Posted on February 18, 2019 at 7:43 pm
Pure pleasure, and a powerful reminder of why the members of the Motion Picture Academy reacted so strongly when the producers of the Oscar telecast tried to take the award for best cinematography off the broadcast. Here’s a look at the Best Cinematography Oscar winners.
Posted on March 5, 2018 at 8:15 am
The 90th anniversary Oscar broadcast was one of the best in many years and not a minute too long. Look, with the Oscars you know what you’re signing up for. You may not be interested in the awards for Best Sound Editing or Best Sound Mixing, but I respect the Oscars for recognizing the dozens of people you never see the rest of the year for every one you see on screen, all vital to the impact of the film. And if they didn’t televise those awards, how would we see people like that guy whose tuxedo sleeves stopped just below his elbows? And I expect and appreciate the political issues addressed in the show. Without them, it would be eerily sterile. What are the nominated films about, after all? They are about justice. They are made to touch our hearts and inspire us to be more inclusive and fair. So, it is not just right, it is deeply moving when Lupita Nyong’o and Kumail Nanjiani remind us that they are immigrants. And also funny when Nanjiani says, “And I am from Pakistan and Iowa, two places that nobody in Hollywood can find on a map.”
I normally do not watch the red carpet, but this year I turned it on a bit early and was really delighted with the ABC pre-show interviews, especially when Michael Strahan showed Timothee Chalamet a video of the high school drama teacher who changed his life wishing him well, along with current students at the “Fame” school he attended just a couple of years ago, and the glimpse of Gary Oldman in full Winston Churchill makeup and costume, dancing to James Brown.
Then, on a prism-circled stage set that kept reminding me of the Shimmer in “Annihilation,” Jimmy Kimmel led off with a graceful, witty opening, candid about the turmoil of the past year, that set the tone perfectly. The promise of a Jetski for the person giving the shortest speech was silly, and having Dame Helen Mirren as the prize girl really made it work. It also inspired a couple of funny callbacks through the night.
Highlights:
Frances McDormand, asking the women nominees to stand, and introducing the world to the term “inclusion rider” — a contract provision stars can insist on that requires film productions to employ a specific number of women and minorities, including the crew, and may require pay equity/parity as well,
Alexandre Desplat, thanking the musicians who worked on “The Shape of Water” and the musicians playing live at the broadcast,
Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph, who should be Golden Globe hosts next year,
Jordan Peele, the first African-American to win a screenplay Oscar, speaking from the heart about what the experience has meant to him,
Jodie Foster blaming Meryl Streep for Tonya-ing her,
Two golden age of Hollywood presenters reminding us what “star” really means — Rita Moreno and Eva Marie Saint, Moreno in the same dress she wore when she won the Oscar for her performance in “West Side Story,”
The outstanding 90th anniversary montage, reminding us of the best that movies — and humans — can be,
The excellent montages introducing the acting awards,
Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder singing Tom Petty during the In Memoriam segment,
The third “amigo” wins — Guillermo del Toro joins his two director friends from Mexico in winning a Best Director Oscar (Alejandro G. Iñárritu won in 2014 for “Birdman” and in 2015 for “The Revenant.” And in 2013, Alfonso Cuarón won for “Gravity”).
Misses:
“Remember Me” is a lovely song, which well deserved its Oscar, but for some reason the live performance sounded off-key,
The trip to the movie theater next door, a stunt that went on too long and didn’t really work,
The people inexplicably left out of the In Memoriam segment, including Tobe Hooper, Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone, Powers Boothe, and John Mahoney.
For a show in which there were no surprises or upsets, it remained lively and engaging all the way to the end. And Faye and Warren and Price Waterhouse got it right this time.
PS Check out rogerebert.com’s annual “If We Picked the Oscars,” including my tribute to Laurie Metcalf.
Posted on March 4, 2018 at 9:24 am
Stephanie Merry of the Washington Post describes some Oscar categories the Academy should have included, like best opening credit sequence, best motion-capture performance, best fight scenes, and best performance by a child. I agree with every one of her categories, nominees, and winners.
The New Yorker asks whether the nominated films pass the Bechdel test. They pretty much do, with exceptions like “Dunkirk” — and, I’d argue, “Call Me By Your Name” and “Phantom Thread.”
And if you need a cheat sheet for your Oscar party predictions, your best bet is Goldderby.
Posted on December 22, 2017 at 12:52 pm
Critic and @oscarguy Wesley Lovell has a thoughtful assessment of women at the Oscars on CinemaSight. While the most-nominated and most-won individuals include women (costume designers Edith Head, Irene Sharaff, Catherine Martin, and Colleen Atwood, actors Meryl Streep, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn, the overall statistics are grim:
In Oscar history, there have been 7,177 films nominated with at least one individual cited. There have been, overall, 11,602 total individuals nominated for Academy Awards. On the single film side, 1,163 films (16.20%) have featured a nomination slate that included at least one woman. 989 of those films were comprised of at least half women. More than half of the nominee slate was women in 534 cases and in a situation where all of the nominees were women, there were 497 instances. On the individual side, 1,321 women (11.28%) have ever been nominated.
On the winners side, we have a worse picture. There have been 4,350 individuals who have won Academy Awards over the years. 332 of those have been women (7.63%)
No woman cinematographer has ever been nominated. Only one woman has won a Best Directing Oscar, Katherine Bigelow for “The Hurt Locker.” Fewer than two percent of the nominees for composers have been women.
There are so many good candidates this year, including “Lady Bird” writer/director Greta Gerwig, “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins, and first-time screenwriter (“The Post”) Liz Hannah. Let’s hope we can improve on the dismal numbers Lovell has made impossible to overlook.
Posted on March 5, 2017 at 3:19 pm
Filmonomics says they have a system for predicting what is going to win the Oscar — two years from now!
The likelihoods of a movie being Certified Fresh, financially successful and being nominated for Academy Awards, is knowable at the point of development.
It is based on their multi-point analysis of the script, even before the movie goes into production.
To be sure, correlation is not causation; there are many factors that go into making a movie successful at the box office and during awards season. Still, the implications for filmmakers here are obvious: If high Slated Script Scores are tied to both high financial returns and high probability of critical and award success, then making sure your script is as good as possible is the key to attracting top talent, smart money, and experienced distributors, all of which are essential to increase the likelihood of stronger outcomes and more accurate projections (as we painstakingly researched and wrote about in this prior post). That sounds like common sense, but one has only to look at a theater marquee to see how frequently this advice is ignored. And now that tools exists that can predict your project’s outcome, ignoring it is inexcusable. If a submitted screenplay fails to make the grade under this scoring system, then at least those involved have a benchmark from which to make adjustments and return with something more appealing.
It should be self-evident that you can make a bad movie with a good script but you cannot make a good movie with a bad script. And yet, given the economics of global distribution, the studios keep making the script a lower priority.
