Month: March 2018

The White House says Melania Trump will present the International Women of Courage Award later this month.

The first lady also will deliver remarks at a March 21 State Department ceremony recognizing women who have shown courage and leadership in pressing for women’s rights worldwide.

The State Department award began in 2007 to commemorate International Women’s Day, which is Thursday. More than 120 women from more than 65 countries are being honored this year.

The first lady says in a statement that the courage shown by the honorees furthers her belief “in the powerful impact women can make through solidarity and support of one another.” She adds that “our strength is something to be celebrated.”

Mrs. Trump also participated in last year’s awards ceremony.
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The 90th annual Academy Awards were, by any definition, a moment of triumph for Latinos.

Guillermo del Toro became the third Mexican-born filmmaker to win best director, and it was his lavish Cold War fantasy “The Shape of Water” that was crowned best picture. Pixar’s box-office smash “Coco,” the biggest budget studio release to feature a largely Hispanic cast, won best animated feature and best song. Lin-Manuel Miranda reminded viewers of Puerto Rico, rebuilding from Hurricane Maria. Lupita Nyong’o advocated for the Dreamers. Rita Moreno returned, resplendently, in the dress she wore to the Oscars in 1962. And Chile’s “A Fantastic Woman” won best foreign language film.

But the Oscars were also, by any measure, an aberration. As much as Hispanics had the spotlight at Sunday’s ceremony, they are seldom granted center stage by Hollywood the rest of the year.

“It was kind of ironic,” said Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition. “By having so many presenters, you’re presenting that this is a very diversified business when it’s not. You can appreciate that they’re there. But then you can ask yourself: Is this really the way Hollywood is? And the answer is no.”

Despite accounting for 18 percent of the U.S. population, and 23 percent of frequent moviegoers, according to the Motion Picture Association’s 2017 statistics, Hispanics are chronically underrepresented in the movies. A study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism found that only 3 percent of speaking characters in the top 100 movies of 2016 were Latinos.

There were no Latinos among the acting nominees this year, nor are there most years. Demian Bichir (“A Better Life”) was the last Latin American nominated, six years ago. Only a handful of Latino actors have ever won an Oscar, including Moreno, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn and Benicio del Toro.

America Ferrera, in a Deadline column in 2016, wrote: “All audiences want to see the world they live in reflected on screens big and small. At a certain point, it becomes unavoidable to notice that we’re being ignored.” Chris Rock, in a 2014 column for The Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Forget whether Hollywood is black enough. A better question is: Is Hollywood Mexican enough?”

But while (hash)OscarSoWhite brought renewed focus on the industry’s poor track record in diversity, Latinos have often been left out of the discussion.

 

 The National Hispanic Media Coalition held two protests ahead the Oscars, one outside the annual academy luncheon and another in Hollywood on Saturday. But Nogales believes stronger action is necessary. He says that he’s asked each of the six major studios to meet with the watchdog group within the next ten days or the coalition will begin boycotting one studio at a time.

“It’s a take-it or leave-it proposition,” said Nogales, who advocates for more American-born Latinos in media. “We’re 50 million strong so we can hurt people’s bottom line.”

That box-office power has been especially obvious with “Coco,” a film that Pixar shifted during development to tell a more indigenously Mexican story. Adrian Molina was also added as co-director. It’s made $745 million worldwide and set new box-office records in Mexico.

“We started making `Coco’ six years ago and it was a very different political climate, of course, than we find ourselves in now,” director Lee Unkrich told reporters backstage Sunday. “While we were making the film, we had a change of presidency and a lot of things started to be said about Mexico and about Mexican-Americans that was unacceptable.

“We began to feel a new urgency to get the movie out into the world,” he said. “We knew how important it was.”

President Donald Trump, whose immigration policies and pledge to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico has been deeply unpopular among Latinos, followed up the Oscar broadcast by tweeting Monday that Mexico had to do “much more on stopping drugs from pouring into the U.S.”

Del Toro, though, spoke on the Dolby Theatre stage about the power of art to “erase the lines in the sand.” The 53-year-old filmmaker, born in Guadalajara, began his first speech by saying, “I am an immigrant.”

