Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 6A - February 16, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Danielle Brooks is a tremendously gifted stage and screen actress who is equally at home in dramas, comedies, musicals and everything in between. There’s something about her and colors — indeed, the two projects for which she is best known are the Netflix comedy turned drama series Orange Is the New Black, on which she appeared from 2013 through 2019, and the musical The Color Purple, which she was a part of on Broadway from 2015 through 2017, resulting in a Grammy win and a Tony nomination, and to which she returned for the film version that debuted in theaters on Christmas Day. Her turn in the big-screen version brought an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as well as SAG, BAFTA, Golden Globe and Critics Choice nods. The 34-year-old…

At first, Kaouther Ben Hania couldn’t figure out what Four Daughters should entail. She’d started working on the film in 2016 after seeing news reports about Olfa Hamrouni, a mother in the director’s native Tunisia whose two teenage daughters ran away from home and joined ISIS in a stunning act of radicalization. Ben Hania thought she’d make a conventional documentary, but after spending time with Hamrouni, she realized the story was too complex for that. So she pressed pause, made the 2020 drama The Man Who Sold His Skin (which earned an Oscar nom for international feature) and came back with a new idea: She would hire actors to portray the family, including Hamrouni’s missing children. Throughout the shoot, they restaged memories and discussed the family’s history alongside Hamrouni and…

Letter to a Pig In Tal Kantor’s short, which combines hand-drawn animation with live-action footage, a Holocaust survivor shares with a class of teenagers the letter he wrote to a pig that saved his life. The story delves into one girl’s imagination, and she soon comes to grapple with collective trauma and memory. Ninety-Five Senses Actor Tim Blake Nelson lends his voice to Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess’ short, a bittersweet ode to the body’s five senses — as well as regret and redemption — seen through the perspective of a death row inmate who has little time left to enjoy touch, taste, sound, sight and smell. Our Uniform This inventive short from director Yegane Moghaddam depicts the childhood memories of an Iranian woman upon the fabric of her old…

Back in September 2021, a friend sent me a paragraph-long notice in a magazine, reporting that Hollywood director Christopher Nolan was working on a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer. This was disturbing news to me, a co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, a 720-page biography of Oppenheimer that was published in 2005 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006. My coauthor, Martin J. Sherwin, and I had never heard from Nolan. But we had long hoped that our Oppenheimer biography might someday be turned into a film. Even before the book won the Pulitzer, a major Hollywood director had optioned the biography. Initially, we were thrilled. When we won the Pulitzer, the director sent us a bottle of French champagne. A script was written.…

She’s been called “a leading lady from the old school” who “epitomizes the wit and glamour of modern Hollywood” by Vanity Fair, while the Los Angeles Times has said she “brings to mind such Golden Age actresses as Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck — sassy, ready-for-anything heroines a half-step ahead of their man.” Over the course of some 35 years in the business, Annette Bening has given standout performances in films like The Grifters, Bugsy, The American President, American Beauty, Being Julia, The Kids Are All Right, 20th Century Women and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, accumulating along the way five Oscar nominations, an Emmy nomination and two Tony nominations, and winning two Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award and a SAG Award. But, in the eyes…

When Ilker Çatak was once frisked in school when he was younger, he had no idea that the incident would one day inspire a movie, one that would earn Germany an Oscar nom for international feature film. Sony Pictures Classics’ The Teachers’ Lounge follows Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a schoolteacher who decides to take matters into her own hands when one of her students is suspected of theft. Themes of prejudice, truth and power dynamics are explored in Çatak’s film, which he co-wrote with Johannes Duncker. It took Çatak three years from conception of the film to the final product, with research and writing of the screenplay taking place during the pandemic. It was then shot over 27 days at an empty school that was about to be torn down…

Director Wes Anderson “wasn’t quite sure for some time” how to go about adapting Roald Dahl’s short story “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” he explains in a long voicemail message. But then he came upon a realization: If he wasn’t directly adhering to the original text, he didn’t really want to turn the piece into a film at all. “I realized that it was Roald Dahl’s words that made the stories particularly interesting, that without his language I was not really as interested in adapting them,” he tells THR. “But I found a way to do them where we kept his language at the center of them.” That strategy involved having his actors narrate the story in direct address to camera, and hiring his The Grand Budapest Hotel star…

“Any resemblance to real events and dead or living people is not a coincidence. It is INTENTIONAL.” So reads a title card at the beginning of Costa-Gavras’ Z, set in an unnamed Mediterranean country that could stand in for any number of police states torn between Russian and American influence at the height of the Cold War. The 1969 Franco-Algerian production was fittingly international: While the dialogue (by Spanish writer Jorge Semprún) is in French, the plot itself, based on a book by Greek author Vassilis Vassilikos, adheres to events in Greece following the 1963 assassination of a popular pacifist candidate (whose counterpart is played by Yves Montand) who’d dared to oppose the ruling junta. The titular letter, painted across the street in a climactic scene, was a protest slogan…

THE GRIFTERS (1990) Bening earned her first Oscar nom for Stephen Frears’ thriller, about a small-time con man (John Cusack) who is torn between his estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) and his new girlfriend (Bening) — both of whom are high-stakes grifters. AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) The film, about a sexually frustrated man (Kevin Spacey) who becomes obsessed with his daughter’s best friend (Mena Suvari), won best picture. Bening was nominated for best actress in a leading role but lost to Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry. BEING JULIA (2004) Bening starred alongside Jeremy Irons in this comic drama, playing a disillusioned stage actress entering middle age. She earned her third Oscar nom for the role — and lost a second time to Swank, who won for Million Dollar Baby. THE KIDS…

To Mstyslav Chernov, the unlikely journey that his film 20 Days in Mariupol has taken is “a big miracle.” First, there’s the fact that the Ukrainian war journalist and filmmaker even survived the production process at all, given that he and his team were filming in Mariupol, Ukraine, as Russia was laying siege to the city in the late winter of 2022. Chernov says he and his colleagues, the only international journalists left on the ground, were eventually hunted by Russian forces and had to be extricated by a special Ukrainian task force. The group managed to smuggle 30 hours of footage past Russian checkpoints to leave the country. Later, the resulting film — documenting the hardships of residents from Russian battle tactics as the city fell — would be…

“When we finished the film, there were 2,000 banned books, and now there are 6,000,” says Trish Adlesic, one of three directors of the Oscar-nominated short The ABCs of Book Banning. The documentary, which is the directorial debut of veteran doc executive Sheila Nevins and is also directed by Nazenet Habtezghi, looks at America’s book-banning endeavors through the eyes of school-age children. The short is bookended by someone on the other end of the generational spectrum: Grace Linn, the 101-year-old free speech advocate whose visit to a Florida school board meeting went viral after she showed a quilt she had made displaying the titles of banned books and compared banning to the Nazis’ burning of books. “Both are done for the same reason,” Linn said. “Fear of knowledge.” Adlesic talks…