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    Category: cinema

    ‘It’s a public health issue’: inside the fight to change Native American mascots | Documentary films

      February 7, 2024
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    The documentary film-maker Ben West hails from Washington DC, and thus grew up rooting for its football team. He wore the gear, watched the games, cheered on an organization named for a slur against Native Americans. Even as a kid, West, who is Cheyenne, felt the dissonance between the team he rooted for and the supposedly “honorific” idea it represented – that Native Americans were a symbol of war and violence, a costume to be donned in the name of gladiatorial sport. “Is that me on that helmet?” he recalled thinking. “Is that me on that jersey? And does that name have anything to do with me?”

    West credits a community of Indigenous people for helping him navigate such confusion, including his father, W Richard West Jr, founding director emeritus of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the activist Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee), whose decades-long fight to change the Washington football team mascot is partially chronicled in West’s film Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting. That’s no small feat – as the film, released on DVD and streaming this week in time for another Super Bowl featuring another team with a Native American logo, explains in swift and at times galling detail, the use of Native American mascots for sports teams is rooted in self-serving fictions, distorts a whitewashed history and does real psychological damage to Native American youth. “It’s a public health issue for Native people,” said West, citing the research the Dr Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip), among others, who have chronicled the quantifiable negative impact of Native American mascots and stereotypes on Native teens’ self-esteem.

    West and co-director Aviva Kempner were already working on the film in 2020, when pressure from the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests on the Washington team’s major sponsors finally forced majority owner Daniel Snyder to cave to decades of calls to remove the mascot. The team rebranded as the Washington Commanders in 2022. (The film makes a point that Native American mascots are interconnected with the oppression of other people; George Preston Marshall, the original owner of the Washington football team scapegoating Native Americans in a majority Black city, was the last owner to integrate his team, and insisted on playing “Dixie” before every game.) “We see Washington as a great test case that the corporations who own these teams can move on, and can still have a very strong fan base,” said Kempner, as was the decision by the Cleveland baseball team to change to the Guardians and discontinue its obviously minstrel-y “Chief Wahoo”.

    But the the problem is far from solved. “We had so many people say to us, ‘ok, so this is over then. Washington has changed its name, so no problem,’” said West. “And that is so not the case.” There are still three major sports franchises in the US with Native American mascots: the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team; the Atlanta Braves, with its particularly offensive and contrived “tomahawk chop” (“it reminds me of a Nazi rally,” said Kempner, who is Jewish, “and it’s just got to end”); and the Kansas City Chiefs, whose “Arrowhead” stadium and symbol have been widely publicized in recent months owing to a certain player dating a certain massive pop star. Perhaps more significant in terms of psychological impact is the more than 2,000 secondary schools with names imitating these franchises, where mock headdresses, Native American faces, war chants and face paint are tradition.

    A good portion of Imagining the Indian goes to dismantling the many, many myths, enshrined in public school and national history, undergirding the false belief that such mascots could be honorific: that Native Americans are an extinct people, that the continent was a blank slate, that Indigenous people were either bloodlust killers or noble savages. “We had to dedicate 25 minutes at the beginning of this movie just to get people to a baseline understanding of what actually happened on this continent,” said West. “There was a genocide. I like to call it an attempted genocide, but through no fault of anybody’s, we are not taught accurate history of what happened to Native people on this continent.”

    The film offers a succinct, if wide-ranging, view of how the “Indian,” in popular imagination, was created through myth, stereotype and erasure. How such myths built Hollywood, through tropes of “cowboys and Indians” – mute, terrifying, almost always parodied by white actors – in massively popular Westerns. How racist conceptions of Native people undergirded the popular character of Tonto, in the Lone Ranger, or extremely racially characterized cartoons (a particularly offensive example from Bugs Bunny delights in counting killed Native Americans with tally marks). “Everywhere you look in American culture, you find non-Native people imagining Indians,” says the historian Philip Deloria in the film. “These imaginings are white fantasies, and they bear almost no resemblance to the real lives of Native people either historically or in the present.”

    Photograph: First Run Features

    So, too, do the supposed “honorific” histories of professional sports franchises. The Kansas City team, as the film points out, was named not in honor of a specific tribe, but for a nickname for former mayor Harold Roe Bartle, who in the 1920s formed a fake Native American tribe, complete with mock rituals, costumes and honorifics, as part of his work with the Boy Scouts. The film’s second half follows Indigenous activists working to expose these histories and change customs on the franchise and local level, including Amanda Blackhorse (Navajo), Rhonda LeValdo (Acoma Pueblo), Gaylene Crouser (Standing Rock Sioux) and Harjo, awarded the presidential medal of freedom in 2014. “I don’t think even in the environment that we were in in 2020, [that] the issue of Native mascots would have been visible enough if not for those decades of work that people have put in to recognizing that this is an issue,” said West.

    Such work – which, as Blackhorse and Harjo explain, faced stiff and angry opposition; legal action to change the Washington team name claimed the better part of their lives – has finally broken through, on some fronts. Washington and Cleveland did change their mascots. So, too, did a handful of secondary schools, spurred in part by a 2015 California law banning the name “Redskins”. In 2020, the Kansas City team banned Native American costumes – headdresses and face paint – at its home games and announced it was “considering” ending the tomahawk chop (it hasn’t, nor has Atlanta). That ban is “not at all effective”, West noted. “Part of the problem here is that you can’t half-step things. Banning war paint and headdresses doesn’t keep people from engaging in the behaviors that they have become accustomed to and attribute to some sort of tradition.”

    On Sunday, ahead of the Super Bowl, another group of Native American activists and allies are expected to protest the continued use of Kansas City’s nickname, as they did last year to little national fanfare. The fight, West acknowledged, will likely be lifelong, owing to the slow, difficult process of re-education and the intransigence of fans to look at their beloved team clearly. “Somehow this fandom causes people to react in such an, honestly, violent way to people who are not confronting them personally,” said West on the typical response to protesters calling for change.

    “The film is not just a film. It’s a call to action,” he added. “We try never to come at people with ‘we’re right, you’re wrong, smack you on the wrist with a ruler if you don’t change your mind.’ But let’s talk about this, let’s have a conversation.”

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    Jack Jennings, P.O.W. Who Helped Build Burma Railway, Dies at 104

      February 6, 2024
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    Jack Jennings, a British prisoner of war during World War II who worked as a slave laborer on the Burma Railway, the roughly 250-mile Japanese military construction project that inspired a novel and the Oscar-winning film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” died on Jan. 19 in St. Marychurch, Torquay, England. He was 104.

    His son-in-law Paul Barrett confirmed the death, in a nursing facility.

    His family believes that Mr. Jennings was the last survivor of the estimated 85,000 British, Australian and Indian soldiers who were captured when the British colony of Singapore fell to Japanese forces in February 1942.

    A private in the First Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment, Mr. Jennings spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner of war, first in Changi Prison in Singapore and then in primitive camps along the route of the railway between Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).

    To build bridges, Mr. Jennings and at least 60,000 P.O.W.s — and thousands more local prisoners — were forced to cut down and debark trees, saw them into half-meter lengths, dig and carry earth to build embankments, and drive piles into the ground.

    In his memoir, “Prisoner Without a Crime,” published in 2011, Mr. Jennings described the dangerous process of driving the piles, using a heavy weight raised by the men to the top of a timber frame.

    “Two men generally guided the pile from a perched situation near the top,” he wrote. “This was a slow, punishing job, jolting your whole body when the weight suddenly dropped and the pile sank lower.”

    He survived the searing heat of the Indochinese jungle; a daily diet of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar, and a battery of ailments: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required skin grafts, which were performed without anesthesia.

    “At least 15 soldiers died each day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings told the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in camp just counting the days I had left to live. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”

    The brutality inflicted by Japanese soldiers was at least as bad during the railway work as it was in the camps.

    “If you weren’t working like they thought you should, you’d get a stick or the butt of a rifle,” he added. “But I had to keep going. I had a friend who slept next to me. I woke up one morning and he was dead.” Four men who tried to escape were beheaded.

    “My feeling for the Japanese guards who were with us, and all who allowed them to commit such barbaric crimes, stays the same,” Mr. Jennings wrote. “I will never forgive or forget.”

    Amid those torturous conditions, Mr. Jennings, who had worked as a wood joiner in England, carved a chess set out of wood he found in the camps, using a pen knife. He carried the chess pieces home.

    Jack Jennings was born on March 10, 1919, and grew up in West Midlands, England. His father, Joseph, a brickworker, died of cancer when Jack was 8; his mother, Ethel (Dunn) Jennings, who had worked in a foundry before she had children, took in laundry to earn money after her husband’s death. She also picked hops during the summer, along with Jack and his two sisters.

    At his mother’s request, Jack left school at 14 to earn money for the family. He fared poorly as an office trainee before finding his métier at a local joinery works. He eventually enrolled in classes in cabinet making at a local art college.

    Mr. Jennings was drafted into the British Army in 1939 and, after lengthy training, traveled by boat to Singapore, arriving in January 1942. The British Army was soon overwhelmed by the Japanese and surrendered Singapore on Feb. 15.

    “They knew where to strike, and strike hard,” he wrote in his memoir, adding that “there was nowhere to hide or to retreat to. We were trapped, civilians and soldiers.”

    The Japanese herded about 500 soldiers, most of them from the Cambridgeshire regiment, onto a tennis court. At each corner a Japanese soldier stood guard with a machine gun. The prisoners drank dirty water and ate “hard Army biscuits and ration chocolate” tossed at them by their captors, Mr. Jennings wrote.

    After five days, they were marched to Changi Prison and later to prison camps that the prisoners themselves had to hack out of the jungle. Mr. Jennings said he spent his time building bridges and being treated for his illnesses. An estimated 12,000 to 16,000 P.O.W.s died during construction of the railway. Many civilian prisoners perished as well.

    Mr. Jennings learned of the Japanese surrender in August 1945 from leaflets dropped in a prison camp that said, “To All Allied Prisoners of War: The Japanese Forces Have Surrendered Unconditionally and the War is Over.”

    He arrived home in October and, two months later, married his girlfriend, Mary. Three days later, he celebrated his first Christmas with his family in six years.

    In 1954, Pierre Boulle, a former French soldier and secret agent who had served in China, Burma and Indochina, published “The Bridge Over the River Kwai,” a novel about the construction of a bridge by Allied prisoners. It was turned into a film in 1957 starring Alec Guinness, as the delusional colonel in charge of the British prisoners at a Japanese prison camp, and William Holden, as an American Navy commander who escapes the camp and joins a commando mission to destroy the bridge. The movie, directed by David Lean, won seven Oscars, including for best picture.

    Mr. Jennings is survived by his daughters, Hazel Heath and Carol Barrett; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

    Mr. Jennings wrote his memoir in the early 1990s, although it would not be published until years later. He made several trips back to Singapore and Thailand.