His win joins him with his countrymen, Alejandro Inarritu (“Birdman,” “The Revenant”) and Alfonso Cuaron (“Gravity”) — who are together known as the “Three Amigos” — as the three Mexican-born filmmakers to win best director, and all in the last five years. Long friends who share their scripts with one another and rely on each other for advice, they have together dominated the Oscars for half a decade like few before them.

“Every time we can demonstrate in any forum, be it sports, science, art, culture, anywhere, what we have to bring to the world discourse, to the world conversation, is extremely important,” del Toro said backstage. “And it’s extremely important when we do it to remember where we’re from, because it’s honoring your roots, honoring your country.”
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Storm Reid tried to play it cool when Ava DuVernay told her she’d gotten the lead role in Disney’s “A Wrinkle in Time,” but it wasn’t long before the tears started flowing.

“I flipped out,” says Reid, now 14 and in the ninth grade.

The Atlanta-native started acting at age 3 after she told her mother that she wanted to be a “stuperstar.” She’s had bit roles in television (“NCIS: Los Angeles,” ”Chicago P.D.”) and film (“12 Years a Slave,” ”Sleight”), but nothing even close to something like “A Wrinkle in Time.” As the heroine Meg Murry, she is in nearly every frame, navigating mean girls at school, the loss of her father and even interdimensional travel.

“It’s such an important story to be told,” says Reid, who had done a book report on the Madeleine L’Engle novel in the 6th grade. “She goes on this beautiful journey and finds herself and becomes more accepting and learns that she is worthy of being loved.”

DuVernay saw Reid very early on in the casting process and said every girl after had to measure up to her. Eventually she trusted her initial impulse and went back to Reid.

“This whole thing doesn’t work if you don’t have a great Meg. She goes from completely depressed to defiant to exuberant to joyful to determined to fighting evil. It’s every emotion,” says DuVernay. “She has the whole thing on her shoulders. She’s incredible.”

The experience of filming “A Wrinkle in Time” was incredible, Reid says, not only because it meant acting alongside the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Chris Pine, but because of DuVernay’s set.

“Our set was so inclusive with women and men and different races and sexualities. It was kind of like the United Nations,” Reid says. “She has a beautiful vision and a beautiful mind.”

Reid looks up to actors like Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep and Natalie Portman and loves movies like “Hidden Figures” that tell stories that aren’t so widely known. She appreciated that all of her A-list co-stars were humble and down to earth and says that she is still just a normal teenager with a normal life outside of acting.

She says people keep telling her how much she’s going to change with her new raised profile. But Winfrey disagrees.

“Miss Oprah told me those people are not right,” Reid says. “She told me, ‘You’re going to stay the same but the people around you are going to change.’ I feel like I’ll be recognized more once the movie comes out but I’m still the same girl.”
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Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Miranda Lambert and pop singer Bebe Rexha with Florida Georgia Line will be performing at the Academy of Country Music Awards in April.

The ACMs announced the first round of performers Wednesday, which also included Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, Maren Morris and Thomas Rhett.

Rexha and Florida Georgia Line will be performing their hit crossover duet “Meant to Be,” which has been a top hit on Billboard’s Hot Country chart for 14 weeks straight.

The leading nominees this year include Chris Stapleton with eight nominations and Rhett with six nominations.

The 53rd ACM Awards will be broadcast live on CBS from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on April 15.
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Architect and educator Balkrishna Doshi, best-known for his innovative work designing low-cost housing, has been awarded the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the first Indian to win architecture’s highest honor in its 40-year history.

The award was announced Wednesday by Tom Pritzker of the Chicago-based Hyatt Foundation.

Doshi has been an architect, urban planner, and educator for 70 years. The foundation called the 90-year-old’s work “poetic and functional,” and noted his ability to create works that both respect eastern culture and enhance quality of life in India.

Among Doshi’s achievements: the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, which accommodates over 80,000 people, many of them poor, through a system of houses, courtyards and internal pathways.

Reached at home in the western city of Ahmedabad, Doshi said his life’s work has been “to empower the have-nots, the people who have nothing.”

The housing itself, he said, can transform how residents see their world. “Now, their life has changed. They feel hopeful,” he said. “They have ownership of something.”

