Oscar Watch: The Favourite‘s Production Designer Re-Designs History With a Flourish
England’s Queen Anne, who only reigned from 1707 to 1714, is hardly the most notable female British sovereign, but to watch her played by Olivia Colman in director Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, one might wonder why this the first we’re hearing of her in so long. True to history, Lanthimos’s depiction of the queen shows her nearly constantly ill and in other ways unwell—she is in possession of 17 rabbits, for example, who mark a combination of lost pregnancies and infants who died young...
Oscar Watch: Composer Nicholas Britell on Nailing the Tone for Vice and If Beale Street Could Talk
Juilliard-trained New York composer Nicholas Britell worked non-stop in 2018 and now he’s got two Oscar shortlisted movie scores to show for it. Early in the year, he teamed with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins to write the music for If Beale Street Could Talk, the tragic love story set in early-’70s Harlem. Then he scored Dick Cheney bio-pic Vice, featuring Oscar front runner Christian Bale, for filmmaker Adam McKay...
Oscar Watch: How NASA Footage Inspired the First Man Editor’s Style
The moon landing was welcomed as a shared triumph in American history, but no one had more at stake than the men who traveled there. The mission’s success was as much a feat of will as of science. First Man captures the danger and courage of pioneering space travel in both broad historic and intensely microscopic ways. Editor Tom Cross was inspired by the movie’s ambition of telling a famous story from a human perspective.
“It allowed us to delve into this first-person subjective type of storytelling where you feel like you are climbing into the space capsule or you feel like it is your hands on the rung of the ladder as you climb down and step on the moon,” Cross described...
Oscar Watch: How BlacKkKlansman‘s Composer Channeled Jimi Hendrix’s Iconic Riffs
Terence Blanchard landed on this year’s Best Original Score Oscar shortlist by crafting the stirring score for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. Based on a true story and set in 1971, the movie casts John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, a black cop who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan with his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) by impersonating a white supremacist over the phone. Blanchard, a jazz trumpeter who grew up in New Orleans alongside Wynton Marsalis,...
Oscar Watch: A Quiet Place‘s Sound Designers on Triggering our Brain’s Reptilian Fear Response
Supervising sound editors Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van Der Ryn had the unusual challenge of applying their expertise to a film that would be so quiet, it had the word in its title. John Krasinski’s thrilling, chilling A Quiet Place was predicated on a brilliant idea; alien monsters have turned the planet into one giant Amtrak quiet car. Only in this world, if you make a sound you’ll suffer a fate far worse than the annoyance of your fellow train passengers...
Game of Thrones Season 8 Trailer Teases Epic Clash, Reveals Premiere Date
The first official teaser for Game of Thrones 8th and final season begins more or less where the epic series began—the Crypt of Winterfell. I say the series began there because it was Ned Stark (Sean Bean)’s death in season one that sent such shockwaves through the viewing public (especially for those of us who hadn’t read George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Fire and Ice” novel series) and made Game of Thrones a show even people who claimed to hate fantasy pay attention to...
Oscar Watch: Justin Hurwitz on Composing the Emotional Toll of Reaching For The Moon in First Man
Oscar and Golden Globe-winning composer Justin Hurwitz crafts scores that feature stirring and beautiful notes and chord progressions, but they are born from human experiences. Hurwitz mines melodies alongside his longtime creative partner, Damien Chazelle, who directs with music in mind. Their first three films together examined the human condition through musicians including a jazz trumpeter (Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), a drum student (Whiplash), and a pianist (La La Land)...
Oscar Watch: A Quiet Place‘s Production Designer on Creating Killer Spaces
In John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place, sound kills. Yet it’s not only what one might say (or scream) that can get you killed, but anything you come into contact with. This means the spaces within the world of A Quiet Place can go from a sanctuary to a trap in a heartbeat. In order to create an environment that was as claustrophobic and terrifying as the film’s brilliant premise, Krasinski tapped production designer Jeffrey Beecroft to build him a world in which everything was potentially fatal...
Oscar Watch: DP James Laxton on Creating Radical Intimacy in If Beale Street Could Talk
Oscar-nominated cinematographer James Laxton (Moonlight) and his longtime collaborator director Barry Jenkins did something novel with If Beale Street Could Talk, and we’re not just talking about the fact the film is adapted from the legendary James Baldwin’s titular novel. Unlike their previous collaborations, 2008’s Medicine for Melancholy, set in San Francisco, and 2016’s Oscar-winning Moonlight, set in Miami, Beale Street unfolds in a city neither had an intimate knowledge of—New York...
Are the Avengers Reassembling for the Oscars?
What will it take to bring back our beloved, fallen Avengers after the now infamous Thanos snap? If you’re thinking it’s Captain Marvel, you might be right about how things shake out in Avengers: Endgame, but it looks like we’ll be seeing them a whole lot sooner—at the Oscars. The Hollywood Reporter has it that the Oscars producers are looking to bring back the Avengers for the telecast (there will be no host this year),...
