Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 2A January 15, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

When the final award of the night, Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, is announced at SAG-AFTRA’s 27th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, the resulting headlines will inevitably hail it as the night’s best picture winner. But that’s not exactly the right nomenclature for the prize, which subtly shifts the emphasis away from the overall film — whatever the merits of its direction, lighting, editing, music — to focus on its actors and how well they relate to one another. The SAG rules themselves don’t offer much guidance as to what qualities its members should consider in their vote, noting only that “those actors with single card billing in the main titles” are eligible to receive a trophy, while the remainder of a cast whose names are…

Michelle Pfeiffer, over the course of more than 40 years in the business, has come to be regarded as one of the most talented and beautiful movie stars in the history of Hollywood. She has three Oscar nominations and an Emmy nom to her name. She has been included on People magazine’s list of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World a record six times, twice appearing on the cover of the issue, including the first time it was published, back in 1990. And though she has worked less frequently in recent years than she did in the past, when she does work, people always sit up and take notice. Proof of icon status? See, or rather hear, Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” and Vance Joy’s “Riptide.” The 62-year-old’s latest…

The Personal History of David Copperfield SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES Though The Personal History of David Copperfield hit screens in the summer, casting for the project began back in 2016, when the landscape “was quite different to how it is now,” says casting director Sarah Crowe, citing a recent growth in diversity and representation reflected in projects like Netflix’s Bridgerton. As a result, Dev Patel’s leading-man status in a Charles Dickens period piece may have been unexpected, but director Armando Iannucci began the project with the actor in mind given his “amazing likability, warmth and vulnerability,” Crowe says. Iannucci also mandated color-blind casting for the entire feature, simply instructing his collaborators to find the best actor for each part. Crowe, who notes that this was the first project she was given permission…

Shaka King’s Judas and the S Black Messiah made me weep. My parents actively resisted America’s system of white supremacy in the 1960s and 1970s. Folk like Fred Hampton were discussed in a way that made me feel like they were family. Whenever my father talked about the 1969 murder of Los Angeles Panther leader John Huggins, or “John John” as he called him, his eyes would fill with tears, and he would look away, then look back at me, his eyes bright with two different elements: water and a certain, steady fire. To me, Fred Hampton was always the most beautiful. He was beautiful, truly — an attractive man. But he was so beautiful in his soul. My deep love for this shining revolutionary comes from published images of…

Ensemble, Film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis, the stars of this Broadway adaptation for Netflix, received career tributes at the Jan. 11 Gotham Awards. Director George C. Wolfe hailed Davis’ “purity of heart and passion and fire and rage.” Boseman’s widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, and 42 co-star André Holland accepted his honor. Malcolm & Marie This category is officially titled “outstanding performance by a cast,” leading to the question of whether this marvelously acted two-hander starring John David Washington and Zendaya can get in. The smallest nominated casts have been for Million Dollar Baby and Beasts of No Nation, with three actors each. First Cow Apart from being named the New York Film Critics Circle’s pick for best film, this latest work from Kelly Reichardt, who…

One of the most prominent Black directors in Hollywood, Spike Lee has worked with casting director Kim Coleman for nearly two decades. Their films range from Inside Man to BlacKkKlansman, plus Netflix’s 2017 television adaptation of his 1986 film She’s Gotta Have It and the streamer’s Da 5 Bloods, which has earned plenty of awards buzz for its stars since its release in June. Da 5 Bloods has produced some of the best performances of 2020, with an ensemble made up of such veteran actors as Delroy Lindo, Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters and Isiah Whitlock Jr. Rising stars like Jonathan Majors and the late Chadwick Boseman brought their energy to the project, as did hidden gems including Veronica Ngo, who plays Hanoi Hannah. To build a cast like this, Coleman…

