Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 7B - February 28, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

In living rooms around the world, a war is raging between two formidable foes: parents and tweens. Eyes roll. Voices rise. Arguments explode. “You’re not wearing that!” “You call this music?” “You just don’t get it!” The two sides, once close, suddenly feel like they’re speaking a foreign language to each other. We’ve all felt the dreaded effects of puberty, but not often do we get to examine what’s under the hood, especially through the lens of the female experience. For me, everything changed in my relationship with my mom when I was a teenager. She went from being my best friend to my nemesis. Why and how did that happen? Those questions always burned in the back of my mind, and for some reason the only way I could…

Elvis — nominated for eight Oscars including best picture — offers a bold look at the life of Elvis Presley while capturing the zeitgeist of the period. But Jonathan Redmond and Matt Villa, Oscar-nominated editors and longtime collaborators of Baz Luhrmann, say the director was adamant that his movie, starring Austin Butler as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, would not be a conventional biographical film. Luhrmann crafted a film that combines electrifying performances, drama and archival material while using Elvis’ manager, Colonel Parker (Tom Hanks), as a narrative device to tell the story. The editors say the experience was shaped by starting with 650 hours of principal photography and another 350 hours of archival material. Each performance was treated as an action set piece that told a different part…

Whether it was creating the Metkayina village or a sinking sea vessel on the Pandora moon, production designers Dylan Cole and Ben Procter say their approach to their work on James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water was, philosophically, not unlike that of any live-action movie. “We design sets,” Cole says, adding that the use of performance capture affected the execution of ideas, not the design work itself. “We have to build proxy sets for performance capture as well as full digital sets.” New parts of Pandora are introduced in the sequel, including the reef-based Metkayina village. Cole says he referenced Indigenous cultures in the South Pacific for the design, but “the main thing was figuring out how this is engineered. And how are you reinforcing story? Something very important…

When it comes to creating movie sound, it’s all about world-building, says Julian Howarth, sound mixer on Avatar: The Way of Water. “And then it’s to make something believable, emotional and to tell a story,” he adds. “In any film, that’s what we’re here to do.” For Howarth’s team, that was about telling an immersive story on the fictional moon of Pandora. But the other Oscar nominees for best sound also placed viewers on a World War I battlefield for All Quiet on the Western Front, in Gotham City for The Batman, in the front row for Elvis Presley’s most memorable performances for Elvis and in the cockpits of naval fighter jets for Top Gun: Maverick. Work on The Way of Water involved creating underwater species such as the whale-like…

A five-time Oscar nominee, a Tony nominee, an Emmy winner and a two-time Golden Globe winner, Michelle Williams broke into the public eye in her teens as Jen Lindley on The WB’s television series Dawson’s Creek. She appeared on the teen drama from 1998 through 2003, en route to proving her tremendous abilities in films like 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy, 2010’s Blue Valentine and Shutter Island, 2011’s My Week With Marilyn, 2016’s Manchester by the Sea and 2017’s The Greatest Showman and All the Money in the World; on Broadway in 2014’s Cabaret and 2016’s Blackbird; and on TV in the 2019 limited series Fosse/Verdon. In 2022, Williams starred in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film The Fabelmans, playing Mitzi Fabelman, a thinly disguised version of Spielberg’s own mother, the…

THE BATMAN The aim of Matt Reeves’ The Batman was to make it feel as if the action could really happen. “There’s no science fiction element or fantastic element that removes it from our reality,” production VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon says, explaining that required doing as much in camera as possible. Special FX supervisor Dominic Tuohy and his team even built four versions of the Batmobile for different uses. Lemmon says that in the ramp jump (pictured right), which occurs as Batman chases the Penguin, his team used a stripped-down vehicle with additional features. “Eventually they were able to dial it in so the car could get up to about 12 feet high,” he claims, adding: “It soared for nearly a hundred feet before it would hit the ground again.…

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT An abandoned farmhouse outside Prague was the starting point for the World War I field hospital, which showed the destruction in the hinterland beyond the battle-fields. Production designer Christian M. Goldbeck explains, “Parts of the walls you see in the background were built and painted by our wonderful scenic painters.” (This is a set photo; in postproduction, the VFX team removed the background behind the structure and added further destruction to complete the look.) BABYLON The fictional Kinoscope studio was critical for Damien Chazelle’s evocation of 1920s Hollywood, explains production designer Florencia Martin, and the vast studio setting was built on location and showed the sets and the desert simultaneously to give the viewers a full sense of that world. The bar set where…

DAWSON’S CREEK (1998-2003) Michelle Williams starred alongside James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson in this teen drama series about a group of friends living in the fictional town of Capeside, Massachusetts. The show ran for 128 episodes. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005) Ang Lee directed the drama about a romantic relationship between two American cowboys, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Williams’ late partner, Heath Ledger. Williams earned her first Oscar nom, for best supporting actress, for her performance. BLUE VALENTINE (2010) This romantic drama stars Williams and Ryan Gosling as a married couple; the film travels back and forth in time to document their courtship and dissolution of their marriage. Williams was nominated for her first best actress in a leading role Oscar. MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (2011) Williams’…

In this season’s competitive cinematography race, Mandy Walker’s bold lensing of Warner Bros.’ Elvis made her just the third woman ever nominated for an Academy Award in the category. Could she become the first to take home the Oscar? Walker is joined by two other first-time nominees in James Friend, for Netflix’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Florian Hoffmeister, for Focus Features’ Tár. Also in the running is veteran two-time winner Roger Deakins, who with his work for Searchlight’s Empire of Light earned his 16th nomination (extending Deakins’ distinction as the most nominated living cinematographer in the category). The fifth contender is another veteran, Darius Khondji, who is nominated for his first collaboration with Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Netflix’s Bardo is the director’s deeply personal, introspective film following documentarian…

THE TALOKANIL CAMILLE FRIEND Establishing the Talokanil, which is a whole new underwater Mayan society, [we wanted] to represent that really well. We wanted to be culturally appropriate. We worked with Dr. Gerardo Aldana [Creative Studies dean and professor of Chicano Studies at the department of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara]. He gave us so many little jewels about what [Mayan culture] is and what it isn’t — a woman who was single, for example, her hair would look [one way] versus a woman who was married, or an older woman. You can’t just go on Google — it’s something that’s been buried, and it’s buried in the ground. JOEL HARLOW Say you [use] Google — the stuff that you will find might not be culturally accurate. It was very…