Innholdsfortegnelse for January 4, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

After a strike-related delay from its original November date, the 14th annual Governors Awards will take place Jan. 9 at the Fairmont Century Plaza. This year, Angela Bassett, Mel Brooks and film editor Carol Littleton have been tapped to receive honorary Oscars, which recognize “extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences or for outstanding service to the Academy,” the organization says. The trophies are given to those who have previously been recognized with competitive Oscars (like Brooks, who won in 1969 for The Producers) and those who have not (like Bassett, who has two noms, and Littleton, who has one). Former Sundance Institute chief Michelle Satter will be honored with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, presented “to an individual in the…

As 2023 came to a close, a pair of animated movies — Aardman and Netflix’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget and Illumination/Universal’s Migration — delivered stories featuring carefully designed chickens and mallards, respectively, that leaned into simplicity to be expressive. Dawn of the Nugget is the sequel to famed British animation studio Aardman’s 2000 stop-motion hit Chicken Run, which was directed by studio co-founder Peter Lord and four-time Academy Award winner and Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park, who designed the original flock. “He came up with this aesthetic, which is very simple. And if you look at Wallace & Gromit and then look at the chickens, they have this in common. They’re not very mobile. The chickens are kind of like bottle shapes with arms and legs,” says…

Many books have been called unfilmable, but in the case of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, that label would hardly be an exaggeration. To start, it’s a nearly 500-page nonfiction dissertation with a heady, ambitious thesis about the foundations of social hierarchies across human history. As such, it pulls in anecdotes from sources as diverse as the Jim Crow South, 1930s Nazi Germany and an anthrax outbreak in the Siberian tundra in 2016. But what captivated director Ava DuVernay in the pages was the abundance of intimate human relationships woven throughout. Her last documentary (2016’s 13th) garnered an Emmy and an Oscar nomination, yet as she read Caste, she began envisioning a narrative feature, especially after learning about Wilkerson’s personal journey of love and loss…

Shortly after the end of his parents’ 35-year marriage, writer-director Noah Pritzker found comfort in the written word. What resulted is now known as Ex-Husbands, a drama-comedy about Griffin Dunne’s Peter Pearce, a New York dentist who’s still reeling from his parents’ divorce six years earlier. Peter must now also come to terms with his dying father (Richard Benjamin) and his own impending divorce from Maria (Rosanna Arquette). Serving as the Palm Springs International Film Festival’s closing night film on Jan. 13, Pritzker’s second feature follows Peter to Tulum, Mexico, where he reluctantly crashes the bachelor party that his youngest son, Mickey (Miles Heizer), organized for his oldest son, Nick (James Norton). Together, the trio must find a way through their own individual problems as their family begins anew. Pritzker…

The Golden Globes telecast is heading back to CBS for the first time in more than four decades. The ceremony is a TV staple, with viewers having come to expect a show that’s looser than the Academy Awards, thanks in part to plentiful alcohol. But the Globes, which debuted in 1944 and could be seen on NBC in the 1960s, went unaired throughout most of the 1970s due to (yup) scandals surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s voting process. Its first CBS broadcast took place on Jan. 31, 1981, where the big winner was Ordinary People, the adaptation of Judith Guest’s 1976 novel about an affluent family devastated by loss. The film landed eight nominations en route to five trophies, including those for best drama, best actress (Mary Tyler Moore)…

The most consequential entertainment business story of 2024 was kick-started by two pro operators having a pre-Christmas meal. The Dec. 19 lunch between Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and Paramount CEO Bob Bakish, held at Paramount’s New York office, instantly ignited a firestorm of “what ifs,” as the future of the storied studio was suddenly in question. Is Paramount for sale? Or is controlling shareholder National Amusements? Or both? But the future of Paramount — and, for that matter, WBD — may be defined by a lineup of characters straight out of central casting: a trio of scions forging their own path in the footsteps of their mogul fathers (Shari Redstone, David Ellison, Brian Roberts); a pair of self-made billionaire investors who find their fortunes tied up in the…

