Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 8A - March 2, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

This year, the Academy Awards will honor outstanding achievement in film for the 95th year. Directors, actors, production designers, editors, costume designers, writers, composers and more will be celebrated for their artistic vision, yet one of the greatest visionary roles in film — that of location scouts — will once again go unrecognized. From the fictional Irish island of Inisherin to the front lines of World War I to the homes that shaped the lives of music and film icons, this year’s top films feature a host of locations intrinsic to their creative DNA. This has been the way for the near-century’s worth of films honored at the Academy Awards, from the scenes shot in the Sierra Nevada mountains for Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush to Michael Corleone’s pilgrimage to…

Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front had an unexpected journey to becoming an Oscar frontrunner. The Netflix war drama had a soft launch in Toronto last year but has been building momentum ever since. Proving to be equally popular with critics and industry professionals — All Quiet swept this year’s BAFTAs, winning seven awards, including best film, best director and most of the technical honors — the movie is suddenly a major player at the Academy Awards, not just as a best international feature nominee, but in all nine categories in which it’s nominated, including best picture. No one has been more surprised by the film’s global success than producer Malte Grunert. Grunert has some Oscar experience (he was a co-producer on 2015 best international feature nominee Land…

After a storied career spanning decades and industries, producer Gail Berman is in no need of further accolades for her résumé. She has produced theater (including the original Tony-nominated staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in 1982), television (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Netflix’s recent hit Wednesday) and animated films (The Addams Family). She’s served as president of Paramount Pictures and the Producers Guild of America. But, surprisingly, Elvis is her first foray into live-action feature film, and it also happens to be responsible for her first-ever Oscar nomination. The road to bringing Presley’s story to life was not an easy one — COVID shut down production, with star Tom Hanks being among the first celebrities to contract the novel coronavirus in 2020. Finding an actor to…

Todd Field may be a man of few films, but he doesn’t lack for accolades. All three of the features he’s directed — In the Bedroom (2001), Little Children (2006) and Tár (2022) — have been bestowed multiple Oscar nominations, including best picture. Tár, which was also written by Field, stars Cate Blanchett as a renowned conductor brought down by allegations of personal transgressions. Like other films of the current era, the making of Tár was complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Field — who had worked in commercials in the intervening years since his last feature — also had to assemble a European crew, since much of the movie was shot in Germany, including Berlin and Dresden. Working in these settings, as well as with a real-life orchestra, brought its…

For producer Dede Gardner, Women Talking, like many of her films, is about complicity. The United Artists feature is inspired by real-life events that occurred in a remote Mennonite community where women were repeatedly raped by the men in their colony, and she hopes the film, as it is seen more after being nominated for the best picture Oscar, will shed a light on violence against women and how working together as a community can produce positive change. “We made the movie to prompt conversation and to put — what I don’t think should be radical — somewhat radical ideas into the slipstream, and so to whatever degree the nomination helps create that opportunity, I’m really grateful,” Gardner, co-president of Plan B Entertainment, tells THR. The producer, who is a…

Shaunak Sen’s sophomore documentary feature, All That Breathes, tells the gripping tale of two brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, former teenage bodybuilders turned bird rescuers, resuscitating endangered black kites from the polluted skies above New Delhi. Through the prism of humananimal relationships, Sen examines such larger issues as the climate crisis and geopolitical tensions in India. He spoke with THR about the project, which has earned him his first Oscar nomination, for best documentary feature. What was the starting point for this film? When you live in Delhi, the air itself is something that always preoccupies you — this gray, oppressive, tactile, almost creepy, sentient thing that’s laminating your life. I wanted to do something around this texture or tone of life in the city. I was interested in…

Twenty-five years after winning the best picture Oscar for Titanic — and 12 years after his second best picture nomination, for Avatar — producer Jon Landau is back in the awards race with Avatar: The Way of Water. Landau talks to THR about besting his own box office records, what it will take for performance-capture roles to be acknowledged by awards voters and if the still-untitled third Avatar film will stick to its current release date of December 2024. Do you have a favorite screening experience of The Way of Water? My favorite screening experience was in early December when I flew from New Zealand to New York, and I screened the movie for Zoe [Saldaña], Sam [Worthington], Sigourney [Weaver] and Stephen Lang. It was the first time we were…

The idea for Everything Everywhere All at Once was born during the 2016 press tour for Swiss Army Man, the Daniel Radcliffe-Paul Dano flatulent corpse two-hander that put directing duo Daniels on the map. Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan had watched a Fight Club and The Matrix double feature and were inspired. Producer and longtime creative partner Jonathan Wang recalls, “It was like an escape from the Swiss Army Man press that we jumped into Everything Everywhere.” They started working on the script immediately and began shooting in 2020. Wang says the timing was both a curse and a blessing. “We got to edit it for over a year because of the pandemic,” he says. “That’s what allowed us to get it to the place that it is now.” Everything…

