Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 8A, March 11, 2022 i The Hollywood Reporter

When I play the imaginary 2022 Oscar montage in my mind, I visualize scores of young people. A cherubic Northern Irish boy running in the cobblestone streets; a New England fisherman’s conflicted daughter belting onstage; two determined Compton-born girls pummeling their competition on the tennis courts; a pair of stubborn starcrossed adolescents finding love and fighting death on the streets of New York City. If 2020’s best picture lineup — featuring Parasite, Joker, The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — collectively spoke to men’s fears about society leaving them behind, and 2021’s contenders — among them Mank, Minari and Nomadland — jointly questioned the mythology America tells about itself, then you might have expected 2022’s Oscar roster to similarly biopsy modern life in a further effort to…

BEST PICTURE The Power of the Dog On Feb. 28, the same day that Sam Elliott raised objections about the film on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Jane Campion’s Montana-set Western was revealed as one of the 10 finalists for the first Twitter #OscarsFanFavorite award. Two days earlier, cinematographer Ari Wegner became the first woman to win the British Society of Cinematographers’ top prize. BEST DIRECTOR Kenneth Branagh Belfast In promotion of his autobiographical dramedy, the Irishman — who now holds the record for most Oscar nominations in different categories, with eight spread across seven — recorded virtual Q&As with Lawrence O’Donnell, Jim Sheridan and Kate Winslet that were widely disseminated by his film’s distributor, Focus Features. BEST ACTRESS Jessica Chastain The Eyes of Tammy Faye On the heels of her…

In late 2019, Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi was having coffee with actress Toko Miura in a quiet cafe in west Tokyo, discussing an ambitious new drama he was developing. Rather than holding auditions, Hamaguchi tends to cast his films simply by sitting down with actors to talk, sharing his vision for a story while getting a sense of the real person who might embody a part. The director had reached out to Miura to discuss Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a comedic, multilayered anthology film he was writing about the conflicted emotional worlds of several idiosyncratic Japanese women. But he quickly appraised that she wasn’t quite right for the part in that project. Instead, he found himself picturing her as the co-star of an entirely different, equally ambitious drama that…

Netflix’s The Power of the Dog, based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, presented an unusual challenge: creating the world of the 1920s Montana plains on the other side of the planet, in New Zealand. For the set, production designer Grant Major was given the gargantuan task of constructing a rancher’s home from scratch. In his approach, Major, whose previous work includes his Oscarwinning design of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, was influenced by the photographs of Evelyn Cameron in creating a Western that looked distinct from its contemporaries. “I tried to give a unique look genre, because there’ve been them done before,” Major “Evelyn Cameron is quite wellknown photographer from from that time, who produced very striking record of her the prairies around…

CRUELLA’S SHOW-STEALING FASHION STATEMENTS We called them ‘photo bombs,’” twotime Oscar winner Jenny Beavan says with a laugh. Vengeanceseeking Estella (Emma Stone), via her couturier alter ego Cruella, creates theatrical, near-animated ensembles to publicly undermine — and upstage — her fashion-establishment boss, the Baroness (Emma Thompson). Like works of moving art, Cruella’s disguises lure viewers into the audacious fun. Behind the scenes, the saboteur creations proved feats of imagination, not to mention physics and engineering. The team, including chief costume cutter Kirsten Fletcher, constructed and meticulously tested Cruella’s billowing red ball-gown skirt. To help Stone achieve her deft physical comedy flourish, 5,060 hand-sewn organza petals created the perfect weight to optimize momentum and gravity. “The first time [Stone] did it, she absolutely hit the mark. It was extraordinary,” says Beavan.…

Spider-Man: No Way Home has landed in a web of criticism surrounding the upcoming Oscars and the Academy’s decision to honor Twitter users’ favorite film during the March 27 telecast. It’s easy to imagine that the Academy chose to spotlight the social media favorite in hopes of fans of the film tuning in. As it stands, No Way Home, the sixth-highest-grossing movie of all time, is a frontrunner for the recognition. The film has a sole nomination for best visual effects, meaning a trip to the podium is hardly assured, given that only one Marvel movie has prevailed in the category: Sam Raimi’s groundbreaking 2004 sequel, Spider-Man 2. That film, in which Tobey Maguire returned as the conflicted title character opposite a new foe in Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, featured…

With his animated short The Windshield Wiper, Alberto Mielgo has the potential to add an Oscar to the pair of Emmys that he received in 2019 for his short The Witness from the Netflix animated anthology series Love, Death + Robots. Based on observations from his travels, The Windshield Wiper — which he wrote, directed, designed and produced (and even composed some music that was used in the short) — examines love. “Love is something that I am super interested in — what is love nowadays and how love adapts itself to how society is evolving,” he says. “My parents were very much based on commitment, and now [many are] focusing on their own self-growth, their careers.” Produced by Mielgo’s studio Pinkman.TV and producer/CG supervisor Leo Sanchez’s Leo Sanchez Studio,…

