Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1 January 2017 i The Hollywood Reporter

Before SpaceX’s Elon Musk or Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson blast off into space, they may want to make sure production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas is on board, since the opulent space-set habitat he created for Sony’s sci-fi romance Passengers would be sure to attract customers. A description of the movie’s spaceship Avalon might sound like a grand Las Vegas hotel — it has rooms for 5,000 guests, with amenities that include an art deco bar, swimming pool, shopping mall, gaming arcade and various restaurants. But in the film, which cost about $115 million to produce, the Avalon actually is a spacecraft equipped to take passengers on a 120-year journey to Homestead 2, a distant planet that humans intend to colonize. While it’s designed so the passengers can hibernate for most…

COLLEEN ATWOOD  Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (WARNER BROS.) In doing research for this film set in J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world of Harry Potter, circa the 1920s, Atwood explored “all the different immigrants coming into New York City in 1924,” she says. Atwood created 90 principal costumes and an additional 1,000 for supporting characters. Star Eddie Redmayne’s Newt costume proved to be the most challenging to get right. “It had to fit in the real world, yet have a bit of magic to it,” Atwood says. “I ended up with a petrol color that fit in on the street but also felt right with his [character’s] ‘beasts.’ It also had to meet movement requirements. When I first met Eddie, it was at a dance studio where he was…

Oscar is becoming a man of few words — and often just one, as filmmakers and the Academy increasingly are showing a preference for movie-title minimalism. Over the years, there has been a clear upward trend in best picture Academy Award nominees with single-word titles, and this year looks to continue that trajectory. Thanks to strong contenders including Arrival, Fences, Lion, Loving, Jackie, Moonlight, Silence and Sully, 2016 has a good chance of breaking the record for the most best picture nominees with one-word titles (the record is four, set with 2013 releases Gravity, Her, Nebraska and Philomena). This year also very well may set a new bar for the highest percentage of best picture nominees with one-word titles (the record: 60 percent, as seen on the graph, a five-way…

“Information on film is not just about pixels. It’s also information about a feeling.” Bruus Christensen What’s the biggest misconception about what cinematographers contribute to a film? “It’s not just making beautiful pictures. People think it’s good cinematography because it’s beautiful. And it’s not that. We’re really trying to express the emotion of the story,” says Rodrigo Prieto, 51, who shed light on both the mystery of faith in 17th century Japan in Silence and a futuristic outer space romance in Passengers. Prieto’s fellow directors of photography nodded knowingly and laughed in agreement as they sat down on Oct. 29 to discuss the alchemy behind their recent work — not just the technical decisions they made but also their critical role in helping a director bring a scene, and a…

Los Angeles has acted as a character in countless films over the decades, and this awards season, several movies — most notably the romantic musical and best picture frontrunner La La Land, along with noir thriller Nocturnal Animals and the Howard Hughes dramedy Rules Don’t Apply — have cast the City of Angels yet again. “The challenging aspect of setting a film in Los Angeles is finding locations that have not been overly filmed,” says Shane Valentino, the production designer on writer-director Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. “It always takes a little longer, but when you find the right place, the reward is immeasurable.” The Focus Features film needed to have the right locations to serve its main character Amy Adams’ art gallery owner Susan Morrow, who lives a moneyed…

Memorable moments from a storied history 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 The Hollywood Reporter went unusually poetic when reviewing The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, saying the film was “as fresh as spring rain, as lyrical as a budding tree.” But Cannes’ 1964 Palme d’Or-winning musical had that effect on people. Jacques Demy’s romantic tragedy about a girl (Catherine Deneuve, then 20) who falls in love with an equally young auto mechanic (Nino Castelnuovo) left audiences weeping, garnered five Oscar nominations and was said to be French president Charles de Gaulle’s favorite film. Part of the movie’s allure is that every line of dialogue is sung recitativestyle, as in opera. Demy described this technique as “film…

AUSTRALIA ↑ Tanna DIRECTORS Martin Butler and Bentley Dean THE LOWDOWN Filmmakers used their documentary skills to help villagers on Tanna make their own feature. Australian filmmakers Butler and Dean embarked on their debut feature, Tanna, after several years of making documentaries centered on Aboriginal Australia. In what Butler calls an “ambitious and crazy” idea, the pair decided to make a fictional feature that hews to their documentary roots. While they didn’t know what story they wanted to tell, they knew they wanted to focus on the people of Tanna, a tiny South Pacific island where Dean had spent time making a doc in 2004. For seven months, the pair and their families lived in the village of Yakel, where they worked with locals to develop a Romeo and…

Before shooting a single frame of 20th Century Women, before even sitting down with its cast for a first table read of the script, Mike Mills hosted a little dance party. The 50-year-old writerdirector personally selected individual tunes for each of the actors — the Talking Heads, Cole Porter, Black Flag and Lou Rawls — then asked co-stars Annette Bening, Billy Crudup, Greta Gerwig, Elle Fanning and Lucas Jade Zumann to gyrate and hustle together the morning they first met on the set for rehearsals. “Everyone got their moment,” recalls Fanning, who danced to “Rhiannon” by Fleetwood Mac. “When it was your song, you went into the circle. Mike was like, ‘You have to dance!’ ” Set in Santa Barbara during the summer of 1979, the $7 million Women,…

Movie titles these days tend to be economical and terse (Inferno, Arrival, Moonlight, Loving). They keep it short. We’re all busy. But some of this year’s films bring a touch of nostalgia. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are throwbacks to an era when movie titles were packed with detail and a lot less boring — a convention more common in the let-it-all-hang-out 1960s and ’70s. Both of these 2016 films’ names are taken from the books that inspired them, presold titles that would be crazy to abandon. But keeping the lengthy literary title isn’t a requirement. The novel The Price of Salt became Carol. The memoir A Long Way Home plays onscreen as Lion. Arrival is based on a science fiction story…