And sure enough, that’s exactly when Choudhury got the idea. “It was written in July, the very next month after the decision had been made and there were so many news articles about the real-world consequences and repercussions for so many people,” she said. “I have an experience myself of needing a procedure for a non-viable pregnancy — which if I hadn’t had, I would not be here to tell this tale or be the mother to my two teenage daughters. And so I really understood the fact that as a storyteller, I had a platform to tell a story with which I could represent one family living in Arkansas and how the real-world repercussions of this decision affects them.

“I had the idea overnight as a fully fleshed, cinematic story. I woke up and the idea was there. I wrote it almost immediately, in the space of about two or three hours. And it’s pretty much the film that you now see on screen.”

Choudhury had planned to get into directing when she went to school in her native Great Britain, but she got sidetracked with offers to write for British TV. She continued as a writer when she moved to the United States and worked on shows like “Fear the Walking Dead” but decided to become a director once she had the lean, 10-page script for “Red, White and Blue,” along with clear ideas of how it should look. “I really wanted it to feel very grounded, where you feel like you are in this world with these characters,” she said.

The key was to figure out how to capture the nuances of the screenplay on camera. “When you write in prose form, you can use details to elaborate the subtext of everything,”she said. “With a sentence, I might be able to say 10 things. But when you have to translate that to the screen, how do you land it so that the same gut punch is felt on the screen as it is on the page?

“I work extensively in the television space, where you have a creative vision as a producer or a showrunner that you maintain. But this was my first time directing, and that was a different beast.”

But she couldn’t focus completely on directing because she was also working as a producer: “I was booking car rentals for my cinematographer to come out here and stay with me,” she said, laughing. “My entire house was turned into the costume department, with fittings happening and my kids running around, hosting people and saying, ‘Can we get you water? What would you like to drink?’ It was as independent as they get.”

Her daughters helped her overcome other challenges, too. “It was difficult to raise the resources we needed financially,” she said, “and it was a mammoth undertaking because this was a production that features child actors who we have responsibilities toward, very rightly so. And we had a road trip, and a pivotal scene with a song in the middle of it.” She laughed. “If I had my wish list, I would have gotten a Cyndi Lauper song or a Taylor Swift song, but I’m a short filmmaker – I don’t have that power or reach or finances. It ended up being my two daughters who sang in that road-trip scene.”

Her film has gotten attention for a devastating reveal that takes place late in its running time, but Choudhury hesitates to call the moment a twist. “Even though it becomes expedient to talk about it that way, this really was the story all along,” she said. “It was a metaphor for the fact that we have preconceived notions, we make judgments. It wasn’t done for the shock factor and it wasn’t done for the twist.

“We’re trying to tell you, ‘These are all the reasons why someone could need and want this (abortion), and here’s another added reason. If you haven’t changed your mind before, how does this affect you now? Because if you are a human being, you should understand why it’s so important.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.

The post How the Supreme Court Spurred the Oscar-Nominated Short ‘Red, White and Blue’ appeared first on TheWrap.

“Lady and the Tramp” was inspired by Disney animator Joe Grant’s own English Springer Spaniel. George Lucas incorporated qualities of his Alaskan Malamute dog, who used to sit in the passenger seat of his car, while writing Chewbacca in “Star Wars.” While playing Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” Andy Serkis based his voice and gestures on his cat Dizz.

The latest and perhaps cutest in that trend is “Godzilla Minus One” director and Oscar-nominated visual effects supervisor Takashi Yamazaki. In the acclaimed Japanese production, the King of the Monsters has been restored to what he was in the original 1954 film: a beast of pure destructive id and aggression.

In this version, the ferocious lizard was rendered completely by visual effects. Especially in the second half of the film, take note of Godzilla’s cat attributes: His stoic, indifferent posture while swinging his tail into city buildings, his proud triangular silhouette and his determined fixation at the plane circling over his head. His instinctual curiosity towards that tiny plane, in fact, is how Godzilla is lured into the ocean for the movie’s climax.

You know what they say about curiosity and what it did to the cat. So we asked Yamazaki about Godzilla’s feline vibes and whether they were intentional.

The director smiled when the question came up.

“Right before we went into production, (my wife and I) actually got a couple of cats,” he said. “And I love my cats so much, so perhaps there was a subconscious tendency for me to sign off on (visual effects) shots that looked like them or just looked more cat-like.”

