Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1A - January 8, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

A film director sleeping with a young woman behind his husband’s back. A group of horny teenage girls starting a fight club. A middle-aged swimmer attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida. This year, queer stories seem to be breaking from common narrative tropes — coming out, persecution, HIV/AIDS — in a major way. But are there actually more stories being told about queer people who aren’t suffering because of their sexuality? For Ira Sachs, who wrote and directed Passages, the answer is not so clear. “This idea that queer films are now broadening out — that’s really not my experience of queer cinema,” says Sachs, emphasizing his own personal canon of favorites and movies that inspired Passages: films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman, Frank Ripploh and Luchino Visconti.…

There’s a very real chance that the sibling singer-songwriters Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell will make history in 2024. Over the 95 years of the Academy Awards, only three people have won two Oscars by the age of 30, the youngest being Luise Rainer, at 28, back in 1938. But Eilish and O’Connell, who won the best original song Oscar in 2022 for the Bond tune “No Time to Die” from the film of the same title, are the frontrunners to win it again for “What Was I Made For?” from Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed summer hit Barbie. If that happens, it will make them, at just 22 and 26, respectively, the new record holders by far. “What Was I Made For?” — which articulates the title character’s feelings as she…

In late 2020, Cord Jefferson, a journalist turned TV writer, was in a state of creative dismay. He had just gone through a crushing professional disappointment: A big-budget series project he had spent months writing and developing for Apple TV — Scraper, based on his first career, as a writer and editor at Gawker Media — was tantalizingly close to going into production. But then, that fall, Apple abruptly pulled the plug. It was in the aftermath of this moment — “a dark period,” as he puts it — that Jefferson happened upon a copy of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure. “It was as exciting as it was uncanny,” Jefferson says of his experience reading the book over Christmas in 2020. “It felt like someone had decided to write a…

Francine Jamison-Tanchuck worked as an assistant to costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers (“swatching fabrics and dressing background players,” she recalls) on Steven Spielberg’s 1985 film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Jamison-Tanchuck was then a costume supervisor for the women characters, “because in those particular days, we had two supervisors on a film: one for the ladies, one for the men,” she explains. “I think it’s better to have just one supervisor, but that’s how they broke it down in the past.” Nearly 40 years later, Jamison-Tanchuck was the head costume designer of Blitz Bazawule’s musical adaptation of the property. She saw the stage show with “some girlfriends of mine, we flew to New York for my birthday celebration,” she says. “To me, The Color Purple is like It’s…

The Promised Land, from Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, is a story of ambition. Set in 1755, it follows Captain Ludvig Kahlen (Mads Mikkelsen), a bankrupt former soldier determined to secure the royal title denied him by birth — the film’s Danish title, Bastarden, is a reference to Kahlen’s origins as the illegitimate son of a rich landowner and his housemaid. He aims to achieve his goal by building a colony for the Danish king in the hinterlands of the heath, at the time a lawless and untamed wilderness. In addition to the unforgiving climate and hardscrabble, crop-resistant soil, Kahlen has to battle with Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), a brutal and arrogant land baron determined to claim Kahlen’s land for his own. The premise has the makings of a classic…

In Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, middle-aged screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) revisits his childhood home to talk to the ghosts of his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) and at the same time embarks on a romantic relationship with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal). Adapted from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel Strangers, the film takes bold steps away from the original text. “I have to be able to feel [that] I can connect on a very personal level with the material,” explains the writer-director. “There was something about this idea of meeting your parents again — how grief can be very hard to get rid of, that pain can live inside you and bubble away.” In order to connect himself to the story, Haigh made several big changes from the…

German filmmaker Wim Wenders still remembers the epiphany he had when viewing the experimental concert film U2 3D at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. It was one of the earliest live-action digital 3D productions — Avatar was still two years away from its defining 2009 release — but at that screening he saw 3D’s potential to convey space and depth, so he used it for his next project, a documentary about dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. “3D is about perception of space, and that’s what I needed most in order to be in Pina’s kingdom,” says the director. With stunning re-creations of her choreography, Pina was released in 2011 and became the first digital 3D feature documentary to earn an Oscar nomination. More than a decade later, stereoscopic 3D has…

From casting the CEO of the company that is financing their movie for Barbie to re-creating one of the most iconic moments of 20th century American history in 117-degree weather in Rustin, the producers behind this year’s awards films have had to navigate their share of uncomfortable, untenable and downright unbelievable situations to get their features to the big screen. Tom Ackerley (Barbie), Ed Guiney (Poor Things), Natalie Portman (May December), Scott Sanders (The Color Purple), Christine Vachon (Past Lives and May December) and George C. Wolfe (Rustin) came together in Los Angeles for THR’s Producer Roundtable. Even with the ups and downs, there is no place they’d rather be than on set. “I feel like cynicism is the creativity killer. It’s the thing that destroys everything,” says Vachon. She…

In the opening of Netflix’s Oscar-shortlisted documentary feature Stamped From the Beginning, director Roger Ross Williams asks a group of Black women scholars, all of whom appear throughout the doc as talking heads, a provocative question: “What’s wrong with Black people?” The answer is, of course, “nothing.” But over the next 90 minutes, those talking heads and author Ibram X. Kendi — his New York Times best-seller is the basis for Williams’ film — come to the same conclusion: Americans have been told various myths, in history books and in popular culture, about Black people. “Like most Americans, I believe a lot of the lies about Black people, even though I’m Black myself,” says Williams, who in 2010 became the first Black director to win an Oscar with his documentary…