Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 7A - February 24, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

People often ask why I, an activist for education and women’s rights, want to produce films and TV shows. It’s because I believe in the power of entertainment to connect people — whether that’s across the living room or across the world. I’ve seen it in my own life. Growing up in Pakistan, I was aware of high tensions between our government and India’s leaders. But that didn’t stop us from falling in love with Bollywood films and obsessing over actors like Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol. When we moved to the U.K., my mother didn’t speak English. But she found she could share a laugh with her British neighbors over Mr. Bean’s physical comedy. At Oxford, I spent too many hours watching The Big Bang Theory or Rick and…

When Ludwig Göransson attends the 95th Academy Awards, he’ll be walking in as both an Oscar winner (he won for Black Panther in 2018) and a first-time nominee (for his first original song entry). He, alongside director Ryan Coogler, Nigerian artist Tems and global icon Rihanna, are nominated for “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. For the in-demand composer — whose work has provided soundscapes for The Mandalorian (seasons one and two), Tenet, Creed I and II, Donald Glover’s Guava Island and more — his most recent collaboration with Coogler is the culmination of a 15-year partnership. But the Swede has said their work on Black Panther made him a better composer. “I’m very fortunate to be able to work with collaborators who choose to do art,” says…

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is an Oscar frontrunner for best animated feature, and if it wins, it won’t be the first time the Academy has honored the wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy. In 1941, Walt Disney’s Pinocchio became the first animated feature to win Oscars for best original score and song, for “When You Wish Upon a Star.” The 1940 film, based on children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, was the second animated feature released by Disney, after 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (which, incidentally, also earned an Oscar nomination for original score). Composers Leigh Harline and Paul J. Smith, who had written the music for Snow White with Frank Churchill, were enlisted to craft Pinocchio’s score. Harline and lyricist Ned…

In the final showdown in A24’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, Jobu Tupaki’s (Stephanie Hsu) chaotic ensemble — like the omnipotent and omniscient antagonist herself — contains multitudes, starting with her alter-ego Joy’s overwhelming emotions. Costume designer and stylist Shirley Kurata assembled remnants of Jobu’s outrageous multiverse-jumping personas, each of which terrorizes her distracted mother, laundromat owner Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh). The first-time Oscar nominee also says she “draped and pieced together” an infusion of sartorial influences, pulled from her encyclopedic fashion knowledge. As Jobu violently resists Evelyn’s outreach, Comme des Garçons-inspired volume and billowing swatches of Vivienne Westwood-referential tartans come alive. “[Fashion is] just ingrained in me. It’s part of my DNA,” says Kurata. She began her career styling shoots for fashion photographer Autumn de Wilde, who later directed 2020’s…

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the world’s greatest novelists — he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 — and a newly Oscar-nominated screenwriter for his adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru into the script for Oliver Hermanus’ Living. Indeed, he is one of only six Nobel laureates ever to receive an Oscar nom, joining the legendary company of George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Harold Pinter and Bob Dylan. A Japan-born Brit, Ishiguro has written eight novels over 41 years, which have collectively sold more than 2.5 million copies in the U.S. alone — most notably 1989’s The Remains of the Day, which was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize, and 2005’s Never Let Me Go, which Time chose as one of the 100…

NANA CONNIE AND MARCEL (ISABELLA ROSSELLINI AND JENNY SLATE) MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON The birth of the profound and heartwarming 1-inch shell voiced by Jenny Slate was an unusual situation that began years before the movie was made, with a series of animated shorts that Slate wrote with her then-husband, director Dean Fleischer Camp, beginning in 2010. “It actually was a character that started with her joking around in this tiny voice about how small she felt, and then I developed the design and the animation of Marcel based on that voice,” recalls Camp. “It’s been a very long journey where we are both mutually building upon this original riff and adding parts to his character and to his world. I don’t exactly know how to separate my…

In the delightfully mischievous short film Le Pupille, which earned Italian writer-director Alice Rohrwacher her first Oscar nomination, a rebellion is brewing within the confines of a Catholic girls' school in Italy on a chilly Christmas Eve in the midst of World War II. Young Serafina (Melissa Falasconi) attracts the ire of Sister Fioralba (Alba Rohrwacher, the director’s sister), the stern mother superior who rules her boarding school with an iron fist and steely gaze. As the schoolgirls prepare for the evening’s festivities — stoically re-creating the Nativity — they listen to a radio report that offers somber news from the battlefield. But when Serafina accidentally changes the station, inadvertently filling the hall with the sounds of a love song with a lyric like “kiss me on my little mouth,”…

