Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 18B - June 12, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

Everyone who loved my father understood his reasons to be done with this life on earth. He had been paralyzed for 40 years because of a stroke resulting from his neck being manipulated in a massage when he was only 53 years old. By 2021, he was 92 — weak, frail, battling terminal chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and falling a lot. He was tired of the fight. He would do anything for us, so how could we deny him his wish? We found there was a law in California that would allow our father to take his own life with the help of medication after a 15-day waiting period, so we brought him home from the hospital to die on his own terms. Over the past 30 years, I’ve used…

DONALD GLOVER Atlanta (FX/Hulu) Glover won Emmys for directing and starring on Atlanta’s first season in 2017. During the fourth and final season, he helmed two episodes and wrote the series finale. BILL HADER Barry (HBO/Max) Hader created the hitman comedy with Alec Berg, and the pair have directed episodes of the show throughout its four-season run. Hader directed all eight installments of the final season. ROB MCELHENNEY Mythic Quest (Apple TV+) Co-creator and star McElhenney did triple duty in the comedy’s third season, co-writing and directing the first two episodes of the show in which he plays the head of a video game company. ZOE LISTER-JONES Slip (The Roku Channel) Lister-Jones wrote and directed the entirety of this comedy series in which she portrays a woman who finds herself…

Prime Video’s Dead Ringers stars Rachel Weisz as twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, and to give the psychological thriller its moody visual style — as well as to place Weisz’s two characters in the same frame — the production turned to cinematographers Laura Merians Gonçalves and Jody Lee Lipes to shoot its six episodes. “The show explores the complicated internal world of the Mantle twins, which allowed us to have experimental, operatic moments,” Gonçalves says of the miniseries, which was based on David Cronenberg’s 1988 thriller Dead Ringers, itself an adaptation of Bari Wood and Jack Geasland’s 1977 novel Twins. She adds that influences included Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession and Thomas Eakins paintings. In order to allow Weisz to appear as both sisters, the production used a motion control rig…

NBC’s Emmy juggernaut Saturday Night Live entered a pair of episodes for the production design award this season, one hosted by Only Murders in the Building’s Steve Martin and Martin Short and one hosted by Wednesday star Jenna Ortega. A nomination, or nominations, would extend the remarkable track record of Eugene Lee, who died in February at age 83 after serving as a production designer on SNL since its 1975 pilot. He has been nominated 17 times for the show, and a posthumous award would give him a seventh Emmy win for the sketch series. “I was very honored to work with Eugene Lee for 47 years,” says fellow production designer Leo Yoshimura. “Eugene hired me to be his art director on Saturday Night Live in August 1975. I overstayed. I…

In the Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs-created Blindspotting, Casal and co-star Jasmine Cephas Jones play Miles and Ashley, an interracial couple parenting their son, Sean, in modern-day Oakland, California. In “N*ggaz and Jesus,” directed by producer Jess Wu Calder in her directorial debut, Sean says the N-word, which forces Miles and Ashley to explain the horrors of the racial slur. “The whole concept of Blindspotting is a core idea that when ever a character in our world is overcome with emotion or a situation, they burst into verse,” says Calder. For this sequence, the writers pushed the idea even further: “We added in the idea of dance and of movement as a way to show emotion when words fail,” she says. When Miles’ words fail him, the scene shifts to…

DRAMA GUEST ACTOR Murray Bartlett The Last of Us (HBO/Max) In the show’s 75-minute third episode, arguably the most acclaimed episode of TV this season, the Aussie — who earned his first Emmy nomination last year, and won, for The White Lotus — breaks hearts as Frank, the loving partner of Bill (played by Nick Offerman). Jon Gries The White Lotus (HBO/Max) The character actor — you’ve seen him in everything from Napoleon Dynamite to Lost — was the only carryover from season one to two, except for his Greg’s love interest turned wife. He was overlooked last year, but gave a more shaded turn this go-around. Nick Offerman The Last of Us (HBO/Max) The Parks and Recreation vet gives a career-best turn as Bill, a survivalist who allows a…