My Time With a Maestro: Veteran Producer Reflects on His Love Affair With Leonard Bernstein Howard Rosenman attended a screening of Bradley Cooper’s Maestro at the Academy late last year and admits he wanted to not like it. The veteran producer (Call Me by Your Name) had tried to sell a project based on the life of Leonard Bernstein years ago but “didn’t have the juice” to get it off the ground. He was also skeptical about the biopic because of his intimate personal ties to the iconic composer, a man he says changed the course of his life. Rosenman, 78, tells Rambling Reporter that, far from hating it, he was so floored by Cooper’s film that he couldn’t stop crying. “It’s a masterpiece,” he says. He met Bernstein right…

Jemma The Quick Pitch Jackson Kalb, who’s amassed a loyal following with his Italian comfort food at Ospi in Venice and a national reputation for his stint on Top Chef, opened East Coast seafood citadel Jemma di Mare in Brentwood last spring, along with a pizzeria pop-up in Palisades Village. Now comes a meat-minded counterpart for Hollywood, where he’s churning out not just crowd-pleasing red-sauce staples like meatballs and veal parmigiana but his personal take on an Italian beef sandwich, with bread made in-house, served on a silver platter at the base of a boutique hotel and members club. One can only imagine the reaction from the class-conscious cousins of The Bear. 1717 Vine St.…

What do you do when you need more than half a dozen classic 1950s-era Ferrari and Maserati race cars to make a film, but the originals today would sell at auction for $30 million or $40 million each? If you’re Ferrari director Michael Mann, you build them from scratch, of course, with historically faithful details to make even the most strident car lover grin with approval. The film, which stars Adam Driver as Ferrari founder and racer Enzo Ferrari, recreates the 1957 Mille Miglia, the famous 1,000-kilometer Italian road race that ran from Brescia, through the Futa Pass, onto Rome and back to Brescia. The production design of Ferrari was exacting: Everything was scrupulously studied, detailed and, eventually, reproduced for the film — from the signage on the Mille Miglia…

Barry Manilow is standing poolside at his Palm Springs home, a spectacular, eight-bedroom hillside villa with far-reaching views of the Coachella Valley. He’s taller than one might expect — a little over 6 feet — and rail-thin, which makes him appear even taller. Manilow is relaxed this morning, tapping one spindly leg to a tune wafting through the speakers — not one of those easy-listening grooves that made him a music superstar, but a thumping slice of techno called “Love Regenerator,” by Calvin Harris. He has an entire Spotify library of that stuff. Manilow, it turns out, loves dance music. At 80 — he reached the milestone last June — Manilow is coming off of one of the busiest stretches of a consistent, six-decade career. In September, he played his…

The Dec. 21 shortlists announcement, which limits the contenders vying for Oscars in 10 categories — international feature, documentary feature, original song and score, makeup and hairstyling, sound, visual effects, and animated, live-action and doc shorts — indicate that Barbie will likely dominate the Oscar noms to be announced Jan. 23. The Warner Bros. comedy earned five mentions across three categories: original score, original song and sound. Composer duo Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt earned notice for their score, plus two songs written for the film: the chart-topping “Dance the Night,” co-written with pop star Dua Lipa, and “I’m Just Ken,” which provided a musical sequence for scenestealer Ryan Gosling. Previous Oscar winners Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell are back in the race with a third Barbie tune, the ballad…

Premiering almost exactly 10 years after the launch of the first season and almost exactly five years after the Mahershala Ali-led third season, True Detective: Night Country is perched precariously in conversation with, and in contrast to, the show hatched and handled by Nic Pizzolatto. Created by Issa López, who wrote or co-wrote most of the season and directed all six episodes, Night Country is in some ways a throwback to the original; it revisits the uncomfortable intersection of true-crime narrative and supernatural undertones. Night Country also includes direct nods to imagery and dialogue from that inaugural season — citations that pander unnecessarily to the Pizzolatto-worshipping corner of the fandom, since otherwise the new iteration is at odds with its predecessors in theme and perspective. Night Country pushes aside Pizzolatto’s…

