The New Yorker:

Jews in the industry called for the Academy Museum to highlight the men who created the movie business. A voice in my head went, Uh-oh.

By Michael Schulman

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I visited the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which occupies a gleaming Renzo Piano building on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, in Los Angeles. As crowds filed in through the Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby, I passed a miniature replica of the Millennium Falcon and took the escalators up, past a floor containing Don Corleone’s desk from “The Godfather.” Beneath a hanging mechanical shark from “Jaws” is a red carpet leading to a room where you can get a video taken with a real Oscar statuette. Next to that is the entrance to “Hollywoodland: Jewish Founders and the Making of a Movie Capital,” the museum’s first permanent exhibition—and its most controversial.

“Hollywoodland” is the product of multiple rounds of damage control. When the building opened, in the fall of 2021, it became L.A.’s most substantive museum dedicated to the town’s defining art form. It wasn’t just an upscale Planet Hollywood. On the heels of #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, the curators looked the industry’s historical blind spots head on. The multistory, ever-changing “Stories of Cinema” exhibition tackled misogyny in classic animation, the racist barriers overcome by Bruce Lee, Native American stereotypes in old Westerns, and the work of the early Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. There were rooms dedicated to Spike Lee and to Patricia Cardoso’s “Real Women Have Curves.” At a temporary display about the “invisible art” of the backdrop, viewers could gaze up at the painted Mount Rushmore from “North by Northwest”—and also read about how Mount Rushmore itself is “a desecration of sacred land taken from the Oglala Lakota.”

Go to link