New York Awards 2003


Movies


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Lifetime Achievement

PHOTOGRAPHED BY RICHARD PHIBBS

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Tim Robbins
Tim Robbins has survived Bill O’Reilly diatribes, Lloyd Grove innuendo, and a starring role in Howard the Duck. He’s been publicly chastised for talking about AIDS at the Oscars and been threatened with boycotts for protesting Bushes I and II. Yet his critics don’t stop him. A Rangers fan who grew up in the Village, he played cinema’s most cynical studio exec in The Player, then emerged as one of the industry’s few real-life idealists. He promptly leveraged his success in The Shawshank Redemption and Bull Durham to write and direct Bob Roberts, Dead Man Walking, and Cradle Will Rock, movies that never would have been made by someone with less conviction. This year, in Mystic River, he was at his best again as the lumbering Dave Boyle, the middle-aged shadow of a bright kid who got hurt, bad. It hurt us to see that baby face—which has allowed him to get away with so much—slacken. The Oscar buzz is gathering, but don’t think for a minute he’s not still courting controversy. His next project, Embedded, is a satire of the Iraq war. —LOGAN HILL

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton
It’s sold more than one and a half million copies and is published in 35 languages, but Hillary Rodham Clinton’s memoir, Living History, is much more than a best-seller. It has allowed Hillary to close the book, as it were, on her tumultuous White House days. And it proclaims to the world what we already know: that she has finally emerged as a serious player in her own right. Senator Clinton has been a compelling advocate for New York and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration who’s also managed to retain respect from GOP colleagues—Lindsey Graham likes her! Closer to home, she’s also laid claim to a key public-health issue: the uncertainty of the air quality around ground zero. Thanks to her skillful use of celebrity to command attention for the issues—and her voracious appetite for work—Hillary Clinton has become a huge force in the Senate. And, of course, the most whispered-about presidential candidate for 2008. —GREG SARGENT

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Jhumpa Lahiri
Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize—acclaim a less-dazzling writer might have spent a decade trying and failing to match. Instead, Lahiri’s first novel, The Namesake, is a full flowering of her talent. Writing about immigrants torn between cultures, she displays the knowingness of the native with the newcomer’s openness to every detail. The title character, Gogol Ganguli, the New England–raised, Ivy-educated son of middle-class Bengali immigrants, is named for the Russian author, and like his creator, who comes from a similar background, Gogol the grown-up architect winds up in New York. Enchanted yet puzzled by the city, he falls into a fruitless marriage to another alienated Bengali (whose friends’ obsessions with designer sheets and wheatless diets are disturbingly familiar). Lahiri herself, now raising a son in Park Slope with her Guatemalan-Greek journalist husband, seems to have had an easier time of it. But her beautifully rendered antihero reminds us of the outsiders we all really are—children of immigrants, cultural hybrids, standout strivers who still sometimes get lost in the crowd. —BORIS KACHKA

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Richard Meier
Like the cylindrical lobbies in some of his buildings, Richard Meier’s career has now described a perfect circle. One of his first celebrated designs was for artists’ housing on the way-West Side—the Westbeth complex, lofts carved from the Bell Labs building, spruced up with pop-out curved balconies. Thirty years later, he is being fêted again for artists’ housing on the West Side—173 and 176 Perry Street, loft towers built from scratch, one fat, one slim, crisply clad in glass of a remarkable (and perhaps patentable) frosty green. Of course, the artists on Perry Street are receiving no subsidies—the residents’ list is as starry as that of the Dakota (Nicole Kidman, Calvin Klein), and the first-floor restaurant will be run by Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Meier and Vongerichten also teamed for the Eastern-mod 66, in Tribeca, whose updated Eamesian décor, in shades of Meier’s signature white, has upstaged even Jean-Georges’s food. Meier, who just wanted to make his mark on his home city, has jump-started the market for truly contemporary residential architecture (some raw spaces on Perry Street went for more than $6 million), and will soon add a third tower to the south along West Street. After commissions in Atlanta, Barcelona, and Rome (and a modest little museum in L.A.), Meier is finally at home in New York. —ALEXANDRA LANGE

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Donna Murphy
Broadway cherishes its divas; indeed, in our impatience for new hits, we demand old vehicles for our most lavishly talented leading ladies. True, Donna Murphy first came on our radar in The Mystery of Edwin Drood; then in the charmingly silly Song of Singapore. And as the love-obsessed Fosca in Stephen Sondheim’s exquisite, dark Passion (for which she won her first Tony), she hid her beauty—though not her glorious mezzo-soprano—behind a tight wig and a nasty mole. But then, while waiting for another premiere to call her own, she was a radiant Anna in The King and I (Tony No. 2), making this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic seem minted for her. Now she’s channeling Roz Russell, singing Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s sophisticated lyrics and Leonard Bernstein’s infectious melodies in Wonderful Town. And again she knocks us out, as Ruth, smart elder sister of the comely Eileen—ambitious Ohio girls who move to Greenwich Village and make it their own. Of course, that’s exactly what this Queens native has done with Broadway. —JEREMY GERARD

