U.S. Olympic Committee Chief Executive Scott Blackmun is resigning for health reasons, the organization said Wednesday, following months of sustained criticism in the wake of the sex abuse scandal involving former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar.

In a statement, the USOC cited Blackmun’s “ongoing health issues” related to prostate cancer, for which he has been receiving treatment. The group also announced new reforms aimed at protecting its athletes from abuse.

The USOC, which announced the change less than a week after the Winter Olympics ended in South Korea, had resisted calls to fire Blackmun over the Nassar case.

“Given Scott’s current health situation, we have mutually agreed it is in the best interest of both Scott and the USOC that we identify new leadership so that we can immediately address the urgent initiatives ahead of us,” USOC Chairman Larry Probst said in a statement.

“The important work that Scott started needs to continue and will require especially vigorous attention in light of Larry Nassar’s decades-long abuse of athletes affiliated with USA Gymnastics,” Probst added.

200 accusers

Nassar pleaded guilty of molesting female athletes under the guise of medical treatment and was sentenced to life in prison. Around 200 women, including several Olympic gold medalists, have accused Nassar of abuse.

The scandal prompted the entire board of directors at USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body in the United States, to resign, along with the president and athletic director at Michigan State University, where Nassar also worked.

A series of criminal and civil investigations were launched into the USOC, USA Gymnastics and Michigan State after numerous accusers said their complaints about Nassar’s treatments were ignored for years.

USOC board member Susanne Lyons, who in January was chosen to lead a working group to address problems that the Nassar case had exposed, will serve as acting CEO while the organization searches for a permanent replacement.

The USOC will increase funding for support and counseling for victims as well as investigations into abuse allegations, among other reforms, according to the statement.
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The will of “To Kill a Mockingbird” author Harper Lee is public following a lawsuit by The New York Times, but details on her estate remain a secret.

The Times reports the will unsealed Tuesday shows most of Lee’s assets were transferred into a trust days before her death two years ago in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.

But the contents of her estate remain private because trust documents are private.

A probate court sealed the will of the famously private writer following her death, and the newspaper filed suit in 2016 to have the document made public. The suit argued that Lee’s desire for privacy wasn’t sufficient legal reason to keep her will hidden from public view.

Records show the estate recently dropped its opposition to unsealing the will.
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The International Olympic Committee has reinstated Russia’s membership after suspending it over state-sponsored doping allegations.

“The Russian Olympic Committee has had its rights fully restored,” said Alexander Zhukov, the president of the Russian Olympic Committee.

The IOC had banned Russian athletes from competing under the country’s flag during the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea because of allegations Russia ran a state-sponsored doping program during the last Winter Olympics, in Sochi in 2014. However, the Olympic Committee allowed more than 160 Russians to compete individually at the 2018 Games.

Two of the Russian athletes failed drug tests at the Pyeongchang Games. However, the IOC said Wednesday that all remaining test results were negative.

“The IOC can confirm that all the remaining results are negative. Therefore, as stated in the Executive Board decision of 25th February, the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee is automatically lifted with immediate effect,” an IOC statement said.

Russia repeatedly has denied it carried out a doping operation.  
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A sea of mourning fans turned out in Mumbai Wednesday to bid an emotional farewell to famed Bollywood actress Sridevi Kapoor, four days after she drowned in a hotel bathtub in Dubai, where she had gone to attend a wedding.

The sudden death of the 54-year-old actress, who won the hearts of Indians with a string of box office hits in the 1980s and 1990s, has prompted an outpouring of grief in India, where Bollywood is a rage.

In the morning, tens of thousands of grieving fans, some clutching flowers, waited patiently in serpentine lines to pay tribute to her at a private club where her body was kept so they could catch a final glimpse of her.

Huge crowds also stood on the roadside or followed a flower-bedecked truck bearing a giant poster of the star as it began its six-kilometer journey to a crematorium amid a tight security cordon. Sridevi’s body was draped in the Indian flag as she was cremated with state honors.

Her sendoff befitted an actress who was called Bollywood’s first female superstar.

Geetanjali Prasad, 33, is one of the millions who have been in mourning since waking up Sunday to news of Sridevi’s death.

“We’ve grown up watching all her movies and danced on so many songs of hers. I am getting emotional as I speak right now,” she said.

Besides ordinary people, a steady stream of Bollywood celebrities paid tribute to Sridevi. Her death was first attributed to cardiac arrest, but later authorities in Dubai called it a case of “accidental drowning.”

The actress had been lavished with praise and titles reserved for those who make it to the very top in Bollywood: “Icon,” “Queen of Bollywood,” and “Megastar.”

What made her win her way into Indian hearts? “There is a genuine connection people had with her,” according to Bollywood filmmaker, Sudhir Mishra, for whom the actress “epitomized the Indian film star” and an era of “popular filmmaking in India.”