Captain Marvel Writer Joins The Vision and Scarlet Witch Series
Saying goodbye hurts a little less when you know you’ll see them again. That is definitely the case when it comes to Vision and Scarlet Witch. Avengers: Infinity War was a heartbreaker, but the most devastating moments came from the power couple who made big sacrifices to try to save lives across the universe. Luckily, their story will continue on the small screen, whether or not they are resurrected in Endgame. Plans to continue Marvel storylines on Disney+,...
Exclusive Video: Oscar Short-Listed The Death of Stalin Composer on Scoring Lunacy
When we interviewed composer Christopher Willis about writing the now Oscar short-listed score for Armando Iannucci‘s hilarious, bleakly resonant dark comedy The Death of Stalin, he told us that one of his major influences in the film was the legendary Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich. “Because he was famous, he had a complicated relationship with Stalin, he was in and out of favor. There were times he thought he’d written a piece that had offended the authorities,...
Oscar Watch: How Composer Brian Tyler Spiced Up Crazy Rich Asians Score
Brian Tyler started playing drums at age four, taught himself piano, guitar and cello soon after, toured the world at age fifteen performing a concerto he’d written and paid his way through Harvard by playing in rock bands. More recently, he’s scored more than $1.2 billion worth of global blockbusters including Avengers: Age of Ultron, Fast & Furious, and Iron Man 3. His latest hit, Crazy Rich Asians,...
Storm Troopers Descend in New Star Wars Resistance Trailer
The galaxy is a big place. Not the Milky Way. Whatever far away and long-ago galaxy that hosts the events of Star Wars. Even though we have been catching up on a new generation in the movies, there is a lot more going on than can fit into three feature-length films. Enter Star Wars Resistance that premiered on Disney channel in October and has been picking up lightspeed. The animated series has been on winter break but returns this Sunday following an action-packed new trailer...
Know Before You Go: A Captain Marvel Primer
Captain Marvel may become the saving grace of the universe, but she’s been hidden in the shadows keeping her magnificence to herself. With spectacular trailers and awe-inspiring images of the Kree soldier in action, we are already obsessed with the photon blasting hero. Still, there are a lot of question marks about the character, especially considering she doesn’t remember her own past. Collider has the dish on what to expect and what you should know before heading to the theater...
Oscar Watch: Black Panther Cinematographer Rachel Morrison on how to Make an Intimate Epic
When Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison (the first woman ever nominated in the category for her work on Mudbound) started working on Black Panther, she had an uncanny feeling; this massive, ultimately groundbreaking Marvel mega-film felt much more like the indies she’s worked on in the past. Black Panther marked her second collaboration with writer/director Ryan Coogler (she lensed his breakout first film, Fruitvale Station), and although Marvel was pouring massive resources into this epic,...
Oscar Watch: Suspiria’s Prosthetic Makeup Artist on Turning Tilda Swinton into an Old Man
The original horror film Suspiria, made by Dario Argento in 1977, was wild and colorful, and the palette of Luca Guadagnino’s version of the story conveys quickly that this is not a remake. The dance company at the center of the story, next to the Berlin Wall, is bleakly lunatic, as are the street scenes of 1970s Berlin outside, where RAF protests hold sway and it is always raining.
The film opens on ex-dancer Patricia (Chloë Grace Moretz) paying a desperate visit to her therapist,...
HBO’s CEO Hints at the Epic Scope of Game of Thrones Season 8
The battle for the Iron Throne will end this year. As fire and ice meet, we will only have six episodes to resolve the eight-season Game of Thrones epic. We got our first look earlier this week with a few seconds in a new HBO promo. Information about the final season is slowly beginning to leak out, but considering the scope of the series, it is difficult to fathom how all the loose ends will be tied up...
HBO Reveals the Game of Thrones Prequel’s Full Cast & Director
We got our first glimpse at some footage from the 8th and final season of Game of Thrones during the Golden Globes broadcast, but HBO is already looking ahead at their upcoming GoT prequel.
We already knew—and were thrilled—that Naomi Watts would headline the prequel as a “socialite hiding a dark secret.” We also knew that Jane Goldman was the showrunner, and Poldark‘s Josh Whitehouse would have a key role in the series...
Venom and Carnage are On a Collision Course for Sequel
Woody Harrelson’s Cletus Kasady promised in Venom, “There will be carnage.” And so there shall be. The mid-credits scene signaled a sequel to Eddie Brock’s (Tom Hardy) symbiote transformation that has now been officially green-lit.
Venom took a massive bite out of the worldwide box office chomping up $855 million. Unsurprisingly, there is more to come from the alien inhabited investigative reporter. Variety is reporting that the creative team is beginning work on Venom 2 slated for October 2020...