    One of them, in 2012, to Thailand, near the Burmese border, was paid for by Britain’s National Lottery, which produced a television advertisement featuring Mr. Jennings for a campaign called “Life Changing.”

    In it he appears to walk slowly with his cane through a re-enactment of a jungle battle scene that was intended to be haunting memories to him, which fades into a visit to a cemetery for the Allied soldiers who died during construction of the railway.

    “We left him to have his own private time amongst the massive cemetery,” John Hillcoat, who directed the advertisement, wrote in an email. “It was daunting how many died. Jack seemed to have carried a lot of guilt being a survivor.”

    In an interview for the National Lottery, Mr. Jennings said that the Thailand he visited was “completely different” from the one he remembered. “So the old dreams just faded, you know — so I was quite surprised and relieved,” he said. “The place is really a nice tourist area now.”

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    The Zone of Interest and All of Us Strangers triumph at London Critics’ Circle Awards | Movies

      February 5, 2024
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    Homegrown experimentalism reigned supreme at the London Critics’ Circle awards, which gave its top honours to Jonathan Glazer’s radical Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest – and an equal number to Andrew Haigh’s devastating ghost romance, All of Us Strangers.

    The Zone of Interest, about the domestic idyll constructed by Hedwig and Rudolph Höss next door to Auschwitz, where he was camp commandant, won best picture and best director.

    Glazer thanked critics, audiences, his colleagues, “and most of all my wife, as it’s all about her at the end of the day anyway”.

    His producer, James Wilson, said he believed the question posed by the film “boils down” to one of “selective empathy: whether we care more about the health and safety and violence against some innocent people than others. It seems so stark in the world [today] that that is not the case.”

    Wilson continued by saying he hoped it went without saying that people in “Ukraine and south Israel” are “as deserving of empathy as those in Gaza or Yemen or anywhere”.

    The film also took the technical achievement prize for music and sound, awarded to Mica Levi and Johnnie Burn for their extraordinary soundtrack, which seeks to convey the unseen horrors behind the camp walls.

    Jonathan Glazer and his wife, Rachael Penfold, arrive at the London Critics’ Circle awards. Photograph: Anthony Harvey/REX/Shutterstock

    Speaking to the audience, Levi also related the film to the current conflict in the Middle East. “Working on this film continues to be monumental for me, and is starting to be for my friends,” they said. “The time we are in can’t be ignored. I wish for a ceasefire – as I’m sure we all do – and for some change.”

    Meanwhile, All of Us Strangers, in which Andrew Scott plays a screenwriter who embarks on a new relationship at the same time reuniting with his long-dead parents, took the Attenborough award for British/Irish film of the year, as well as best actor for Scott.

    Speaking to the audience, Scott said: “This is completely wonderful … it just launched our film in the most extraordinary way, and it’s made a difference.”

    He nodded to the film’s position at the top of the Irish box office, and it also having made No 1 in the UK, too. “For a gay love story, it ain’t nothing,” he said. “Don’t say those films don’t make money.”

    He went on to thank his co-stars Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, “my sexy mum and dad”, and the “also sexy” Paul Mescal, before thanking Haigh for allowing him to be part of a film which has elicited such emotional reactions. “Never in my life have I had such heartfelt, raw responses from audiences.”

    Scott finished by paying tearful tribute to his own mother and father, “who I’ve thought about every day”.

    Accepting the film of the year award, Haigh thanked critics for being “so generous with the film” and “connecting to it in really personal ways”.

    Mescal won British/Irish Performer for his body of work in 2023; the actor has also appeared over the past 12 months in God’s Creatures, Foe and Carmen. Thanking the voters for having helped “films like [Strangers]” which “need to be seen”, he singled out Scott and Haigh, saying that working on the film “was one of the privileges of my life”.

    Misan Harriman and Andrew Haigh at the London Critics’ Circle film awards. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images

    While The Zone of Interest is in contention for five Oscars next month, All of Us Strangers was not nominated in a single category. And while both films are up for Baftas, All of Us Strangers’ six nominations do not include a nod for Scott – an omission which met with considerable backlash.

    Meanwhile, best actress went to Emma Stone for Poor Things, consolidating her narrow lead over Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone in the Oscars’ race. Da’Vine Joy Randolph won best supporting actress for The Holdovers, repeating the win she has so far managed in every awards ceremony so far this season.

    However, there was a surprise in the supporting actor category, which went to Charles Melton for May December.

    The sweep of honours for Glazer and Haigh’s films meant Oppenheimer – hotly tipped to sweep the Oscars – went home without a single award, as did Barbie and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

    Justine Triet and Arthur Harari at the awards. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images

    Justine Triet and Arthur Harari took the screenwriting award for Anatomy of a Fall, while Mstyslav Chernov accepted the documentary prize for 20 Days in Mariupol. Speaking to the crowd, Chernov said he believed “cinema has the power to change history and how people will see our time, and maybe make better choices”.

    Both The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall lost out to Celine Song’s Past Lives for foreign-language film of the year, while Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron won the animated film prize.

    Oscar-nominated Jeffrey Wright was presented with the Dilys Powell Award for Excellence in Film by his American Fiction director Cord Jefferson. Meanwhile, Wright’s rival Colman Domingo took the inaugural Derek Malcolm Award for Innovation, named for the late Guardian film critic.

    How to Have Sex won two awards: international breakthrough performance for Mia McKenna-Bruce and Philip French Award for British/Irish breakthrough film-maker for writer/director Molly Manning Walker.

    Other winners included Lola Campbell, who won young performer for Scrapper, and Natalie Cubides-Brady, director of short film The Veiled City.

    The London Critics’ Circle is the UK’s longest-standing critics’ organisation, with 210 members. It is one of the last remaining awards ceremonies before the Baftas in a fortnight. These are followed, three weeks later on 10 March, by this year’s Oscars.

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    Don Murray, a Star in Films That Took on Social Issues, Dies at 94

      February 4, 2024
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    Don Murray, the boy-next-door actor who made his film debut as Marilyn Monroe’s infatuated cowboy in “Bus Stop” in 1956 and played a priest, a drug addict, a gay senator and myriad other roles in movies, on television and onstage over six decades, died on Friday at his home near Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 94.

    His son Christopher confirmed the death.

    In the postwar 1950s, when being sensitive, responsible and a “nice guy” were important attributes in a young man, Mr. Murray was a churchgoing pacifist who became a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He fulfilled his service obligation by working for two and a half years in German and Italian refugee camps for $10 a month, assisting orphans, the injured and the displaced.

    Back from Europe in 1954, he settled on an acting career focused on socially responsible themes. He appeared in a television drama about lawyers serving poor clients, and he had a part in the 1955 Broadway production of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder’s comedic vote of confidence in mankind’s narrow ability to survive, which starred Helen Hayes and Mary Martin.

    The director Joshua Logan saw that production and cast Mr. Murray in “Bus Stop,” his adaptation of William Inge’s play about a singer who is pursued by a cowpoke from a Phoenix clip joint to a snowbound Arizona bus stop, where a spark of dignity and character flame into a moving and humbling love. The film established Marilyn Monroe as a legitimate actress and Mr. Murray as an up-and-coming star.

    “With a wondrous new actor named Don Murray playing the stupid, stubborn poke and with the clutter of broncos, blondes and busters beautifully tangled, Mr. Logan has a booming comedy going before he gets to the romance,” Bosley Crowther wrote in a review for The New York Times. “And the fact that she fitfully but firmly summons the will and strength to humble him — to make him say ‘please,’ which is the point of the whole thing — attests to her new acting skill.”

    Mr. Murray’s performance in “Bus Stop” earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. He won many other honors for a body of work that included more than 35 Hollywood films, some 25 television movies and scores of other credits for starring in television and stage productions, as well as for writing, directing or producing for movies and television. But he was never again nominated for an Academy Award.

    His best-known early films also included “A Hatful of Rain” (1957), the story of a tormented drug addict hiding his secret from his wife, played by Eva Marie Saint; “Shake Hands With the Devil” (1959), a tale of the 1921 Irish rebellion, which also starred James Cagney; and “The Hoodlum Priest” (1961), in which Mr. Murray, who co-wrote the screenplay, portrayed a Jesuit who counsels former convicts.

    “Don has become identified with what might be called social significance and ‘appeal to reason’ film dramas,” Cue magazine noted in 1961. “He won’t play in a drama that glamorizes evil or glorifies violence. ‘I’m no nut on that,’ he says, ‘my pictures don’t have to carry a message — but they do have to say something.’”

    Mr. Murray played a memorable role in “Advise and Consent” (1962), Otto Preminger’s hugely successful film of Allen Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning political novel set in the halls of the Capitol. It starred Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton and Walter Pidgeon; Mr. Murray portrayed a married United States senator with a gay encounter in his past, who is blackmailed for his vote in a Senate confirmation fight over a nominee for secretary of state.

    Mr. Murray’s Hollywood roles dwindled in the late 1960s, and he turned increasingly to television. His most notable role was in “The Outcasts,” an ABC series in which he and Otis Young starred as a team of post-Civil War bounty hunters — Mr. Young as a former slave and Union soldier, and Mr. Murray as a former slave owner and Confederate officer.

    One of the first television shows with Black and white co-stars, “The Outcasts” ran for 26 weeks in the 1968-69 season. Broadcast after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were slain, it was widely criticized at the time for its depictions of racial tensions and violence. But in later years, seen in reruns and on home video, it was hailed as a forgotten classic.

    Mr. Murray co-wrote and directed “The Cross and the Switchblade” (1970), a film that starred Pat Boone as a street minister who brings two city street gangs to Christ — a character based on the work of an actual New York preacher. “Is it convincing?” Howard Thompson asked in a review for The Times. “And how hard does it hit? Answers: convincing and hard enough. I liked it.”

    From 1979 to 1981, Mr. Murray played Sid Fairgate, a husband and father, on the long-running CBS prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing.” He then returned to the big screen, appearing with Brooke Shields in “Endless Love” (1981), Denzel Washington in “License to Kill” (1984) and Barbara Eden in “The Stepford Children” (1987).

    Mr. Murray and Ms. Eden also co-starred in “Brand New Life” (1989-90), an NBC series about a wealthy widowed lawyer and a divorced waitress, each a parent of three teenagers, who marry and make a new life together in Bel Air, the affluent enclave of Los Angeles, with the blend of two families from contrasting social backgrounds leading to conflicts and comedy.

    Lean and youthful-looking nearly all his life, Mr. Murray was still appearing in movies in his 70s, including “Internet Love” (2000) and “Elvis Is Alive” (2001). After a 16-year hiatus, he resurfaced in 2017 in eight episodes of “Twin Peaks: The Return,” the Showtime continuation of David Lynch's 1990-91 ABC series. His character, Bushnell Mullins, was a Las Vegas insurance man endlessly at odds with clients and the authorities.

