Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 33B - December 4, 2023 i The Hollywood Reporter

It is almost like a Shakespearean drama with a lot of cool action,” says two-time Oscar-winning film editor Pietro Scalia of Michael Mann’s new Ferrari, which is based on the biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine and explores the life of the eponymous automaker (played by Adam Driver) as he struggles personally and professionally in 1957. In his first pairing with the director, Scalia — who won his Oscars for JFK (shared with Joe Hutshing) and Black Hawk Down — emphasizes that while thrilling race scenes were created, Mann’s focus was first on character and key relationships, like those between Enzo and Laura (Enzo’s wife, portrayed by Penélope Cruz) and Enzo and Lena (his lover, portrayed by Shailene Woodley). “I remember that he loved to…

When it comes to Wes Anderson, production designer Adam Stockhausen admits he’s a fan first, collaborator second. “I love the way he tells stories,” says Stockhausen, who first worked with the auteur as an art director on The Darjeeling Limited. Since then, Stockhausen has served as production designer on Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel (for which he won an Oscar), The French Dispatch, this year’s Asteroid City (released in June by Focus Features) and the director’s recent series of short films — The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher and Poison — based on stories by Roald Dahl for Netflix. “I love how he thinks visually,” Stockhausen adds. “I definitely like the challenge it brings to help make that happen.” The director’s latest feature…

Without a juggernaut such as Avatar: The Way of Water in the running — and schedule changes that pushed big tentpoles, notably Dune 2, back to 2024 — this season’s visual effects Oscar race is shaping up to be a competitive one. The road to a nomination begins with a committee of branch members who meet to discuss qualified work and create a shortlist of 10 films that will be announced Dec. 21. These films will participate in a January “bake-off,” during which VFX teams from each of the movies present a show-and-tell and answer questions from branch members before they vote on which five films to nominate for the VFX Oscar. One from the sci-fi arena that seems to have an assured place on the shortlist is Gareth Edwards’…

Like real teens across the decades (and the pond), students on the big screen this season succeed in presenting their status, aspirations and insecurities despite the confines of a school uniform — or dress code, like at Barton Academy, circa 1970, in Focus Features’ The Holdovers. To fill out the archetypes at the fictional New England boys boarding school, costume designer Wendy Chuck raided costume houses for late-’60s suit jackets, trousers, button-down shirts and ties. “Is he a kid that has to look disheveled? Is he the jock that is more put together?” says Chuck. On the last day of class before holiday break, the brawny “bully” Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) glowers in a rugged brown corduroy jacket, mussed white button-down and a striped tie in an aggressive shade of…

Yentl, the story of a woman who disguises herself as a man to pursue her dream of a Talmudic education, was a pioneering film for director and star Barbra Streisand, who became the first woman to win a Golden Globe for directing in 1984. Two months later, the film again broke new ground when Marilyn Bergman became the first woman to win an Oscar for original score. She shared the award with her husband and writing partner, Alan Bergman, and composer Michel Legrand in the original song score category (at the time, the Academy handed out separate honors to “musical” and “non-musical” movies; Yentl was considered the former). The Bergmans were already accomplished songwriters before Yentl, and had won two original song Oscars: for The Thomas Crown Affair (also a…

I joined Outlier Society as president and became Michael B. Jordan’s producing partner after serving as president of production at Paramount Pictures. When I arrived at Outlier, the Creed III team was already in development on the script from a story by the franchise’s originator, the incomparable Ryan Coogler, to be written by King Richard Oscar nominee Zach Baylin and Keenan Coogler, Ryan’s brother. While I was of course excited to support Michael in his directorial debut and produce this film alongside Michael and Ryan, another great joy for me was reuniting with producer Irwin Winkler, with whom I had worked over many years and films in my Paramount days and who won the Oscar for best picture with Rocky. In the early stages of preproduction, we stress-tested the concept…

BEST PICTURE Air Director Ben Affleck, who was kept from campaigning by the SAG-AFTRA strike (he also plays a small part in the film), finally hit the circuit with a BAFTA Q&A on Nov. 30. But he disappointed some by skipping the Gotham Awards on Nov. 27, when his film was presented with a Visionary Icon & Creator Tribute. (The honor was accepted by screenwriter Alex Convery.) BEST DIRECTOR Greta Gerwig Barbie The helmer of the year’s biggest blockbuster and her film’s star, Margot Robbie, jointly accepted the Gothams’ Global Icon & Creator Tribute. The same day, it was announced that Gerwig will be honored Jan. 4 with the Palm Springs International Film Festival’s director of the year award. BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY Anatomy of a Fall Justine Triet and Arthur…