Yamazaki’s gleeful penchant for approving kitty-like shots of Godzilla was also noted by his wife.

“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “When my wife sees the film, she doesn’t see Godzilla in certain scenes. She looks at him and she says, ‘Oh, that’s our cat!’ That’s our cat!’ She can tell from the movement of Godzilla.”

“Godzilla Minus One” notched a number of historical milestones when it received the Oscar nomination. It’s the first Japanese production nominated for Best Visual Effects and the first Godzilla film ever nominated for any Oscar. Toho Studios produced 33 of the franchise, next to several Hollywood productions.

And Yamazaki is the first director nominated for visual effects since Stanley Kubrick won his only Oscar for the effects of “2001: A Space Odyssey” in 1969.

“To have my name next to Stanley Kubrick, no matter how niche or specific the list is, it means so much,” Yamazaki said. “If there is any category to be nominated in, this is the one it was meant to be. I’m very flattered and honored by it.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Director Says His Pets Inspired the Big Monster: ‘I Love My Cats So Much’ appeared first on TheWrap.

But musician and composer Scott George, despite turning up on the Best Original Song shortlist in December for his climactic song “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People),” still seems surprised that his name was uttered that morning, when he became the first Native American man and member of the Osage Nation to be nominated in the Best Original Song category.

“Even to this day, I’m not finding words to explain or express it,” said the soft spoken George. “We had tuned into a morning show, and they drag it out for a good 45 minutes. So I’m sitting here, getting dressed, I’m supposed to be at a
meeting two hours away. And I’m waiting, waiting, waiting. I get a text from Chad Renfro, who is our tribal liaison with Apple [which distributed the film]. And he said, ‘You made the nomination.’”

George is part of a troupe of Oklahoma-based Osage talent and has been singing Native music for more than 40 years. “As traditional singers, we were kind of shy about getting involved in it,” he said. “And I say that because for most of our music, we don’t ask for it to be recorded. We don’t like to be copied and things like that, so we kind of keep to ourselves.”

But George was assured of Scorsese’s respect for Osage tradition after the director attended some of their local dances. The composer gave Scorsese hundreds of possibilities from the music he’d made with his colleagues, and the director chose “Wahzhazhe” because it gelled with posthumous nominee and Six Nations-raised musician Robbie Robertson’s tribal-infused score.

George said the film could have used existing Osage music, but they decided to compose a new song because the old dances “just don’t have the same feeling that we think [Scorsese] wanted.” George’s track concludes the film, accompanied by a magnificent bit of cinematography from the also-nominated Rodrigo Prieto. The camera is on a crane, which rises above a drum to reveal an Osage tribe performing “Wahzhazhe.”

The camera looks down on a circle of musicians and singers that appear to be creating the flower moon of the film’s title. The sequence serves as a cleansing after what has been a harrowing journey, and it ends the film with the Native American perspective.

“We were kind of clueless as to how that was going to come about or how that was going to look,” said George, who appears in the scene as the lead singer of the troupe. “But we did have a couple of issues while they were raising the camera. Our sticks came in close contact with the camera that hovered over our ground. We had to watch what we were doing there. So it was tight, and there’s the lighting and shadows and all that stuff. But it was really kind of fun, though it was on one of the hottest days of the month in Oklahoma, which is known for its sweltering heat days.”

George is relishing the opportunity the nomination will bring for Osage visibility in the arts. But he weighed his options carefully when asked if more film and TV work is in his future. “I’ve been singing for 40-plus years, and I consider myself on the tail end of that life,” he said. “It takes a lot out of you to sit there and drum, let’s say, from noon to five o’clock, and then come back after dinner and do it again till midnight. It takes a lot out of your arm or your lungs and everything else. So to get involved in something like that, it would just have to be the right situation.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.

The post How ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Singer Scott George Became the First Osage Oscar Nominee for Original Song appeared first on TheWrap.

“Seventeen-year-old America thought she was getting nominated for ‘Gotta
Kick It Up,’” the actress told TheWrap with a laugh in January, just hours after getting her first nomination. “Seventeen-year-old America thought she could get nominated for an Oscar for a Disney Channel movie. She did not quite understand the rules of the game.”