One out of every five moviegoers has vanished since the pandemic, according to research compiled by one Hollywood studio. Whether they’ll ever return to see a film on the big screen is anyone’s guess — and, if they do, when. It’s an alarming stat that offers some explanation as to why the box office turned on its head in 2023, leaving the film industry bewildered. Superhero fare — the genre that helped prop up the business for well over a decade — no longer got a free pass as megabudget pics bombed, including The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, both from DC, and Marvel Studios’ The Marvels. “Audiences’ tastes are changing, and it feels like they want more challenging fare,” says chief Comscore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.…

You broke my heart.” That’s what former Marvel Entertainment chairman and CEO Ike Perlmutter said to Bob Iger, according to The Wall Street Journal, when Iger made it clear in 2015 that he was not going to name veteran Disney executive and Perlmutter favorite Jay Rasulo his eventual successor. (He anointed Tom Staggs instead, and Staggs was out the following year.) Iger’s relationship with Perlmutter went sharply downhill from there, and in March, after incrementally stripping Perlmutter of his duties at Marvel, Iger ejected the contentious billionaire from the company altogether. Even before that happened, Perlmutter had backed his friend and Palm Beach neighbor, Nelson Peltz, in his quest for a seat on Disney’s board, which Peltz and Perlmutter argue is too cozy with Iger to be effective. Peltz dropped…

Before Hollywood shut down for the holidays, Warner Bros. squeezed in an L.A. fan event for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom on Dec. 18, with star Jason Momoa and director James Wan. “This might be the last time we’re up on a stage together,” Momoa told Wan, as the film may be Momoa’s final turn as the superhero with DC’s James Gunn and Peter Safran revamping the comic book universe. He added, “It’s been 12 years playing this character; it’s the longest I’ve ever played a character, through so much.” Wan said to his star, “Years from now, decades from now, there are going to be many Aquamans out there, but everyone’s going to look back to your Aquaman and that’s the one everyone is going to be gauging it…

At the end of 2021, a surprise contender zoomed toward a best picture nomination when Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car began to sweep critics groups’ awards across the country. The Japanese drama earned the prize for best film from critics in Boston, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, besting then-frontrunners Dune and The Power of the Dog and eventual best picture winner CODA. Buoyed by critical acclaim, Drive My Car went the extra mile beyond the international feature category, which it won: It also earned Academy Award nominations for best picture, director and original screenplay, way outpacing any predictions made by prognosticators when the season had begun in earnest. People often deride the Oscars for being about artsy films most moviegoers don’t see. But the fact remains that it’s the…

Zadrian Smith says he’s never seen anything like it in all the years he’s been working in fashion. “The showrooms have been wiped out — people are nervous about not having anything, that’s why it’s been happening,” says one half of the styling duo Zadrian + Sarah, whose clients include Wish star Ariana DeBose. “There have been times in which it’s felt like a fashion-show reality challenge.” When the SAG-AFTRA strike was settled Nov. 9, studios and streamers hit the ground running with media tours, premieres and other events in an attempt to make up for lost promotional time this awards season. The sudden flood proved to be a headache for stylists, while the rush to return to business exerted extra pressure on the usual end-of-year red carpet logjam. The…

No Oscar precursor’s top award is more informative about the best picture Oscar race than the Producers Guild of America’s, known as the Darryl F. Zanuck Award. The PGA is about the same size as the Academy — both have about 10,000 members. The PGA and the Academy each nominates 10 films for its top honor. And, like the Academy but almost no other awards group, the PGA uses a weighted preferential ballot to select that category’s winner. But before examining the track record of the groups picking the same winner, it’s worth looking at when they have differed on nominees — they tend to overlap on all but one or two titles a year. The ones on which they diverge, however, are fairly consistent: The PGA goes for big,…

In the opening moments of Netflix’s The Brothers Sun, a trio of hitmen descend on the home of Charles Sun (Justin Chien), the scion of a notorious Taiwanese triad. In a series of long, fluid takes, Charles defends himself with the grace of a trained warrior and the assurance of a man who’s used to danger, sending bodies flying and blood spilling. But a grim and gritty battle this isn’t. The entire fight plays out against an episode of The Great British Bake Off that Charles had been watching before he was so rudely interrupted. “Oh no, I think your cake’s just fallen,” the host sighs as Charles sends a man crashing down from the second floor. The scene sets the tone for eight hourlong episodes that serve up plenty…