    Donald Patrick Murray was born in Hollywood on July 31, 1929, one of three children of Dennis and Ethel (Cook) Murray. His father, a singer and dancer, and his mother, a former Ziegfeld Girl, had moved from New York to work in talking pictures but returned to Broadway as the Great Depression settled in.

    Don and his siblings, William and Ethelyn, grew up in the village of East Rockaway on Long Island. He was a football and track star at East Rockaway High School, from which he graduated in 1946. After graduating in 1948 from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, he worked as a waiter and house painter, acted in summer stock and had small parts on television.

    His first break on Broadway was the part of a sailor in “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), Tennessee Williams’s play about a widow (Maureen Stapleton) returning to life and love.

    Mr. Murray was drafted by the Marine Corps in 1952, but he refused induction as a conscientious objector, citing his affiliation first with the Congregational Christian Church and later with the pacifist Church of the Brethren. He was allowed to fulfill his service obligation by assisting European refugees.

    While filming “Bus Stop” in 1956, he married the actress Hope Lange, a fellow cast member. They had two children, Christopher and Patricia, and were divorced in 1961. In 1962, he married the actress Elizabeth Johnson, known as Betty. They had three children, Colleen, Sean and Michael.

    In addition to his son Christopher, he is survived by two other sons, Michael and Sean; two daughters, Colleen Otcasek and Patricia Murray; a sister, Ethelyn Allison; and four grandchildren.

    In an interview for this obituary in 2017, Mr. Murray said that, inspired by his work with postwar refugees in barbed-wire camps in Italy, he and Ms. Lange founded the Homeless European Land Program and bought 150 acres on the island of Sardinia in 1956. With financial aid from international agencies and Protestant charities, he said, they brought more than 100 refugees out of the Italian camps — people from Communist countries in Europe and Franco’s Spain — to Sardinia, to settle in what became a permanent self-supporting community.

    “They planted crops and built homes,” he said. “The town is still there, with children and grandchildren of the original refugees.”

    Early in his career, Mr. Murray refused to sign an open-ended contract with 20th Century Fox. “They could put you in whatever picture they wanted,” he told a U.C.L.A. film soiree celebrating his work in 2014. He agreed to make two pictures a year if given time off to act on Broadway, and he bought out his contract to produce “The Hoodlum Priest” independently.

    “He didn’t play the game in the studio age,” the author and film authority Foster Hirsch told the gathering. “He never did get typecast and had great versatility.”

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    ‘The Connector,’ a Show That Asks: Should News Feel True or Be True?

      February 2, 2024
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    During a dinner break from rehearsals in mid-January, Prince, Brown and Sherman discussed how working on the musical had changed their perceptions about journalism, how the show had developed over the past decade and what they wanted the audience to leave the theater talking about. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

    Daisy, how has the show evolved in the decades since your initial idea?

    DAISY PRINCE I was naïve in thinking that, somehow, the explosion of social media and the easier access to information would set up a checks-and-balances system. But what I hadn’t accounted for was the fact that we’ve become much more of a culture of belief, instead of one that accepts the fact that there’s objective truth.

    JASON ROBERT BROWN The biggest thing that happened was the Trump presidency. The day before we did our first reading, Kellyanne Conway had used the term “alternative facts.” So, suddenly, our show was in the context of this presidency that was built on a foundation of bullshit, and we were like, “Oh, that’s actually the show we’ve been writing is the story of how you get to a culture of bullshit.” How do you get to a place where nobody has any reason to believe anything that they don’t want to believe?

    But the show is set in the late 1990s. Why did you decide on that era?

    PRINCE If you’re going to try to find a moment when the scales are about to tip, that was the moment. It wasn’t just the explosion of the internet, but because more young people were adept at using the internet, older people found themselves in a very peculiar and precarious position when it came to employment. And the people in this show are struggling with that.

    You began collaborating on this show in 2011. Why has it remained a priority for you?

    BROWN The idea that an audience comes into this and walks out of it thinking deeply, and perhaps differently, about the way they look at the news, the way they look at the media, the way they look at the internet, the way they look at even their relationships is really important to me.

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    Alec Baldwin pleads not guilty to new charge in fatal shooting on Rust film set | Alec Baldwin

      February 1, 2024
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    Actor Alec Baldwin entered a not guilty plea on Wednesday on a new involuntary manslaughter charge in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on a New Mexico movie set in October 2021.

    The actor was indicted earlier this month in the shooting, nearly a year after prosecutors dropped similar charges against him. At the time, the prosecutor’s office said that it would continue investigating the matter and that it could refile charges.

    Baldwin made the plea as he waived his right to an arraignment, court documents showed.

    Prosecutors brought the case before the grand jury in Santa Fe earlier this month, alleging that Baldwin caused Hutchins’s death either by negligence or “total disregard or indifference” for safety. The grand jury opted to indict.

    Baldwin, who also served as a co-producer on the western drama, was pointing a gun at Hutchins during an October 2021 rehearsal when the weapon fired, hitting her and wounding the film’s director, Joel Souza. Hutchins died at a nearby hospital.

    Baldwin has said that he pulled back the hammer of the gun before it fired, but that he did not pull the trigger. In a 2021 interview, he said he had believed the weapon had been safe and loaded with blanks, and denied responsibility for the shooting.

    “I feel someone is responsible for what happened, but I know it isn’t me. I might have killed myself if I thought I was responsible, and I don’t say that lightly,” he said.

    Halyna Hutchins at the Sundance film festival on 19 January 2018 in Park City, Utah. Photograph: Mat Hayward/Getty Images for AMC Networks

    The prosecution’s case centers on his role as an actor holding the weapon as well as his role as a co-producer with legal responsibility for production safety.

    Prosecutors had previously dropped charges against Baldwin based on evidence that the hammer of the revolver might have been modified, allowing it to fire without the trigger being pulled.

    But an independent forensic test commissioned by prosecutors concluded that Baldwin would have had to pull the trigger of the revolver for it to have fired the live round that struck Hutchins in the chest and killed her.

    “Although Alec Baldwin repeatedly denies pulling the trigger, given the tests, findings and observations reported here, the trigger had to be pulled or depressed sufficiently to release the fully cocked or retracted hammer of the evidence revolver,” the analysis states.

    Baldwin’s defense has described the situation as a “terrible tragedy” that “has been turned into this misguided prosecution”.

    “We look forward to our day in court,” Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro, defense attorneys for Baldwin, said earlier this month in response to news of the indictment.

    David Halls, the film’s assistant director who handed the weapon to Baldwin, was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence with unsupervised probation, a $500 fine, 24 hours of community service and a firearms safety class on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon in connection with the case.

    The movie’s chief weapons handler, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who had handled the gun before Halls, has also been charged with involuntary manslaughter and faces trial this year.

    Baldwin and his co-producers also face civil lawsuits seeking financial compensation, including from members of the Rust crew. The actor reached an undisclosed settlement with Hutchins’s family in 2022.

    The Rust Movie Productions company paid a $100,000 fine to workplace safety regulators in New Mexico.

    The film resumed production in April of last year with Matthew Hutchins, the husband of the late cinematographer, as an executive producer.

    Reuters contributed to this report

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    Minute-Long Soap Operas Are Here. Is America Ready?

      January 31, 2024
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    When Albee Zhang received an offer to produce cheesy short-form features made for phones last spring, she was skeptical, and so, she declined.

    But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.

    Since last summer, she has produced two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that are creating cookie-cutter content aimed at women.

    Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.

    The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.

    ReelShort is owned by Crazy Maple Studio, a company in Northern California that is backed by the Beijing-based digital publisher COL Group.

    ReelShort’s titles include “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband,” “I Got Married Without You” and “Bound by Vendetta: Sleeping With the Enemy.” The shows are formulaic: The plotlines include romance and revenge, the characters are archetypical and the dialogues are simple.

    The extremely short genre became popular in the Asia-Pacific region during the pandemic, and Joey Jia, the chief executive of Crazy Maple Studio, took notice.

    ReelShort aims to get people hooked as quickly as possible, with much of the action happening in the first few super short episodes. “This is a pay-as-you-go model,” Mr. Jia said. “If people are confused by the story, they leave.”

    The cost of making these features is relatively low, $300,000 or less, according to Crazy Maple Studios. The crews are small and partly made up of recent film graduates in Los Angeles, according to actors who worked on the productions.

    Viewers can watch dozens of minute-long episodes on ReelShort for free via multiple platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. But at some point, they must either pay or watch ads to unlock subsequent episodes.

    Sometimes people pay as much as $10 or $20 to keep watching, Ms. Zhang, the producer, said. “Isn’t that a crazy business?”

    In December, Mr. Jia told The Wall Street Journal that the company had already made $22 million in revenue.

    In the United States, ReelShort is trying to succeed where the short-form content company Quibi failed. Quibi launched in early 2020 and shut down that same year, partly because of what its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg called bad timing: The app offered five- to 10-minute videos of news and entertainment for people on the go, right as people stopped going anywhere because of pandemic lockdowns.

    And while Quibi focused on more highbrow content with A-list stars, ReelShort is doing the opposite: It’s giving people juicy plot points, from werewolves to evil step mothers to secret billionaire husbands to more werewolves.

    “We learned a lot from Quibi,” said Mr. Jia, the Crazy Maple Studio executive. ReelShort isn’t trying to appeal to everyone, like Quibi tried to do, he added.

    “To build a successful mobile app, you need to find out your core audience,” he said. And that audience is women who love soap operas. (ReelShort’s audience is roughly 75 percent female, Mr. Jia said.)

    Mr. Jia said he wasn’t trying to compete with streamers like Netflix. If you’re free to sit on your couch for a few hours, ReelShort is probably not the app you’re opening. It’s for those in-between moments: at a bus stop, in the bathroom.

    “We are using a very different business model,” Mr. Jia said, “and serving a different time.”

    ReelShort is hardly the first app owned or partly owned by a Chinese company to break through in the United States. TikTok and the shopping apps Shein and Temu have been among the most downloaded in recent months in Apple’s American app store.

    But for TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, this has been problematic. Lawmakers in the United States, Europe and Canada have expressed concerns that TikTok and its parent company may put people’s sensitive personal information into the hands of the Chinese government, and they have worked to restrict access to the wildly popular app. ReelShort has not faced the same kind of pressure.

    Last month, ReelShort was downloaded one million times and earned $5 million in revenue in Apple’s app store, according to the data firm Sensor Tower, and it was downloaded three million times in the Google Play Store, earning $3 million in revenue there. Since November, ReelShort has ranked somewhere in the top 15 of most popular entertainment apps in both app stores on most days. (For a few days in November, ReelShort even surpassed TikTok as the most popular entertainment app in Apple’s app store.)