In reality, the actress picked up a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Gloria in Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie’s critical favorite and box-office smash, “Barbie.” Gloria is not a Barbie herself, but rather a human working for Mattel who’s struggling, as all women do, with figuring out how to exist in a male-dominated world, especially as she’s raising a teenage daughter.

Ferrera drew acclaim for the role thanks to an emotional monologue concisely detailing that exact complicated struggle—a monologue she immediately knew
from just reading the script was “a gift.”

But, lying within Gloria’s struggles is still just a young girl with an eagerness to play with her Barbies. When Barbie herself (Robbie) shows up to seal the rift between their two worlds, Gloria is thrilled to know she is the one Barbie came for.

When Gloria and her daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) go to Barbie Land, the older woman fawns over Barbie’s many outfits, most of which she had herself
growing up. And, according to Ferrera, that childlike excitement was easy to harness.

“That still very much exists in me,” she said. “I feel so close to my childlike glee, particularly around getting to do my work. As an actress, or when I’m directing, it feels like play. And I feel very close to that kind of ecstatic energy when I’m getting to do what I love.”

She continued, “That was also so much the energy that Greta brought to the project — that everyone brought to the project, but because of Greta, it all felt
like child’s play. And so that wasn’t really hard for me to tap into.”

What was harder and more “involved” for Ferrera was striking a balance between the imaginative side of Gloria, who would readily believe Barbie came for her, and the fact that she is an adult woman in the real world who would likely have some skepticism.

In preparing to reconcile those aspects of the character, Ferrera was inspired by the documentary “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie,” which told the story of Kim Culmone, who led what Ferrera called “the Barbie revolution” and expanded the doll’s look to include different races, body types, abilities and more, despite facing criticism and questions from virtually everyone in her life.

“For her, on a personal level, it was about her childhood memories — playing with Barbie with her mother and what that imagination meant and what that connection meant. And she never let that go,” Ferrera said. “Even though Barbie was imperfect, it still had value to her, and she held onto that value. And because she was a real woman in the real world who believed in what Barbie could be, I felt like I could see Gloria.”

She continued, “I thought, yes, Gloria is not afraid to love what she loves. She’s a little afraid, because she’s hiding most of it, and she’s pretending to be whatever people need her to be in any situation. But this journey gets to be one where she unabashedly gets to revel and love what she loves. And that felt like a really important journey to see an adult, grown woman go on. To just give herself the permission to value what she values and to love what she loves.”

Her performance culminated in the year’s most celebrated cinematic monologue when Gloria details how impossible it is to be a woman in today’s culture. Ferrera knew she had to do the monologue justice, but she didn’t know that it would go viral and prompt cheers and tears from audiences everywhere.

She got to experience that firsthand when she watched the film at its Los Angeles
premiere.

“It was a premiere audience, so it’s always a friendly audience, all the laughing and the clapping and whooping and hollering,” she said. “But there was a wonderful reaction to the speech. I actually took my 3-year-old daughter with me and she sat on my lap the whole time. I was sure she was going to fall asleep and she didn’t.”

Ferrera continued, “Just having my daughter in my lap and getting to experience that moment and everyone’s reaction to it was a very, very special moment. [It was] really wonderful to see the words and the work land with people.”

To get an Oscar nomination for playing out this journey on screen is just the cherry on top for Ferrera. That said, she’s acutely aware of what her nomination means for Latinx actors, who are historically underrepresented when awards season comes around, particularly at the Oscars.

“I grew up watching the Academy Awards and looking for proof that I could one day be there,” she said. “And I found that in any woman of color or a person outside of the dominant stereotype of movie star. And so I think it really makes an incredible impact when people see people who reflect them in these cultural moments that are about celebrating and valuing people’s voices, people’s
stories, people’s work, people’s artistry.”

She added, “For too long, so many of us have had so little to see ourselves in. So to get to be in that room and represent millions of people who maybe feel like it’s more possible for them to be valued and celebrated in our culture, it means everything to me. It’s truly, to me, the real power of the moment.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.

Read more from the Down to the Wire issue here.

The post America Ferrera Reflects on Her Journey From Disney Channel to ‘Barbie’ to the Oscars appeared first on TheWrap.