In 1987, Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf performer to win an Oscar for her role in Children of a Lesser God (and, at 21, the award also made her the youngest best actress winner in history). Now, Matlin has stepped behind the camera to direct “Ava’s Story,” the second episode of the Fox anthology series Accused. The episode follows Ava (Stephanie Nogueras), a Deaf surrogate who goes to extreme measures to protect the baby she brought into the world after learning of the parents’ plans for cochlear implants. Along with Nogueras, “Ava’s Story” features other Deaf actors including Josh Castille and Lauren Ridloff. The move makes Matlin the first Deaf director to direct a network show and the first to join the DGA. Matlin spoke to THR about her…

ANDOR (LUCASFILM/DISNEY+) “What was really important for us is that locations and environments feel plausible [and] realistic,” says VFX supervisor Mohen Leo, of Industrial Light & Magic. “Even when we knew that what we would ultimately create would be 70 to 80 percent of the frame replaced or augmented with computer graphics, it was important for us to go to real locations and be able to have the director and the cinematographer shoot something where they felt confident that this is the composition, the feel and the weight of the architecture, the feel of the light, and that we could then build a much more fantastic shot around that.” The live-action portion of this shot was filmed with extras at the McLaren Building in the U.K., and everything outside the…

Boston Strangler (Hulu) In the revelatory Boston Strangler, Matt Ruskin flips a well-known saga on its head. The story has been told onscreen many times, most famously in a 1968 feature starring Tony Curtis and Henry Fonda. In that movie, released only a few years after a series of murders targeted single women in their Boston-area apartments, the only female characters of note are victims. A select group of upstanding male detectives puzzle over the lurid details of the crimes and wax psychological about the perp. Then came the straight-to-video thrillers about Albert DeSalvo, the confessed but not quite proven killer, and the countless episodes of true-crime series. This time around, the investigator originally played by Fonda has just one scene and a couple of lines; the center instead belongs…

When HBO offered Bridget Everett an overall deal, she never imagined anything would actually come out of it. “I thought, ‘OK, this is money, but after a year I’m gonna have to go back and just make my live shows,’” she says during a lunchtime interview in April to mark, incidentally, the second season of her series, Somebody Somewhere. The quietly affecting comedy, about a woman who is still struggling with the emotional reentry to her hometown after her sister’s death, has embodied the kind of success specific to premium cable: critical acclaim, a steadily growing audience and prestige awards (it was just nominated for a Peabody). Everett speaks about it with equal amounts of pride and extreme humility. “We’re a small show, and I’m not chasing any hardware, but…

When editor Timothy Good shared with then-assistant Emily Mendez the possibility of tackling Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann’s HBO/Max series The Last of Us, based on the PlayStation game of the same name, Mendez — who was promoted to editor during the season — immediately responded, “That is my favorite video game I’ve ever played, and we have to do it!” In the story, a pandemic has destroyed the world as we know it, and one survivor, Joel (played by Pedro Pascal), is asked to protect an immune teenager, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who might hold the key to a cure. “The first thing they gave us was episode three [‘Long, Long Time’],” says Good of the flash-back-filled story centering on the lifelong romance of two survivors played by Nick Offerman…

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities features different monsters and mythical creatures in each of its eight stand-alone episodes, necessitating the involvement of multiple character and prosthetic design companies to bring each nightmare to life with proper attention to detail. Prosthetics department head Sean Sansom first crossed paths with del Toro working on his 1997 film Mimic, designing giant cockroaches as part of legendary creature creator Rick Lazzarini’s crew. Ten years later, Sansom would be brought back into del Toro’s universe for Pacific Rim. Mike Hill, Cabinet’s creature makeup designer, was first contacted by del Toro when the director commissioned original artwork from him (Hill operates as an independent designer and artist, having left his post as managing director of the award-winning Karakter Design Studio). “We became friends,” he explains.…

A year after an Oscars that was marred by outrage over the decision to present eight categories in advance of the live telecast, the 95th Academy Awards received high marks from members. Co-production designers Alana Billingsley and Misty Buckley said that both their work and the presentation itself were about “celebrat[ing] film,” including “bringing life to the crafts.” Billingsley (an Emmy winner for the production design of the Academy Awards in 2020 and 2021) and Buckley talked with The Hollywood Reporter about their approach to production designing the Dolby Theatre for the Oscars in March. What was the brief when you started to plan the 2023 ceremony? MISTY BUCKLEY The brief that we were given was to design a set that really celebrates film — both the experience of cinema…