Oscars 2023
‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ Writer-Director Raven Jackson Brings Poetry to Motion With First Film
Watching Raven Jackson’s audacious debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, is like participating in an intimate ritual. The film follows Mack (played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a child and Charleen McClure as an adult) as she comes of age in Mississippi, tracking the emotional arc of her life from girlhood to maturity. […]
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Oscar Sound Contenders Bring the Chaos of Battle, the Tones of Unseen Strategy to the Screen
Killers of the Flower Moon “I’m the first [listener], so I always pay attention to how the performances, the transitions, the arc will be experienced by the audience,” says veteran production sound mixer Mark Ulano. In the case of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple/Paramount — about a series of murders that […]
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‘The Zone of Interest’ DP Lukasz Zal on Depicting Evil Without the Emotional Manipulation
To work on The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing Holocaust drama about the domestic life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family, Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal said he had to “forget everything I was taught” about making “beautiful images.” Glazer’s film, loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, follows the seemingly mundane activities of […]
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How VFX Pros Transformed Worlds and Faces With Visual Effects
Without a juggernaut such as Avatar: The Way of Water in the running — and schedule changes that pushed big tentpoles, notably Dune 2, back to 2024 — this season’s visual effects Oscar race is shaping up to be a competitive one. The road to a nomination begins with a committee of branch members who […]
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Creative Fusion on an Extra-Large Scale: Jennifer Lame on Editing ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Postcard From Earth’
Editor Jennifer Lame’s work has appeared on many of the world’s largest screens this year. Over the summer, her second movie with director Christopher Nolan, his historical epic Oppenheimer, for Universal, had moviegoers scrambling for tickets to Imax’s large-format theaters. And in October, the Lame-edited Postcard From Earth, from director Darren Aronofsky, became the first […]
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From Lillian St. Cyr to Lily Gladstone: A Brief History of Hollywood Honoring Native Talent
Lily Gladstone is creating a lot of excitement these days. The 37-year-old actress of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage is generating Oscar buzz with her performance as Mollie Burkhart, the Osage wife of the scheming Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Apple/Paramount’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The actress also earned a Gotham Award nom on Oct. 24 […]
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Netflix Short ‘The After’ Depicts a Shocking Tragedy and a Father’s Grief
In Netflix’s live-action short The After, a man named Dayo (David Oyelowo, who also serves as executive producer) loses his wife and child in a brutal public display of violence. Describing his film’s intense and shocking opening scene, director Misan Harriman compares it to “an act of God” — one born out of the “collective […]
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Kris Bowers Is the Busiest Composer in the World
Kris Bowers is one of the busiest multihyphenates working in Hollywood. This year, the Emmy-nominated Bridgerton composer returned to Shondaland and Netflix’s hit costume drama to compose its prequel series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story; he also composed the score for two Disney properties, the feature film Haunted Mansion and the Marvel series Secret Invasion. On […]
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‘Silver Dollar Road’ Director Raoul Peck on Doc’s Interrogation of Systemic Racism: “When Was America Great, and For Whom?”
Our ancestors left this here for us,” a member of the North Carolina-based Reels family says in the documentary Silver Dollar Road, referring to the 65-acre waterfront property that had long been their financial and spiritual haven. In the late 1970s, a relative of the Reelses cited a legal loophole to claim that he was […]
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“We Wanted to Paint With the Light and Write With the Camera”: The THR Cinematographer Roundtable
“I think it was a voice from the wider audience telling us that people wanted to go to the cinemas again and people wanted to join in with an event,” says Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema of the summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon. Rodrigo Prieto, who lensed Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as well as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of […]
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Celebrity-Focused Docs Fall Short in the Awards Race: “A Giant F***-You to Netflix”
The International Documentary Association (IDA), Cinema Eye Honors and Gotham Awards have delivered their verdicts on the top feature docs of the year. And, for the streamers, it’s a grim result. Absent from the Gothams’ doc feature selections, the Cinema Eye’s top feature and director noms and the IDA’s 17-title shortlist are titles from Netflix, […]
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‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Costume Designer Breaks Down Hidden Messages in Heirloom Patterns and ’20s-Era Suits
For Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, costume designer Jacqueline West immersed herself in researching early-1920s denizens of Osage County, Oklahoma. She visited museums commemorating plundering oil tycoons and watched rare black-and-white home movies commissioned by Osage families, wealthy from retaining mineral rights to their oil-rich reservation. Osage costume consultant Julie O’Keefe ensured the […]
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