Photo: Richard Phibbs

P. Diddy
P. Diddy—we think that’s what we’re currently supposed to call him—has always been a figure of controversy. Partly because he’s evolved before our eyes—rap star, producer, hip-hop squire in a white suit, boyfriend of J.Lo, fashion entrepreneur, TV star—what is he, exactly? But this year, he produced the soundtrack to Bad Boys II (with a four-week stint at the top of the album charts), another Sean John collection (which earned him his fourth straight CFDA award nomination), and Making the Band, his MTV show. He’s become a New York institution, one of the city’s most exciting creative engines. It’s a command performance—on several stages at once. His running of the marathon this year (and the $2 million he raised for, yes, the kids) is a metaphor for his staying power. He’s definitely not finished yet—whatever his name is.—JOHN HOMANS

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Al Franken
If Al Gore ever gets that liberal cable network going, Al Franken is one of the few people we’d actually want to watch. He has the rare talent of taking the political outrage that stems from disbelief (Bush said what?) and making it funny rather than screechy. Plus, he’s proved deliciously successful at bullying bullies. This year, of course, the former Saturday Night Live comic worked Bill O’Reilly and Fox into a fine lather over his best-seller Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. (When O’Reilly brags about growing up in working-class Levittown, Franken points out that he actually hails from well-off Westbury.) The network sued, citing its trademarked phrase and calling Franken “shrill and unstable” and “increasingly unfunny.” Regrettably, the legal farce didn’t last long. “There are hard cases and easy cases,” said the judge. “This is an easy case.” Which is precisely how we feel about giving Franken an award. —JARED HOHLT

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Proenza Schouler: Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough
Two years ago, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez were petitioning their Parsons professors for permission to co-design their senior theses. Two runway shows later, they’re in such demand they’re turning top retailers away. “We hope they’re not mad!” says Hernandez. They may not be in mass production, but they’ve managed to do exactly what young designers should do: make women look seriously, tremendously cool. Proenza Schouler embodies exactly the nonchalance that New Yorkers spend hours carefully assembling: classic, sharp shapes that are never too fussy or prim, that are always sexy but never overt. Celebrities beg them for clothes, which, in today’s paparazzi-heaven fashion world, is as gold as it gets (for the record: Demi Moore, Marisa Tomei they love, the Olsen twins they could do without), but they’re still so young that they were momentarily mistaken for waiters at the Costume Institute Gala. “At the end of day, we’re still kind of big dorks,” says Hernandez, with the confidence of one who’s always been anything but. —AMY LAROCCA

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Caroline Kennedy
It’s a family tradition: Her uncle Bobby was a New York senator, all too briefly. Her mother’s shining civic legacy includes saving Grand Central. But Caroline Kennedy has been a more elusive New Yorker—until now. Raising three kids of her own, she began this year to lift a million more. Kennedy answered the call of Mayor Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein to connect New York’s wealth and talent with its impoverished public schools. So far, she’s helped raise $150 million while forging partnerships with everything from the History Channel to the Dave Matthews Band. She’s also added an indelible New York image to a family scrapbook stuffed with scenes from Hyannisport and Washington: Caroline, in the hallway of a Harlem elementary school, hugging an awestruck sixth-grader. And then, quietly, encouraging the girl to study harder. —CHRIS SMITH

Photo: Richard Phibbs

Kevin Kline
He seems to have been born to crack us up. Maybe it’s Kevin Kline’s flourish with a sword or the wiggle of his butt: We’ll never forget his pratfalling Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance or the high-school teacher on the verge of coming out who can’t resist a disco beat in In & Out. We could go on. And yet we also recall him as Meryl Streep’s Holocaust-obsessed lover in Sophie’s Choice; his contemplative Hamlet; his depressed Connecticut squire in The Ice Storm; his vain Trigorin in The Seagull (again opposite La Streep). Since graduating from Juilliard into John Houseman’s Acting Company in 1972, he has personified the quintessential character actor in a leading man’s body: He is Ray Bolger and Laurence Olivier. For years he was a mainstay of both Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and Lawrence Kasdan’s Big Chill–Silverado–Grand Canyon troupe, succeeding at what’s been a daunting challenge for most American stars: to have a life both onscreen and in the theater, in Hollywood and in New York—and to do it as a citizen of this city. And now we have him as the fat knight in Lincoln Center Theater’s lauded production of Henry IV. Looking like Thomas Nast’s Santa on a bender, Kline offers a Falstaff outsize yet human: Few moments in memory compare in poignance with his stunning collapse after his erstwhile comrade in mayhem, Prince Hal, just crowned King Henry V, turns on him in the street and pronounces, “I know thee not, old man.” For how well, in fact, Hal knows this man—as do we the actor inside the fat suit, always game for the next challenge, ever true to the art that is his purpose and our pleasure. —JEREMY GERARD

New York Awards 2003