16 Mar 2024

Lily Gladstone’s upset loss to Emma Stone was expected for this reason

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When Emma Stone’s name was announced Sunday night as the winner of best actress at the 96th Academy Awards, she looked genuinely stunned, as many pundits had said that Lily Gladstone was the frontrunner and predicted she would make history as the first Native American woman to win an acting Oscar.

But in the run-up to Sunday’s ceremony, some awards watchers were skeptical. They expressed doubt that Gladstone would achieve this historic milestone and not because she didn’t give a superb performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

They cited the issue of Gladstone’s relatively limited screen time in the Martin Scorsese epic crime drama, set in the Osage Nation in the 1920s, and the view that her character, Mollie Burkhart, wasn’t really the film’s narrative focus.

Gladstone, who has a white mother and whose father is of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage, is on screen for about 56 minutes in a film that’s three hours and 26 minutes long, according to Matthew Stewart, a screen timer expert with Gold Derby.

With that 27% screen time, some critics have argued that the film is more interested in the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who is on screen for 1 hour and 49 minutes. Gladstone’s limited screen time also sparked debate months ago over whether her role was supporting and she should have campaigned in the supporting actress category.

On the Hollywood industry podcast “The Town” Thursday, host Matthew Belloni and guest Michael Lasker, a talent manager and Oscars expert, agreed that Gladstone had a supporting role. Mollie is an Osage woman whose relatives are systematically being murdered by her husband, played by DiCaprio, and his uncle, played by Robert De Niro, in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land.

Belloni and Lasker compared the Mollie character to Stone’s Bella Baxter, whose story is definitely at the center of “Poor Things,” making it more of a traditional leading role.

“I am on record as saying that Emma Stone is going to win,” Belloni said. “It’s a flashier performance.” In Yorgos Lanthimos’ costume drama, Stone plays a woman who goes on a journey of self-discovery after being brought back to life by an eccentric surgeon. She’s on screen for one hour and 37 minutes, or 69% of “Poor Things” running time.

“I think ultimately voters watch the movies, evaluate the performances and select based on what they think is the best performance,” Belloni continued. “There are other factors that come into it. The representation issue, I think, is a big one. (Gladstone) would be the first Native American actress to win in this category. It would be a great moment on stage at the Oscars, and I do think that comes into a little bit.”

Lasker agreed that it would have been a great Oscars moment for Gladstone to win and to give a moving speech on the historic nature of the honor. He also said she was “amazing” in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” though he, too, noted that she’s only in the movie for about 50 minutes.

“It occurred to me: If they had run Lily in supporting, she probably would have run in a landslide,” Lasker said.

Maybe Gladstone would have won in the supporting category, but she would have had stiff competition: Over the course of the 2023 awards season, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was the overwhelming favorite to win that trophy for her performance in “The Holdovers.”

Some people online wondered if the increasingly international makeup of the Academy’s membership could have favored an Emma Stone win. Others expressed concerns that Gladstone’s loss was due to racism and Hollywood’s unwillingness to rectify its “ugly history” of marginalizing and misrepresenting Indigenous people.

For many others, the results of the race revived debate about the narrative intentions of “Killers of the Flower Moon.” As Scorsese and Gladstone promoted “Killers of the Flower Moon,” they, as well as Gladstone fans and some film critics, insisted that her Mollie character was “the moral center” of the film’s narrative.

“If Mollie is the movie’s conscience, Gladstone is its center of gravity: Even when she shares scenes with A-listers like DiCaprio and De Niro, the film bends to her,” New York Times writer Kyle Buchanan wrote in a profile of Gladstone.

A Goldstone fan also posted on X Sunday night: “lily gladstone was the heart and soul of KotFM. the sheer intensity she commanded was astounding. every look, scream, tear, word that came out of her, i felt it in my bones. a performance for the ages in a film that has cemented its place in film history.”

Certainly, Scorsese tried to deflect criticism that he had created another film that focuses on a group of White male antiheroes or on a White male savior. The legendary director explained in interviews that an early version of the screenplay focused on federal agent Tom White, who led the investigation into the Osage murders. DiCaprio originally was cast in the Tom White role. Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth adapted the script from the book by David Grann, but the script wasn’t working.

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” Scorsese told Time. “Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

The script was retooled to examine Mollie and Ernest’s fraught marriage and how racism fuels hatred and greed, NPR reported.

