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

A funny thing happened on the way to this year’s Oscar nominations: The indie business got punched in the gut. A decade after the movie Academy changed its rules, allowing up to 10 best picture nominees instead of the previous five (a direct response to The Dark Knight’s absence from the final lineup), the policy may have had a more far-ranging effect than some expected. True, it hasn’t achieved its original goal: to boost Oscar ratings by acknowledging more mainstream pictures with wider audience appeal — ratings hit an all-time low in 2018, with 26.5 million viewers, but bounced back a bit in 2019 to 29.6 million, still the second smallest audience ever. Instead the rule change has achieved something else: placing the studios front and center of the Oscars…

Best Animated Feature KLAUS Best Animated Feature (Independent) I LOST MY BODY Best Animated Special Production HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: HOMECOMING Best Animated Short Subject UNCLE THOMAS: ACCOUNTING FOR THE DAYS Animated Effects in an Animated Feature Production FROZEN 2 Character Animation in an Animated Feature Production KLAUS Character Animation in a Live-Action Production AVENGERS: ENDGAME Character Design in an Animated Feature Production KLAUS Directing in an Animated Feature Production KLAUS Music in an Animated Feature Production I LOST MY BODY Production Design in an Animated Feature Production KLAUS Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production FROZEN 2 Writing in an Animated Feature Production I LOST MY BODY…

1917 When Dennis Gassner received the script for 1917, he was on vacation with his wife in Alaska. “I had gone on this long, long wander to become very primal again,” he says. “In a complicated world, I wanted to find a sense of reality with nature.” One morning, “at the end of the road,” Gassner got a message from Sam Mendes about his ambitious war film — and soon the script. “I read it in an hour and 58 minutes, and I immediately rang Sam back and told him I had to do it.” Waiting for Gassner when he arrived in London for preproduction was a collection of 50,000 images from World War I. “I immersed myself daily into this horrific thing,” he says. That may have been a…

1917 “The main aim of this ‘one-shot’ approach was to lock the audience in with what [soldiers] Blake and Schofield are experiencing, so we designed the ambience to slowly unravel in the same way that you would experience it in real life,” says supervising sound editor Oliver Tarney of the World War I drama. “Sometimes the intensity would be building over a 10-minute period; other arcs would play out much more quickly.” Production sound mixer Stuart Wilson adds that keeping the connection to the characters was crucial. “Our two leads were mostly wearing three microphones each, to capture different emphasis of breaths, equipment and footsteps,” he says. FORD V FERRARI The biggest challenge for the sound team on Fox/Disney’s Ford v Ferrari was finding vintage cars to record authentic sounds.…

Twenty years ago, Sam Mendes, then 34, had about as good an Oscar night as you can get. On March 26, 2000, his film directing debut, American Beauty, won five awards, including best picture and director. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Mendes as thanking DreamWorks for having “the courage to hire a bloke from the English theater.” Fittingly, he was thanking the DreamWorks co-founder who’d just handed him the directing award: Steven Spielberg, who’d won for directing the previous year with Saving Private Ryan. (Spielberg had also given Mendes what he once said was the best advice a first-time director could receive: “Wear comfortable shoes.”) Mendes had since 1992 been the artistic director of the 251-seat Donmar Warehouse in London. “Sam had been the hottest theater director in London for many…

BEST PICTURE Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s revisionist Hollywood tale starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt came up short for the main prizes at both the PGA and SAG Awards. It was also the target of a Jan. 13 Daily Beast piece titled “The Big Harvey Weinstein Problem With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” 1917 Parasite’s win of the best ensemble SAG Award has some doubting this World War I drama’s frontrunner status (although Sam Mendes’ pic wasn’t nominated), despite its PGA Award victory. A Jan. 20 Variety column, “Why 1917 Is the Last Film That Should Be Winning the Oscar,” hasn’t helped, either. BEST ANIMATED FEATURE Toy Story 4 On the heels of its shocking loss to Laika’s Missing Link for best animated feature…

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994) I was double nominated that year with Little Women [directed by Gillian Armstrong]. It was so unexpected. Very dreamy. Shawshank was the first time I worked with [DP] Roger Deakins. It was like, “Wow, this looks great.” There are moments where you just take for granted what’s put in front of you. Shawshank always looked so beautiful. We’ve gotten to know each other better by virtue of proximity with Jarhead, Skyfall, Wall-E [on which Roger Deakins worked as a visual consultant]. [Director] Frank Darabont showed me a three-hour version of Shawshank early on without a stitch of music in it, and it was riveting. The question was: How could I not make this a worse movie, with no less character and personality? We often start that…