He called the prize an honor both for for himself and for India.

“What I have done for close to the last 60 years, working in rural areas, working in low-cost housing, worrying about India’s future. Now all this comes together and gives me a chance to say “Here we are!” he said.

Doshi was influenced early by two of the great 20th-century architects, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn.

The prize citation noted how their influence “can be seen in the robust forms of concrete which he employed.”

But he grew into his own. “With an understanding and appreciation of the deep traditions of India’s architecture, he united prefabrication and local craft and developed a vocabulary in harmony with the history, culture, local traditions and the changing times of his home country India,” the citation read.

Doshi’s work ranges from the blocky, concrete Life Insurance Corporation Housing buildings in Ahmedabad to the naturalist curves of that city’s Amdavad ni Gufa underground art gallery.

“My work is the story of my life, continuously evolving, changing and searching . searching to take away the role of architecture, and look only at life,” the prize announcement quoted him as saying.

While the work of Pritzker winners are often scattered across the globe, Doshi is known for working almost completely in his homeland, designing buildings for government offices, companies and universities.

Born in 1927 in the city of Pune, Doshi studied architecture in Mumbai and later worked under Le Corbusier, overseeing his projects in the cities of Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. He was the founding director of Ahmedabad’s School of Architecture and Planning, which is now known as CEPT University.

He founded his own practice in 1956, and lives and works in Ahmedabad.

Doshi will be formally awarded the prize in a May ceremony at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
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After Chinese New Year in Cambodia, Cambodians believe powerful spirits ascend to possess the living.
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Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until the age of 32.

It’s an extraordinary fact, considering the trajectories of most Hollywood directors. Orson Welles filmed Citizen Kane at 25. Steven Spielberg was 27 when he made Jaws. A 23-year-old John Singleton directed Boyz N the Hood.

It was already doubtful that DuVernay could jump from a career in film marketing and publicity so late and without even a film degree to back her up. That she is also a black woman made it even more unlikely.

But in just 13 years, DuVernay has successfully and improbably risen to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry, as a filmmaker, producer and agent of change, breaking down barriers and smashing ceilings wherever she sets her sights. 

Now, at 45, she has an Oscar-nomination (for the documentary The 13th), a historic Golden Globe nomination (for Selma, she was the first black female director to get that recognition) and has also become the first woman of color to get over $100 million to make a live-action movie. That film, A Wrinkle in Time, with its $103 million production budget, opens nationwide Friday.

The Walt Disney Co. acquired the rights to Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning 1962 novel in 2010, and it went through various writers and budget points. The story about an awkward 13-year-old girl, Meg Murry, who travels through time and space, was a notoriously unwieldy one that carried the dreaded “un-filmable” stigma.

“I was shocked that they called me,” says DuVernay. “I’d done Selma and The 13th. How did they even think that would work? But they did. And when they said I could make her a girl of color, it just grabbed my whole heart.”

DuVernay set off to do the impossible — make a big budget, kids-targeted sci-fi blockbuster with an unknown 13-year-old black actress (Storm Reid, now 14) as the lead.

“I think it’s incredible that Disney made the decision to hire Ava on this and gave her the creative control to cast whoever she wanted,” says Reese Witherspoon, who co-stars in the film as one of the mystical “Mrs.” alongside Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling.

‘Film is forever’

Winfrey, Witherspoon and Kaling, all hardworking multi-hyphenates themselves, marveled at DuVernay’s tireless work ethic and attention to detail. Once she even sent costume designer Paco Delgado back to hand paint hundreds of eyes on one of Winfrey’s costumes because that’s what she had seen in the concept drawing.

“I was like, ‘I think it’s fine without the eyes? I think it’s OK!’ Winfrey recalled.

DuVernay laughed that Winfrey recounted that moment.

“She came out and everyone applauded for the dress and it was extraordinary,” DuVernay explains. “But I looked and I said, ‘Well on the sketch there were little eyes. Where are those?’ And he was like, ‘Well this looks good too.’ And I’m like, ‘Well let’s go take a look at that anyway.”

Asking for what she needs, and wants, is something DuVernay has learned as she’s gotten older.

