Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/30/2022 i Variety

When the Grammy nominations were announced in November, the man who surprised everyone with the biggest stack — 11 — was Jon Batiste, known to TV audiences as Stephen Colbert’s musical director, and nominated this year for his wide-ranging album, “We Are,” and the soundtrack from Disney-Pixar’s “Soul.” His work in multiple genres makes him a kindred spirit as well as friend to composer-musician Terence Blanchard. Although Blanchard’s Grammy nominations come in jazz categories this year, his expansive vision made history when he became the first Black composer at the Metropolitan Opera, with his astounding work, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” The two join Variety for a conversation about awards, the folly of categorizing creativity and the healing power of music. What does it mean to be recognized for the…

Asked to name a favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers album, drummer Chad Smith says, “I’m partial, sentimentally, to ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik.’ John [Frusciante] had matured as a player and was coming up with really melodic stuff. Anthony [Kiedis] had started to sing more [instead of rap]. It was the first time we worked with Rick Rubin; we had signed to Warner; we made an incredible record; and everything changed after that.” It seemed magical, in other words. But was the supernatural actually involved? Ever since the album’s 1991 release, mythology has been built around how the Hollywood hills house they recorded in with Rubin was haunted … a legend that may have fed into the recent Foo Fighters horror-comedy film “Studio 666.” “Instead of living in our apartments and…

Ever since “Ghosts” premiered in October, viewers of the CBS sitcom have been wanting to know why Trevor, played by Asher Grodman, doesn’t wear pants. Even costume designer Carmen Alie has been stumped. “I was wondering how he died,” Alie says. The episode airing March 31 will reveal how Trevor — a Wall Street trader from the ’90s who’s one of the several ghosts haunting an old house in New York’s Hudson Valley — met his demise. But more important, it will explain his mysterious lack of trousers. The episode involved a flashback, and Alie turned to “The Wolf of Wall Street” for inspiration, knowing she would have to show Trevor and his Wall Street bros on the trading floor. That meant a flood of gray and navy suits. “But…

Pete Holmes is a fairly cerebral comic, a presence whose jokes consistently feel carefully thought through. His recent HBO sitcom “Crashing,” which ended in 2019, took a subject that is easy to lampoon — a comedian’s quest for recognition and success — and took it seriously, treating it with real sensitivity. There’s something particularly dispiriting, then, about “How We Roll,” a new sitcom starring Holmes that’s lacking any semblance of his voice or his wit. Indeed, the series, based on the life of the professional bowler Tom Smallwood, can feel at times like a satirical device from “Crashing,” a sitcom Holmes’ character might have tried to appear on only to learn a valuable lesson from not booking it. In our reality, though, “How We Roll” simply adds up to a…

After weeks of controversy over the decision to cut eight artisan categories from the Oscar broadcast, the winners of those categories got to collect their statuettes. Their acceptance speeches were edited for insertion into the primetime live show, and excerpts are highlighted below. For the full winners’ speeches, go to Variety.com. MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” Linda Dowds, Stephanie Ingram and Justin Raleigh LINDA DOWDS: You just saw that we are in a group of incredible nominees, and everybody took a moment to celebrate all of us and each of us. I so love that. It’s the true spirit of what our work is about. … There are tens of thousands of craftspeople just like us who are below the line who come into work every day…

Anyone who feels the Grammy Awards might be stodgy today may want to consider how far the show has come since the 1990s. Not only was that decade an utterly abysmal time for fashion — The hair! The shoulder pads! The big, stiff suits! — but the music industry was riding the CD boom, which took profits to hitherto-unimagined heights and made hubris balloon even faster: The titans of the industry thought, as they usually do, “We have made it. We’ll just keep doing exactly the same thing over and over and the masses will give us more and more money.” The sounds of the future (hip-hop, alternative, heavy metal) got obligatory new categories as a patronizing pat on the head for “the youngsters,” as the Grammy voting body had…