    In total, more than seven million people downloaded ReelShort in the United States in 2023, on Apple and Android phones combined, according to data.ai. Worldwide, there were more than 24 million downloads last year. After the United States, India is ReelShort’s next-largest market, followed by the Philippines.

    Kasey Esser, a Los Angeles-based actor who has worked on short-form shows for ReelShort and other apps, described the format as this generation’s soap opera. He drew a comparison to channels with made-for-TV content, such as Hallmark.

    “People know exactly the story they’re going to be getting, but they will still watch it,” Mr. Esser, 34, said. “They will still love it.”

    For the actress Samantha Drews, ReelShort was a chance to play different types of characters. “I can say now that I’ve been cast in 15 to 16 features in the last few years,” Ms. Drews, 25, said. “That’s not something every actor can say.”

    Camille James Harman, 57, had a supporting role in the 2018 movie “Vice,” the Dick Cheney biopic starring Christian Bale that received several Oscar nominations. But she said she received a lot more responses for her starring role as an evil stepmother in the 2023 ReelShort production “The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband.”

    Other apps with names that are still unknown to many — Sereal+, ShortTV, DramaBox, FlexTV — have started producing such features, hoping to cash in on ReelShort’s formula.

    The quantity of new titles coming out on these platforms is greater than that of many traditional streaming services. And if it’s up to Mr. Jia, that will continue in 2024: “The goal this year is to deliver another 100 titles,” he said.

    As ReelShort pumps out its content, the quality of the productions is getting better, said Leomax He, who directed three productions for the app last year. Some shoots now employ a stunt or intimacy coordinator.

    “Budgets have gotten larger, the cameras are better, the crews are getting larger,” said Mr. He, 27.

    Major studios have not yet dabbled in the genre, but some actors and filmmakers speculated that American companies would soon enough start creating their own short-form content.

    “That’s why I am doing so many of these,” Mr. Esser, the actor, said. “It’s a unique opportunity to be the first guy known from these in the U.S.”

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    Women, Oscars, and power (a repost)

      January 30, 2024
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    Kathleen Kennedy on the 1 January 2013 cover.

    Kristin here:

    David’s health situation has made it difficult for our household to maintain this blog. We don’t want it to fade away, though, so we’ve decided to select previous entries from our backlist to republish. These are items that chime with current developments or that we think might languish undiscovered among our 1000+ entries over now 17 years (!). We hope that we will introduce new readers to our efforts and remind loyal readers of entries they may have once enjoyed. The run-up to the Oscars seemed a good time to revisit this one.

    Ever since the Oscar nominations were announced on Tuesday, January 23, social media and mainstream news outlets have been full of posts and articles about the “snubs” of female directors, notably Greta Gerwig and Celine Song. Even Hilary Clinton weighed in with some Barbie-love. Of course the failure to nominate many other people, male and female, also insired similar indignant tirades by fans. How could Alexander Payne be left out when virtually everyone who sees The Holdovers adores it? What about Leonardo DiCaprio? Or Greta Lee? Or fill in the blank?

    This sort of kvetching goes on every year, when inevitably a large number of worthies fail to be nominated. This year was perhaps bound to produce more of these also-rans, since as many have pointed out, this year saw an unusual number of excellent films. Christopher Nolan, Wes Anderson, and Alexander Payne released films that are arguably among their best. Aki Kaurismäki, after a gap of six years, returned with the quietly excellent Fallen Leaves. Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement with The Boy and the Heron. Outside the Oscar nominees, major veteran filmmakers contributed Close Your Eyes (Víctor Erice) and R.M.N. (Cristian Mungui). The list could go on.

    Returning to the issue of female directors and actors being snubbed by Academy voters, a few people point out that Margot Robbie is nominated for “Best Picture,” having been one of the producers of Barbie. Emma Stone is in the same position with Poor Things (though she, of course, did get nominated for Best Actress). On the whole, however, being a woman nominated for producing a Best Picture gets little or no attention, even if it is arguably as prestigious, if not more so.

    This strange imbalance has gone on for a long time. On October 23, 2017, I posted a blog entry on the topic. It was inspired by a Variety cover story on Kathleen Kennedy (above). I discussed the reasons why female producers are ignored by the public and by journalists. As I say below, that happens partly because there is no “best producer” category, and in the past, the names of the producers who would claim the statuette if their films won, were not listed. I see that this year, the Academy’s website does list all the names of the producers of the Best Picture nominees. Did they read my post? I’ll never know. I note that the suggestion made in my final paragraph has not been followed by the press.

    The old post does give a rundown of female producers who were nominated and in some cases won, from the first in 1973 up to 2016, by which point women were commonly being nominated in this category. For 2023, eight of the 30 producers of Best Picture nominees are women.

    The original entry

    Now that I have your attention …

    We are now well into the season when award speculation begins. Well, actually Oscar speculation knows no season these days, but it snowballs between now and the announcement of the winners on March 4–at which point the speculation concerning the 2018 Oscar race revs up.

    Among the issues that will inevitably come up is the question of whether more women directors will get nominated, especially following the critical and box-office success of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman. It would be great to see more female nominees for Best Director, but the real problem is achieving more equity in the number of women being able to direct films at all. Unless more women direct more films, their odds of getting nominated will be low. Maybe the occasional Kathryn Bigelow will emerge, but overall the directors making theatrical features remain largely male.

    Variety recently ran a story about initiatives to boost women’s chances in Hollywood. It stressed the low percentage of women in various key filmmaking roles:

    The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University found that in 2014, women made up just 7% of the directors behind Hollywood’s top 250 films. Overall, of the 700 films the center studied in 2014, 85% had no female directors, 80% had no female writers, 33% had no female producers, 78% had no female editors and 92% had no female cinematographers.

    Discouraging, except that there’s one figure that doesn’t support the lack of women. If 33% of films were without female producers, that means 67% had female producers–which is a lot better than in those other categories.

    One thing that has struck me as odd is the lack of attention paid to the distinct rise in the number of female producers being up for Oscars in the recent past. This Variety article, however, is the first one I’ve seen offering numbers to show that women are doing a lot better in the producing field than in other major areas.

     

    The missing names

    Kathleen Kennedy, the lady illustrated at the top of this entry has produced seven films nominated as Best Picture, and she is considered one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. How could she not be? She produced Steven Spielberg’s films, alongside others, for many years and since October, 2012, she has been President of Lucasfilm in its incarnation as a subsidiary of Disney. She runs the Star Wars series.

    In the Indie realm, producer Dede Gardner is on a roll, having since 2011 had three films nominated for the top prize in addition to wins in 2013 and 2016. Others, such as Megan Ellison and Tracey Seaward, have enjoyed multiple nominations. (I’m using the film’s year of release rather than the year when the award was bestowed.) As we’ll see, female producers are beginning to catch up to their male colleagues in number as well as prestige. Why no fuss about such important strides?

    I think the main reason is that there’s no “Best Producer” category. If there were, I suspect our image of women in the industry would be very different. But there’s just a Best Picture one. In most cases neither the industry journals nor the infotainment coverage lists the producers alongside the titles of the Best Picture nominees. So who’s to know that the “Best Picture” race also is, faut de mieux, the “Best Producer” contest.

    Another, perhaps less important reason why producers draw less attention is that because a film often has several producers. It’s more complicated to assign responsibility for who did what. Most people have a general idea of what directors do. They’re on set, they make decisions, and they supervise other artists. A female producer, like a male one, may have been included for many reasons. She might have done most of the work in assembling the main cast or crew members or she might have concentrated on gaining financial support. She might instead be termed a producer as a reward for crucial support at one juncture. We can’t know, and that perhaps makes it difficult for the public to get enthusiastic about producers. Of course, if journalists covered them more in the entertainment press, the public might gain more of a sense of what producers do.

    Yet whatever their contribution, those producers played some sort of crucial role, and they are the ones who get up and receive the statuettes when that last climactic announcement of the evening is made. (Lately there has been a trend for the every member of the cast and crew and all their relatives present to rush onto the stage for a grand finale, but it’s the producers who give the thank-you speeches.) They can take those statuettes, with their names engraved on them, home and put them on their mantels or to their office to display in a glass case. Yet few have any name recognition outside the industry, the entertainment press, and a few academics.

    Despite these producers’ importance, it’s difficult to find out who they have been over the years. Go to almost any website, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ own, in search of Oscar nominees stretching back through the years, and you will usually find names listed in all the other categories–but only the title of the nominated films in the Best Picture category. I finally found a complete list of Best Picture nominees’ producers compiled by an industrious contributor to Wikipedia. Going through and doing some counting and cross-checking, I have created and annotated my own list. With it I’ve tried to show the fairly steady progress that women have made in this category. I call them “nominees” below. Somewhat paradoxically, they win the Oscars, though technically the film is the official nominee.

    To keep this list from becoming even longer, I’ve listed only nominated films which had one or more women among their group of producers. Up to 2008 there were five films each year. Starting in 2009 the number could be anywhere between five and ten, though it’s usually eight or nine. I give the number of nominated films starting in 2009. Assume any films not listed were produced by men. If you’re curious about who those men were, click on the link in the previous paragraph.

    Here’s how things developed, including only years when female producers were “nominated.” (My comments in red.) Be patient. It gets off to a slow start, but things pick up.

     

    And the nominees are …

    1973 The Sting  (WINNER)  Tony Bill, Michael Phillips, and Julia Phillips.

    Julia Phillips becomes the first female producer nominated since the Oscars began in 1927 and the first to win.

    1982  E.T.  Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy.

    The second female producer nominated.

    1984  Places in the Heart. Arlene Donovon.

    The third nominated female producer.

    1987  Fatal Attraction. Stanley R. Jaffe and Sherry Lansing.

    The fourth nominated female producer.

    1989  Driving Miss Daisy. (WINNER) Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck.

    Lili Fini Zanuck is the second female producer to win.

    1991  The Prince of Tides. Barbra Streisand and Andrew S. Karsch.

    1994  Forrest Gump. (WINNER)  Wendy Finerman, Steve Tisch, and Steve Starkey.

    The Shawshank Redemption.  Niki Marvin.

    Wendy Finerman (right) becomes the third woman producer to win a Best Picture Oscar.

    This is the first year when two women are nominated. From this point to the present, there has been no year without at least one female producer nominated.

    1995  Sense and Sensibility.  Lindsay Doran.

    1996  Shine.  Jane Scott.

    1997  As Good as It Gets. James L. Brooks, Bridget Johnson, and Kristi Zea.

    The first year when four women are nominated.

    The first time two women are nominated for the same film.

    1998  Shakespeare in Love. (WINNER) David Parfitt, Donna Gigliotti, Harvey Weinstein, Edward Swick, and Marc Norman.

    Elizabeth.  Alison Owen, Eric Fellner, and Tim Bevan.