AIKĀNE An island warrior falls into a mysterious underwater world and begins an epic adventure. THE BRAVE LOCOMOTIVE Andrew Chesworth, who worked on the animation team for Big Hero 6, wrote and directed this musical tale. CHUTES Kenzie Sutton’s short examines capitalism and consumerism through the lens of childhood toys. EPICENTER A man and a woman both have surreal connections to South Korea’s Bukhansan mountain. MUM’S SPAGHETTI Poppy aspires to become the world’s next great rapper alongside her beatboxing dog, Snoop. ARMAT Élodie Dermange’s short delves into her family’s Armenian origins and reckons with generational trauma. THE BRIDGE Izumi Yoshida’s film, inspired by true events of the 1920s, tells the story of orphans forced into adulthood. COLOUR! A young girl attends a new school and risks losing her identity by…

Hair designer Francesco Pegoretti and makeup designer Jana Carboni worked as a team to focus on the two leads of Ridley Scott’s historical epic Napoleon, about the eponymous French general and emperor (Joaquin Phoenix) and his free-spirited first wife, Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In the scene pictured above, Napoleon meets Josephine for the first time at a candlelit party, days after she’s escaped beheading during the French Revolution. “For the first part of the movie, she has to have short hair because she was in the prison waiting for the guillotine,” explains Pegoretti. In the real story of Josephine’s life, she was saved from beheading by only one day and had cut her hair off herself to prevent it from getting caught by the blade. “In the longer version [of the…

To achieve the hyper-naturalistic, lived-in connections among her trio of characters in Past Lives, writer-director Celine Song put both her cast and crew through a number of unusual exercises. For Greta Lee and Teo Yoo, who play childhood soulmates Nora and Hae Sung, that meant not being allowed to physically touch until the very moment their characters do onscreen, when they reunite as adults in New York City. “It becomes this really big, kind of cosmic thing to create this weird emotion of longing for each other,” Yoo tells THR. “That created a certain type of chemistry and this wonderful tension on film.” The story unfolds in three chronological acts: 24 years ago in Seoul during the last days before Nora’s family immigrates to North America; 12 years later, when…

In Netflix’s live-action short The After, a man named Dayo (David Oyelowo, who also serves as executive producer) loses his wife and child in a brutal public display of violence. Describing his film’s intense and shocking opening scene, director Misan Harriman compares it to “an act of God” — one born out of the “collective trauma of 2020.” What follows is Dayo’s recovery as he draws into himself, taking on a job as a rideshare driver to limit the intimacy of interactions with others — that is, until a family of three riders forces him to confront his long-simmering emotions. Oyelowo says it was Harriman’s work as a photographer that inspired him to join the film, which Harriman co-wrote with John Julius Schwabach. “I had been paying attention to his…

Killers of the Flower Moon “I’m the first [listener], so I always pay attention to how the performances, the transitions, the arc will be experienced by the audience,” says veteran production sound mixer Mark Ulano. In the case of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple/Paramount — about a series of murders that took place in the Osage Nation in the 1920s — that included the tonality of the main characters. For instance, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart is “filled with conflict and ambivalence over … his marriage and his fundamental, amoral betrayal [due to] fear of his uncle [William King Hale, played by Robert De Niro],” says Ulano. “You could hear that — I mean, Leonardo disappears into this character.” Ulano also praises De Niro and Lily Gladstone…

“I think it was a voice from the wider audience telling us that people wanted to go to the cinemas again and people wanted to join in with an event,” says Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema of the summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon. Rodrigo Prieto, who lensed Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as well as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, also was encouraged by “the excitement that came from the audience wanting to go back to the cinema and see such a diverse example of human experience — Barbie’s not a human, but she does have human emotions, after all.” This discussion was part of The Hollywood Reporter’s Cinematographer Roundtable, recorded remotely Nov. 16 and also including cinematographers Cristina Dunlap, who lensed American Fiction; Shabier Kirchner, of Past Lives; Dan Laustsen, of…