By Hilary Fox
LONDON (AP) --For once, deaf audiences are being prioritized at U.K. cinemas.
Paramount Pictures UK will be showing their movies with captions the day before general release, meaning deaf and hard of hearing cinemagoers across the country will be able to watch them first.
The distributor is starting with the robot animation “Transformers One” on Oct. 10. Subtitled screenings of Paramount’s upcoming films, “Gladiator II,” “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and “The Smurfs Movie,” will follow over the next few months.
Rebecca Mansell, chief executive of the British Deaf Association, called the initiative ground-breaking. Deaf, deafened and hard of hearing audiences have been struggling to attend the few available subtitled film showings because they are often scheduled at inconvenient times, she said.
“It fits in with the cinema’s needs, but not necessarily when the Deaf community want to go,” she said. “The deaf community always feel that they are the last ones to know, the last ones to watch something, the last ones for everything. And now we’re going to be the first. It’s definitely a really exciting moment.”
Around 18 million people in the U.K. are registered as deaf, deafened or hard of hearing, according to the association.
Paramount has also been running deaf awareness training with cinema managers and staff in U.K. cities so that they can better communicate with customers.
Yvonne Cobb, a TV presenter and celebrity ambassador for the British Deaf Association, was running the training at a large cinema in central London’s Leicester Square Wednesday.
She said the three-hour training session wasn’t enough for staff to become fluent in British Sign Language, but workers were able to learn basic signs, how to interact with deaf customers and what not to do — for example shouting or covering one’s mouth. They were also taught how to spell with their fingers to indicate the name of the movie.
“We taught the staff how to say the number of which screen it’s in, and also some greeting signs as well — for example ‘how are you?’,” said Cobb, who is a qualified British Sign Language teacher.
Paul Johnston-Naylor, a general manager at Feltham Cineworld, completed the training on Wednesday and said that learning the British Sign Language alphabet was very useful.
“We can try and finger spell some of the names of the movies and then some of the common phrases that we would probably use in the cinema industry, to help the customer navigate their way through the cinema, buy their popcorn, go and sit in a screen and find their seats,” he said.
Cobb even invented a new sign for “Transformers One” that was inspired by the robot characters like Optimus Prime and Megatron.
Mansell also notes that subtitles are becoming increasingly popular with younger generations.
“60% of young people prefer watching things with subtitles,” she said. “I think before, people view them as being in the way or ruining the image. And now they’re a lot more accepted and a lot more normalized.”
The Grammys’ voting body is more diverse, with 66% new members. What does it mean for the awards?
For years, the Grammy Awards have been criticized over a lack of diversity — artists of color and women left out of top prizes; rap and contemporary R&B stars ignored — a reflection of the Recording Academy's electorate. An evolving voting body, 66% of whom have joined in the last five years, is working to remedy that.
At last year's awards, women dominated the major categories; every televised competitive Grammy went to at least one woman. It stems from a commitment the Recording Academy made five years ago: In 2019, the Academy announced it would add 2,500 women to its voting body by 2025. Under the Grammys' new membership model, the Recording Academy has surpassed that figure ahead of the deadline: More than 3,000 female voting members have been added, it announced Thursday.
"It's definitely something that we're all very proud of," Harvey Mason jr., academy president and CEO, told The Associated Press. "It tells me that we were severely underrepresented in that area."
Reform at the Record Academy dates back to the creation of a task force focused on inclusion and diversity after a previous CEO, Neil Portnow, made comments belittling women at the height of the #MeToo movement.
Since 2019, approximately 8,700 new members have been added to the voting body. In total, there are now more than 16,000 members and more than 13,000 of them are voting members, up from about 14,000 in 2023 (11,000 of which were voting members). In that time, the academy has increased its number of members who identify as people of color by 63%.
"It's not an all-new voting body," Mason assures. "We're very specific and intentional in who we asked to be a part of our academy by listening and learning from different genres and different groups that... Read More