“All I can say is that all three films have a lot of love in them, and they all cover stories and people that I felt deserved more attention,” Proudfoot, who collaborated with composer and filmmaker Kris Bowers on “Concerto” and “Repair Shop,” told TheWrap. “I do not deserve more attention, but these stories do.”

“The Last Repair Shop” is the story of a facility in downtown Los Angeles that repairs musical instruments that are loaned out without charge to students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Ben asked me, ‘You went to LAUSD schools — do you know this place?’” said Bowers, who was unaware of the people who tuned the piano and fixed the saxophone he played when he was in school. “I had never heard of it. Literally, Steve Bagmanyan [one of the film’s subjects] tuned the pianos at my elementary school and middle school. And I just never thought about it.

“I was kind of disappointed in my young self that I never thought, ‘Why is this piano always in tune?’ I just enjoyed the privileges of being young and having things taken care of.”

Even before he met anyone at the repair shop, Proudfoot was convinced there could be a good film in the people who worked there. “There’s a little voice that I have learned to protect and listen to,” he said. “And that voice was  very strong and consistent early on.”

He also found the shop visually interesting when they first visited it – but most of the employees felt burned by a past newspaper article about the large backlog of repairs the shop once had. Initially, not one of them wanted to participate in the film.

“The supervisor said, ‘Look, the best I can do is give you a few minutes to talk to the whole group,’” Proudfoot said. “So on their break, everybody came around in a semicircle and I gave my song and dance about short documentaries and what we wanted to do and what films I had made before. And at the end I had my ‘Jerry Maguire’ moment and said, ‘Who’s with me?’ Four people raised their hands, and those are the four people in the movie.”

If that was an inauspicious start, those four volunteers told fascinating and moving stories in their interviews with Proudfoot: There was the stringed- instrument repairman who had to face coming out as gay at a time when it wasn’t accepted; the Mexican immigrant saved from a life of poverty when she landed a job in the formerly all-male shop; the former country musician whose band had once been advised by no less than Colonel Tom Parker; the Armenian refugee whose American sponsor taught him piano tuning.

“At that point, it was just like, ‘Man, we better not screw this up,’” Proudfoot said. “This is a gift from the documentary gods.”

Bowers added interviews with some of the LAUSD student musicians. “They were so amazing, full of light and beauty,” he said. “They had such clarity talking about their connections with their instruments. I definitely saw myself in every one of them, which was a big reason why I really wanted them in the film.”

The film went through a number of iterations over a period of four years. When it was accepted by the Telluride Film Festival, the directors decided they had to add the finale of their dreams and pulled together students, alumni and repair technicians in a makeshift orchestra to play a new composition of Bowers’ over the end credits.

“A lot of the composition and arranging and orchestrating of it came from our conversations about how it would be filmed,” Bowers said. “It was a lot of fun, and it was something that connected Ben and I early on – this fascination with whether music can be that integral to the filmmaking process.”

Bowers has a flourishing career writing film music, including the scores to “Green Book,” “Origin” and “The Color Purple,” and Proudfoot makes his living with brand-sponsored short films – but both said they’re committed to the short-documentary format.

“What I like about these films that we self-finance and make on our own is that they’re noncommercial,” Proudfoot said. “Never once do we stop and say, ‘Are we going to be able to sell this?’ It doesn’t even enter the conversation, and the people that are supporting it financially are not assessing whether it can recoup its investment. Everybody is aligned in a very human mission to create a beautiful story that will inspire people.

“I feel like the short documentary is this secret corner of cinema that has the whole world of craft, of cinematography and music and editing and filmmaking.

“It’s hard to beat that. I think we’re in a renaissance of short documentaries, mainly driven by the internet, and I think it’s going to keep going and going and going.”

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post 3 Oscar Nominations in 4 Years? That’s Short Work for Ben Proudfoot appeared first on TheWrap.

But when she received her first Oscar nomination this year for her score to “American Fiction,” she became the fourth woman to be nominated for Best Original Score during the time she’d been in the Academy — not a lot, but enough to make her feel that progress had been made, especially considering that when she joined it had been 15 years of nothing but male nominees.

