Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 4A January 2020 i The Hollywood Reporter

This year, like last year, and eight of the 10 years before that, no women were nominated for the best director Oscar. Despite recent (and controversial) attempts by the Academy to diversify its membership, the status quo remains: Only one female filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow for 2009’s The Hurt Locker, has ever been deemed any given year’s most inspired visionary. What’s different this awards season is that one of those snubbed women directors has made a high-profile film that illustrates the many hurdles female artists have to overcome: first to prove that they’ve got talent (and should be compensated fairly for it), then to have their own ideas about what constitutes great art recognized by male gatekeepers. Serendipitously, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, based on author Louisa May Alcott’s original work, is…

It’s a mix of relief and disbelief,” says producer Jane Rosenthal of The Irishman’s best picture nomination, more than a decade after she began work on the crime epic. As the longtime producing partner of Robert De Niro, Rosenthal became involved with the Netflix film — which tells the story of Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran (De Niro) and his claim to having killed Teamster union leader Jimmy Hoffa — in 2007. At the time, Netflix was still a mail-order DVD rental service and the de-aging technology that would be required for De Niro to play Sheeran in his 20s as well as his 60s was still several years off from beta testing. More than a decade of technological development later, Rosenthal found herself on opening night at the 57th New…

In the early 1990s, Amy Pascal was the Sony production executive in charge of developing the latest big-screen adaptation of Little Women. That version, directed by Gillian Armstrong, starred Winona Ryder as Jo (earning her a second Oscar nomination) and Christian Bale as Laurie, as well as Susan Sarandon, Kirsten Dunst and Claire Danes. A decade later, when Pascal was running Sony’s film studio, she was approached by another adoring fan of Louisa May Alcott’s iconic 1868 novel about four sisters who march to their own drumbeat in a patriarchal world: Greta Gerwig, an actress and then-emerging filmmaker who had her own unique take on the feminist tale. “To me, the book was so clearly about women, art and money. I felt like there were all these spiky things that…

Producer Kwak Sin-ae has known Bong Joon Ho since the late 1990s, when she was an eager young film journalist covering South Korean cinema and he was a promising young director making short films. Now Kwak, 51, has produced Bong’s rapturously received Parasite, which collected six Oscar nominations — including best picture, best director and best international feature — and became the first South Korean film to garner that recognition from the Academy. Part thriller, part black comedy, part social satire, Parasite has transcended boundaries of genre and nationality, grossing more than $137 million worldwide since it unspooled at the Cannes Film Festival in May, more than $25 million of that from typically subtitle-averse domestic audiences. Kwak spoke to THR about the challenges of marketing the indefinable film, the disappointment…

BEST PICTURE Marriage Story Noah Baumbach landed pic and original screenplay Oscar nominations to go with three acting noms and one for original score, and his film was toasted at a Jan. 15 BAFTA/PGA event, while stars Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson were feted at the Santa Barbara Film Festival on Jan. 17. Uncut Gems The Safdie brothers’ diamond district drama was shut out of the Oscar noms — with not even a film editing nod — prompting star Adam Sandler to tweet: “Bad news: Sandman gets no love from the Academy. Good news: Sandman can stop wearing suits.” DOCUMENTARY FEATURE The Cave Despite visa problems caused by the Trump administration that prevented him from campaigning like other shortlisted filmmakers, Feras Fayyad is a nominee in this category for the…

After an eleventh-hour shimmy into the awards race, Sam Mendes’ seemingly one-shot World War I epic 1917 has enjoyed a dramatic last-minute entrance of which even the director of two Bond titles would be proud. Following two young British soldiers (played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) as they undertake a daring mission across the trenches into No Man’s Land, the Universal film has been hailed as a visually sumptuous masterpiece, lauded for not just its technical wizardry (thanks largely to Roger Deakins’ cinematography and the stitchwork of editor Lee Smith), but also its immersive storytelling and sound. Already a double Golden Globe winner (for best picture, drama, and for best director) and appearing on many critics’ top 10 lists, 1917 has amassed nine BAFTA and 10 Oscar nominations. Among…

A movie that, on paper at least, could have easily gone the way of Jerry Lewis’ infamous debacle The Day the Clown Cried, Jojo Rabbit has defied all odds to become one of the year’s most beloved films — an unlikely comedic tale about a 10-year-old fledgling Nazi and his imaginary best friend, Adolf Hitler. The film sprung from the mind of Taika Waititi, the New Zealand-based writer-actor-director, who transformed the sober 2004 novel Caging Skies into a World War II-set fairy tale that, when you least expect it to, yanks the rug out from under the audience while delivering a timely message about ultranationalism and hate. (Besides writing the screenplay, Waititi also directed and plays Hitler in a turn that owes more than a little to John Cleese and…

