Innholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 6B - February 20, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

From the moment editor Laurent Sénéchal read the script for Anatomy of a Fall, he knew he had a challenge ahead of him when it came to the crucial flashback showing a drag-out fight between Sandra (Sandra Hüller), an author on trial, and her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), who fell to his death off the roof of their Alpine home. The scene arrives in the middle of Sandra’s trial over her role in Samuel’s plummet. What begins as just audio played for the courtroom is eventually brought to life for the audience watching the film. “When I was reading, I didn’t really know what would be the point of view,” Sénéchal says. “It’s like the point of view of God. For me, it was a bit tricky.” That sequence is…

“The only reason we are talking right now,” director Pablo Berger says over Zoom, “is because I fell in love with Robot and Dog and the story.” The Spanish director is speaking from L.A., where he recently attended the Oscar nominees luncheon for his feted feature animated film Robot Dreams, but, as he explains, the project originated with Sara Varon’s 2007 graphic novel. “The characters are very simple, cartoonlike,” says Berger. “That was very attractive and at the same time something very good for animation.” So Berger, working on his first animated project, along with his character designer Daniel Fernandez Casas, embarked on a little bit of a “makeover” for the central duo, a human-like dog and the robot pal he orders who becomes his best friend. Set in ’80s…

“They can’t put out what you got inside you / No way to put out that flame” “THE FIRE INSIDE” BY DIANE WARREN FLAMIN’ HOT For Eva Longoria’s feature directorial debut, 15-time nominee Warren composed a crowd-pleasing anthem about following one’s dreams. Mexican American singer Becky G sings the track, centering on the theme of self-determination as explored in Longoria’s film about Richard Montañez, the Frito-Lay janitor turned marketing director who claimed to have invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. “Anywhere else I’d be a 10 / Is it my destiny to live and die a life of blond fragility?” “I’M JUST KEN” BY MARK RONSON AND ANDREW WYATT • BARBIE One of Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling’s scene-stealing moments is in the blockbuster comedy’s final act. While Margot Robbie’s Barbie suffers existential…

In April 2019, the Academy made a major change to the category formerly known as best foreign-language film. The following March, at the 92nd Academy Awards, Parasite made Oscar history when it became the first non-English film to take best picture — and the first movie to win the Oscar for the newly designated category of best international film. The decision to rename the category was born out of the Academy’s efforts to diversify its membership and embrace the global filmmaking community. “We believe that ‘international feature film’ better represents this category, and promotes a positive and inclusive view of filmmaking, and the art of film as a universal experience,” Larry Karaszewski and Diane Weyermann, then co-chairs of the international film committee (Weyermann died in 2021), said in a statement.…

In early 2022, Pablo Larraín asked esteemed cinematographer Edward Lachman whether he’d be interested in shooting a movie about Augusto Pinochet, the 20th century dictator responsible for torturing, abducting or executing thousands of Chileans during his 17-year rule. Larraín is the master of the anti-biopic, having directed unorthodox films about Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer), Jacqueline Kennedy (2016’s Jackie) and Pablo Neruda (2016’s Neruda), and El Conde — cowritten with fellow Chilean Guillermo Calderón — would be his most offbeat yet: a black-and-white satire portraying Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) as a 250-year-old vampire who faked his death and now drinks blood smoothies on a secluded farm while his children attempt to off him so they can obtain their inheritance. Lachman quickly deduced that Larraín’s far-out fusion of Gothic horror, dark comedy and…

When Poor Things hair, makeup and prosthetics designer Nadia Stacey began crafting the prosthetic looks for Willem Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter, her goal was not to make him look like a monster. Rather, she wanted him to look like there was a man underneath all the injuries that his father inflicted upon him with medical experiments when he was a child. “It was one of the hardest things of the whole filming process for me because with Baxter, we were designing something that we hadn’t seen before,” Stacey tells THR. She worked with prosthetic artists Mark Coulier and Josh Weston for about a month on developing the mad scientist’s look. Once the team nailed down Baxter’s face the way director Yorgos Lanthimos had envisioned it, with five silicone pieces and a…

Jack Fisk’s résumé lists collaborations with an incredible group of directors, among them Terrence Malick (Fisk has worked with the auteur since his debut, 1973’s Badlands), David Lynch (The Straight Story, Mulholland Drive) and Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master). But Apple’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which scored Fisk his third career Oscar nomination, is the production designer’s first film with Martin Scorsese. “Marty and I started out about the same time, but he was always on the other coast,” says Fisk, who now lives in Virginia with his wife, Sissy Spacek. “I never really met him, but we had a lot of mutual friends.” Fisk tells THR that he first heard about the events that take place in Scorsese’s latest — the systematic murders of members…

Ninety-two years before Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon would wrestle with Osage County’s troubling history, there was another Oscar-nominated film that explored the very same Oklahoma terrain, even if it did so with kid gloves on. 1931’s Cimarron is best remembered today — if it’s remembered at all — for its epic opening land-rush sequence (it required a week of shooting, 5,000 extras and 28 cameramen). Directed by Wesley Ruggles, who like Scorsese also helmed an adaptation of The Age of Innocence, Cimarron was the first Western to win a best picture statuette — and remained the only one until Dances With Wolves galloped onto the big screen 59 years later. In 1931, the talkie experiment was only 4 years old and Tinseltown was in the throes of…

After traveling to dozens of exotic locations around the world to film 20th Century Studios’ The Creator, director Gareth Edwards made one last trek that was among his most consequential: to Industrial Light & Magic in Northern California. There, he showed a rough cut of the film to the VFX pros who would be tasked with helping him make his $80 million film look like it cost $200 million, turning human actors into robots — no uncanny valley allowed — and creating futuristic cities and secret labs by augmenting real-life locations with visual effects. Many of the key moments onscreen were filled with temporary text such as “epic Nomad shot,” a reference to the killer space station at the center of the film concerning a war between humans and artificial…

For sound editor Richard King, it wasn’t the explosion scene in Universal’s Oppenheimer — nominated for 13 Oscars, including best sound — that was most challenging to work on. Instead, it was the smaller quantum particle and wave sequence scenes inside J. Robert Oppenheimer’s head that were most demanding. “They couldn’t sound small, even though [director] Chris [Nolan] was depicting very small objects and very small events,” King tells THR. “These small objects and these small events contained enormous latent power that we wanted to express. There’s the particle stuff and then there are the shimmering light-wave images, which I think are the idea that light is both a particle and a wave, the paradox that Oppenheimer talks about. It sounds appropriately impressive, because these little tiny events represent what’s…

It’s hard to believe that Laura Karpman, a five-time Emmy-winning composer and Juilliard graduate who has scored narrative features (The Marvels) as well as documentaries (Pray Away) in a career spanning more than 30 years, has only now received her first Oscar nomination. Karpman is nominated for her score for Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, a jazz soundtrack that comes alive with the use of multiple pianos and saxophones, as well as clarinets, trumpets, bass, drums and a string orchestra. The film, nominated for five Oscars including best picture, was always going to sing to a jazz tune, says Karpman. After all, the film’s main character is named Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. “When you have a character that’s named Thelonius Monk, you can’t ignore jazz,” Karpman says, referencing the influential American jazz…