“Before the Alliance, we had two or three, right?” Karpman said. (Rachel Portman was nominated for Best Original Score in 1999 and 2000, and Ann Ronell once in 1945; a handful of other female composers were nominated in the now-defunct song score and musical or comedy score categories.) “And since the Alliance, we’ve had Germaine [Franco], me, Mica Levi, who now identifies as gender nonbinary but at that point identified as female, and Hildur [Guðnadóttir] winning. So I think we’ve made tremendous progress. But we need to do more, because there are many of us who are very, very good at this.”

Karpman, a Juilliard-trained composer who has also written operas and concert pieces, said this sitting in the home she shares with her partner, composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, on the beach in the Playa del Rey area of Los Angeles. The bottom floor is an office and recording studio, filled with musical instruments of all shapes, sizes and purposes; on a shelf, her five Emmy Awards are dressed in Barbie clothes.

And as she talked about the music that brought her first Oscar nomination, she couldn’t help but illustrate it by sitting at a 1928 Steinway piano that had been given to her father by legendary Hollywood hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff. She asked for the piano after her father died — and the day it was delivered to her house, she recorded some of the “American Fiction” score on it.

“I started playing to test the piano, and Nora ran in from the other room and said, ‘Oh my God, press record!’” she said. “That became the family theme for the movie, but it was also my family theme.”

With Jeffrey Wright playing a character who is named Thelonious and nicknamed Monk, she knew the “American Fiction” score would have to nod to protean jazz pianist Thelonious Monk by being jazzy and piano-based, which suited her because she’d spent much of her life in music studying jazz along with classical music.

“The question was, do we take a piece of Monk and arrange it and massage it into a score?” she said. “And they chose to go with original music, which was the best choice. When you’re working with Monk’s music, you have to have a reverence, in a way. And when you’re working with an original score, we can pull it apart, dissect it, extend it, change it.”

For Karpman, the trickiest part of the score was the film’s opening stretch. “We leaned on comedic tropes so that audiences would know that it was funny,” she said. “They were hearing some serious things, but the whole point of the movie is that it’s OK if we laugh. So we did bongos, funky piano … But it was hard to find the right tone, for sure.”

Although Karpman has been very active in recent years, scoring “Lovecraft Country” and moving into the Marvel universe with the TV series “What If…?” and “Ms. Marvel” and film “The Marvels,” she feels the Oscar nomination is “one of those pivotal moments in my life.” Partly, that’s because she’s spent the last few years inside the Academy, using her time as a governor to push to diversify a branch once well-known for being old, male and set in its ways. But when she arrived on the board, out of necessity that was beginning to change as the Academy set its sights on expansion in the wake of #OscarsSoWhite.

“They wanted to see people come into the Academy from underrepresented groups, including women,” she said. “I thought, maybe I can do some good here.”

Not that she thought she was paving the way for her own nomination. “I think it was right at the beginning of the Alliance, and a woman director who had been involved in advocacy came up to me,” Karpman said. “She said, ‘I think what you’re doing is amazing, but you have to come to terms with the fact that it will never benefit you.’ And I sat there for a minute and said, ‘I’m OK with that.’ I just thought, if I leave it better than I found it, I’m fine. I’m making a living, it’s good.”

She grinned. “I never, ever, ever thought that this would happen to me, but it did. I have benefited from my own advocacy, but that was never the intent.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.

The post How ‘American Fiction’ Composer Laura Karpman’s Fight for Diversity Led to Her First Oscar Nomination appeared first on TheWrap.

“Salt Lake Film Society started a new arm during COVID,” Jerusha said. “And it was a really cool and lovely idea where they take filmmakers who have worked in the industry and pair them with up-and-coming animators. We picked six different animators and along the way, our buddies Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer jumped on board and wrote this script knowing that it was going to be for five to six animators. That’s how they picked the five senses as the vehicle to show each chapter.”

They began work on “Ninety-Five Senses” in 2020, during the early pandemic and while the Hesses were already working on Netflix’s animated adaptation of “Thelma the Unicorn.” The subject matter hit home for everyone involved. “I
think the whole mood of the world affected the emotion — the themes of death and reflecting on your life and having gratitude for things in spite of the heartbreak that you’re experiencing,” Jared said.

The result is a sobering examination of capital punishment in which the animation makes it feel even more urgent, even though the film does not have a political bent. “It was really an international group,” Jared said, noting that
many of the animators hailed from Latin America, now gaining steam in the animation game. “Some were just out of film school; some are still in film school. It was just an incredible collection of young, talented artists that brought this
thing to life.”