In 2020, Red Hot Chili Peppers mainstays Anthony Kiedis, Flea and Chad Smith got together in a room to write music with their most well-known guitarist, the returning John Frusciante, for the first time in 15 years. They worked on material from January until October, at which point they commenced recording with producer Rick Rubin — with no touring break as originally planned — resulting in the band’s abundant and exploratory 12th studio album, the 17-track “Unlimited Love.” “Maybe it’s because John was gone for so long, but there was a real breaking of the dam when it came to writing music in that time period,” Kiedis says. “One of the strange silver linings of the world shutting down was that we didn’t have anything to do but write music.”…

The Houston of “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” premiering April 1 on Netflix, is both a loving depiction of the city as it once was and a vision of a place that never quite existed. Translating live-action elements into its animated scenes, the film, written and directed by Richard Linklater, explores the 1969 moon landing from the perspective of an ordinary kid, Stanley, played by Milo Coy, racing through vignette after vignette of life in the city with painstaking specificity. But the overall look is one of palpable nostalgia — a sense that the viewer is watching Linklater’s wistful recollections of his own childhood. “Memories can be deceiving,” says animation production designer Vincent Bisschop. “Certain parts can be crystal clear, and other details get lost or twisted through the…

Each of the four albums that soulful contralto vocalist, composer and producer Jazmine Sullivan has crafted since 2008’s “Fearless” has been a work of emotionally frank andrevelatorylyrics. All alsohave received Grammy nominations. Her latest, 2021’s “Heaux Tales,” finds the Philadelphia native pushing herself vocally and stretching her storytelling into more arduous terrain, revealing struggles related to abuse, regret, sex, shame, money, infatuation, evolution, revolution and agency. Musically, it’s Sullivan’s most minimalist-sounding collection yet. “Heaux Tales” earned recognition in three categories at this year’s Grammy Awards — set for April 3 at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas — where it’s up for best R&B album as well as R&B song and R&B performance for “Pick Up Your Feelings.” Sullivan talked to Variety while putting the finishing touches on February’s…

TROY KOTSUR is operating on one hour of sleep, but he’s still smiling ear to ear. It’s Monday, the morning after he became the second deaf performer in Academy history to win an acting award at the Oscars (after his “CODA” co-star Marlee Matlin, who took home best actress in 1987 for “Children of a Lesser God”). His turn as the lusty fisherman Frank Rossi in “CODA” became a favorite of this awards season, and so did appearances from the affable 53-year-old performer, a working Los Angeles stage actor who until recently was not a known entity in Hollywood. As Kotsur thinks about what his Oscar win will mean to him, he starts to cry. “I was so tired of financially struggling for so many years,” he says through an…

It was a quirk of fate that first set Cécile Frot-Coutaz on the path to becoming CEO of Sky Studios, to which she was appointed last year. “I think we all have [those] moments that have quite an impact on your trajectory,” Frot-Coutaz tells Variety. “You may not really realize it when it happens, but when you look back later on, you can see the thread.” For Frot-Coutaz, who is receiving Variety’s Intl. Achievement in TV Award at MIP, that moment was a decision made by her father, a French research scientist, to accept a three-year posting just outside Washington, D.C., and bring his family with him. At age 8, Frot-Coutaz arrived in the U.S. not knowing a word of English and with little understanding of American culture. “In those…

At a time of strife, division, anxiety and war, you might think the moment would be right for a nostalgic escape to the retro-excessive trash-movie mystique of the ’90s — an age when action thrillers were big, loud, decadent, “rebellious” and, as often as not, ripped off from “Die Hard.” “Ambulance,” however, could make you rethink that impulse. It’s directed by Michael Bay, who over the years has trafficked in a great many varieties of excess: massively scaled kiddie gizmo excess (the “Transformers” films), apocalyptic sci-fi excess (“Armageddon”), fake-authentic historical excess (“Pearl Harbor”) and good old buddy-movie excess (“The Rock” and “Bad Boys”). “Ambulance,” a propulsively violent and in-your-face chase thriller, stakes out a genre we might simply call ’90s excess. Set during one long day in Los Angeles, it’s…