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story centers on the emotionally draining divorce of a couple. While that sounds like a very sad and difficult story to watch, and at times it is, it’s also a beautiful and often funny love story. The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival in August, centers on New York-based theater director Charlie (Adam Driver) and his wife, an actress named Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), who are on the brink of a breakup after Nicole decides that she wants to move to Los Angeles with their young son. The pair sets out to amicably divorce but, influenced by a pair of cutthroat lawyers (played by Laura Dern and Ray Liotta), things quickly turn ugly. In particular, there’s a blowout fight scene between Driver’s and Johansson’s characters that…

An impeachment trial that divides the country. Large crowds chanting to “lock up” their right-wing candidate’s political opponent. And the rise of an authoritarian leader who threatens to undercut democracy and the rule of law. Sound familiar? In Netflix’s The Edge of Democracy, nominated for best documentary feature, Brazilian writer-director Petra Costa delves into her country’s messy political history — and in the process presents a dark “distorted mirror” of the myriad crises facing the U.S. today. With remarkable access to former Presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff and Michel Temer — as well as the current hardline president, Jair Bolsonaro — Costa documents Brazil’s fraying democracy through the prism of her family’s own history, contrasting the views of her right-wing, industrialist grandparents with the ideals of her…

It’s been more than 50 years since Mel Brooks’ The Producers wrestled with the challenge of courting Oscar for a film offering a comic version of Adolf Hitler, something Jojo Rabbit is facing this year. “There are many to whom this brand of humor is more an opening of wounds that can never heal,” THR said in its Dec. 28, 1967, review. “Those who will not buy Grundig and Volkswagen will probably pass by The Producers as well.” (For anyone under 50, the German company Grundig was once the largest radio manufacturer in Europe; Volkswagen was founded in 1937 by a Nazi labor union.) But on the bright side, THR loved the movie. “It is a hilarious film, sparked by the sort of performance in which star Zero Mostel has…

When supervising sound editor Alan Robert Murray sat down to talk with director Todd Phillips about their sonic approach to Warner Bros.’ Joker, the filmmaker said he wanted realistic sounds instead of the typical tones expected in a comic book-inspired film. “He didn’t want overdone punches and sound design that made it seem unrealistic,” says Murray, a two-time Oscar winner (American Sniper, Letters From Iwo Jima) who earned his 10th career nomination — a record for sound editing — with Joker. “So it was more of following Arthur’s descent into madness. Everything would start off normal, and then our sound effects reacted to what was going on with Arthur.” For a sequence in which Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is beaten up by three Wall Street suits on a subway car,…

Producer Jenno Topping’s definitive moment while working on Ford v Ferrari came six weeks out from shooting. Topping, director James Mangold and the rest of the team were having a meeting — toy cars and cardboard cutouts in hand — to figure out how to shoot one of the film’s many races. Then, in a bemused tone, Mangold announced to the room, “You know, I am not really much of a car guy.” After getting over her initial shock from this admission, Topping realized that it was exactly what made Mangold perfect for the project. “He’s enough of a car guy to really care about how those scenes were shot and what cars meant in the movie, but that’s not what the movie was about to him,” says Topping. “And…

Emma Tillinger Koskoff has built a reputation as Martin Scorsese’s right hand, working her way up from an assistant on 2004’s The Aviator to sharing a 2020 Oscar nomination with the filmmaker for The Irishman. But just four days after ending a 108-day shoot on the director’s Netflix film, Koskoff found herself in a scouting van with Todd Phillips, taking a leap of faith with another director. Joker may not have seemed like a natural move for Koskoff, who hadn’t kept up with comic book films since working as Uma Thurman’s assistant on Batman & Robin more than 20 years earlier — and who had never produced a movie not directed by Scorsese. But her gamble paid off. The R-rated Warner Bros. project, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as loner Arthur…

When the Hollywood rumor mill began churning out reports that Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film would be set in Los Angeles in 1969 — and center on Sharon Tate and the Manson murders — the director’s fans (and critics) naturally assumed that his next movie would be gruesome and irreverent, likely incorporating some revisionist history just like his previous best-picture-nominated films Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds. While it certainly doesn’t skimp on those familiar Tarantino qualities (particularly in its third act), Sony’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is much more emotional and sweeter than any Tarantino film before it. Following Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a fading Hollywood actor and his stunt double turned driver, respectively, Once Upon a Time serves as a love letter to…

AMERICAN FACTORY Produced by the Obamas, American Factory checks in on the General Motors plant that directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar explored in their 2009 short The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, which was also nominated for an Academy Award. THE CAVE For The Cave, director Feras Fayyad returns to his native Syria, this time to document a team of female doctors working in an underground hospital. Fayyad was previously nominated for his 2017 film, the Syrian war documentary Last Men in Aleppo. FOR SAMA For Sama documents the Syrian war from a personal perspective. Directors Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts drew from more than 500 hours of footage recorded by al-Kateab, starting as a student in Aleppo through the birth of her first daughter. HONEYLAND Shot…