Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 32D - November 21, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

When I set out to make my short film Take Me Home, I wanted to raise questions about our responsibilities to family as we grow older. The film captures a feared transitional moment for families that include a loved one who cannot live on their own: What is inherited? How do we navigate the hurdles of the American health care system when we are living on the margins of life? I grew up as the middle child of 11. My adoptive parents had four biological children, then adopted seven more — six of whom are Korean, several with disabilities. We grew up in a John Hughesesque suburb of America on a picturesque street. Our family stood out whether we liked it or not. Inside the house, however, adoption and disability…

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, photographed by DP Robbie Ryan, received an enthusiastic ovation as it opened the 31st EnergaCamerimage cinematography film festival Nov. 11. A familiar face at the annual event and an Oscar nominee for Lanthimos’ The Favourite, Ryan used an inventive range of film stocks and lenses to support the absurdist story (an adaptation of the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray) of Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone, who also produced), a Victorian woman brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist played by Willem Dafoe, and her journey toward liberation. The approach to the cinematography took a cue from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “[Poor Things] is very obviously artificial in many aspects,” Ryan explains. “[Dracula] leaned heavily on early…

At this point, it’s rare to see a best original song shortlist without Diane Warren’s name on it. She’s claimed 14 nominations in that starry Oscar category, and umpteen other movies have made her a contender since the early 1980s. This year, Warren has two tracks up for grabs: Flamin’ Hot’s “The Fire Inside” and 80 for Brady’s “Gonna Be You.” Both songs are typical Warren: soaring and earnest. But instead of the romantic ballads for which she’s best known, like “How Do I Live” and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” they have other preoccupations. “The Fire Inside,” empowerment pop performed by Becky G, concludes Eva Longoria’s biopic about Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia), a Frito-Lay janitor who rises through the ranks after creating the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. And…

When Wanda Sykes first toured the L.A.-area school that her now-14-year-old twins attend, not only were she and her wife, Alex, won over by how LGBTQ-inclusive it is, but the comedian imagined how things would have been different if she had grown up with such acceptance. “I could’ve saved myself a lot of unnecessary dick in my life,” she jokes in her latest Netflix stand-up special, Wanda Sykes: I’m an Entertainer, which premiered on the streamer in May. From LGBTQ issues to police violence against Black Americans, Sykes packs a remarkable amount of political humor into the hour of comedy, all with a personal approach that, she says, “makes it more relatable.” The Emmy-winning performer — who also starred this year on two series, The Upshaws and The Other Two,…

In Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, Oscar nominee Barry Keoghan stars as Oliver Quick, a middle-class student at Oxford University who becomes infatuated with his handsome and wealthy classmate Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). As the school year ends, Felix invites him to spend the summer with him and his idiosyncratic family at their massive country estate — the eponymous Saltburn. Fennell’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning debut, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn is a psychological black comedy inspired by Gothic literature, tracing Oliver’s struggle to fit in with the strange and rich family that hosts him at their home. But twists and turns abound in Fennell’s satire of the British class system, which she describes as “Barry Lyndon meets indie sleaze.” Calling out other films set in similar environs (including Oscar-winning features The Remains…

When Jordan Reddout and Gus Hickey heard that Hulu was developing an adaptation of The Other Black Girl, they knew they wanted in. “We called our agents and said, ‘Do whatever you have to do to get us a meeting,’” says Reddout, who had already read (nay, “devoured”) the best-selling novel about a book publishing company that becomes a dystopian workplace. Hickey says they connected to one of the book’s themes in particular. “As people who have been in corporate America and worked desk jobs, we’ve felt that experience of having to sacrifice a piece of yourself to succeed,” he explains. “I think everyone who has worked in capitalism has wondered whether or not it’s worth it.” The longtime writing partners, who previously worked on Mixedish and the Will &…

Episode six of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty’s second season sees the Los Angeles team and its bitter rival, the Boston Celtics, on a course to meet in the 1984 NBA Finals. In the script, this translated to a mere sentence: “It said something like, ‘The two teams colliding on each other as we make it to the player,’ — it’s really that simple,” explains director Salli Richardson-Whitfield. Onscreen, however, this moment translated to a massively complex and intricate sequence editing together different playoff games and following a basketball as it travels across varying stadiums and players. “It was really something that [cinematographer] Todd Banhazl, Idan [Ravin], our basketball coordinator, [and I] really came up with ourselves.” To execute this sequence, which was shot in a studio…

At the opening of David Fincher’s The Killer, Michael Fassbender’s unnamed assassin describes his look as based on a German tourist he saw in London. It’s a convenient disguise for blending in on the streets of Paris because, as he explains, no one wants to interact with a German tourist. But what does that look like off the page? That task fell to costume designer Cate Adams, working with the exacting director. “David had a lot of ideas about how he wanted him to look,” she says. “He did not want him to look cool at all, like a typical assassin.” The solution? Bucket hats, Skechers and “lazy people clothing.”…

“I always want to steer away from Asian tropes and lean upon what I can do with the power of drama.” A 24’s Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song’s feature film debut, is a bittersweet and tender drama incorporating big ideas of cultural identity and fate within an intimate and surprising story of an unexpected love triangle. Centered on Greta Lee’s Nora, the film follows the young woman as she emigrates from South Korea to Canada with her parents as a child, and later moves to New York City, where she lives and studies as an aspiring playwright. But a blast from the past comes back to haunt her when she reconnects with a childhood crush from Seoul — Teo Yoo’s Hae Sung — with whom she develops an emotional online…

When Lee Eisenberg’s wife first read Bonnie Garmus’ novel Lessons in Chemistry, she immediately said, “This is a series.” “I started reading the book that night and just flipped for it,” recalls the showrunner, who developed the TV adaptation for the Apple TV+ series that stars Brie Larson in the lead role of chemist Elizabeth Zott. “I thought the writing was incredible, and the twists and turns completely took me by surprise,” he says. “I’ve never done this before, but I called Apple and I said, ‘If there’s anything to be done on this show, I just want to raise my hand. And I left it like that.’” To Eisenberg’s delight, the streamer was interested. “They said, ‘Oh, we’re actually looking for a writer. Do you have time to meet…

American Horror Story: Delicate As FX’s horror anthology enters its 12th season, three things set apart its latest baby, Delicate, from its big siblings. One is the fact that it’s the first story based on a novel — Danielle Valentine’s Delicate Condition, a Rosemary’s Baby riff about an actress, Anna (Emma Roberts), trying to conceive via IVF. Another is that it’s the first season not to have co-creator Ryan Murphy as showrunner; instead, AHS newbie Halley Feiffer (American Crime Story: Impeachment) is fulfilling that role. In combination, they signal a potential for American Horror Story to head in a cleaner and clearer direction, away from its long-standing reputation for sloppy plotting — but not too far from its gift for building buzz, since the third standout element is the headline-worthy…