For its final-days Oscars countdown coverage, the Hollywood Reporter scored the first official interview given by new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences CEO Dawn Hudson. Reporter Stephen Galloway spoke with her on Sunday February 19 together with the organization’s COO Ric Robertson.

When asked what has surprised her most about the job, Hudson offered this answer:

“The scrutiny. I had what I thought was a casual meeting [during] my first couple of days, and 20 minutes after they left the LA Times called me. Then I thought, “OK, no meeting is off the record.” The Academy matters to people around the world. It’s such a global mark. And so the flap of the butterfly wing really does create [a worldwide effect].

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Film Independent, which puts together the LA Film Festival as well as the annual Spirit Awards, announced today they were taking the usual step of naming two presidents of their organization. Film Independent senior director Sean McManus and director of artist development Josh Welsh were both promoted and will help run the organization jointly. The pair are taking over for Dawn Hudson, who left Film Independent in June to become the CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

McManus has been with Film Independent since 1998, as has worked as senior director for the past six years. Welsh, meanwhile, has been running the organization’s various labs and development programs for the past decade. He also, according to the press release, moonlights in an alt-country band called Meatyard. They have an artsy video featuring sad mannequins if you’re curious.

Maybe Dawn Hudson would have been better off acquiescing to Michael Cieply‘s interview request.

The New York Times reporter, in the absence of access to the newly named chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or her presidential colleague Tom Sherak, has offered up a rather strange passive-aggressive profile of the one-time Film Independent-IFP head.

For every flattering quote, there are basically two narrative insults. At the halfway point of the piece for example, after framing Hudson as a Harvard drop-out who suffered a “rare collapse in confidence,” Cieply goes on to gently question the lineage of her brief acting career:

High Crimes (2002) was directed by Carl Franklin, who won the IFP/West’s Independent Spirit Award for his One False Move in 1993. In 1994, Ms. Hudson had a small part in Angie, directed by Martha Coolidge, who won a Spirit award for Rambling Rose in 1992. The next year, the director Jonathan Wacks, a Spirit nominee for Pow Wow Highway in 1990, cast her in Ed and His Dead Mother.

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