Oscar Watch: Writer/Director Nadine Labaki on her Riveting Drama Capernaum

Lebanese writer-director Nadine Labaki took to the streets to make her third feature, Capernaum, which centers on a neglected young boy. Furious with his parents after they sell his barely pubescent sister to an older man, the boy runs away from his ramshackle home. He befriends an Ethiopian refugee and then becomes the caretaker for her baby after the woman is arrested.

Playing a child who shares his own first name,

Oscar Watch: Black Panther Co-Editor Michael Shawver on the key to Cutting Fight Scenes

Editor Michael Shawver goes way back with writer/director Ryan Coogler. In fact, he edited Coogler’s first two films, his 2013 breakout film Fruitvale Station, and his deft resurrection of the Rocky franchise with 2015’s Creed. His work on Creed turned out to be the perfect training for his next Coogler project; the epic, game-changing Black Panther. 

Shawver’s gut—and keen eye—led him to feel very connected to the hand-to-hand combat scenes that took place at Warrior Falls.

A Grieving Detective Drives the Action in Film Noir State Like Sleep

Like her brooding State Like Sleep heroine Katherine Grand, filmmaker Meredith Danluck lost a close friend to suicide. Like Katherine, she moved from the United States to Belgium to live with a highly secretive partner. And like Katherine, Danluck rushed to a Brussels hospital after her mother suffered a stroke. Now currently available on Digital, On Demand, and in select theaters, State Like Sleep may draw many of its plot points from Danluck’s adult life but one of its most offbeat sequences comes straight out of a movie she saw at the age of seven.

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,

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,

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.

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.

Director Matthew Carnahan on Valley of the Boom & the Internet’s Wild West Early Days

“I certainly didn’t see it coming,” says Matthew Carnahan of the dot-com boom—as well as the bust—that he cleverly chronicles in Valley of the Boom, a National Geographic limited series premiering on January 13 that combines a scripted narrative along with documentary-style interviews.

Flashing back to his own introduction to the web in the 1990s, Carnahan recalls a friend excitedly telling him about how he was able to talk to a woman through his computer when it was hooked up to his phone line because of this thing called the Internet.

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),

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,

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.

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,

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),

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.

How Ruth Ginsberg’s Nephew Wrote On the Basis of Sex

Before he experienced the memorial service epiphany that led to On the Basis of Sex, writer Daniel Stiepleman had knocked around for a few years, working in the Peace Corps, teaching high school English and producing TV commercials in Wisconsin. Then, he attended the 2010 funeral of his uncle Martin, the late husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. “Martin’s friend gave a eulogy and mentioned in passing that discrimination on the basis of sex was the only case Ruth and Marty ever argued together,”

Stan & Ollie Director Revisits a Great Doubles Act

When he was a kid growing up in Scotland, filmmaker Jon. S. Baird loved Laurel and Hardy movies so much that he impersonated Stan Laurel at his school’s “fancy dress” day alongside a classmate dressed in an Oliver Hardy outfit. Three decades later, Baird pays homage to the great song-and-dance comedy team as director of Stan & Ollie. In the movie, opening wide January 11, Steve Coogan plays the duo’s rake-thin mastermind with Golden Globe-nominated John C.

Oscar Watch: Black Panther‘s Co-Editor on the Key Scene She Influenced

A rich African inspired heritage and fierce women warriors proved this year that fresh perspectives are long overdue on screen. Black Panther came out swinging and took a major swipe at barriers to cinematic representation. The immensely talented team dreamed up a world that was not only thrilling and gorgeous but also put new faces at the forefront of the superhero genre. Not only were there more black actors on screen than any other Marvel film,

Oscar Watch: Cold War‘s DP Lukasz Zal on Crafting Pawel Pawlikowski’s Latest Masterpiece

Cinematographer Lukasz Zal won the prestigious Silver Frog Award at Camerimage for his work on Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, a ravishing look at a romance over the course of 30-years and several thousand miles through Europe. Zal had worked with Pawlikowski on Ida, the director’s previous masterpiece, as a cameraman (he ultimately earned himself a co-cinematographer credit). For Cold War, Zal was in command of the camera team,