Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 1B - January 9, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Maestro was editor Michelle Tesoro’s first collaboration with director Bradley Cooper, who also stars as iconic composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in the now-streaming Netflix drama. While they worked closely on the edit — “Bradley loves to be in the cutting room,” she notes — Tesoro says their work always centered on character and performance when viewing his takes: “Whenever we would talk about his performance — or anybody else’s for that matter — we would never reference him as in ‘you, Bradley.’ We always talked about the characters as who they were, where ‘Lenny’ does this.” The Emmy-winning editor of Netflix limited series The Queen’s Gambit says that Cooper (who also co-wrote Maestro’s screenplay with Josh Singer) is incredibly collaborative. “We try things and we show the assistants and…

When director Matthew Heineman and musician Jon Batiste began their second collaboration after The First Wave — a harrowing documentary in which Heineman embedded himself in a New York hospital during the early days of the COVID pandemic, and for which Batiste provided the score — the project was much less fraught than its predecessor. American Symphony follows the former Late Show With Stephen Colbert bandleader during a career high: receiving a monumental 11 Grammy nominations for his 2021 album We Are (which won album of the year and four other prizes in April 2022) and preparing for a one-night performance of the titular composition at Carnegie Hall. Batiste, by all assumptions, was on top of the world. But privately, things were much more complex. His partner, writer and musician…

To tell the love story of Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre, Maestro director Bradley Cooper reteamed with his Oscar-nominated A Star Is Born cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and used various film looks, starting with black-and-white before moving to color and a widescreen aspect ratio. Cooper, who also stars as the renowned composer and conductor in the Netflix drama, gravitated toward film and championed the use of celluloid after running a series of tests, the DP says. Cooper also used actual locations to great effect, including Carnegie Hall, Ely Cathedral, Tanglewood, Broadway’s St. James Theatre and the Bernsteins’ Fairfield house in Connecticut. For the early part of the movie, Libatique explains, he used Kodak’s one available black-and-white stock. “That’s in the film with varied filtration to maximize the black and…

The opening synthesizer lines of the song “Flashdance… What a Feeling” offer a sense of promise — something big is about to happen. And the tune, performed by actress and singer Irene Cara for the soundtrack of 1983’s Flashdance, delivered, becoming a hit single and winning the Oscar for best original song in 1984. In fact, it was the only award that the film won, though the drama was also nominated for cinematography, editing and again in the original song category, for another synth-pop hit, “Maniac.” Producer Jerry Bruckheimer enlisted composer and producer Giorgio Moroder, with whom he had worked on the 1980 film American Gigolo, to write the music for Flashdance, about an aspiring ballet dancer, played by Jennifer Beals, who works by day as a welder and by…

In 2023, a number of outstanding ensembles dominated the year’s most celebrated films. As such, this season has delivered Oscar-worthy performances from two (or more) supporting actors and actresses in each film — which could result in the Academy nominating more than one supporting actor and/or actress from their respective features. Frontrunners include Danielle Brooks and Taraji P. Henson in Warner Bros.’ The Color Purple, Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons in Apple/Paramount’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo in Searchlight’s Poor Things, and two sets of supporting performers in Universal’s Oppenheimer: actresses Emily Blunt and Florence Pugh, and actors Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr. But there are also strong contenders in Ben Affleck and Chris Messina in Amazon Studios’ Air; Jamie Bell and Paul…

“There’s that great old quote about Hollywood: ‘No one knows anything,’ ” says Kemp Powers. “Yet everyone acts like they know everything. I get particularly frustrated by some of these trends, because they selectively omit things that don’t validate their thesis,” admits Powers, one of the trio of directors behind Sony Pictures Animation sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which made $690.5 million at the worldwide box office. “There’s always a selective omission. Apparently no one wants to see any superhero movies, but Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did pretty damn well, too, with superheroes.” Seth Rogen, one of the writers and producers of Paramount and Nickelodeon’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (and the voice of Bebop) agrees, pushing back against a perception that family and animated movies might…

It’s unusual to see an animated movie make the visual effects Academy Award shortlist — and even more rare for one to earn a nomination. But this season, Sony Pictures Animation’s bold Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse became the first animated feature to advance to the final 10 since 2020’s Soul from Pixar. To date, only 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings (both stop-motion) have earned VFX Oscar noms, plus Jon Favreau’s 2019 The Lion King (if you are among those who consider that an animated movie). The selection of Across the Spider-Verse underscores the continued blurring of the lines between what is considered animation and what is viewed as visual effects. Across the Spider-Verse — the sequel to Oscar winner Into the Spider-Verse —…

BEST PICTURE Creed III Bradley Cooper conducted a Jan. 6 Q&A in L.A. with Michael B. Jordan, while Irwin Winkler, a producer of the Rocky films, also did the rounds on behalf of this sequel that comes 48 years after the Oscar-winning original. Barbie Maya Rudolph moderated a Jan. 5 Q&A with Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera. Meanwhile, the Academy deemed the script adapted, meaning it will face stiffer competition than if it had been classified original. Oppenheimer During the Christmas break, Christopher Nolan’s J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic was chosen for seven awards, including best picture and director, at the 28th Capri Hollywood International Film Festival in Italy, where many voters reside. BEST ACTOR Paul Giamatti The Holdovers Kathryn Hahn presided over a Jan. 8 screening and Q&A…

Since The Holdovers hit theaters, the word “cozy” has been at the center of a (good-natured) debate. Viewers and critics looked to the word as a descriptor for its setting (a prep school’s campus during Christmastime), its star (Paul Giamatti, spectacled, mustachioed and sporting corduroys and knits), its period (a nostalgiaclad 1970). Director Alexander Payne, quite vocally, doesn’t agree — there’s a lighthearted, almost saccharine connotation to the term that, understandably, grates on him. The Holdovers, despite its more festive elements, is a cerebral movie about three lost souls (an isolated professor, a recently bereaved mother, a hapless and left-behind student) enduring the loneliest winter break of their lives. But it wouldn’t be awards season without a few semantics. Giamatti, for his part, takes no umbrage with coziness. “I know…

Production designer Ruth De Jong and costume designer Ellen Mirojnick have worked on projects helmed by incredible filmmakers. De Jong earned an Emmy nomination for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return and worked as the production designer on Jordan Peele’s Us and Nope. Mirojnick, meanwhile, earned an Emmy for Behind the Candelabra — one of her six collaborations with Steven Soderbergh — and designed costumes for Steven Spielberg (Always), Richard Attenborough (Chaplin), Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days), Oliver Stone (Wall Street) and Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Starship Troopers). So the pair know a thing or two about what makes a great director. But it’s Oppenheimer writer-director Christopher Nolan whom De Jong and Mirojnick call the ultimate filmmaker. “There is no other director like him, and I’ve worked with some…

Along shooting schedule, continuity, COVID protocols and a large cast were all challenges met by the hairstyling and makeup teams for Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon, which was shot on location in Oklahoma from April through September 2021. Of course, their commitment to telling an authentic story was the first key responsibility in making the Apple/Paramount historical drama, based on David Grann’s nonfiction book of the same name, about the murders of members of the Osage Nation who had achieved great wealth from their oil-rich land in 1920s Oklahoma. The work for the makeup and hairstyling department heads, Thomas Nellen and Kay Georgiou, respectively, began with meticulous research. This included talking with consultants as well as working with the production’s research department, which had amassed a collection…