“You take her in a musical, in a dance film, take her in an absolutely realistic film, take her in a romcom (romantic comedy); here is a person who is so malleable and so versatile and so skillful. She was a brilliant actress and a star,” Mishra said, adding with a touch of regret, “They don’t make stars like that anymore.”

Sridevi starred in about 300 films in her career, starting out as a child actor in south India, and making her debut in Bollywood in 1978, where she soon made her mark. She is best remembered for her role as an investigative journalist in the 1987 blockbuster Mr. India. Besides Bollywood, she starred in many films in southern India and was awarded the country’s fourth highest civilian honor, the Padma Shree.   

Not only were many of her movies massive box office hits, she was one of the first people to win accolades for carrying films to success on her own shoulders in a country where film heroes tend to play the lead role.

She retired from acting after her marriage in 1997, but returned to prove her mettle yet again in two movies – English Vinglish in 2012 and Mom last year.

“She was truly pan-Indian,” filmmaker Mishra pointed out as millions of people from household maids to executives took out time to watch television coverage of her funeral or just share a thought about her. “What the film industry does — it is one of the things that binds the country in a sense in a complex nation. It is quite important, these all India kind of icons,” he said.
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Aside from the posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight) and best animated film for The Incredibles, no superhero film has ever penetrated the top categories of the Academy Awards.

Though regular honorees for their bombastic visual effects or thunderous, wall-to-wall sound, comic-book movies have been denied the upper reaches of achievement. Marvel Studios — one of the most dominant pop-culture juggernauts the movies have ever seen — hasn’t won a single Academy Award.

But there are signs that the deep freeze for superheroes is thawing. Logan, James Mangold’s acclaimed final chapter of Wolverine, the long-clawed X-Men character played by Hugh Jackman, is nominated for best adapted screenplay at Sunday’s awards. The nod, which Mangold shares with co-writers Michael Green and Scott Frank, is the first screenplay nomination for a superhero film.

That could be read as a sign that the film academy is finally starting to give in to the era’s most bankable box-office force. Last year, Deadpool seemingly came just shy of scaling the Dolby Theatre walls after a quixotic awards campaign netted the hyper-violent and hyper-verbal R-rated film two Golden Globe nominations. This year, Patty Jenkins’ female empowerment blockbuster Wonder Woman was considered a definite contender but came up short despite a nod from the Producers Guild. 

A tide may be turning just as the sensation and acclaim of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther has positioned the Marvel release to be a potential heavyweight at next year’s Academy Awards. A decade after Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was denied a best picture nomination — an omission that sparked the academy’s expansion of the best picture field from five films to up to 10 — Black Panther is poised to score the first best-picture nod for a superhero film, not to mention potentially a host of other categories including directing, costume design, visual effects, production design, score and, maybe, Michael B. Jordan as supporting actor.

​Expanding the possibilities

Any shift for the academy, though, may be less about changing tastes than the rising ambitions of filmmakers — like Coogler, Jenkins, James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) and Mangold — who are expanding the possibilities of the genre.

“It’s people opening up to consider something that might have been seen wholly as a money-making effort to see that in some cases these films might constitute more ambition than previously imagined,” Mangold said of his nomination in an interview. “It’s a stepping stone and it won’t be the last.”

Mangold is a veteran of star-led but naturalistic character-driven dramas (Walk the Line, Cop Land). In Logan he endeavored to, like a revolution launched from within, invert most of the genre’s conventions. Its title bares no sequel-signifying numbers, just a simple, unadorned name. Logan connects to no future installment but, after a 17-year run for Jackman’s character, has the finality of death. Where other superhero films are all heroism and invincibility, the violent, R-rated Logan — styled after a Western — is filled with pain and vulnerability. It’s a human-sized movie in a supersized genre.

“I wanted to make my own kind of commentary about this kind of film, the comic-book film if you will, where there’s huge amounts of casualties but they are largely unfelt by the audience,” said Mangold. “Cities fall. Planets explode. Extras fall and topple. But the actual ending of lives is not felt. In a quest for scale, lives become cheap.”

Mangold speaks with both optimism for superhero movies that can take the mold of any genre (“There’s infinite possibility”) and derision for the assembly-line product that Hollywood has often favored that give a filmmaker little room for personal expression.

“At the point you’re locked into all the design, casting and story choices that have already been made, you’re hamstrung,” said Mangold. “It’s why films like Guardians or Black Panther or Wonder Woman where they break free of some of the narrative-lock and style-lock that was coming from the previous films that I think you get the biggest sense of freshness.”

Benefits of popularity

Logan grossed $616.8 million, vindicating the risk that Mangold and 20th Century Fox took in deviating from formula. It was relatively cheap by superhero movie standards with a production budget of $97 million. The film opened all the way back on March 3, after premiering at the Berlin Film Festival, with little expectation of being remembered in Oscar season.