But some said that Scorsese didn’t go far enough in prioritizing Mollie’s perspective, according to NPR. Upon seeing the film at its Los Angeles premiere, Christopher Coté, one of the Osage language instructors brought on to coach the cast, expressed disappointment to The Hollywood Reporter that Mollie wasn’t really at the center of the movie, while acknowledging that its overarching theme is complicity in white supremacy.

Coté said: “Martin Scorsese not being Osage, I think he did a great job representing our people, but this story is being told almost from the perspective of Ernest Burkhart.”

On Sunday night, the Times’ Buchanan defended the choice for Gladstone to campaign in the leading actress category. “There’s more to a film career than winning an Oscar,” he wrote on X. “By going lead, Lily told Hollywood to treat her like a lead. And she just booked another lead, which many supporting winners struggle to do.” But someone responding to Buchanan’s post argued that it would have been “bad optics” for Gladstone to be considered a supporting actor in a story about the Osage Nation while DiCaprio was pushed as a lead actor.”

Gladstone’s supporters could argue that she had as much right to campaign for a leading acting Oscar as Anthony Hopkins did in 1991, when he won best actor for his 16 minutes of screen time as Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Meanwhile, as her fans expressed disappointment that she didn’t win the Oscar, they said her nomination itself was historic. As the Washington Post reported, Gladstone’s season was “trailblazing,” with her racking up Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards. She also received a standing ovation when she won the SAG award last month.

Some cultural commentators also spoke of the “Lily Gladstone effect,” how her high profile this awards season, standing at podiums to accept multiple honors, would help lift up other Native talent in the industry, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

“Lily Gladstone not winning does not take away from the fact that she gave one of the best performances of the year,” said Variety editor Jazz Tangcay on X. “Her performance and the film will live on long after tonight is over. Her wins have been historic and trailblazing. She already made history.”

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16 Mar 2024

Owner of Willmar massage business charged with forcing woman into prostitution

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WILLMAR, Minn.  — The Willmar business owner arrested last weekend in an alleged assault at her massage business has been charged with inducing a woman into prostitution.

Ying He, 55, made her first court appearance Tuesday in Kandiyohi County District Court on charges of inducing a a female employee to engage in prostitution at her massage business in Willmar, a felony offense. A gross misdemeanor charge of running a disorderly house and a misdemeanor fifth-degree assault charge also were filed against her.

Minnesota statute defines a disorderly house as a location where habitual violations of the law occur, which could include prostitution, sale or possession of controlled substances, gambling or unauthorized sale of liquor.

Judge Melissa Listug set $150,000 bail with no conditions. Conditional bail was set at $50,000, including the conditions that He have no contact with the victim and turn in her passport within three hours after her release.

She remained in custody as of Friday at the Kandiyohi County Jail. Her next scheduled court appearance is for a remote hearing on March 20.

According to the criminal complaint, Willmar police were dispatched March 9 to a business in the 2400 block of First Street South. The owner was waving the officer down outside, but the 911 caller was said to be inside the business.

The caller, the woman from California, was sitting on the floor of the business and appeared to be crying. She told the officer through an interpreter that He, her boss, had confined her in a small room within the building, would not let her eat or drink or turn on lights, and would not allow her to leave.

She advised the officer that she had flown to Minnesota from California on March 3 and had been living inside the business since then. She alleged that He would lock her inside a small room every day whenever there was no business appointments.

According to the complaint, the woman told the officer that she had given a 30-minute massage to a customer that day and when the customer asked for more work to be done, He became upset with her and punched her on the head. She further stated that she felt dizzy and had a headache.

The woman was transported to the hospital via ambulance for treatment of minor injuries.

At the hospital, she told a detective that she had been in Willmar for approximately one week after she found employment through an agency based in Los Angeles.

According to the complaint, she paid the agency $100 and was told her flight to Minnesota would cost about $630. She advised she paid for half of her flight ticket and He, her new boss, paid for the other half and arranged an Uber to bring her to Willmar from the airport.

The woman told police that He controlled her movements and she was forced to begin working the day after she arrived. She further stated He told her to do “whatever the customer wanted her to do.”

The woman alleged He told her to perform sex acts on customers, clarifying that “small jobs” meant masturbating the customer, and “big jobs” meant having intercourse with the customer.

According to the complaint, when the woman refused to do as instructed, He got mad at her and allegedly threatened that she would find her if she tried to leave. He allegedly described her own boss in Los Angeles as a lawyer who worked for the courts.

When He spoke to the responding officer, she denied hitting the woman and said the woman had yelled at her and tried to hit her with a water bottle, according to the complaint.

She told police the woman was driving customers away because she did not know how to do massages. She told the officer she wanted the woman to leave and denied forcing her to live there, according to the complaint.