    Life Is Beautiful. Elda Ferri and Gianluigi Brasch.

    Gigliotti is the fourth woman to win a producing Oscar.

    1999  The Sixth Sense.  Frank Marshall, Kathleen Kennedy, and Barry Mendel.

    First year when a woman producer, Kennedy, is nominated for a second time.

    2000  Chocolat.  David Brown, Kit Golden, and Leslie Holleran.

    Erin Brockovich.  Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg, and Stacey Sher.

    For the second time, two women are nominated for the same film.

    2001  The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.  Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie O. Osborne.

    2002  The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie O. Osborne.

    2003  The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (WINNER)  Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Barrie O. Osborne.

    Lost in Translation.  Ross Katz and Sofia Coppola.

    Mystic River. Robert Lorenz, Judie G. Hoyt, and Clint Eastwood.

    Seabiscuit.  Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Gary Ross.

    Walsh is the fifth woman to win in this category.

    Walsh and Kennedy tie for the first woman nominated three times.

    The second year when four women are nominated.

    2004  Finding Neverland.  Richard N. Gladstein and Nellie Bellflower.

    2005  Crash. (WINNER)  Paul Haggis and Cathy Schulman.

    Brokeback Mountain. Diana Ossance and James Schamus.

    Capote.  Caroline Baron, William Vince, and Michael Ohoven.

    Munich.  Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy, and Michael Mendel.

    Cathy Schulman is the sixth woman to win.

    The third time four women are nominated.

    Kennedy becomes the first woman nominated four times.

    2006  The Queen.  Andy Harris, Christine Langan, and Tracey Seaward.

    2007  Michael Clayton.  Jennifer Fox and Sydney Pollack.

    Juno. Lianne Halfon, Mason Novack, and Russell Smith.

    There Will Be Blood.  Paul Thomas Anderson, Daniel Lopi, and JoAnne Sellar.

    The first year in which five women are nominated in this category.

    2008  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall, and Céan Chaffin.

    The Reader.  Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Donna Gigliotti, and Redmond Morris.

    First time a woman, Kennedy, reaches a fifth nomination.

    The third time two women are nominated for the same film.

    2009  The first year of up to ten nominations. Ten films nominated.

    The Hurt Locker. (WINNER)  Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicholas Chartier, and Greg Shapiro.

    District 9.  Peter Jackson and Carolynne Cunningham.

    An Education.  Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey.

    Precious. Lee Daniels, Sarah Siegel-Magness, and Gary Magness.

    Kathryn Bigelow becomes the seventh woman to win in this category. (Right, with her producing and directing Oscars.)

    The fourth time two women are nominated for the same film.

    2010  Ten films nominated.

    Inception.  Christopher Noland and Emma Thomas.

    The Kids Are All Right.  Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, and Celine Rattray.

    The Social Network.  Pana Brunetti, Céan Chaffin, Michael De Luca, and Scott Rudin.

    Toy Story 3.  Darla K. Anderson.

    Winter’s Bone. Alex Madigan and Ann Rossellini.

    The second year five women are nominated in this category.

    2011  Nine films nominated.

    Midnight in Paris.  Letty Aronson and Stephen Tenebaum.

    Moneyball.  Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz, and Brad Pitt.

    The Tree of Life.  Sarah Green, Bill Pohlad, Dede Gardner, and Grant Hill.

    War Horse.  Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy.

    Kennedy receives her sixth nomination.

    The third year in which five women are nominated in this category.

    The fifth time two women are nominated for the same film.

    2012  Nine films nominated.

    Amour.  Margaret Mengoz, Stefan Arndt, Veit Heiduschka, and Michael Katz.

    Django Unchained. Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, and Pilar Savone.

    Les Misérables.  Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, and Cameron Mackintosh.

    Lincoln. Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy.

    Silver Linings Playbook.  Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen, and Jonathan Gordon.

    Zero Dark Thirty.  Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, and Megan Ellison.

    Eight female producers nominated, besting the previous record by three.

    The first year in which each of two nominated films has two female producers.

    Kennedy receives her seventh nomination.

    2013  Nine films nominated.

    12 Years a Slave.  (WINNER)  Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Klein, Steve McQueen, and Anthony Katugas.

    American Hustle.  Charles Roven, Richard Suckle, Megan Ellison, and Jonathan Gordan.

    Dallas Buyers Club.  Robbie Brennert and Rachel Winter.

    Her.  Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze, and Vincent Landay.

    Philomena.  Gabrielle Tana, Steve Coogan, and Tracey Seaward.

    The Wolf of Wall Street.  Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland, and Emma Tillinger Koskoff.

    Dede Gardner becomes the eighth woman to win an Oscar in this category.

    Megan Ellison becomes the first woman nominated for two films in the same year.

    2014  Eight films nominated.

    Boyhood. Richard Linklater and Cathleen Sutherland.

    The Imitation Game.  Nora Grossman, Ido Wostrowskya, and Teddy Scharzman.

    Selma.  Christian Colson, Oprah Winfrey, Dede Gardner, and Jeremy Kleiner.

    The Theory of Everything. Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, and Anthony McCarten.

    Whiplash.  Jason Blum, Helen Estabrook, and David Lancaster.

    2015  Eight films nominated.

    Spotlight. (WINNER)  Blye Pagon Faust,  Steve Golin, Nicole Roaklin, and Michael Sugar.

    The Big Short.  Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, and Brad Pitt.

    Bridge of Spies.  Steven Spielberg, Marc Platt,  and Kristie Macosko Krieger.

    Brooklyn.  Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey.

    The Revenant.  Arnon Milchan, Steve Golin, Alejandro G. Iñárittu, Mary Parent, and Keith Redmon.

    Blye Pagon Faust and Nicole Roaklin become the ninth and tenth winners.

    For the first time two women win for the same film.

    For the second time, two nominated films have two female producers.

    2016  Eight films nominated.

    Moonlight. (WINNER)  Adela Romanski, Dede Gardner, and Jeremy Kleiner.

    Hell or High Water.  Carla Haaken and Julie Yorn.

    Hidden Figures.  Donna Gigliotti, Peter Chernin, Jenro Topping, Pharrell Williams, and Theodore Melfi.

    Lion. Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, and Angie Fielder.

    Manchester by the Sea.  Matt Damon, Kimberly Steward, Chris Moore, Lauren Beck, and Kevin J. Walsh.

    Adela Romanski and Dede Gardner become the eleventh and twelfth winners.

    For the second time, two women win for the same film.

    For the second time, eight women are nominated, which so far remains the record.

     

    Why should these names be hidden?

    So we have overall 88 nominations for women, with twelve women winning Oscars for producing films. That compares with four nominations and one win for female directors. Women have not come all that close to parity with men in the producing category, but compared to the directors category, which people seem to take as a bellwether for the status of professional women in Hollywood, it’s spectacular. Moreover, we can see a fairly steady growth over the past twenty-three years, to the point where seven or eight producing nominations a year routinely go to women.

    Of course, Oscars are not the only or the most objective way of measuring women’s power in Hollywood. One could try a similar examination of the number of women producing Hollywood’s top box-office films over the years.  I assume there would be a similar growth in numbers, but the measurement would probably be a little more nuanced. That would be a much bigger project than would fit in a blog entry–even entries as long as the ones we occasionally favor our readers with. The San Diego State University study I mentioned earlier took an approach of this sort, and I’m sure there is deeper digging to be done among the statistics revealed by such research..

    Given the way the Oscars have captured the public’s and the industry’s imaginations, however, the growing number of female producers being honored is a good way to point out that things may be better than they seem when one focuses narrowly on the directors category.

    After all, the prescription for putting more women in the director’s chair and behind the camera and so forth is always that more female producers and writers are needed, making films for women and by women. This seems reasonable, and yet the question remains, if women are doing so well, relatively speaking, in rising to the top as producers, why, over the twenty-three years since 1994 haven’t they hired more women at every level for their film crews? (Of course, some of them have acted as producer-directors on their own projects.) Why hasn’t Kennedy, who has been firing and hiring male directors for Star Wars projects lately, ever given a female director a shot at it? Maybe she will at some point, as the evidence grows that women can create hits.

    Perhaps most women producers are constrained by their fellow producers on projects, who are often men. They may feel pressured to reassure studio stockholders and financiers by sticking with the tried and true. And yet there do finally seem to be signs that studios are looking beyond the obvious pool of talent. Patty Jenkins, an indie filmmaker, directs Wonder Woman to unexpected success. Taika Waititi, a Maori-Jewish indie filmmaker from New Zealand, suddenly finds himself directing Thor: Ragnarok, which shows every sign of becoming a hit. With luck, the effect of the rise of female producers, as well as of more broadminded male ones, will finally have a significant impact on both gender and ethnic diversity in Hollywood filmmaking.

     

    In closing, I would suggest to the press that it would be helpful for them in writing their endless awards coverage to list more than just the titles of the Best Picture nominees. Add the names of their producers, who are in effect nominated for Oscars. Treat them more like stars, the way you do with directors. I realize that there are often lingering disputes over which of the many producers attached to some films are actually the ones eligible to accept Oscars for them. But once such disputes are resolved, these “nominees” should be listed, and certainly after the awards are given out, they should be part of the historical record of Oscar nominees and winners. This would help both the public and the industry to get the big picture, not just the Best Picture.

     

    [Oct. 24, 2017: My thanks to Peter Nellhaus for pointing out Julia Phillips’ win for The Sting in 1973. I have corrected the text accordingly.]

    The Shawkshank Redemption (1994).


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    How Cord Jefferson turned a novel about race into American Fiction – the year’s buzziest comedy | Movies

      January 29, 2024
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    A few years ago, I walked into a large central London bookstore to find a book I’d written, planning to sign a few copies before its imminent publication (as authors are often encouraged to do). The book was about money – as both title and jacket copy made abundantly clear – and yet the bookseller I approached to ask where I might find copies informed me he’d placed them in… race studies. When I challenged him on that categorisation, he grew defensive, while one of his colleagues standing nearby visibly cringed. Over time, I grew to see the encounter as so on the nose as to render it absurd, almost comical – a perfect allegory for how the book industry views Black writers and yet so ludicrous that I considered it anomalous. Imagine my surprise then, when reading Percival Everett’s novel Erasure a few months ago, only to find that exact scenario playing out beat for beat.

    Everett is as prolific as his work is uncategorisable, the author of more than 30 books, including 2022’s Booker-shortlisted The Trees. His previous novels have included allegorical zombie horror and a sort of spy caper, while his forthcoming novel, James, is a retelling of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of enslaved Jim. Now Erasure, published in 2001 and widely regarded as one of his finest novels, has been adapted for the screen by journalist turned screenwriter Cord Jefferson. The result is American Fiction, a biting satire that takes aim at the publishing and media industry’s endless appetite for stereotypically “Black” narratives – or as one character bluntly states: “white publishers fiending Black trauma porn”.