“Film is forever,” she says. “It’s cemented. You’ve got to do it right now and it’s got to be the best it can be. So, let’s go back and put the eyes on the dress.”

Witherspoon says she has never met a director who spends so much time talking about others: Acknowledging everyone’s contributions in a cast and crew of hundreds, and then spending weekends talking about other people’s work too, from Patty Jenkins to Ryan Coogler.

DuVernay always has something in the works. She’s afraid if she slows down, it might all go away.

“I just feel like I have a short window in this industry. There is no precedent for a black woman making films consistently. There are beautiful black women directors but there are seven-year, six-year gaps between them,” she says. “Even though people tell me it’s OK, I think it’s all going to stop tomorrow. I want to do as much as I can do when I can. It’s not unreasonable, you know? Tomorrow they can say, ‘No we don’t want you to make movies anymore.”‘

And, indeed, there is still that idea that female filmmakers are not given second chances, even when they succeed. It’s something DuVernay thinks about often.

“I look at Guy Ritchie. That guy is bulletproof,” she says. “He can make something that doesn’t work. The next week he’s the director of another thing. I look at him and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic.’ But that wouldn’t have been Patty Jenkins and it won’t be me.”

Planting a seed

Initial tracking suggests that A Wrinkle in Time may open in the mid-$30 million range, which might not even be enough to unseat Disney’s “Black Panther” (which DuVernay passed on directing) from the No. 1 spot.

Wrinkle, however, is film that is first and foremost for children ages 8 to 12, DuVernay says. Before a screening she asked the audience to try to watch it through the eyes of a child — an unusual request for something from an already very kid-friendly studio like Disney which makes films for the younger set that nonetheless appeal to a wide swath of ages.

Critics reviews are under embargo until Wednesday, and social media reactions so far have been unusually sparse for a film this big. DuVernay says of the critics that, “Some of them will see what we tried to do. Some of them, it’s not [going to be] for them. It is what it is.”

And it’s the film she wanted to make, for the 12-year-old her, and for someone like Kaling, who says that she always loved sci-fi but that it never loved her back.

“I’ll always direct things but who knows if that price point ever comes again. I’m OK with that. This is a big swing,” DuVernay says. “But the chance to put a black girl in flight? I will risk it. I risk it for those images. It may not hit now, but somewhere a Mindy Kaling, a chubby girl with glasses and brown skin will see it and it will mean something. Or, a Caucasian boy will see how a black girl says, ‘Do you trust me’ and the Caucasian boy says, ‘I trust you,’ and he follows her. Just to plant that seed and say that’s OK, you can follow a girl? Those images? I’ll risk it. I’ll risk it for that.”
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She is known as “nonna” in Italian, “abuelita” in Spanish and “Grandma” in English. But across cultures, the grandmother is the matriarch and foundation on which the family unit is built.

In ethnically diverse East Boston, home to a large immigrant community, a new mural serves as a visual tribute to grandmothers and the values that residents of what is known as “Eastie” share across ethnic lines.

“It makes me feel identified,” Salvadoran-native Guadalupe Gonzalez said of the mural, known as “Immigrant Grandmothers,” which stands tall underneath an overpass along a park known as the East Boston Greenway.

“I identify with these grandmothers that came with nothing, [like me], that came with a dream,” said Gonzalez, a 59-year-old mother of two and grandmother of four. She shares a powder-blue, triple-decker home with two other immigrant families from El Salvador in what is now an area comprising mainly immigrants from Latin America.

Gonzalez’s East Boston neighborhood, located about a kilometer from the mural, reflects the changing demographics throughout the port city’s history. 

Heidi Schork, director of the Mayor’s Mural Crew of the City of Boston, conceived of the idea for the mural after noticing more elderly women on the streets than in other areas of the city — “going to market, sweeping the sidewalks and going to medical appointments.”

“I noticed, in looking over a lot of reference photos, that the posture of making tortillas and making pasta is exactly the same,” Schork said, an example that transpired into three centerpiece grandmothers.

Among other motifs are local churches, a topic Schork said “broke the ice immediately” among Italian and Central American grandmothers, along with polka-dotted dresses — “the international grandmother outfit.”