Police later returned to He’s business and viewed surveillance video. According to the complaint, the video shows an interaction between the woman and He in a hallway outside a client room that an adult male was seen entering.

It is unclear what the interaction was about, according to the complaint, but the two women passed each other and the video shows that He punches the woman on her head and punches her a second time before the woman starts walking away.

After reviewing the video, officers placed He under arrest.

According to the complaint, law enforcement seized eight different cellphones along with business ledgers and DNA swabs from inside the business while executing a search warrant.

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16 Mar 2024

Pamela Paul: Colleges are putting their futures at risk

by | posted in: Society | 0

For more than a century, an understanding existed between America’s universities and the rest of the country.

Universities educated the nation’s future citizens in whatever ways they saw fit. Their faculty determined what kind of research to carry out and how, with the understanding that innovation drives economic progress. This gave them an essential role and stake in both a pluralistic democracy and a capitalist economy — without being subject to the whims of politics or industry.

The government helped finance universities with tax breaks and research funding. The public paid taxes and often exorbitant tuition fees. And universities enjoyed what has come to be known as academic freedom, the ability for those in higher education to operate free from external pressure.

“Academic freedom allows us to choose which areas of knowledge we seek and pursue them,” said Anna Grzymala-Busse, a professor of international studies at Stanford University. “Politically, what society expects of us is to train citizens and provide economic mobility, and that has been the bedrock of political and economic support for universities. But if universities are not fulfilling these missions, and are seen as prioritizing other missions instead, that political bargain becomes very fragile.”

Her remarks came during a recent conference on civil discourse at Stanford, ranging from free expression on campus to diversity, equity and inclusion hiring statements. But underlying all the discussions was a real fear that universities had strayed from their essential duties, imperiling the kind of academic freedom they had enjoyed for decades.

Of course, there have long been attempts at political interference in academia, with a distrust of elitism smoldering beneath the widespread disdain for the ivory tower. But in the past few years, these sentiments have boiled over into action, with universities jolted by everything from activism by its trustees to congressional investigations to the wresting of control by the state to the threatened withdrawal of government support.

The number of Republicans expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in universities plummeted to 19% last year, from 56% in 2015, according to Gallup polls, apparently due largely to a belief that universities were too liberal and were pushing a political agenda, a 2017 poll found. But it could get much worse.

“A Trump presidency with a Republican legislative majority could remake higher education as we’ve known it,” Steven Brint, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, warned last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education, citing the potential for the Department of Justice to investigate universities for admissions procedures, for example, or penalties for schools that the government determines are overly beholden to social justice priorities. In some states, it could mean decreased funding from the state, the elimination of ethnic studies or even the requirement of patriotism oaths.

That would bump up against what many students, faculty and administrators view as the point of a college education.

“I was reading applications for my graduate program,” said Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford. “The person would describe their political activism and then say, ‘And now I will continue that work through my Ph.D.’ They see academia as a natural progression.” But, she cautioned, the social justice mentality isn’t conducive to the university’s work.

“We have to keep stressing to students that there’s something to being open-ended in our work; we don’t always know where we want to go,” Burns said.

Right now, the university’s message is often the opposite. Well before the tumultuous summer of 2020, a focus on social justice permeated campuses in everything from residential housing to college reading lists.

“All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives,” noted Jonathan Zimmerman, author of “Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” in a 2019 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the most part, though, it doesn’t.”

Instead, many universities have aligned themselves politically with their most activist students. “Top universities depend on billions of dollars of public funding, in the form of research grants and loan assistance,” The Economist editorialized last week. “The steady leftward drift of their administrations has imperiled this.”

One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarized subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.

At last month’s conference, Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position? If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.

As for the cons, Zambrano continued, issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices. In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless. Moreover, such statements force a university to simplify complex issues. They ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying. (Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern University, have rightly balked.) Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.

The temptation for universities to take a moral stand, especially in response to overheated campus sentiment, is understandable. But it’s a trap. When universities make it their mission to do the “right” thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities — and the polarized country they’re in partnership with — they’re wrong.

When universities become overtly political and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculty the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.

Pamela Paul writes a column for the New York Times.

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16 Mar 2024

Column: New QBs coach Kerry Joseph says ‘it’s about trust’ with the Chicago Bears QB — whoever that ends up being

by | posted in: News | 0

MOBILE, Ala. — Kerry Joseph doesn’t have any thoughts yet on the Chicago Bears’ biggest offseason decision, the one that holds the key to the NFL draft.

