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20 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C TO B E R 2 0 1 7 news Above, left: Dr. Tweedie teaching at the Beijing Film Academy in China. Right: The St. Louis street on Lot 2 of the old MGM backlot in Culver City was built for MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, designed by Jack Martin Smith working with Lemuel Ayers and Cedric Gibbons. Director Vincente Minnelli is standing on the crane arm. GRANT FOR A NEW BOOK ON PRODUCTION DESIGN Press release from the Motion Picture Academy ® Dr. James Tweedie, who is authoring a volume on Production Design, has been named a 2017 Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ® . Tweedie is an associate professor of comparative literature, cinema and media, University of Washington. His essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, Cultural Critique, October, Public Culture, Screen, and other journals, anthologies and edited volumes. He is the author of The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford University Press), which won the 2014 Katherine Singer Kovács book award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and co-editor (with Yomi Braester) of Cinema at the City 's Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia (Hong Kong University Press). His new book project will construct both a history and a theory of Hollywood Production Design, examining the contributions of designers to the look of studio films and explaining why that contribution matters and why design should be placed at the center of the creative process when considering the classical studio system and its contemporary successors. The Academy's Grants Committee has awarded Dr. Tweedie one of two $25,000 Film Scholar grants on the basis of his proposal for the book. The other grant will be given to Dr. Ross Melnick, at University of California, Santa Barbara, who is writing a book about Hollywood's foreign ownership of motion picture theaters throughout the world. "The Academy is delighted to support the noteworthy efforts of Melnick and Tweedie, whose unique visions will illuminate fundamental aspects of Hollywood history through new lenses," said Academy Grants Committee chair Buffy Shutt. "We are confident these ambitious scholars will further the understanding and appreciation of motion pictures and hope their completed projects will spark inspiration in their peers and industry professionals alike."