It might seem bizarre that the wonderfully eclectic Nelson (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” “Watchmen,” “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”) would be a new colleague for the duo, but he fit exactly into the proceedings and enhanced the emotional timbre of the piece. “Tim was our muse from the very beginning,” Jared said. “We’re just huge fans of all of his work. And he’s born and raised in Oklahoma. He just has such an authentic drawl he’s bringing to life.” Jerusha added, “He specifically found a Texas accent to do, which is so cool. He’s such a pro. And when we met him, it really felt like, ‘Oh, yeah, you feel like you have been a part of us forever.’”

The short film format is proving to be attractive for many of the world’s most individualistic filmmakers: Wes Anderson is a nominee for Best Live Action Short Film this year while Pedro Almodóvar made that category’s shortlist. “You have the freedom to be personal,” Jared said. “And there’s such a purity about it. You’re doing things for the love.” Jerusha added, “There’s not really any money going into it, you don’t get any money out of it. And sometimes these little stories [wouldn’t] get any light shined on them if they were feature-length.”

The news of their nomination was especially heartwarming coming the week that “Napoleon Dynamite” enjoyed a 20th anniversary screening at the Sundance Film Festival. Jerusha attended the screening while Jared was hard at work on the much-anticipated big-screen adaptation of video game phenomenon “Minecraft.”

“I had just watched it for the first time in 10 years, with my 11-year-old. She was giggling the whole time and I had a big smile plastered on my face,” Jerusha said of their tiny indie — made for a minuscule $400,000 — that ended up becoming a massive hit, grossing roughly 100 times what it cost to produce. “It just holds up in the weirdest way,” she said, laughing. “Sitting with it now, I’m like, ‘This is such a tight, funny, dumb movie.’’’

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.

Illustration by Rui Ricardo for TheWrap

The post How ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ Filmmakers Jared and Jerusha Hess Got the Oscars’ Attention by Pivoting to Animation appeared first on TheWrap.

Based on the graphic novel by Sara Varon, the film is a wordless meditation on friendship and sacrifice from the point of view of a lonely dog named DOG living in a stylized, animal-filled version of 1980s Manhattan. DOG sends away for a robot pal, and the ensuing friendship changes both of their lives forever — in the same way, perhaps, that an Academy Award nomination will change the lives of Berger and his team.

“When we got the news, we just screamed,” said Berger. “I have never screamed or jumped so much.” Berger added that the journey to being nominated was a long one for a film that premiered at Cannes last summer, where it was acquired by Neon. He said he read the trades, like TheWrap, that trumpeted that “Robot Dreams” could be an Oscar contender, but he was skeptical, given the number of amazing animated films this year.

“For us, the Oscars is the biggest film influence in the world,” Berger said. “As a director, the biggest award you can get is that more people got to see your film. And I know this nomination is going to make that happen.” He said in Spain, where the film is still playing, the box office jumped 120%. It ticked upwards in France, too. (“Robot Dreams” will be released in America this summer.)

“Robot Dreams” marks Berger’s first animated feature. He said that he picked up the graphic novel more than 10 years ago and returned to it as inspiration after making his last two live-action features. “I took out the book (and) when I got to the end, I was in tears,” Berger shared. “I said, ‘This is so powerful. If I want to tell the story, I have to make an animated film.’” And he did.

To pull off “Robot Dreams” — which is ambitious, wordless and in 2D — Berger recruited a team that included veterans of “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles,” “The Triplets of Belleville” and Cartoon Saloon’s “The Book of Kells.” “It was a combination of people that have no experience in animation and people with a lot of experience in animation,” Berger said. “That gave me confidence. I enjoyed the process enormously. It really was such a pleasure to make this film.”

And it’s just as much a pleasure to watch. The finished product speaks as a testament to the movie’s unexpected emotional heft that it can turn Earth, Wind & Fire’s perennial wedding jam “September” into a rueful rumination on friendship, memory and loss. Berger said that the song, which you’ll never hear the same way again, was a part of the movie from early on. “The film takes place from September to September, so I knew I needed a song for them and a song that they could roller dance in Central Park to,” Berger said. “It had to be funky. The song was perfect.”