    It follows novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (played superbly by a grouchy but lovable Jeffrey Wright), who, frustrated by the publishing world’s elevation of stereotypical “hood lit” tropes over his own rather more high-minded literary efforts, decides in a Puckish moment of mischief to write a novel crammed with as many stereotypically “ghetto” tropes as possible. It is intended as parody, a middle finger to an industry that maddens him – but to his dismay, the ostensibly progressive white publishing world takes the novel at face value and he winds up with an astronomically large book advance. That Monk submitted the novel under a pseudonym only further complicates matters, and he is soon trapped between disgust at the publishing industry, at himself, and by the fact that he desperately needs the cash.

    “One of the ways that white America chooses to receive work by Black artists is by focusing on the race of the creator,” Everett says when we speak about the reception his work often receives. “I would say that my addressing of race really has very little to do with that bogus category of race and more to do with the fact that I’m American – there is not a serious American novel that does not deal with race, and when race is not an issue in an American novel, that’s about race.” He describes the absence of Black people in the TV show Friends – set in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities – as “a commentary on how America would like to see itself”.

    And though American Fiction looks set to be one of 2024’s buzziest movies, Erasure – experimental, deeply literary, often bleak – doesn’t immediately seem the most obvious material for screen adaptation, given current Hollywood appetites for big-budget IP blockbusters and easily franchise-able reboots. For Jefferson, however, the number of parallels between Erasure and his own experiences was compelling enough to prompt his first attempt at a feature-length screenplay. “Have you ever read a book that felt like it was written specifically for you?” he asks. “That’s how it felt when I read [Erasure].”

    He is referring to Erasure’s professional themes, but also to its layered exploration of complicated family dynamics: sibling tensions, ailing parents, alienating father figures. “There was so much that related to my personal life that it just started to feel eerie after a while.” In fact, when Jefferson first began writing for TV nearly a decade ago, he felt the need to lay firm ground rules with his newly acquired reps, telling them: “If you only send me out for ‘Black’ shows, I will fire you. Because I’m sure that’s not how you treat your white clients – I’m sure you don’t just send [them] to things that fit their racial profile.” Having started his career as a journalist, he had grown tired of constantly being asked to cover what he referred to, in a viral 2014 essay, as “the racism beat”, and wanted to avoid a similar fate within television.

    He needn’t have worried, going on to write for a list of TV shows – Succession, The Good Place, Masters of None – as prestigious as it is diverse (in the Latinate, rather than corporate, sense of the word). The decision to turn his hand to film with American Fiction came not long after an Emmy win in 2020 for his writing on HBO’s superhero drama Watchmen, and the result is an assured, polished movie that would be regarded as a home run for any film-maker, let alone a novice. Tender, caustically funny, subversive and smart, it boasts a formidable ensemble cast that includes Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K Brown and Erika Alexander, and makes entertaining drama out of a topic – race – we are accustomed to seeing treated as anything but.

    Cord Jefferson, left, and Percival Everett attend a screening of American Fiction in Los Angeles in December 2023. Photograph: Variety/Getty Images

    It’s interesting that American Fiction’s version of Monk’s parody novel opts to stay faithful to the style of literature originally satirised by Erasure, given publishing appetites for that sort of hood lit (1996’s Push by Sapphire is a clear reference here) have largely waned in the 20-odd years since Everett’s novel was published. Still, given the literary establishment has moved on to equally restrictive modes of engagement with Black writers, frequently pressuring them to foreground their identities or racial trauma, that anachronism doesn’t particularly undercut the film’s message.

    And American Fiction otherwise manages to capture the myriad anxieties and minor indignities of the writer’s life with hilarious accuracy: a misspelled name tag at a sparsely attended literary festival panel feels all too familiar; I recognise, too, Monk’s resentment towards the smug and (of course) undeserving anointed few who’ve chosen to “play the game”. In his case, that is the pandering Sintara Golden (played by Rae), who veers between slyly obsequious and cynically self-aware, and whose runaway bestseller We’s Lives in da Ghetto provides the template for Monk’s own ghetto fanfic.

    In adapting Everett’s darkly funny text, Jefferson opts to amp up the comedy, and he informs the audience at a screening I attend that he wants them to laugh, specifically giving permission to the white people in the audience to laugh at his treatment of race. Why was that so important to him? “I remember going to see Amistad [Steven Spielberg’s 1997 historical drama of enslaved people] in the theatre with my family in Tucson, Arizona.” This is where Jefferson grew up, by his telling in an area with very few other Black or biracial people. “The theatre was nearly empty. And I enjoyed the movie, I thought it was good, but we left and I thought… ‘Are we the people who need to see this movie?’”

    In his own movie, comedy is employed as a Trojan horse, allowing Jefferson to make serious points about race and how our culture metabolises it while avoiding being a scold. It’s a smart approach, one that lets American Fiction sidestep the white fatigue with race discourse I sensed creeping in almost immediately after the histrionic self-flagellation of 2020. Jefferson cites other race satires, including Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle and Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, as “spiritual predecessors” to his own. “I wanted this movie to feel welcoming. This is a conversation that I wanted a lot of people to participate in.”

    But does that impulse mean American Fiction risks becoming the very thing it is satirising – that is, stories about Black people angled towards the white gaze and which portray the Black experience solely in relation to white people? Especially since 2020, a tendency I’ve observed within my own home turf of publishing and journalism is that the type of Black-authored work (the largely white) industry gatekeepers favour frequently puts racism – and therefore white people – at or close to its centre, even if only as obstacles to Black self-realisation.

    Jefferson, too, seems conscious of this potential hazard, well aware that the white-saviour narratives long championed by Hollywood – enslaved people movies, or civil rights biopics – also often conversely provide absolution for white audiences, who can set themselves against the flagrant racism of, say, a Ku Klux Klan member burning a cross on a lawn, eliding the many subtler ways they themselves enact racism on a daily basis. As Monk’s literary agent observes early on: “White people think they want the truth but they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.”

    Issa Rae, left, and Nicole Kempskie in American Fiction. Photograph: MGM/Everett/Shutterstock

    “That was something I wanted to avoid,” Jefferson notes. “I didn’t want to make a movie ostensibly saying: ‘This is a movie about Black people’ and yet it centres whiteness in a very real way and shunts the Black characters to the side. It’s something that I thought about a lot.” Consequently, American Fiction is rich with irony and remains drolly self-aware throughout; at one point Monk drily remarks to the white editor who has acquired his book: “I’m sure white people on the Hamptons will delight in it.” It feels like a pointed commentary on how the movie of which he is unwittingly the star will itself be received, the snake-eating-its-tail nature of creating work that critiques white people in a post-George Floyd landscape.

    American Fiction avoids that pitfall by broadening its scope far beyond the consequences of white liberal anxieties. Though much of the discourse around the film – much like the initial trailer released – has focused largely on its treatment of race, audiences may be surprised to find large parts of the film are a poignant study of a family in crisis, making clear that racism is not the defining pillar of Black identity. I imagine it has been strategically marketed thus, in the knowledge that white moviegoers may not be interested in a film they suspect is about something as quotidian as ordinary Black people experiencing quiet family drama – if indeed such a film would ever even be greenlit.

    Monk’s relative privilege also allows for subtle commentary on intra-community class dynamics: a middle-class college professor, he is, alas, an incorrigible snob, and the depiction of low-income Black America he dreams up, one of “deadbeat dads, rappers, crack”, verges on the grotesque. It’s never clear how much of that is his own view and how much is him reflecting the culture’s prejudices back at it as part of his literary prank. Jefferson is clear, though, that this is not his own stance, pointing out that his film is not intended as criticism of the sort of Black art that Monk himself despises, so much as an effort to challenge its predominance.

    “The first thing that Jeffrey [Wright] said when we met,” he says, “was: ‘I want to make sure that you don’t want to make some sort of respectability politics, “talented tenth”, Bill Cosby “pull up your pants” movie.’ It just made it even clearer that he was thinking about this film in the same way I was and that he was the exact person for Monk.” It’s a sentiment Everett echoes when discussing Erasure: “My contention was never that that kind of work is not art. My problem was that was the only thing available and it was viewed as representational of the African American experience, reducing it to one thing.”

    With five Oscar nominations under its belt, along with a Bafta nomination for adapted screenplay and two Golden Globe nominations, it doesn’t feel like hyperbole to suggest that American Fiction feels like an instant modern classic. Outside of awards ceremonies, it seems destined to foster lively debate: already a handful of conservative commentators have claimed it as a victory for “anti-woke” narratives, though to me it seems much more closely aligned with conversations my distinctly “woke” peers and I have been having for years.

    Even still, I’m left turning over a series of uncomfortable, complex questions long after the credits have rolled. Where does one draw the line between authenticity and pandering? Do I need to temper my disdain for Black authors who choose to “play the game”? How weird should I feel about how hard white people in that cinema were laughing? Each question invites two more and I land on a different answer most times. I suspect that’s exactly the film’s intention.

    Otegha Uwagba’s most recent book is We Need to Talk About Money (Fourth Estate)

    American Fiction opens in the UK on 2 February

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    Jake Johnson Likes to Play the Hollywood Game, Especially When It Changes

      January 28, 2024
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    If you were bored enough — a stultifying job, living with Mom after a bad breakup — you, too, might climb into a mysterious limo carrying Andy Samberg. You might even consider the offer: outwit assassins for 30 days and win $1 million.

    It’s a risk that Tommy, played by Jake Johnson, is willing to take in “Self Reliance,” the dark comedy on Hulu that he also wrote and directed.

    Johnson, 45, was antsy during the pandemic when he decided the time for this project was now.

    “When you get on this roller coaster, you don’t know how long you’re going to be allowed to play while you’re here,” he said in a video interview from the studio he built for podcasts and Zoom calls in his Pasadena, Calif., home. “You should take chances and experiment. And if you have a relationship with an audience, you should be presenting new options.”

    Johnson is best known as an actor in movies and television, particularly the sitcom “New Girl,” which ran for seven seasons and is one of the reasons Anna Kendrick and Samberg agreed to come aboard “Self Reliance.”

    “Having somebody as funny as him start the movie, it sets the tone in the way that I want this movie to be viewed,” Johnson said before talking about losing at chess, carpentry mishaps and out-of-this-world restaurants. “And that is: sit back, have a glass of wine or smoke a joint or whatever you like to do and enjoy it. It’s a ride.”

    These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

    1

    When I had kids, they become such a dominant part of my life. They transform every day, every thought. So the idea of living without them — I don’t even know what living is.

    2

    I get a lot of self-worth from staying busy. Right now it’s the podcast I’m most excited about. Our show is called “We Are Here to Help,” and Gareth Reynolds and I try to help callers. We just had one where an adult woman’s mother and stepfather kiss her on the lips when they say goodbye.