“You saved Hollywood’s ass.” That’s what Steven Spielberg told his fellow best picture nominee Tom Cruise at the Oscars Nominees Luncheon on Feb. 13, a remark that was captured in a now-viral video clip. And while Cruise’s star power and producing muscle played a major part in Top Gun: Maverick’s success — it was the top-grossing film of 2022 and resuscitated theatrical distribution from a pandemic-driven coma — another key player was Jerry Bruckheimer, the producing giant who helped catapult the original Top Gun into cinemas nearly four decades ago. Now, at 79, Bruckheimer has earned his first Oscar nomination for best picture, proving that a box office megahit can compete in the Oscar race alongside the critical darlings — especially since Maverick managed to be both all at once.…

Last October, A House Made of Splinters director Simon Lereng Wilmont called Azad Safarov to tell him that he was coming to Ukraine for the documentary’s premiere. “I said, ‘Are you crazy? There’s war outside,’ ” Safarov, the film’s assistant director and line producer, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “[Simon] said, ‘No, no, I’m coming.’ ” While the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine brought the conflict to the forefront of international news, the eastern part of Ukraine has been at war since 2014. That’s where A House Made of Splinters is set, in the city of Lysychansk. Ukrainian army forces have battled against Russian-backed separatists on the eastern side of the country for nearly a decade. Directed by Danish filmmaker Lereng Wilmont, the film centers on the children affected by the…

Searchlight’s The Banshees of Inisherin was a notable reunion between writer-director Martin McDonagh and stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who first teamed up on McDonagh’s feature debut, 2008’s In Bruges. But McDonagh’s latest film — which has netted him Oscar nominations for best director, original screenplay and picture — also reteamed him with Graham Broadbent, who has produced each of McDonagh’s features and earned his second Oscar nomination for best picture, after Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri scored a nom in 2018. Speaking with THR, Broadbent looks back on when he first read the script for McDonagh’s darkly comic fable and claims that when the Oscar-winning writer-director calls about a new project, Broadbent knows it will be extraordinary. You’ve worked with Martin McDonagh several times before and with great success.…

Having spent the past quarter century working for Steven Spielberg, Kristie Macosko Krieger has often visited The Milky Way, the Los Angeles restaurant once run by the director’s mother, Leah Adler (who died in 2017), and her second husband, Bernie Adler. Krieger also knew Spielberg’s late father, Arnold, and knew that Bernie and Arnold had once been close friends, but had no idea that a young Steven Spielberg had discovered the blooming relationship between his mother and the family friend when making home movies as part of his obsession with amateur filmmaking. This very personal story would come to light when making the semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans, which Krieger produced alongside Spielberg and Tony Kushner, who co-wrote the script with the director. Krieger began her tenure with Spielberg as his assistant…

Triangle of Sadness not only marks producer Erik Hemmendorff’s first Oscar nomination, but it is also his first English-language feature film. Alongside producing partner Ruben Östlund, who wrote and directed the satire, Hemmendorff set out to cast international actors like Harris Dickinson, Woody Harrelson and Charlbi Dean (who died three months after the film premiered at Cannes), to pair with the global theme of the fashion industry. Hemmendorff recently spoke with THR about what the Oscar nominations mean for the Swedish film industry, the legacy Dean left before her death in August at age 32 due to bacterial sepsis and the challenges they faced during production. What does the Academy’s recognition mean to you? From my point of view, we already won. I’m really proud that the film has made…

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Netflix’s German anti-war epic, nominated in nine categories including best picture, could make history as the second Oscar-winning adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque novel. CLOSE A24’s Danish entry is a bittersweet drama from director Lukas Dhont that stars Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele as 13-year-old best friends whose companionship is marked by tragedy. EO Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s drama, which earned the jury prize at Cannes, features six donkey actors as the eponymous animal, who traverses Europe and encounters a broad spectrum of humanity. THE QUIET GIRL Colm Bairéad’s coming-of-age drama — about a withdrawn girl who finds a loving home with distant relatives after being neglected by her parents — made history as the first Irish-language Oscar-nominated film.…

THE ELEPHANT WHISPERERS Directed by Kartiki Gonsalves, this Netflix doc follows Bomman and Belli, an Indigenous couple in South India, who form an incredible bond with an orphaned baby elephant, Raghu. HAULOUT Russian scientist Maxim Chakilev is the subject of this short from sister-and-brother duo Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who follow Chakilev as he watches the walruses off the Chukchi Sea coast. HOW DO YOU MEASURE A YEAR? Filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt filmed his daughter, Ella, every year on her birthday from age 2 to 18, and the result is an examination of a father-daughter relationship as it evolves over the years. THE MARTHA MITCHELL EFFECT This Netflix doc uses archival footage to tell the story of the Watergate whistleblower, whom the Nixon administration tried to gaslight and silence when…