He said it became even more perfect when he started looking at the lyrics more closely — Do you remember / the 21st night of September? “My head exploded because I didn’t realize that this song was meant to be the main theme of ‘Robot Dreams.’ The film talks about memory, talks about how memory helps us to recover from loss,” Berger said. The song plays throughout the movie, in various versions, but they couldn’t get the song for the closing credits. It was too expensive. Some dreams are pricier than others.

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How ‘Robot Dreams’ Nabbed a Surprise Oscar Nomination for Director Pablo Berger appeared first on TheWrap.

Only a handful have achieved this rare three-peat. Corbould is the only special effects artist to do so, and the most recent in any category since songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman were nominated three times in 1983 (for “Tootsie,” “Best Friends” and “Yes, Giorgio”) and sound designer Randy Thom in 1984 (for “The Right Stuff,” “Never Cry Wolf” and “Return of the Jedi”).

“I’m very proud and honored,” said Corbould on a Zoom call from Malta, where he’s working on “Gladiator 2,” set for release later this year.

Corbould comes from a VFX family: His uncle Colin Chilvers netted an Oscar for 1978’s “Superman,” and as a young man Corbould watched Christopher Reeve fly (with the help of wires) on the Fortress of Solitude’s set. Corbould later gained acclaim within the effects world for his stunning work on the opening Normandy sequence of “Saving Private Ryan.”

“My job ranges from smoke, mist, rain, a wet down,” he said. “We deal with breakaway bottles and glass, rain effects, snow effects, wind effects, hydraulic rigs, pneumatic rigs. Plus, we do electrics, plumbing, engineering. All the things that the director sees on the set.”

Corbould received five prior nominations before his three this year and won Oscars for the original “Gladiator” and “Gravity.”

“So many people strive all their life for recognition,” he said of this year’s honors.
“To get three in one year, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet. The only question now is, ‘Who do I sit with at the show?’”

His choices for seatmates include the teams of “Napoleon,” his eighth film with Ridley Scott; “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” his second job on the stunt-savvy Tom Cruise franchise; and “The Creator,” his second collaboration with Gareth Edwards after “Rogue One” (for which Corbould was nominated in 2017).

“Three different types of movies there, which is great for the category,” he said. “You’ve got a bit of everything in terms of the variety of genres and how they use special effects.”

For each film, Corbould was called upon to fabricate the elements so that the action could be caught live on camera. In the case of “Napoleon,” that meant three separate locations for the famous Battle of Austerlitz re-creation. “The top of the hill was the exact same spot where we filmed Richard Harris in ‘Gladiator,’” he said. “The ice lake was on an old military airfield, where we dug a big
tank, and the underwater shots were done at Pinewood Studios.”

Corbould’s collaboration and friendship with Scott stretches back to the 1990s. “It’s quite an easy conversation between the two of us,” he said. “We’ve worked together so long that I know exactly what he wants. He does all his own storyboards and so that means that if there are 10 canons in the drawing, he wants 10 canons. It’s that simple.”

In “Dead Reckoning,” more than a year of planning went into the spectacular train chase and crash sequence. Here, too, multiple locations were used: an actual train route in Norway and a half-bridge in the U.K., where two train cars were actually driven off, plus massive outdoor rigs, including a vertical set and a three-axle gimbal. “And we had a set that was two ends of the train carriages that were pivoted,” he said. “That was mainly to do the jump from one train to
another. Then we’d re-dress the train to make a different carriage for the next shots.”

In this renaissance age for practical effects, “The Creator” was a bullseye project for Corbould. “Gareth said to me, ‘I want to shoot this my way: Guerilla style, small crew, one camera, 360-degree shots.’” The futuristic visual effects were conceived in post-production. “We put loads of smoke in scenes, we did the pyrotechnics and explosions, but it was mainly to set the look for reference later. It was all shot normally. There were background extras running through shots and nobody had (VFX) markers on them. Who were robots and who were real was all decided in post.”

Though the production timeline on the three films didn’t overlap, Corbould said, “A little part of me wishes that they were released over three years. But I’ll gladly take the three in one.”

Corbould is also grateful that his craft is still recognized under the banner of Best Visual Effects. “For a while we tried to get our own separate category, for practical effects. Because we thought there was a timeline for when practical effects would be phased out, but in the last five or six years, (practical effects) have come on stronger than ever. People realize that you can’t do everything with CGI, or it looks like a cartoon and audiences lose interest.”