Left of the mural’s center, one such immaculately dressed older woman stands proudly beside her young granddaughter, who is wearing an organza dress to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation, a rite of passage in the Catholic Church.

“It had these little pleats in the front of it, and you had the little white gloves,” Diane Modica, an East Boston-based lawyer, said of an outfit she once wore when she was a child, in the company of her grandmother. “My grandmother standing next to me, it evokes such memories.”

WATCH: Women with Ties to Mural Discuss its Significance

​United by purpose

Modica, the granddaughter of early 20th-century Sicilian immigrants, lives in the same house that her family bought in 1922. Although the immigrants of her diverse neighborhood come from vastly different origins than a century ago, Modica says they are united by their reasons for settling.

“They’re not doing anything different than what we did,” Modica said, “which is come over, work hard, raise their family, take care of their family and hope for a better future.”

The completed artwork presents typical East Boston homes, together with villages of southern Italy and Central America. It is one of a series of City of Boston mural projects inspired by a larger national campaign “To Immigrants With Love.”

“People here are really linked to where they came from, even if it was generations ago,” Celina Barrios-Millner, Immigration Integration Fellow at the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, told VOA.

“We want to connect that pride and that love for today’s immigrants, as well.”

Like the women in the mural and near her Boston home, Gonzalez believes in the value of hard work, and looks up to labor leaders and civil rights activists such as Dolores Huerta and the late Cesar Chavez.

She credits her achievements as a house cleaner to provide for her youngest son’s education in El Salvador, and now — she hopes — the next generation, too.

But for those achievements to be possible, she counts longevity among her blessings.

“[Life] doesn’t take years away,” Gonzalez said. “The years give you life!”
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Grammy-winning Latin rapper Residente will receive the BMI Champion Award at the BMI Latin Awards this month.

 

The performing rights organization says in a statement Tuesday that Residente will be the first act to receive the honor in the 25-year history of its Latin Awards.

The event takes place March 20 in Beverly Hills, California.

 

Residente is best known for his work in the Puerto Rican rap group Calle 13. He is the most decorated Latin Grammy act of all time with 24 wins.

 

Residente’s self-titled solo debut, released last year, won him a Grammy in January. He will receive the BMI honor for his career achievements and philanthropy.

 

“Despacito” hitmaker Luis Fonsi will earn the BMI President’s Award at the event, which honors Latin music’s top songwriters and publishers.
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With her brusque style, salty language and emphasis on discipline, 92-year-old youth soccer coach Maria Angelica Ramos is helping to turn young children into fully fledged footballers in Peru.

Ramos, known by her players as “the Old Lady,” has been a coach for almost half a century, most of them at Lima’s America Mimi Sporting Club.

Some 1,000 players have run laps and completed drills under her strict eye and even though her health is failing the nonagenarian task master is still going strong.

She has earned the affection of her young charges, who see Ramos as their “second mother.”

“The ‘Viejita’ is a really good lady,” said Luis Ignacio Ore Marin, one of her players.

“She’s like a second mother to us, and when she trains us, when she says things that — I shouldn’t say them — it’s for our own good. Because, we have to learn and to understand that we have to be strong.”

With no family of her own, Ramos has dedicated much of her life to the children she trains and said that with her health deteriorating she values their companionship more than ever.

“I live alone, I don’t have a family, I don’t have children, I don’t have anyone,” she said. “Before, I didn’t miss it, but now I’ve been sick, so I see the need for someone to be with me.”

“I’m going to keep going as long as God wants me to. I don’t know, but I think I’m going to die on some (soccer) pitch, but I’m going to keep going with this.”
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A note written by Albert Einstein to an Italian woman scientist who had declined to meet him sold at auction Tuesday along with a batch of other letters left by the renowned physicist.

“To the scientific researcher, at whose feet I slept and sat for two full days, as a friendly souvenir,” reads the note in his native German, signed and dated October 1921, which fetched $6,100 at Winner’s Auctions & Exhibitions in Jerusalem.

The auction house said Einstein, then 42 and soon to win the Nobel Prize, wrote the letter to Elisabetta Piccini, a chemistry student half his age who lived one floor above his sister, Maja, in Florence.