Disney’s Black Panther may do even better at next year’s Oscars for many of the same reasons. It largely stands apart from Marvel’s cinematic universe. It eschews many of the typical beats of a superhero film. And it’s identifiably the work of a filmmaker. 

“If it gets in, it has more to do with Ryan Coogler than it does with any of the phenomenon around it,” said Glen Weldon, author of The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. “This film feels like the third film that a guy named Ryan Coogler would make. Though it’s part of this arc, it does feel very personal. It does feel like it’s about something.” 

With Academy Awards ratings falling in recent years, the broadcast could certainly benefit from welcoming the most popular movies on the planet into the show. That would be quite a turnaround for the Oscars, where the closest a superhero film has come to winning best picture was when Alejandro Inarritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) took the award in 2015. But that movie, starring Michael Keaton as a former superhero star, vilified the genre as a scourge for art.

“When people tell me — and they tell me very often — ‘I hate superhero films and they’re all same,'” said Weldon, “I tell them, ‘Yes, they have been but they don’t have to be.'”
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Should any of this year’s winners at the Oscars use the occasion to promote a political cause, you can thank — or blame — Marlon Brando.

Brando’s role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather remains a signature performance in movie history. But his response to winning an Academy Award was truly groundbreaking.

Upending a decades-long tradition of tears, nervous humor, thank-yous and general goodwill, he sent actress Sacheen Littlefeather in his place to the 1973 ceremony to protest Hollywood’s treatment of American Indians.

In the years since, winners have brought up everything from climate change (Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant, 2016) to abortion (John Irving, screenplay winner in 2000) to equal pay for women (Patricia Arquette, best supporting actress winner in 2015 for Boyhood).

“Speeches for a long time were relatively quiet in part because of the control of the studio system,” said James Piazza, who with Gail Kinn wrote The Academy Awards: The Complete History of Oscar, published in 2002. “There had been some controversy, like when George C. Scott refused his Oscar for Patton [which came out in 1970]. But Brando’s speech really broke the mold.”

Producers for this year’s Oscars show have said they want to emphasize the movies themselves, but between the #MeToo movement and Hollywood’s general disdain for President Donald Trump, political or social statements appear likely at the March 4 ceremony.

Salutes for speaking out

Winners at January’s Golden Globes citing the treatment of women included Laura Dern and Reese Witherspoon, who thanked “everyone who broke their silence this year.” Honorary Globe winner Oprah Winfrey, in a speech that had some encouraging her to run for president, noted that “women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up. Their time is up.”

Before Brando, winners avoided making news even if the time was right and the audience never bigger. Gregory Peck, who won for best actor in 1963 as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, said nothing about the film’s racial theme even though he frequently spoke about it in interviews. When Sidney Poitier became the first black to win best actor, for Lilies of the Field in 1964, he spoke of the “long journey” that brought him to the stage, but otherwise made no comment on his milestone.

When Jane Fonda, the most politicized of actresses, won for Klute in 1972, her speech was brief and uneventful. “There’s a great deal to say, but I’m not going to say it tonight,” she stated. “I would just like to thank you very much.”

Political movements from anti-communism to civil rights were mostly ignored in their time. According to the movie academy’s database of Oscar speeches, the term “McCarthyism” was not used until 2014, when Harry Belafonte mentioned it upon receiving the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. “Vietnam” was not spoken until the ceremony held April 8, 1975, just weeks before North Vietnamese troops overran Saigon.

No winner said the words “civil rights” until George Clooney in 2006, as he accepted a supporting actor Oscar for Syriana. Vanessa Redgrave’s fiery 1978 acceptance speech was the first time a winner said “fascism” or “anti-Semitism.”

​Comments linked to movies

Political or social comments were often safely connected to the movie. Celeste Holm, who won best supporting actress in 1948 for Gentleman’s Agreement, referred indirectly to the film’s message of religious tolerance. Rod Steiger won best actor in 1968 for the racial drama In the Heat of the Night and thanked his co-star, Poitier, for giving him the “knowledge and understanding of prejudice.” The ceremony was held just days after the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose name was never cited by Oscar winners in his lifetime, and Steiger ended by invoking a civil rights anthem: “And we shall overcome.”

Hollywood is liberal-land, but the academy often squirms at political speeches. Redgrave was greeted with boos when she assailed “Zionist hoodlums” while accepting the Oscar for Julia, a response to criticism from far-right Jews for narrating a documentary about the Palestinians. She was rebutted the same night: Paddy Chayevsky, giving the award for best screenplay, declared that he was “sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own propaganda.”

