Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 41B, December 7, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

Even before an iconic distant whistle opened the first screenings of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, it was clear that musicals would factor into this year’s Oscar race. Hollywood loves musicals, and the classic 1961 West Side Story, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, is the most honored in the genre, winning 10 Oscars, including best picture and director, plus crafts awards like cinematography, music and sound. “Look at West Side Story, All That Jazz, Singin’ in the Rain. Those are really good stories, great performances and music — these are well-crafted movies,” says recording mixer Michael Minkler, who is no stranger to musicals, having won two of his three Oscars for Chicago (2002) and Dreamgirls (2006). “Those are important ingredients that draw people to the movies.” Rob Marshall’s Chicago…

If there was one key ingredient that helped director Liesl Tommy and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson navigate their whirlwind journey to bring the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect to the screen on a hyper-accelerated production schedule, it’s the mutual R-E-S-P-E-C-T the longtime collaborators have for each other — and for the Queen of Soul herself. “I’ve worked with Tracey extensively over the last 15 years,” Tommy says. “She’s a national treasure of a writer, and I knew that she had the personal experience, and the creative skill, to make this a really authentic screenplay.” Adds Wilson, “We have a shorthand in the way we work together. Liesl understands a writer’s brain — and that’s a rare talent, I’ve found, in collaborators.” Despite their considerable accomplishments — Tommy is an Obie winner…

Flee could make Oscar history. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated documentary, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and bowed Dec. 3 in the U.S. via Neon and Participant, could become the first film to secure Academy Award nominations in the categories of best international feature (for Denmark), documentary and animated feature. Flee also is a contender for a best picture nomination, which, for a documentary, would be an Oscar first. And it all started with a voice. The voice of Amin Nawabi. Flee opens with a scene of Amin as he lies on his bed, closes his eyes and begins his story. It’s Amin’s voice — warm and intimate but also hesitant and fearful — that pulls us in as he tells his old friend Jonas the…

Aneophyte undergrad in the contemporary West End traversing the swinging ’60s, a grifter turned apprentice in tumultuous ’70s London, and an aspiring entrepreneur in a timeless fairytale realm: Last Night in Soho’s Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), Cruella’s Estella (Emma Stone) and Cinderella’s Ella (Camila Cabello), respectively, have one thing in common, besides the potential same nickname: fashion design talent. The films’ costume designers shared the challenge of not only portraying distinct protagonists but also imparting character through the young women’s creative visions and sartorial perspectives. Reflecting real life, to establish an origin story subliminally telegraphs a budding point of view and early influences. Awaiting her fashion school acceptance letter, Last Night in Soho’s wide-eyed Eloise blissfully flits around her bedroom in a newspaper dress, inspired by the late-’50s-era Audrey Hepburn and…

One of the “great things” about doing sound design for animated films is that one is involved from the early stages of production, says sound veteran Randy Thom, an Academy Award winner for The Incredibles and sound designer and rerecording mixer on Sony Pictures Animation’s Vivo. “The filmmakers really need sound in their early experiments to see how scenes are going to work when all they have visually is storyboards.” For Vivo, which debuted this summer on Netflix, that included vocalizations for the title character, a kinkajou voiced by Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Vivo speaks English some of the time,” says Thom, “but he also ‘speaks kinkajou,’ [requiring] a set of sounds that is believably animalistic.” To do this, Thom combined sounds of puppies, cats, monkeys and, of course, kinkajous. “I did…

For MGM/United Artists’ House of Gucci, Jared Leto plays Paolo Gucci, the middle-aged, overweight and balding cousin of Adam Driver’s Maurizio Gucci. For an actor who has grown accustomed to transformative work in films like 2013’s Dallas Buyers Club (which earned him an Oscar for best supporting actor) and this year’s The Little Things, one shouldn’t be surprised if Leto’s presence in the film’s cast goes unnoticed until the final credits roll. Assisting Leto in his uncannily realistic portrayal of the onetime designer turned Gucci family black sheep was makeup artist Göran Lundström, who earned an Oscar nomination in 2019 for his work on the Swedish fantasy film Border. The pair reunited to speak with THR about the process of turning Leto into Paolo Gucci with the use of Lundström’s…

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH A dagger appears in the corridor of Scotland’s Inverness Castle — an illusion of light falling upon a door handle — on the set where Denzel Washington as Macbeth performs one of William Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies in A24/Apple TV+’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, written and directed by Joel Coen. The colonnade set was built on Stage 21 on the Warner Bros. lot. “The visuals, with their basis in German expressionism, were designed to mirror the Thane of Cawdor’s fatal vision and allow the actor to be drawn toward the instrument he will ultimately use in his tyrannous rise to power,” explains production designer Stefan Dechant. “The door handle being an optical illusion of a dagger symbolizes intent. … Only at the end of the soliloquy,…

When composer Harry Gregson-Williams begins a collaboration with director Ridley Scott, he’ll usually leave their first meeting with a set of questions instead of a list of demands. “Ridley is an ideas man,” says Gregson-Williams, who has worked with the veteran director on five films: 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven, 2012’s Prometheus, 2015’s The Martian and this year’s The Last Duel and House of Gucci. “When I’ve come onto his projects, he’s already painted most of his picture. He certainly knows the power of music and is ready to employ it, and it’s very refreshing to have him pose multiple questions to me rather than dictate the direction that the score should go.” For 20th Century’s The Last Duel, Gregson-Williams had the benefit of a 14th century setting to guide his…

GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE Director Jason Reitman calls Ghostbusters: Afterlife a “love letter” to the 1984 film helmed by his father, Ivan Reitman. “There is a lot of emotion and sensitivity in that,” relates Sheena Duggal, who shared VFX supervisor duties with Alessandro Ongaro. “In honoring the simplicity of the original film, we wanted the silhouette of Muncher, Terror Dogs and the Mini-Pufts to be so clean that you know them by the silhouette.” The Mini-Pufts, of course, reference the original Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, but here they were made more childlike. “We made adjustments to the legs,” says Duggal, “so they became double-tiered, and added creases to the arms like you might find in a baby.” To put them on the screen, a 3D-printed reference was used on set during the…

In October, Phumi Morare became one of only 17 filmmakers — and one of only two Black filmmakers — to win a 2021 Student Academy Award, in her case, the gold prize for best narrative film from a domestic film school for Lakutshon’ Ilanga (When the Sun Sets), which was her thesis film en route to receiving her MFA in Film Directing at Dodge College at Chapman University in 2020. The 34-year-old South African’s production re-creates an Apartheid-era crisis experienced by her mother. It previously screened at the Telluride Film Festival and was recognized with a BAFTA Award nomination. Now, it’s eligible for an actual Academy Award, for best live-action short. What was your journey to this film? I was born and raised in Johannesburg, went to boarding school in…

“Heavy!” Sammy Davis Jr. exclaimed, applauding as he took the stage at the 44th Academy Awards following Isaac Hayes’ performance of his Oscar-nominated song “Theme From Shaft.” Davis was making history that night as the ceremony’s first Black host (alongside co-hosts Helen Hayes, Alan King and Jack Lemmon). But before the night was over, Isaac Hayes too would make history as the first Black winner of best original song — as well as the first Black winner in any Oscar category outside of acting. Hayes was a songwriter, producer and recording artist at Memphis-based Stax Records when he was approached about writing the score for Gordon Parks’ Shaft, a blaxploitation film about private detective John Shaft. Upon seeing some early footage of Shaft coming out of a subway, Hayes was…