BEDSIDE TABLE
“I am a passionate lover of memoirs—I have two shelves of them at home. Lately I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle (2009) and Between the World and Me (2015), about Coates growing up black in Baltimore and finding his way in America. As a writer, he reminds me of William Faulkner—his books articulate experiences we’ve all had, or that reside in our subconscious.
“In 2011, I became CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The films I’ve seen and the books I’ve read enrich one another. Artists often deal with issues of inequality, of racism, of sexism—it is inherently their work to channel something we can relate to—but this is a particularly good year for films taking on important issues, from race in America to the war in Syria. Coates’s memoirs fed my experience of watching several of them, particularly Raoul Peck’s beautiful I Am Not Your Negro, based on James Baldwin’s writing, and Ava DuVernay’s 13th, which deals with slavery and America’s prison system.