ONCE UP ON A TIME IN HOLLY WOOD Reading Quentin Tarantino’s script and love letter to 1969 Los Angeles, Arianne Phillips was captivated by the rich car-radio culture evoked by reference material from local Top 40 station KHJ. “I was lucky enough to find some of the playlists from the specific time that our story takes place,” says Phillips. “I made mix CDs and listened to them constantly when I was prepping, and it really set the tone for me.” The costume pro adds, “Music is such a great way to immerse myself in a time and a place.” She notes that the chart diversity reflected the transitional era. “This is a culture explosion … beautifully reflected in this playlist. It’s a cross section of pop songs at the time,…

While Universal’s 1917 may not seem like a visual effects-heavy movie, director Sam Mendes’ decision to make his World War I epic appear as a single, uninterrupted shot created a considerable challenge for the Oscar-nominated VFX team that had to invisibly stitch together individual takes. What amounts to unseen work was so extensive that visual effects supervisor Guillaume Rocheron estimates that 91 percent of the final film was touched by the effects team. Collaboration was critical and began in preproduction, and execution of filming and postproduction came down to meticulous planning by Mendes, cinematographer Roger Deakins and other members of the filmmaking team. Numerous approaches were applied to connecting takes, including wipes at, for instance, a tree or a building; morphing on close-ups of an actor; replacing part of a…

Thelma Schoonmaker has been one of Martin Scorsese’s most trusted collaborators for half a century, and with her eighth Academy Award nomination, for Netflix’s The Irishman, she ties a record held by Michael Kahn (1994’s Schindler’s List) as the most nominated editor in Oscar history. She also holds three Oscar statuettes — for 1980’s Raging Bull, 2004’s The Aviator and 2006’s The Departed — a record she shares with Steven Spielberg’s longtime collaborator Kahn, as well as the late Daniel Mandell and Ralph Dawson. She may have all those projects and accolades under her belt, but Schoonmaker, 80, says her latest project with Scorsese, The Irishman, was “as important to me as I think Raging Bull was so many years ago. It’s wonderful that Scorsese is making great movies at…

With her latest best original song nomination for “I’m Standing With You” from the Fox feature Breakthrough, Diane Warren now holds an Oscar record — if not yet an Oscar. Her 11th career mention makes her the most-nominated woman in Oscar history without a single win. Her first nom came back in 1987, for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from the comedy Mannequin. On Feb. 9, she’ll have attended the ceremony as a nominee across five decades. Whether or not the prolific songwriter gets a breakthrough of her own this year, she says the recognition itself is always a thrill. “The novelty has never worn off,” says Warren, 63, who hosted a “sleepless sleepover” with friends to watch the early morning nominees announcement. Though the song had been shortlisted —…

Oscar-nominated hair and makeup designer Naomi Donne had a few tricks up her sleeve when trying to keep bloody wounds, explosive powder and dirt stains looking the same in each take to maintain the continuity of Universal’s 1917. The single-shot style of the war film inspired her and prosthetics designer Tristan Versluis to use an unorthodox remote-controlled blood pump to depict Lance Corporal Blake’s (Dean-Charles Chapman) stab wound in real time. Normally, Donne says, the crew would cut the take “and throw a load of blood on and then carry on.” But since the scene was filmed in one go, she relied on a pump, activated from a distance: “It had to be timed perfectly. It had to have the right amount of blood. You pray that it happens OK,…

When this year’s Oscar contenders were announced, Mark Ulano scored a rare double nomination in sound mixing for Fox/Disney’s Ad Astra and Sony’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which also garnered a sound editing nom). “I had no expectation because there are some very good films out there this year,” admits the veteran sound mixer, who won an Oscar for James Cameron’s historical drama Titanic and nabbed an additional nomination for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. He’s also the former president of the Cinema Audio Society, a nonprofit devoted to advancing the sound mixing community. “For this to happen was really amazing,” he says of his two nominations, which, he emphasizes, he shares with his team — including his wife, sound pro Petrushka Mierzwa. Ulano has a long history of…

Sister What’s it like to grow up with a sibling? That’s an experience most Chinese children never knew while living under China’s one-child policy. But director, writer and stop-motion animator Siqi Song was one of the rare little sisters who knew the answer when all her friends would ask. “I always feel lucky, because I was not supposed to exist,” Song says, recounting how she drew from her own life to craft her animated short film Sister, in which an older brother imagines how his life would have been different if he’d in fact had a sister. “I interviewed my brother a lot,” she says. “The story has an annoying little sister because I know that’s what my brother told me he felt about me. Well, he wouldn’t say it…