When Borat Sagdiyev returned to the screen 14 years after the Oscar-nominated Borat, creator and star Sacha Baron Cohen was eager to examine Trumpism in America in the months leading up to the 2020 election. Along for the ride was Tutar, Borat’s teenage daughter, played by 24-year-old Bulgarian newcomer Maria Bakalova, whom Borat planned to give as a present to Vice President Mike Pence. Here, the actors reminisce about the film’s wild mid-pandemic production and how Baron Cohen prepared his young co-star for Borat’s shocking and hilarious antics. Sacha, what were some of the tips you gave Maria on how to be convincing around the people you were filming? SACHA BARON COHEN Are you asking me to reveal my secrets? (Laughs.) Maria would get, if I can say this, very…

The Full Monty’s SAG Awards upset for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture at the 1998 ceremony — beating a murderers’ row that included Good Will Hunting, Titanic, Boogie Nights and L.A. Confidential — capped an unlikely journey from low-budget British comedy to one of the most beloved properties of the 1990s. 1997’s Monty launched a Broadway musical and a hit play that ran in London’s West End from 2014 until the novel coronavirus pandemic forced its theater to shutter last year. It all began when Italian producer Uberto Pasolini approached screenwriter Simon Beaufoy with an idea. “He was fascinated by the idea of male strippers,” recalls Beaufoy, 54. Chippendales had proved a hit in London, and Beaufoy hadn’t given it much thought: “But Uberto said, ‘In…

While Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart were co-directing a segment for Salma Hayek’s 2014 animated feature The Prophet, the pair decided to make a film to complete the Cartoon Saloon-produced “folklore trilogy,” which included 2009’s The Secret of Kells and 2014’s Song of the Sea, both of which were directed by Moore and Oscar-nominated. “We came up with the seed of an idea, which was about empathy, about a hunter becoming the thing that [villagers] were hunting,” explains Moore, who is a co-founder of Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny, Ireland-based animation studio. They discussed Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland during the mid-1600s, which is said to have contributed to the extinction of the country’s wolves, as well as local folklore about a people who transform into wolves when they fall asleep.…

For director Lee Isaac Chung, the most stress-inducing screening of Minari was not the movie’s packed Sundance Film Festival world premiere, but rather a post-Thanksgiving dinner showing in his Los Angeles living room. Minari is based on Chung’s childhood move to Arkansas, where his family lived in a trailer on the land on which his father, who emigrated with his mother from their native South Korea, hoped to build a farm. Throughout writing and production, Chung decided not to tell his family that his movie pulled from large swaths of their lives. Still, his parents were “piecing it together,” he says, as he told them bits of the plot and asked questions about their work as chicken sexers (the practice of determining the sex of a chicken after it has…

When he came back for his first feature film in a half-decade, Mank, David Fincher brought his trusted casting director Laray Mayfield into the fold. Over the past few decades, Mayfield has cast nearly all of the features (and even Fincher’s foray into television, Netflix’s Mindhunter) that make up Fincher’s portfolio, including Fight Club, The Social Network and Gone Girl. The pair is quick to praise each other’s style, work ethic and personality. “Our working relationship is amazing. I am so fortunate to have worked with Dave for as long as I have. We have been working together since 1986. It is creative, lively, challenging in the best sense of the word and warm because we are also dear friends,” Mayfield says of Fincher. “We have a shorthand that has…

I can’t live in this room.” Frances McDormand’s vandwelling character utters these unequivocal words during a crucial exchange in Nomadland, one that unfolds in the guest room of a suburban house. A strikingly similar rejection of a well-meaning offer — of shelter, of security — takes place near the end of Ammonite when Kate Winslet’s 19th century paleontologist surveys a well-appointed chamber meant to inspire her with its creature comforts. “You presumed I’d just be fitted into your life here,” she tells the woman she loves. “You don’t understand me.” Delivering two of the most indelible lead performances of 2020, McDormand and Winslet portray ferociously independent women. On that front, they’re hardly alone in what has been a strong year for female actresses. In very different ways, Carey Mulligan (Promising…