    3

    This studio was a master closet. I said to my wife, “What if I knock that bookcase out and build the walls out and turn that into the closet and turn this into an office?” I found this great carpenter who is better than me so that I can watch him work. All of that gets really exciting, and I spend all my time thinking about it. I did some drywalling, sanded everything down, the plaster went everywhere. I was like, “I have to learn a new technique.”

    4

    I played with my Uncle Eddie when I was younger, and Eddie was an old hustler who used to con me. Then Mike Cera challenged me on Chess.com and just embarrassed me. I’ve got an 8-year-old nephew who’s a bit of a prodigy and in the comments section talks trash while poorly spelling words. That is as humiliating as it gets — to have somebody say, “You suck, Uncle Jake,” spelled wrong while checkmating me.

    5

    I’ve got a bunch of different buddies who I’ll take random hikes with. We get up to Griffith Park or go around Pasadena, just two hours to work up a sweat and chat — hearing where they’re at and their perspective. I’d rather be walking up a hill than sitting around eating a sandwich with somebody.

    6

    Newness I find really exciting. When there’s a new phase and everybody’s panicking and going, “It’s all Marvel movies” or whatever, I’m like, “Now there’s a big change to the game and a lot of us are going to fall off the cliff and die. But there’s movies to be made if you want to keep playing.”

    7

    Right now my daughters are learning division and multiplication, and we’re doing a lot of it at home. There are tears and there are fights, and then there’s growth. They take a jump forward, and all of a sudden they’re both crushing something and I don’t know how they got there. That stuff gets me through a lot of days.

    8

    When everybody goes to sleep, there’s a few hours where everything is quiet and you can just flip around and watch whatever you want to watch. And that chunk of time — what my buddy Steve Berg would always call “the getting weird time” — I love it.

    9

    We have coffee at the same time in the morning. We get in some really wild discussions and we’ll be like, what is happening? And I’ll be like, “We’re drinking straight concentrate. We are drugged right now, my dear.”

    10

    We’ll drive to deep Alhambra or somewhere in the San Gabriel Valley, find some crazy little hole-in-the-wall shop where the menu’s not even in English. Then you get some dish and every once in a while you’ll take that first bite and you’re like, “Holy [expletive], in what galaxy … ?”

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    Fighter review – India’s pizazz-free Top Gun weighed down by patriotic propaganda | Movies

      January 27, 2024
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    Fresh off the megahit Pathaan, director Siddharth Anand is back with yet another star vehicle, this time pairing Indian superstars Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone on screen for the first time. Aiming to valorise the tribulations and triumphs of the Indian air force, Fighter inevitably invites comparisons to the Top Gun franchise. The parallel extends to more than mere visual similarities: these films are all made with the approval and support of the military in their countries.

    While the recent Top Gun update Maverick coyly constructs a faceless, stateless enemy, Fighter goes full throttle into an India v Pakistan showdown. Considering the current state of Hindi cinema, such hyper-nationalistic storytelling is to be expected, but the film offers little in terms of action pizazz. CGI-ed to death, the much-hyped scenes of aerial combat are flat, lifeless and utterly forgettable. Sentimental speeches of patriotic allegiance weigh down the love story between Roshan’s cocky squadron leader Patty and Padukone’s fiery fighter pilot Minni. Out of uniform their characters become so much more human that one wishes Roshan and Padukone could have just starred in a propaganda-free romance instead.

    The need to wrap jingoism and commercial thrills into one neat package also results in one ludicrous sequence after another. Racy musical interludes – item songs – are haphazardly inserted throughout; at one point, a flight mission awkwardly cuts to an out-of-place daydream in which the two scantily clad stars groove to a sizzling tune in some distant seaside resort. Even when the camera gazes in awe at aircraft shooting through the sky, it dutifully pauses to take in roadside billboards on which ads for house paint are prominently displayed. Patriotism sells, but product placement pays the bills, too.

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    Fighter is out now in cinemas.

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    2024 Oscar Nominations: ‘Oppenheimer’ Leads the Way With 13 Nominations

      January 26, 2024
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    The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning and last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved to be a dominant duo once again, with “Oppenheimer” leading the way with 13 nominations and “Barbie” collecting eight. A handful of major awards contenders are still exclusively in theaters, most notably “American Fiction,” “Poor Things” and “The Zone of Interest,” which are all best picture nominees. But the vast majority of titles are currently available to stream or rent on various platforms. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.

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    ‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.

    Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

    The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.CreditCredit...Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated Press

    Nominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score.

    How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    Conjuring the dark wizardry of the Manhattan Project, the director Christopher Nolan turned the Trinity test into a seat-rumbling summer spectacle, placing it at the center of “Oppenheimer” like the nuclear core of 20th-century history. But there’s a disturbing intimacy to the film as well, with Cillian Murphy’s tremulous J. Robert Oppenheimer leading an unstable band of scientists while nearly drowning in uncharted political and ethical waters. In exploring the origins of a technological boogeyman that continues to haunt mankind, Nolan embraces the contradictions of the flawed, brilliant man whose spirit seems to embody it.

    ‘Barbie’

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBk4NYhWNMM[/embed]

    Nominated for: Best picture, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, original song (two nominees).

    How to watch: Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    Perhaps “Barbie” was destined to become the year’s biggest box-office phenomenon, but Greta Gerwig had to thread a very thin needle in creating a pop entertainment of buoyancy and substance. While playing off the fizzy appeal of the fashionable plastic doll that has lined toy shelves for over half a century, Gerwig seizes the opportunity to reflect on the distance between Barbie’s vision of womanhood and the troubling messiness of reality. As Gerwig’s bruised idealist, Margot Robbie’s Barbie keeps the tone light as she journeys from the matriarchal paradise of Barbieland to the real world, which isn’t the utopia she might have imagined.

    ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP34Yoxs3FQ[/embed]

    Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, supporting actor, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, original score, original song.

    How to watch: Stream it on Apple TV+. Buy it on Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.

    The nativist skirmishes and corruption that have defined so many of Martin Scorsese’s gangster (and non-gangster) dramas surface again in this sprawling epic of American greed and violence, based on David Grann’s historical nonfiction book. Set in the oil-rich Osage territory of 1920s Oklahoma, “Killers of the Flower Moon” looks into a murderous conspiracy to wrest claim rights away from the native population. At the film’s center is the toxic love story between an Osage woman (Lily Gladstone) and an impressionable war veteran (Leonardo DiCaprio) whose affection for her is clouded by his relationship to his scheming uncle (Robert De Niro) and a taste for the finer things.

    ‘The Holdovers’

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    ‘The Holdovers’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.

    “Hi, I’m Alexander Payne. I directed ‘The Holdovers.’” I thought Barton Men don’t lie. Don’t get me wrong, that was fun. But you just lied through your teeth. “The story is basically about a bunch of students at an all-boys prep school in New England who have nowhere to go for the holidays. And eventually, the story boils down to the relationship between the very curmudgeonly teacher selected to stay behind with the boys this year, Paul Giamatti and one student in particular, played by Dominic Sessa, a new actor.” There was an incident when I was at Harvard with my roommate. And? He accused me of copying from his senior thesis. Plagiarizing. Well, did you? No! He stole from me. “A cook is only as good as his or her ingredients, and having Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa, both are capable of learning and performing pages of dialogue at a crack.” So you got kicked out of Harvard for cheating? No, I got kicked out of Harvard for hitting him. You hit him? What, like, punched him out? Nope I hit him with a car. “It’s about three or four pages of dialogue, and I wanted to do it in one go and choreograph it to the camera.” “At first, you’re fooled into thinking that only these two characters are alone at the liquor store. But suddenly you’re surprised at the end of the scene by the appearance of the liquor store salesman.” There you go, killer. “And he was played by a guy named Joe Howell who actually works at that liquor store.”

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    Alexander Payne narrates a sequence from his film featuring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa.CreditCredit...Seacia Pavao/Focus Features

    Nominated for: Best picture, actor, supporting actress, original screenplay, editing.

    How to watch: Stream it on Peacock. Buy it on Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu and Amazon.

    Reuniting for the first time since “Sideways” nearly 20 years ago, the director Alexander Payne and his lovably cantankerous star, Paul Giamatti, have made a film (destined to become a future holiday staple) about the relationship between three people left to themselves over Christmas in 1970. Giamatti stars as the least-liked teacher at an elite New England boarding school, assigned to babysit the small handful of students whose parents didn’t pick them up for the break. After a good deal of friction, he starts to forge a warmer relationship with one troubled student (Dominic Sessa) and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s facing her first Christmas since losing her son in Vietnam.

    ‘Maestro’

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    ‘Maestro’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    The director Bradley Cooper narrates a sequence from the film in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan.

    Hi I’m Bradley Cooper. I co-wrote and directed ‘Maestro.’ It was very important to me, at the onset of this scene, that she be in a position of power. So, her on the windowsill, the light haloing her behind, waiting for whoever was gonna come in to be scolded. And then he’s sort of like a dog who knows that he’s done something bad, comes in, stays right on that side of the frame, almost out of the scene, and then slowly comes over, and then parks himself back in that position, almost trying to get out of the frame. And then I wanted sort of for you to be hearing this celebratory Thanksgiving Day parade going on, and seeing these floats go by, to sort of play into the juxtaposition between this sort of horrific scene happening and this joyous occasion outside, and for it also to be kind of comedic, in a way, and ridiculous. This was a scene that I wrote many years ago, when I first started to work on this project, and it maintained its integrity all the way ‘till we started shooting five and a half years later. “You’re letting your sadness get the better —” “Oh, stop it!” “Let me at least finish!” “This has nothing to do with me!” “Let me finish what I’m going to say!” “No! No!” “I think you’re letting your sadness get the better of you.” “This has nothing to do with me! It’s about you, so you should love it!” So this is the point of the film that everything has come to a boiling point, specifically for Felicia. She’s entered into a marriage eyes wide open in terms of how she perceived it would be, and how her husband, Leonard Bernstein, would behave, and now it’s gotten to a point where it’s encroached so much into her emotional state that she can’t take it anymore. “Hate in your heart! Hate in your heart, and anger for so many things, it’s hard to count. That’s what drives you. Deep, deep anger drives you. You aren’t up on that podium allowing us all to experience the music the way it was intended. You are throwing it in our faces.” “How dare you?” My fear was that we wouldn’t be able to maintain this frame for the entire scene. But because Carey Mulligan is such an assassin actor, it was effortless. We did this three times. This was the third take. And once we got it, that was it. Her main thrust is that he’s got hate in his heart, and he’s not up there on the podium doing anything other than teaching the audience that they’re not as good as him. It was very important to me that the audience, as they watched the film progress after this scene, know that that’s not really what she felt, because there’s no way that Felicia would have fallen in love with a man who has hate in his heart. But when we are trying to hurt somebody that we love, we’ll try to hit them where we think we can hurt them, and on the podium is where he feels, I think, the most free, and the most able to fulfill his potential. To me, when you’re not cutting, it, as a viewer, it should feel unsafe. You don’t know where it’s going. And if you start cutting, it just changes everything. “— zero opportunity to live, or even breathe as our true selves. Your truth makes you brave and strong, and saps the rest of us of any kind of bravery or strength!” But what I loved about it was just, and Matty Libatique is so incredible, the cinematographer, able to execute what I wanted, which was to have her feel almost regal. But she was, Felicia, in that moment. “If you’re not careful, you’re going to die a lonely, old queen.” Mommy, daddy! [CHEERING] Daddy! Snoopy’s here! Hurry up! [KNOCKING ON DOOR] You’re missing Snoopy! What are you guys doing in there? I love when they’re shadowed here by his ego. Outside the window, this Snoopy sort of represents where he is in his life. And then for her to leave him in the middle at the end of the scene, and he’s just there, you know, in the center of the ring, as Snoopy goes by. That was always what I had envisioned. [CHEERING]