That said, it didn’t make sense to Corbould that Christopher Nolan’s practical effects-heavy “Oppenheimer” wasn’t even longlisted for the category. “I was surprised by that, honestly. I thought that would get a clear nomination. It’s good that there were a few comments made about that.”

But as for the upcoming Oscars show, Corbould looks forward to the celebration. He laughed when recalling that he considered asking the Academy for three nominees’ worth of tickets to the ceremony. Instead, his plus-one will be his wife, Maria.

“I probably won’t win, you know, because that would be the irony of it,” he said, citing Murphy’s Law (a.k.a. Sod’s Law in England). “So let’s just have some fun. I’m going to really enjoy it.”

Jimmy Kimmel hosts the 96th Academy Awards, airing March 10 on ABC.

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.

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But Robbie wasn’t nominated for Best Actress and Gerwig was passed over for Best Director, categories in which they were thought to be shoo-ins.

Were the Robbie/Gerwig slights a bummer? Sure they were. But for anyone unfamiliar with the Oscar nominating process, it’s a matter of numbers and ranked placement that often breaks a few hearts in the process. And it is
possible that this story overshadowed a possibly larger, more significant one: that this could be the most inclusive, exciting, unconventional, big-and-small-budgeted Best Picture lineup in the Oscars’ 96-year history.

A quick survey of this year’s Best Picture lineup unveils stories about the Black experience (“American Fiction”), the Native American experience (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and the Asian and Asian-American experience (“Past Lives”). It
includes movies in which a character’s LGBTQ+ status is not an immediate reason for tragedy (“American Fiction,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Maestro,” “Poor Things”). And it contains stories of women exploring autonomy and self-worth in worlds—that can be interpreted as both real and unreal—dominated by men (“Barbie” and “Poor Things”).

And even the more traditional Oscar-sounding films in the mix are not wholly conventional: “The Holdovers” dares its audiences to luxuriate in a 1970s-mood character drama and contains a sympathetic portrayal of a grieving, working-
class Black woman as well as an adult and teen struggling with depression. “The Zone of Interest” deviates wildly from its source material to create an even more demanding, purposefully distanced look at the seemingly idyllic life of a Nazi
family that lives just outside the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where the father oversees the camp’s atrocities. (If that’s not timely in 2024, nothing is.)

And even though “Oppenheimer” is a biopic by no less a powerhouse than Christopher Nolan, it was a massive gamble that could have backfired spectacularly if it didn’t connect with audiences. It illustrates thorny, unheroic human weakness, while its techniques and visuals are not presented for easy digestibility.

A quick survey of Twitter will tell you that opinions differ wildly on all of these films. The gnarly discourse sometimes yields a few salient points, chiefly that cinema still needs to tell all of these stories from even more uniquely personal and diverse points of view. But since the 2009 expansion of the Best Picture nominees, which—ironically enough—was sparked by the sting of Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” not making the Best Picture cut that year, one would be hard-pressed to find a lineup so diverse and so illustrative of the filmmakers’ passions.

Even the snob factor is greatly reduced for the second year in a row: After 2022’s two top international grossers, “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun:
Maverick,” made the Best Picture cut, both “Barbie” (2023’s champ) and “Oppenheimer” (its third-place grosser) are there. And history will show that there were definitely not as many cosplay Mavericks and Na’vi in attendance at theaters in 2022 as there were Oppys and Barbies (and Kens) in 2023.

Oscar debates and gripes are all part of the fun and why everyone always comes back for more. But as “Steel Magnolias”’ Truvy Jones once said, why don’t we just focus on the joy of the situation? One need only refer to Dua Lipa’s “Barbie” anthem “Dance the Night” (which the Academy overlooked despite it being perhaps the most ubiquitous pop song of 2023) for the right frame of mind before everyone gets back to the hard work of stomping out injustices. This resonance will read loud and clear on that red carpet on March 10: “Even when the tears are flowin’ like diamonds on my face/I’ll still keep the party goin’, not one hair out of place.”

This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more of the issue here.

Illustration by Rui Ricardo for TheWrap

The post Does the 2024 Oscars Represent History’s Most Inclusive Lineup of Best Picture Nominees? appeared first on TheWrap.