The team’s new quarterbacks coach, hired Friday, doesn’t even know where his office is at Halas Hall. He has been on a whirlwind tour since the season ended, free to seek a new job after the Seattle Seahawks forced out coach Pete Carroll.

Joseph, the assistant quarterbacks coach for the Seahawks the last two seasons, spent one day in Lake Forest interviewing for the Bears job. In between, he was scrambling to get to Mobile, where he’s serving as quarterbacks coach of the American team in the Senior Bowl.

Somehow along the way, Joseph got hooked up with Bears gear and was wearing a team-issued navy hat, navy shorts and gray sweatshirt at practice Tuesday at Hancock Whitney Stadium on the South Alabama campus.

He doesn’t have preliminary thoughts on Justin Fields. Joseph was the assistant wide receivers coach in Seattle in 2021, when the Bears drafted Fields. He has yet to dig in on this year’s draft, in which the Bears hold the first and ninth picks and are in position to select a new quarterback.

“I was getting transitioned to coming out here,” the 50-year-old Joseph said.

It’s the first time he has been an NFL position coach — above the assistant position coach level. The connection is easy to make. He worked with new Bears offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, who came from the Seahawks. The Bears also interviewed Seahawks quarterbacks coach Greg Olson for the offensive coordinator job.

The last first-time quarterbacks coach the Bears hired was Shane Day in 2010 based on his experience working with then-offensive coordinator Mike Martz in San Francisco. Since Day, the Bears have rolled through Jeremy Bates, Matt Cavanaugh, Dowell Loggains, Dave Ragone, John DeFilippo and most recently Andrew Janocko.

It would be overly dramatic to say this is the most important offseason for a Bears quarterbacks coach. There has been urgency to get the position right for the longest time. It just so happens they own the No. 1 draft pick as they prepare to thoroughly examine a talented group of passers, including USC’s Caleb Williams, North Carolina’s Drake Maye (who was a spectator at practice Tuesday), LSU’s Jayden Daniels and Michigan’s J.J. McCarthy.

Joseph, who was responsible for red-zone preparation with the Seahawks, had a hand in helping revive Geno Smith’s career in Seattle as Smith threw for 4,282 yards and 30 touchdowns in 2022. Joseph’s knowledge of Waldron’s system will be critical whether the Bears draft a quarterback or not.

“When you think about Shane and what we were able to do with the (Seahawks) offense, I think quarterback play is about having confidence,” Joseph said. “Quarterback play is just about being competitive. It’s about being smart, being dependable, having a good IQ of the game, being passionate.

“When you think about traits, when you talk about quarterback play and when you talk about Shane’s mentality, it’s just about being connected to the play caller, being connected to the offense. There are some things you’ve got to have and you’ve got to bring to it.”

Joseph was a quarterback at McNeese State and had a 42-11 record as a four-year starter, helping the Cowboys to two Southland Conference titles. He spent time with the Cincinnati Bengals in 1996 as an undrafted free agent before playing in NFL Europe. He tried to make the Washington Redskins as a slot back and then played safety for the Seahawks from 1998 to 2001, appearing in 56 games with 14 starts.

He returned to quarterback in the Canadian Football League in 2003, winning a Grey Cup with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in 2007, when he was named the league’s most outstanding player. After retiring following the 2014 season, he got into coaching at the college level with stops at his alma mater and Southeastern Louisiana before joining the Seahawks as an offensive assistant in 2020.

The diverse background — having played defense in the NFL — gives him a different perspective to teach offensive football.

“It helps me tremendously,” Joseph said, “because playing the safety position, playing that dime (position), playing down in the box helped me understand how defenses attack the offense, how guys fit. So now that I’ve gone back to quarterback, I see it from a defensive mentality.

“Being able to help guys to understand the game, not just from the offensive side but from the defensive side, kind of helped (with) where to put their eyes. That’s what it did for me as a player, and I try to teach it that way with a defensive mentality.”

Joseph will learn where his office is soon, and then he can hit the ground running as the Bears prepare for the draft and install a new offense — quite possibly with a new quarterback. As far as his philosophy on developing a young quarterback, he leaned into some basic tenets.

“I use three things: accountability, responsibility, communication,” Joseph said. “It’s about trust, believing and having confidence in each other. A quarterbacks coach and a quarterback, you’ve got to have those three things.

“Then, hey, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s about developing the fundamentals, developing the mentality to be a good leader. To be a winner. Just willing to compete. There are so many things that I have in my philosophy as a person that I take into the coaching world and into the quarterback room to help develop a group of guys.”

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