Producer Bert Schneider and director Peter Davis, collaborators on the 1974 Oscar-winning Vietnam War documentary Hearts and Minds, both condemned the war by name (they were the first winners to do so), welcomed North Vietnam’s impending victory and even read a telegram from the Viet Cong. An enraged Bob Hope, an Oscar presenter and longtime Republican, prepared a statement and gave it to Frank Sinatra, who was to introduce the screenplay award: “The academy is saying, ‘We are not responsible for any political references made on the program, and we are sorry they had to take place this evening.’ ” 

​Moore draws boos

In 2003, Michael Moore received a mixed response after his documentary on guns, Bowling for Columbine, won for best documentary. The filmmaker ascended the stage to a standing ovation, but the mood soon shifted as he attacked George W. Bush as a “fictitious president” and charged him with sending soldiers to Iraq for “fictitious reasons.” The boos were loud enough for host Steve Martin to joke that “right now, the teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.”

Sometimes, the academy tries to head off any statements before they’re made. Whoopi Goldberg, host of the 1994 show, hurried out a list of causes during her opening monologue.

“Save the whales. Save the spotted owl. Gay rights. Men’s rights. Women’s rights. Human rights. Feed the homeless. More gun control. Free the Chinese dissidents. Peace in Bosnia. Health care reform. Choose choice. ACT UP. More AIDS research,” she said, before throwing in jokes about Sinatra, Lorena Bobbitt and earthquakes.

The audience laughed and cheered.
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After dusk in Havana, an ice-blue neon sign illuminates the faded facade of the Cine El Megano, one of many abandoned movie houses in the Cuban capital, lighting up a once vibrant corner at the heart of the Caribbean city that had gone pitch black in recent decades.

The glowing neon italic letters fill the building’s colonial facade with an art deco accent between the doors below and the wraparound balcony above. It is the work of Cuban artist Kadir Lopez Nieves, who is restoring the vintage signs of the cinemas, hotels and cabarets that lit up Havana’s nightlife in its 1950s heyday.

His project, dubbed “Habana Light Neon + Signs,” has so far restored around 50 signs, reflecting a broader revival in Havana. The city, one of the architectural jewels of Latin America, has been enjoying a tourism boom.

“They called it the Broadway or Paris of the Caribbean because it had so much light and brilliance,” said Lopez Nieves, during an interview in his workshop and gallery. “But when I started out the project … Havana was switched off in terms of light.”

After Fidel Castro’s 1959 leftist revolution, many of Havana’s ritzy entertainment venues, often run by American mobsters and frequented by the rich and famous, were shuttered or slowly became run-down.

Effects of weather

Over the decades, tropical weather wrought havoc on their neon signs. The communist-run island, laboring under a U.S. embargo, often lacked the funds and know-how to fix them.

As elsewhere, other forms of lighting, such as LEDs, proved cheaper and the ornate neon signs were abandoned. 

Lopez Nieves set about restoring the neon lights of a dozen cinemas as a project for the Havana Biennial arts festival in 2015. His work delighted locals.

“It’s lending more life to the city at night,” said Alberto Echavarria, 68, guarding a parking area down the road from the Cine Megano. He said the sign recalled the once “fabulous” ambiance of the neighborhood, which lies close to Havana’s neo-classical Capitol Building.

Shining incandescent from afar, the sign also helped to make the run-down area more salubrious by chasing away shady characters, he said.

“Obscure zones would go from being marginal to being photographed,” said Lopez Nieves, who then started restoring other neon signs, using historic documents such as old photographs for guidance. “A personal project turned into a social project.”

The initiative has become self-financing, thanks to the ale of new commercial signs to Cuba’s fledgling private sector, costing between $200 and $3,000.

Close to Havana’s seafront, the Bar Cabana sign flashes red, while around the corner the La Farmacia restaurant sign burns white.

​Tropicana lights

Lopez Nieves says he has a large contract to restore the lights at Havana’s famed Tropicana nightclub, which in its prime boasted famous patrons such as Hollywood stars Frank Sinatra and Humphrey Bogart.

Amid a global neon revival, the initiative started attracting enthusiasts from all over the world, who offered their expertise, he said.

“I love [neon] because it’s an organic light that lives and breathes. And then to discover an entire city — it’s almost like finding a treasure box,” Jeff Friedman, who runs a New York neon sign manufacturing company, said during a trip to Havana.

Foreign expertise has come in handy, Lopez Nieves said. There are only a few craftsmen left in Cuba who know how to bend the neon tubes into letters and fill them with gas to create different colors.

Lopez Nieves hopes to safeguard that knowledge with his next project: the creation of a neon center in the abandoned art deco cinema Cine Rex. It would host a museum and workshops, as well as a store for new and classic designs. He plans to open it in December.

“Neon is having an important revival,” he said, “and I’m glad we’re part of that.”
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