During a visit to the city, “Einstein was very interested in meeting her. However, Elisabetta was introverted and too shy to meet with such a famous person,” Winner’s said on its website.

Also sold Tuesday for $103,000 was a 1928 note in which the auction house said Einstein outlined ideas for his “Third Stage of the Theory of Relativity.” A 1946 English-language letter of encouragement that he penned to an American World War II veteran who aspired to be a scientist also fetched $6,100.

Last October, Winner’s sold another Einstein letter, a 1922 meditation on happiness that he wrote upon learning he had won the Nobel, for $1.3 million.
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In 1932, Pablo Picasso was 50 years old and art critics were asking whether he was yesterday’s man.

He proved them wrong with an outpouring of creativity that is charted in the exhibition “Picasso 1932 — Love, Fame Tragedy,” opening this week at London’s Tate Modern gallery.

More than 100 paintings, drawings and sculptures, all from 1932, show Picasso’s influences, including his rivalry with Henri Matisse, his interest in psychoanalysis and his passion for younger lover Marie-Therese Walter.

Walter inspired some of the Spanish artist’s greatest portraits, one of which sold at Sotheby’s last week for almost 50 million pounds ($70 million.)

Three nudes of Walter, painted over a five-day period and not displayed together since 1932, are at the heart of a show that explores the interplay between Picasso’s work and his life — especially his complicated love life.

In 1932, the artist was living in Paris with his wife Olga Khokhlova and their son Paulo, while having a relationship with Walter, who was 28 years his junior.

Co-curator Nancy Ireson said at a preview Tuesday that the exhibition offered “an incredible opportunity to get really close to Picasso.”

“We’re used to seeing him as an iconic artist, but here we really get to the person and to the heart of his creativity,” she said. “Without making judgment, it makes an iconic figure more relatable.”

Picasso’s career lasted seven decades — he died at 91 in 1973 — but 1932 was one of his most fertile years. Walter, with her strong aquiline nose, inspired paintings, drawings and sculptures that absorbed and transcended styles including cubism and surrealism.

In March alone he produced the three nudes — “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” ″Nude in a Black Armchair” and “The Mirror” — as well another portrait, “Girl Before a Mirror,” which is on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The show also includes “The Dream,” a vividly colored portrait of Walter considered among Picasso’s greatest works. It was once owned by Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn, who put his elbow through the canvas in 2006 just after agreeing to sell it for $139 million.

Olga left Picasso in 1935 when Walter became pregnant, around the time the artist moved on to a new mistress and muse, Dora Maar.

Picasso’s treatment of women has often been criticized, but Diana Widmaier Picasso, granddaughter of the artist and Walter, said “this traditional idea of Picasso being a monster” was simplistic.

She said Picasso’s passion for Walter “led him to explore different mediums including sculpture, print, drawing.”

“He’s making love with all these mediums, not just with Marie-Therese,” she said. “It’s a consecration of Marie-Therese, who he’s transforming into a figure of peace and freedom.”

The exhibition runs Thursday to Sept. 9. It previously ran, without the three March 1932 nudes, at the Picasso Museum in Paris — where it was given the more suggestive title “Picasso 1932: Erotic Year.”

Grandson Olivier Widmaier Picasso said looking at his grandfather’s erotically charged paintings of his grandmother could be awkward.

“The sexuality is a part that I don’t want to discuss most of the time — no one does,” he said.

But, he added, “it’s very important to show the public that for every subject, every model, there was a direct relationship between the artist and the model.”
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The former chief of staff for former first lady Michelle Obama will head The Recording Academy’s new task force focused on inclusion and diversity.

The academy announced Tuesday that Tina Tchen, a veteran lawyer who is also working on the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, will chair the new initiative. The Grammys announced the task force after its CEO drew criticism for saying women need to “step up” when asked about the lack of female winners backstage at its 60th awards show, held in January.

The task force plans to uncover unconscious biases and other barriers that impede women’s success in the music industry.

Tchen says in a statement it’s “an important initial step by the Recording Academy to demonstrate its commitment to tackling these challenges in a comprehensive way.”
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