Actress Aunjanue Ellis and screenwriter Zach Baylin were coming from two very different career paths when their trajectories converged on Warner Bros.’ King Richard, the best picture-nominated film dramatizing how, on little more than hope, dedication and sheer gumption, Compton parents Richard Williams and Oracene Price cultivated their daughters Venus and Serena into two of the finest tennis champions the sport has ever seen. Ellis had three decades’ worth of high-profile stage, film and television experience, along with prestigious awards nominations and a Primetime Emmy to her credit. Baylin, despite several years of pushing stories forward in Hollywood, had yet to see one of his screenplays produced before his Blacklist standout featuring the Williams’ story. But on King Richard, the two were able to enjoy the kind of creative volley…

LUCA’S GIULIA In Disney/Pixar’s Italian Riviera-set film, sea monsters Luca and Alberto take human form on land, where they befriend a confident and spunky only child named Giulia (voiced by Emma Berman). “She’s learned to stick up for herself and she’s kind of streetwise, but she’s also an outsider, a little bit of an outcast,” says animation supervisor Mike Venturini. “She’s never really fit in with her community, which is what’s going to make her a great friend to Luca and Alberto, who are outsiders, too.” While Luca and Alberto are round in their design, Guilia is more angular. “She’s sharp-angled in her silhouette, which fits her sharp wit,” Venturini says. “Guilia’s a bold personality, so in a lot of her posing she’s very chestout, confident and kind of leaned-in.…

Hans Zimmer, the iconic composer who can count scores for films like The Lion King (for which he won an Oscar in 1995), Gladiator, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, the Dark Knight trilogy and Interstellar to his credit, just received his 12th Academy Award nomination, for Dune. The German native, however, calls this nomination different from its predecessors because of what Frank Herbert’s novel, on which Denis Villeneuve’s movie is based, meant to him as a young man. “I read the book when I was a teenager, and Denis read the book when he was a teenager, and we talked a lot about that,” Zimmer tells THR. “One of the things that happened to both of us is rather than coming at this movie with the wisdom of years…

Affairs of the Art Director Joanna Quinn and writer Les Mills’ hand-drawn short revolves around a workingclass character, Beryl, and her family’s many eccentric ways. Bestia Inspired by real events, this stop-motion short, from director and cowriter Hugo Covarrubias, follows a secret police agent in Chile’s military dictatorship. Boxballet An unlikely friendship develops between Olya, a ballerina, and Evgeny, a brutish boxer, in this short from Russia that was directed and co-written by Anton Dyakov. Robin Robin Netflix’s stop-motion animated musical from Aardman Animations and writer-directors Dan Ojari and Mikey Please is a story about a robin who is raised by a family of mice.…

It began almost as a joke. Journalist David Sirota floated the idea of his friend Adam McKay (an Oscar winner for The Big Short) directing a film about the climate crisis and made an offhanded comment about how the situation feels like an asteroid is headed toward Earth and nobody cares. It struck a chord with McKay, who spent three weeks penning a first draft of Don’t Look Up. A whirlwind few years later, Sirota now shares an original screenplay Oscar nomination with McKay, one of four noms for the film that features an all-star cast led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. McKay and Sirota always hoped their film would reach the widest audience possible, and it appears to have done just that, with Netflix touting Don’t Look Up…

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Netflix musical Tick, Tick … Boom!, about the life of Rent creator Jonathan Larson, was always going to conclude with his 30th birthday and the song “Louder Than Words,” which he performs onstage. But there were still aspects of the ending that needed to be unlocked — “a way to contextualize the ending with Jonathan Larson’s legacy and the success of Rent,” explains Andrew Weisblum, who edited the movie with Myron Kerstein. For all the Oscar nominees in film editing, their respective endings posed specific questions. “We reached outside of the script to start playing with archival footage,” which was incorporated into the final scene, Weisblum says of the conclusion. “It became clear that that was an important ingredient for [anchoring] the rest of the film, not just…

The production design for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune naturally took its cues from Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel. “What’s interesting about the book is you can have multiple interpretations because it doesn’t dictate what things should be, but it gives a lot of clues of how things could look,” says production designer Patrice Vermette. “Denis also encouraged us to think about the ecology.” Take, for example, the city of Arrakeen on Arrakis. “In the book, the wind goes at 850 kilometers an hour. That influenced the design. Everything was at an angle, for the wind to sweep over the buildings. … and the walls are so thick because the book says it’s a planet where there’s so much heat and sun. By making the walls super thick, it creates some coolness…

DUNE The approach was to come up with techniques to be as grounded and as photoreal as possible,” says production VFX supervisor Paul Lambert of the effects on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel. “We always were trying to think outside the box,” he adds, praising the collaboration not just with Villeneuve but with other department heads, particularly DP Greig Fraser and production designer Patrice Vermette. “We came up with various techniques, which enabled the visual effects to be far more believable,” he says, explaining that, for example, for scenes set on the desert planet of Arrakis, they shot the interiors of the ornithopters — aircrafts whose look Lambert describes as dragonfly-like — in front of a “sand screen” (a sand-colored backdrop, rather than a bluescreen)…