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    The director Bradley Cooper narrates a sequence from the film in which he stars alongside Carey Mulligan.CreditCredit...Jason McDonald/Netflix

    Nominated for: Best picture, actor, actress, original screenplay, cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, sound.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

    In his follow-up to “A Star Is Born,” the director/actor Bradley Cooper again turns to the emotionally turbulent life of a musician, casting himself as Leonard Bernstein, the famed American conductor and composer who lived a double life in full. Starting in lustrous black-and-white, “Maestro” depicts the young Bernstein’s intoxicating rise through the New York Philharmonic and his romance with the stage actress Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) in the 1940s. The film then shifts to color in later decades, as Bernstein’s sexual dalliances and substance abuse take their toll on a marriage that’s under sharp public scrutiny.

    ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MdTMA0PetA[/embed]

    Nominated for: Best picture, director, actress, original screenplay, editing.

    How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    The winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s penetrating drama sounds like a routine did-she-or-didn’t-she courtroom procedural, as a novelist (Sandra Hüller) stands trial for murdering her husband at their Alpine chalet. Yet the courtroom theatrics open up a deeper investigation into a difficult marriage and the toll it exacts on the couple’s legally blind son (Milo Machado Graner), who discovers the body. Though the woman’s innocence is at stake, Triet is more compelled by the domestic tensions leading up to the death and the fallout from the trial.

    ‘Past Lives’

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    ‘Past Lives’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.

    “Hi, my name is Celine Song, and I’m the writer and director of ‘Past Lives.’” [MUSIC PLAYING] “So the scene is between Hae Sung, who’s played by Teo Yoo, and Nora, who is played by Greta Lee, and it’s about these two characters who haven’t seen each other in person in 24 years. And they’re sort of reuniting in New York. And the focus of the scene is about the way that Hae Sung looks so lost and alone and very small in New York City, in the city that is foreign to him. It’s a city that he’s here as a tourist. And the thing that we’re, of course, trying to capture here, is a kind of sense of anxiety and excitement. It’s some kind of a mix of both of waiting for your old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. And he doesn’t know what to expect. And we wanted him to look like a kid in the scene. You know, him as he’s touching his hair to fix it, because he just wants to leave a good impression. And we’re really talking about capturing this moment where Nora is going to shout his name and he’s going to turn. And this whole shot was set up for this turn.” [CAR HORNS] “Hae Sung!” “And then we get to actually experience his sort of stunnedness or awe as he is seeing Nora. And the way that I sort of wrote this in the script, is that it’s as though he is seeing a ghost, and she’s also seeing a ghost. They’re sort of seeing a ghost in each other. And not only is this ghost, a real person who’s physical, she’s also walking towards him. And it’s meant to be a little bit terrifying.” [FOOTSTEPS] - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] “So this is the moment in the past for them where they were childhood sweethearts. And I think for that moment, that viscerally, you’re sort of transported back in time. And Nora here is sort of breaking the barrier between them and crossing over. And the sound design for this is also about New York crashing down on them as she reaches over to hug him.” [TRAFFIC] [CAR HORNS] “There’s very little dialogue in the scene. So, so much of it had to happen through the way that they’re living with this moment and trying to navigate how they feel. And this particular shot is something that me and my DP, Shabier Kirchner, were sort of pulling from a Kore-eda trick, which is what we call the swinging camera. Where here, we’re with Hae Sung, and we’re so happy to see him and we’re excited to experience this through him, but we miss Nora. So, the camera moves so that we can see Nora.” - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [MUSIC PLAYING] “And now we’re so happy to see Nora and we’re just happy to experience this moment with her. And, but we’re happy to be here, but we also start to miss Hae Sung, so there’s a little bit of longing that gets built. And then we move over and we see Hae Sung again. And we’re so happy to see Hae Sung. And I think that feeling is really the thing that we were after for what we wanted this to be. Because now we’re going to miss Hae Sung again, and we’re so happy to see Nora. And this is the kind of emotional state that we want to put the audience, of longing and also glad to see someone, which is sort of what the heart of the scene is. And of course, they’re so happy, and we sort of walk them out of the scene.” - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] - [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] [LAUGHS]

    Video player loading
    The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, featuring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.CreditCredit...Jon Pack/A24

    Nominated for: Best picture, original screenplay.

    How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    In her heart-rending feature debut as a writer-director, the playwright Celine Song offers a what-if romantic scenario that pulls at the identity of a happily married woman in New York, even decades after she and her family moved from South Korea. Once extremely close childhood friends, Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) reconnect as adults on social media, and meet again in America, where they reminisce and inevitably begin to wonder about the path not taken. Comparisons to Richard Linklater’s “Sunrise” trilogy may be inevitable, but the temptation and longing in “Past Lives” is uniquely complicated by the cultural crosswinds that affect Nora, Hae Sung and Nora’s American husband (John Magaro), who waits patiently in the wings.

    ‘Nyad’

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3anCgVSQb3Q[/embed]

    Nominated for: Best actress, supporting actress.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

    After directing a series of documentaries about seemingly impossible physical feats, like scaling the 3,000-foot El Capitan rock wall without ropes (“Free Solo”) or pulling off the Thailand cave rescue (“The Rescue”), Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make a natural transition to features with this biopic about the distance swimmer Diana Nyad. Nyad (Annette Bening) had set several distance records in the 1970s, but the film focuses on her effort to swim from Cuba to Florida at the age of 64, with help from her close friend Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Vasarhelyi and Chin once again tap into the indomitable spirit of an athlete willing to court death to push the limits.

    ‘May December’

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    ‘May December’ | Anatomy of a Scene

    The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.

    Hi, I’m Todd Haynes, and I’m the director of ‘May December.’ [DOOR OPENS & CLOSES]: “Now, this is silly.” “This is actually very serious business.” “If you say so.” So in this scene, Natalie Portman, who is playing an actor, Elizabeth Berry, who’s planning to portray the character that Julianne Moore plays, Gracie Atherton-Yoo, in a story about the origins of this scandalous relationship that took place over 20 years ago, where Gracie seduced a 13-year-old boy. And in this scene, she literally is, as actors do, looking at the way Gracie applies makeup, and her makeup choices. And so like many scenes that you will see in the film that take place in rooms with mirrors, the scene is shot with the camera occupying the place of the mirror. “You know, I think that it would be better if I just did this to you.” And so the actors are performing directly into the lens of the camera when they are looking at the reflections of themselves, and they look just off the lens at the reflection of the other actor. What’s really interesting about the scene is, that usually Natalie Portman’s character is in the position of interviewing people and asking questions and trying to collect information to help her in her transformation into portraying this woman. Here, it’s Julianne who starts asking questions about Natalie’s character and Natalie, Elizabeth’s life. “So, did you always want to be an actress?” “Always.” So, you start to hear more about Natalie’s character than we’ve ever heard in this scene. “I wanted to be on Broadway. And when I told my parents, I was nine or 10, they were so disappointed. They said, honey, you’re so much smarter than that.” “What did you say? Are you smarter than that?” “I don’t know. I don’t know.” And there’s an intimacy that starts to emerge between the two of them, and a sense that, wow, are these women going to find a kind of safety in each other rather than a sense of threat, or how far is this going to go? And that’s the sort of atmosphere that the scene conjures I think for the viewer as you’re watching. But in the end, man, as a director of great actresses that I’ve been lucky enough to mark my career by, this was a particular astonishing day to watch these two women. “What was your mother like?” “She was beautiful.” And so a shot like this is a great idea, but it doesn’t work unless you have Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. And so the silences and the breaks and the little bit of laughter is really what’s happening, and it gives the viewer a lot to chew on. [MUSIC PLAYING]

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    The director Todd Haynes narrates a sequence from his film starring Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore.CreditCredit...Francois Duhamel/Netflix

    Nominated for: Original screenplay.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

    With their prismatic take on a tabloid scandal that echoes the Mary Kay Letourneau case, the director Todd Haynes and the screenwriter, Samy Burch, adopt a serio-comic tone that echoes high art like “Persona” one minute and early 2000s USA Network fodder the next. Natalie Portman stars as a semifamous actress who travels to Savannah, Ga., to study for the role of a Letourneau-like woman (Julianne Moore) who was caught having sex with a seventh-grade boy, but wound up marrying him and having children after a prison stint. The actress’s presence, asking simple questions that the couple has been studiously avoiding, destabilizes their relationship, particularly the much-younger husband (Charles Melton), who starts to reflect on what happened to him.

    ‘Rustin’

    [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuZ-UONInl4[/embed]

    Nominated for: Best actor.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

    In championing a less-heralded yet fascinatingly multidimensional figure in the civil rights movement, “Rustin” gains much of its power from Colman Domingo’s electrifying lead performance as Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and socialist who had the ear of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The action leads up to Rustin’s greatest triumph as an organizer, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of an estimated 250,000 people. But “Rustin” digs into the intense internal divisions within the movement over holding the march as a message to the Democratic front-runner John F. Kennedy. It also explores the depth of Rustin’s personal passion for economic justice.

    Other Major Nominees

    ‘Society of the Snow’

    Nominated for: Best international feature. Makeup and hairstyling.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

    ‘Elemental’

    Nominated for: Best animated feature.

    How to watch: Stream it on Disney+. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    ‘Nimona’

    Nominated for: Best animated feature.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix.

    ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’

    Nominated for: Best animated feature.

    How to watch: Stream it on Netflix. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    ‘Bobi Wine: The People’s President’

    Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

    How to watch: Stream it on Disney+.

    ‘The Eternal Memory’

    Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

    How to watch: Stream it on Paramount+. Buy it on Google Play, Vudu, YouTube and Apple TV.

    ‘Four Daughters’

    Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

    How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

    ‘20 Days in Mariupol’

    Nominated for: Best documentary feature.

    How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.

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