Composing the score for a war film can be, apologies for the metaphor, a minefield. Go too heavy on the orchestral oomph — all soaring strings and booming base — and you can quickly swing into schmaltz. Go too small and minimalist, and the onscreen explosions can overpower your music. Plus, there’s the danger of familiarity, of echoing the grand and epic scores of war films past. So, when director Edward Berger asked his regular composer, Volker Bertelmann, to write a score for his antiwar drama All Quiet on the Western Front, he told him to break all the rules. “I said, ‘I want something different, something we’ve never heard before,’” says Berger, “then, and this is almost the most important thing: I said, ‘I want you to destroy the images…

Colin Farrell is a 46-year-old Irishman who has been a bona fide movie star for half of his life. Described by the Los Angeles Times as “a compelling actor with a surprisingly wide range” and by The Guardian as “a pretty boy with the acting chops of a heavyweight,” he has worked on films helmed by many of his era’s most distinguished directors, including Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick, Michael Mann, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Sofia Coppola, Peter Weir, Yorgos Lanthimos, Neil Jordan, Steve McQueen, Tim Burton, Kenneth Branagh, Ron Howard and his most frequent collaborator, Martin McDonagh. And he has shared the screen with many of its biggest stars and finest actors, as well, including Tom Cruise, Al Pacino, Jeff Bridges, Nicole Kidman, Denzel Washington, Jessica Chastain, Ben…

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY (1993) Ishiguro’s 1989 novel was adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD (2003) Guy Maddin directed and co-wrote the film with George Toles, based on an original screenplay written by Ishiguro. THE WHITE COUNTESS (2005) Ishiguro’s screenplay for James Ivory’s film focuses on a disparate group of people trying to survive in 1930s Shanghai. NEVER LET ME GO (2010) Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield star in the movie that was adapted by Alex Garland from Ishiguro’s 2005 novel of the same name. LIVING (2022) Directed by Oliver Hermanus, Living stars Bill Nighy as a civil servant who decides to live life to the fullest after a terminal cancer diagnosis.…

The moving Oscar-nominated animated short The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, based on the illustrated book of the same name by British artist Charlie Mackesy, wasn’t initially planned as a published work or a film but rather began as a series of drawings in early 2018 that he posted on his Instagram account (now with a 1.7 million following), featuring the four titular characters and their musings about kindness, hope, friendship and courage. For instance, in one drawing on Instagram — which is also featured in the short — the boy asks, “What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever said?” The horse replies, “Help.” Mackesy began to post more of his drawings and was moved by the response. “Everyone was discussing their feelings and what was difficult and…

AN IRISH GOODBYE Seamus O’Hara (left) stars in writer-directors Tom Berkeley and Ross White’s short about two estranged brothers who reunite on their family farm in Northern Ireland after their mother’s death. Their strained relationship is further tested when they discover a list of their mother’s unfulfilled wishes. IVALU A young girl (Mila Heilmann Kreutzmann, right) traverses the bitterly cold terrain of Greenland in search of her missing sister, whose name gives this short its title. Directed by Pipaluk K. Jorgensen and Anders Walter, this emotional adventure is based on a graphic novel by Morten Dürr. NIGHT RIDE In Eirik Tveiten’s short drama, Ebba (Sigrid Husjord, far right) is fed up waiting for a tram to take her home at night, and eventually steals a vehicle for herself. But on…

For Searchlight’s The Banshees of Inisherin, composer Carter Burwell reunited with Martin McDonagh after collaborating with the director on In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Using such instruments as the harp and the celesta, he began composing the score while focusing on Colin Farrell’s Pádraic, building upon the tragedy and sadness that his character encounters throughout the film. In total, the score took six to eight weeks to compose, though he’d already begun coming up with ideas for the music while McDonagh was filming. “In the end, it almost became more like a fairy tale,” Burwell tells THR. “The score pushed it into a world where it’s a little bit more an allegory than a story that might have truly happened.” You have frequent collaborators, Martin…