscars Party • 2019 • Designer: Dundas Couture

Academy Awards • 2020 • Designer: Valentino

Vanity Fair Oscars Party • 2020 • Designer: Prabal Gurung

Academy Awards • 2022 • Designer: Louis Vitton

Vanity Fair Oscars Party • 2022 • Designer: Louis Vitton

Photo: Vanity Fair Slideshow • Other Photos: Getty Images

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Remember… fashion you can buy, but style you possess. The key to style is learning who you are, which takes years. There's no how-to road map to style. It's about self expression and, above all, attitude. — Iris Apfel

Seem like only 319 days ago…

[bespokeredmayne]

Ginger glamour

Eddie Redmayne + Jessica Chastain at The Academy Museum Gala Saturday night in Los Angeles. It doesn’t get more elegant or stylish than this.

[luckydiorxoxo]

Michael B. Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Sofia Coppola will be honored at this year’s Academy of Motion Pictures Museum Gala on October 14.

[thejewofkansas]

Awards Season 2023-24: The 96th Academy Awards

I got some very cool stuff at the Oscar party I attended, but perhaps the most photogenic was this lovely poster for Past Lives. Is Al Pacino okay? Serious question. That concern aside, it was a pretty good night. Kimmel’s hosting was hit-and-miss, but I’ve certainly seen worse. I liked how they presented the acting awards. Would’ve been cool if they’d done that with a couple other categories,…

[eddieredmayneargentinablog]

2022 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 13th Governors Awards.

"At the #GovernorsAwards, #EddieRedmayne arrives in a black double-breasted tailored jacket, a white shirt with red cuffs worn and wide-legged trousers. Completed with a lily pin in antique silver metal and black #McQueenPunk shoes"

📸 From Alexander McQueen IG

[joannanora]

Anya Taylor-Joy, Billie Eilish, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Caitríona Balfe, Jamie Dornan and Disney exec Dana Walden are among the 397 artists and executives invited to join the membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. If all of this year’s invitees accept membership, it will bring the total number of Academy members to 10,665, with 9,665 eligible to vote for the 95th Oscars set to take place on March 12, 2023.

[loveandthings11]

I'm liking that Oscars logo behind him 🤩

Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences 13th Governors Awards, November 19, 2022

[whileiamdying]

Academy Apologizes to Sacheen Littlefeather for Her Mistreatment at the 1973 Oscars (Exclusive)

Nearly 50 years after suffering harassment and discrimination for protesting Native American mistreatment, the activist will be the guest of honor at an evening of healing and Indigenous celebration hosted by the Academy Museum on Sept. 17.

BY REBECCA SUN

Sacheen Littlefeather at the Oscars in 1973 (left) and the Red Nation Film Festival in 2019. COURTESY OF GLOBE PHOTOS/ZUMA WIRE; ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES

The first time Sacheen Littlefeather encountered the Academy, in 1973, she was booed onstage at the Oscars, heckled with mock ululations and so-called “tomahawk chops” offstage, and threatened with arrest and physical assault.

Nearly half a century later, she will return to the Academy as an invited guest of honor for an evening of reflection at the Academy Museum, featuring something she never dared to imagine: a formal apology from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“I was stunned. I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this, experiencing this,” Littlefeather (Apache/Yaqui/Ariz.), now 75, tells The Hollywood Reporter of receiving the Academy’s statement, which was first privately presented to her in June. “When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood there alone.”

Back then, in an instantly historic moment in both Oscars and live television history, a 26-year-old Littlefeather took the stage at Marlon Brando’s behest to decline the best actor award (for his role in The Godfather) on his behalf. She had two promises to keep: not to touch the statuette (Brando’s instructions), and to keep her comments to 60 seconds (an order from show producer Howard Koch, who told Littlefeather minutes before the award presentation that he had security on hand to arrest her if she went past time).

“[Brando] very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award,” Littlefeather said in her improvised non-acceptance speech, knowing she would not have time to read from the actor’s eight typed pages of prepared remarks. “And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry [the audience begins to boo] — excuse me — and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.” (A month before the ceremony, the activist organization American Indian Movement had occupied the South Dakota town of Wounded Knee to protest the sustained mistreatment of Native Americans, a standoff that at the time of Littlefeather’s televised appearance at the Oscars was under a U.S. Department of Justice-imposed media blackout.)

Littlefeather’s 60-second plea for justice resulted in immediate and enduring personal backlash. She says that in the wings, John Wayne had to be restrained from storming the stage to physically attack her, while in the aftermath, her identity and integrity were impugned (the rumors were so abiding that in 2012, Dennis Miller mocked Elizabeth Warren by calling her “as much Indian as that stripper chick Brando sent to pick up his Oscar”). Littlefeather, who had acted in a few films before her infamous moment, says that the federal government threatened to shut down any talk shows or productions that put her on the air.

“The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified,” then-Academy president David Rubin wrote in the organization’s apology letter, dated June 18. “The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”

The statement of apology will be read in full at the Sept. 17 Academy Museum event honoring Littlefeather, who will participate in a conversation with producer Bird Runningwater (Cheyenne/Mescalero Apache/N.M.), co-chair of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance. It was Runningwater who first reached out to Littlefeather on behalf of the Academy, as part of the museum’s ongoing efforts to revisit the organization’s past and determine its future through a more expansive, inclusive lens. “Bird gave me a call — on the phone, of course. He tried to send smoke signals but they wouldn’t fit underneath the door,” jokes Littlefeather. Runningwater and fellow Academy Inclusion Advisory Committee member Heather Rae cultivated a relationship with the lifelong activist, paving the way for her to record an episode for the Academy Museum podcast, released in June, as well as a visual history for the Academy Oral History Projects, to be released next month.

An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather, which will be free to the public via online reservations, will also feature a land acknowledgement from Virginia Carmelo (Tongva/S. Calif.) and performances by traditional vocalist and singer Calina Lawrence (Suquamish/Wash.), the San Manuel Bird Singers (San Manuel/Calif.), Michael Bellanger (Ojibwe/Minn. and Kickapoo/Okla.) and the All Nation Singers and Dancers and Steve Bohay (Kiowa/Okla.) and the Sooner Nation Singers and Dancers, as well as remarks from Rubin and incoming Academy president Janet Yang, Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Assemblymember James Ramos (Serrano/Cahuilla/So. Calif.). Academy Museum director and president Jacqueline Stewart and Earl Neconie (Kiowa/Okla.) will emcee the evening.

It will be Littlefeather’s first visit to the museum, which has her photograph displayed in its Academy Awards History gallery. The Bay Area resident, who went on to study nutrition and traditional medicine and worked in Mother Teresa’s AIDS hospice in San Francisco, never expected a reconciliation with the organization that altered the trajectory of her life nearly half a century ago.

When Stewart visited her home in June to record the visual history, she presented Littlefeather with two gifts. “I was thinking, it can’t be a pair of slippers. That’s too casual for the Academy,” Littlefeather recalls. Indeed: She instead received a photograph of her appearance on the Museum’s gallery walls (“Right next to Sidney Poitier when he won best actor for Lilies of the Field, so I’m in good company here”) and the framed letter from Rubin.

As Stewart read the letter aloud, Littlefeather sat in bemused but attentive silence as she listened to words she never thought she’d hear. “You know, I never stood up onstage in 1973 for any kind of accolades. I only stood there because my ancestors were with me, and I spoke the truth,” she said afterward, clearly still processing the apology but expressing herself with the same poise and candor she has demonstrated since the world first heard her voice. It wasn’t until three minutes later, after she reflected on and paid tribute to the Native American filmmakers and artists making progress in Hollywood — like Running water, Rae, actor Wes Studi and Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo — that the emotions hit, and Sacheen Littlefeather began to cry, clutching the framed letter to her chest.

“Yes, there’s an apology that’s due. As my friends in the Native community said, it’s long overdue,” says Littlefeather, who is living with metastasized breast cancer. “I could have been dead by now. All of my friends — [activists] Dennis Banks, Russell Means, John Trudell, [comedian] Charlie Hill — are gone.”

Littlefeather’s husband, Charles Koshiway (Otoe/Sac&Fox), has also passed, of blood cancer last November. They were together 32 years. “His spirit is still here with me, and I know that what he wanted for me was always justice and reconciliation,” says Littlefeather, although when asked what she thinks of Koch and the other Oscar night participants who stood by as she was harassed, she laughs heartily: “When they got to the other side, I’m sure that my ancestors spoke to them on my behalf. And I’m sure Mr. Charles went over there and had a talk with them immediately. I’m sure his first target was John Wayne.”

But for Littlefeather herself, she says she has abided by a personal daily practice of “love, gratitude and forgiveness.” And she has been heartened by the very recent progress in Native American representation onscreen and among Hollywood’s storytellers: “At long last, somebody is breaking down the doors. And I’m so very happy this is happening — even though I don’t swear like they do on Reservation Dogs.”

In her concluding words back in 1973, Littlefeather said, “I beg at this time that … in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.”

It took 49 years, but those hopeful words have finally become prescient.

Read the Academy’s full statement of reconciliation to Sacheen Littlefeather below.

June 18, 2022

Dear Sacheen Littlefeather,

I write to you today a letter that has been a long time coming on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with humble acknowledgment of your experience at the 45th Academy Awards.

As you stood on the Oscars stage in 1973 to not accept the Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando, in recognition of the misrepresentation and mistreatment of Native American people by the film industry, you made a powerful statement that continues to remind us of the necessity of respect and the importance of human dignity.

The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified.  The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable.  For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged.  For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.

We cannot realize the Academy’s mission to “inspire imagination and connect the world through cinema” without a commitment to facilitating the broadest representation and inclusion reflective of our diverse global population.

Today, nearly 50 years later, and with the guidance of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance, we are firm in our commitment to ensuring indigenous voices—the original storytellers—are visible, respected contributors to the global film community. We are dedicated to fostering a more inclusive, respectful industry that leverages a balance of art and activism to be a driving force for progress.

We hope you receive this letter in the spirit of reconciliation and as recognition of your essential role in our journey as an organization.  You are forever respectfully engrained in our history.

With warmest regards, David Rubin President, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

[panicinthestudio]

Sacheen Littlefeather, who declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar, dies aged 75, October 3, 2022

The Native American actor and activist who declined Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather has died aged 75, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced in a tweet on Sunday. Littlefeather had been suffering from breast cancer. 

The Hollywood Reporter cited a statement from her caretaker that said she died at noon on Sunday at home in the northern California city of Novato, surrounded by her loved ones.

The Guardian

[coochiequeens]

“In addition, the academy announced that it will host “An Evening with Sacheen Littlefeather,” a conversation with Littlefeather about reflection, healing and celebration, on Sept.17.”

[brian-in-finance]

Video 📹 from ABC (USA)

Remember… this story is the search for joy and hope in the face of violence and loss. We will never forget all of those lost in the heartbreaking, heartwarming, human story of that amazing city of Belfast on the fabulous island of Ireland. — Sir Kenneth Branagh, accepting the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay