Innholdsfortegnelse for 3/9/2022 i Variety

The latest prediction from our film awards maven Clayton Davis is that coming-of-age drama “CODA” will run away with the best picture Oscar at the March 27 ceremony. I have to say that would be awfully fabulous given that everyone —me included — loves a little-engine-that-could underdog story, and this feel-good, scrappy movie filmed in a short amount of time certainly fits that bill. A remake of an award-winning French film, “La Famille Bélier,” the story, written and directed by Siân Heder, centers on the only hearing member of a deaf family (played by Emilia Jones) who’s torn between pursuing her passion for music and her fear of abandoning her family’s fishing business. “CODA” made history at last month’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, becoming the first film with a predominantly…

Cate Blanchett, who recently appeared in front of the camera in “Don’t Look Up” and “Nightmare Alley,” has been busy behind the scenes developing film and TV projects through the Dirty Films banner she co-founded with her husband, Andrew Upton. Among those in the works: “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” her first collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar in his Englishlanguage debut; Indigenous Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s “The New Boy”; and the Apple TV Plus series “Disclaimer” from Alfonso Cuarón. Blanchett will star in each in addition to producing. Blanchett, who was recently honored with a lifetime achievement trophy at the César Awards in France and the inaugural International Goya in Spain, has producing credits on projects including “Carol,” “Stateless” and “Mrs. America.” She chalks up Dirty Films’ eclectic selections to its…

Imagine standing by yourself in a room and having a conversation that needs to sound like it’s taking place on a bumpy bicycle ride. Or in the midst of a heavy lift, or during an epic battle. Imagine this all because unlike performing in a live-action film with other actors, props and thoroughly designed and decorated sets or locations, voicing an animated character means not just visualizing it, but convincingly vocalizing it. Animated films take a notoriously long amount of time so actors return to the recording booth, sometimes over a period of years, as scripts evolve. In between sessions, great chunks of the movie may have been rewritten, but the actors need to jump back into character as though they never left. “Encanto” director Byron Howard remembers working with…

This year’s song race may be more competitive than initially thought. Billie Eilish’s James Bond theme “No Time to Die,” long believed the front-runner, has been out for over two years (awaiting a COVID-delayed release of the film it was written for) and faces opposition from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Encanto” song. While it’s not “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the TikTok sensation driving the Disney soundtrack to No. 1 and gold-record status, Oscar voters could choose its companion, the nominated “Dos Oruguitas,” as “close enough.” And don’t count out Queen Bey. “Be Alive” from “King Richard” Superstar Beyoncé is, at long last, an Oscar nominee for this inspirational, Black-pride song from the finale of the film about Venus and Serena Williams’ hard-working tennis-coach dad. Beyoncé’s co-writer Dixson says his father “was…

In the past 20 years, since becoming an Oscar precursor on the awards calendar, the BAFTAs have courted a more international audience — though in choosing a host for the ceremony, organizers have always kept things local. In recent years, national treasures including Graham Norton, Joanna Lumley and Stephen Fry have filled the position; last year’s low-key pandemic ceremony had suitably low-key hosts to match, with broadcasting personalities Dermot O’Leary, Clara Amfo and Edith Bowman — all little-known outside the U.K. — sharing duties. This year, BAFTA has taken a different tack and looked beyond borders, tapping Australian actor and comedian Rebel Wilson to host proceedings on March 13. It’s a sharp change in direction for an event that has traditionally sought witty emcees rather than outright comics: no one…

The showcase of four immersive titles from Taiwan at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) festival symbolizes a strong boost to the island’s confidence in developing XR (extended reality) content among a new generation of curators, according to the industry insiders behind some of the featured works. “[The selection] shows that the new generation of Taiwan’s creatives and storytellers are willing to try and use new ways to create their art,” says Estela Valdivieso Chen, CEO of Serendipity Films, one of the producers of the 17-minute featured short “Madame Pirate: Becoming a Legend,” which will be making its international premiere at SXSW EX Experience Spotlight. “They are both utilizing the local resources the island has, like its tech, and working with international partners all over the globe to break the…

TV REVIEW Docu-series: Netflix (six episodes; all reviewed); March 9 With: Pat Hackett, Bob Colacello, Rob Lowe, Mariel Hemingway In the new documentary series “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” the late pop artist’s re-created voice sounds eerie and uncanny — human but not. It’s aesthetically jarring, and a fitting tribute. Director Andrew Rossi, with the permission of Warhol’s estate, used an artificial-intelligence program to reproduce his speaking voice, so that “Warhol” can read aloud from the diaries he kept. The result is a flat, almost robotic recapitulation of observations and events, narrating a vivid stream of footage from his life and career without emotion or intonation. “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” executive produced by Ryan Murphy, builds, over six well-structured episodes, a sense of its subject as intelligent, but alienated from his…

Now that omicron is in decline, Broadway optimism is on the rise. After a bumpy holiday season rife with performance disruptions, show closures and hiatuses due to the highly contagious COVID variant, there are signs of recovery in the New York theater industry — and producers are becoming increasingly bullish about a busy spring season. “When there was a bump in the road, people stopped and regrouped, but then we safely went on,” says James L. Nederlander of the Nederlander Organization, which owns nine Broadway theaters and also produces the new musical starring Billy Crystal, “Mr. Saturday Night.” “Right now, I think the more noise Broadway can make, the better.” With the weather getting a little better and attendance going up each week, I think people are getting pretty excited…

Game creation platform Roblox’s 2021 haul of $1.9 billion in revenue is more than double what the company made in 2020, and the $570 million it earned in the fourth quarter alone is greater than what it brought in during all of 2019. But its vast popularity with kids is proving difficult to sustain: The last two quarters saw users 13 and up — instead of kids under 13 — lead daily active user growth, causing fourth-quarter DAUs to slightly miss analyst expectations. Following Roblox’s fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 15, the stock fell as much as 38% before picking up slightly. It goes to show that despite Roblox’s ascent, the long-term success of any metaverse endeavor must rely on establishing and maintaining broad appeal to different age demographics. For…

The bargaining standoff between Major League Baseball and its players that led to last week’s cancellation of Opening Day is a particularly bitter pill to swallow for the local and national outlets that bring games to their most ardent fans — networks that already have experienced two seasons of COVID-driven disruptions. On March 1, MLB took the dramatic step of tabling Opening Day games and activities set for March 31. It also canceled other early games for the 2022 season. The cancellations affect programming and advertising plans for baseball TV partners including ESPN, Turner Sports, Fox Sports, Sinclair Broadcast Group and NBC Sports Regional Networks and team channels like the Yankees’ YES Network and the Dodgers’ Spectrum SportsNet LA. “Like all baseball fans, we hope there is a resolution as…

Look through the list of this year’s Oscar nominees in the animated feature category and you’ll find each hero’s journey hinges on the same thing — family. They’re either struggling to break free, trying to find their place in the world or looking back on a mystery. In every case, it’s messy. Most of the filmmakers leaned into their own experiences with family and mined tidbits for their films. The result is movies that hits specific notes but play well for larger audiences who see themselves in the families on screen. “One of the goals of the movie is to get kids and parents to kind of see each other and see the world through each other’s perspectives,” says Michael Rianda, helmer of “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.” “Because, when…

This year, all five Oscar nominees in the sound category have also scored Motion Picture Sound Editors nominations at the 69th annual Golden Reel Awards. For the second year in a row, the Oscar category combines sound editing and sound mixing. The MPSE Golden Reel Awards, to be held as a virtual global ceremony March 13, recognizes the craft of sound editing, dividing those accolades into three disciplines for the awards category. “Dune,” “Nightmare Alley,” “No Time to Die” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” all received nominations. “Dune,” a leading contender in the Oscar race for sound, as well as other crafts, leads the way with three nominations for achievement in sound editing, which includes feature effects/Foley, feature dialogue/ADR and feature underscore. “Sound effects are everything from doors opening and…

Pop! Six! Squish! Uh-uh! Cicero … Tax credits! The 2002 film “Chicago” brought the stage musical and the song “Cell Block Tango” to the big screen. It also helped revolutionize the industry. When the Rob Marshalldirected movie debuted to critical and commercial success, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley expressed dismay that it was shot in Toronto rather than in his city — shining a light on the reasons major motion pictures choose where to film. After NAFTA was ratified in 1993, Canada enacted tax incentives for productions on both the federal and provincial level. “The tax incentive in Canada was reported on, and there was national press. It raised the question ‘How do we do this?’” Vans Stevenson of the Motion Picture Assn. tells Variety. Stevenson has led the MPA’s…

While growing up in Washington, D.C., John Gibson didn’t always see the Black community represented in film and television. “Movies were always important to me. They were inspirational, aspirational escapism when things weren’t great,” Gibson tells Variety. “But in movies and TV shows about my city, I didn’t see my community. And if I did, I didn’t see the diversity within the Black American experience.” The MPA launched a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion program in 2012, which has been led by VP of external and multicultural affairs John Gibson. He has worked with more than 50 partners to promote initiatives that enhance diversity behind and in front of the camera. “I think of this role as the great connector,” Gibson says. “When there are oftentimes many of our partners that…

Color wasn’t the only consideration for production designer Rona Liu and director Domee Shi when they were developing the look of Disney Pixar’s “Turning Red,” available on Disney Plus March 11. They also wanted “chunky cute.” That meant building everything to look bigger and rounder for the coming-of-age story of a middle school girl, Mei, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, who transforms into a giant red panda each time she feels anxiety or gets angry, as she navigates between being a free-spirited teen with her posse of best friends and an obedient, all-A student for her mom. Liu says it was Shi who wanted to use the idea of a red panda, an animal native to Asia that has not been widely portrayed in media. “They’re reclusive and sleep all day,”…

FILM REVIEW Director: Domee Shi With: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse Puberty is a monster — or more aptly, an adorable, uncontrollable giant panda — in Pixar’s “Turning Red.” An Oscar winner for her imaginative smothering-mother short “Bao,” helmer Domee Shi makes a worthy addition to the boys-club studio’s relatively small circle of feature directors, exploring another complicated Asian American (technically, Chinese-Canadian) parent-child dynamic, this time between a perfectionist tiger mom and the high-achieving yet deeply repressed teenage daughter who’s dying to let out her inner freak just a little. For decades, boys could look to werewolves and the Incredible Hulk as colorful metaphors for mood swings and aggro outbursts, while girls have had considerably fewer models to draw on for the changes they face in adolescence — which…

It’s a pretty sweet time to be a top executive in Hollywood. A series of high-profile mergers and acquisitions, and the arrival of some tech giants looking to break into the entertainment business, has put a premium on corporate talent. All industry eyes have turned to Discovery chief David Zaslav to see what he has planned once his company’s merger with WarnerMedia is consummated, and speculation is running rampant about who deep-pocketed streamers Apple and Netflix may be planning to hire. All of this jockeying is coming as the industry is experiencing a “once-in-a-generation seismic shift in the power structure of the business,” according to one former studio chief. As major media companies have launched in-house streaming services, their hunger for buzzy shows and movies has become insatiable. At the…

Is an equity stake the new overall deal? Some of the industry’s biggest talent management firms are setting investment deals with large production entities that extend much deeper than the first-look agreements of years past. The M&A activity reflects producers’ desire to find exclusive expressways to talent, especially the multihyphenates who are defining Hollywood’s vibrant new creator economy. It also advances the ambitions of a breed of managers who want to build on the seller’s market for talent at a moment of unprecedented global investment in content production and talent deals. This month, Range Media Partners, the management startup led by CAA and Entertainment One alum Peter Micelli, sold a minority slice (less than 20%) of the company to A+E Networks — home of cable’s A&E network, History and Lifetime.…

AWARDS CIRCUIT The hustle and bustle of awards season is nearing an end, with Oscar voting getting underway on March 17. So naturally, every contender is looking to gain an advantage, and the BAFTA and Critics Choice ceremonies, which take place March 13, provide that opportunity. At CCA, Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” lead the tally with 11 nominations apiece, including best picture. Still, with a group of more than 500 North America-based broadcast journalists and writers doing the voting, we shouldn’t expect either to triumph unequivocally. At BAFTA, “Belfast’s” six-nom tally isn’t as robust as Focus Features would have liked, but prospects look strong for the film to pick up wins for original screenplay, outstanding British film and possibly supporting actor Ciarán Hinds, who is…

01 “The Lost City” Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum look like they’re having a blast in the trailer for “The Lost City,” where she plays a kidnapped romance novelist who’s rescued by a Fabio-like model known for posing on her book covers. Will the second time at SXSW also be the charm for Tatum — who patrolled Austin a decade ago in a gag police uniform for the premiere of “21 Jump Street”? “It’s probably the broadest thing I’ve ever done,” Tatum tells Variety of his latest action comedy. “I play a cover model, and she hates me and doesn’t want anything to do with me because I’m probably very annoying and dumb.” As for how they found their chemistry, Bullock says she’s known Tatum socially for years from having…

The Academy’s 400-member music branch singled out an especially diverse group this year, including composers born in England, Spain and Germany along with two Americans, one of whom is not only a woman but also a person of color. They also cast a wide net in terms of genre: a comedy, two dramas, a science-fiction epic and an animated family film. And while “Dune” has long been the favorite of Oscar prognosticators, don’t count out critically praised “The Power of the Dog,” the colorful backdrop of “Encanto” or Academy voters’ frequent use of the score category as a consolation prize: a convenient way to reward a film that won’t win anything else. Don’t Look Up New York composer Nicholas Britell received his third Oscar nomination for the music of Adam…

It’s easy — and perhaps a bit lazy — to posture that 2021 was a year like no other. In fact, not only was there a global pandemic, but the angst over film, theater attendance and the future of entertainment went along in lockstep. As the Hollywood awards season marches on with the Critics’ Choice Awards taking place on March 13 at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel, the productions up for consideration include different elements of escapism while steadfastly sidestepping an exact replication of the current pandemic, a paradigm also set by the past. Ryan Lintelman, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History entertainment curator, points out that theater owners worried about the future of their business during the 1918 flu pandemic as well, wondering if audiences would favor intimate…

The BAFTAs had a challenging year in 2021, ricocheting among progress, stasis and scandal, and ending up somewhere in the middle. Their mission, following an outcry over the previous year’s white ceremony — with no acting nominees of color, no women up for the director prize, and Sam Mendes’ “1917” prevailing over Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” in the major races — was to diversify the awards, and fast. This year’s film ceremony is set for March 13 at the Royal Albert Hall in London. To that end, drastic changes were made, with the performance and directing categories handed over to small nomination committees (including some non-BAFTA members) who could curate more eclectic, progressive nominee fields from the branchvoted longlists. The fix was immediately effective, as BAFTA revealed a fresh, surprising…

GRAY’S GOLD Searchlight’s “Nightmare Alley” has four well-deserved Oscar nominations: production design, Tamara Deverell, Shane Vieau; costume design, Luis Sequeira; cinematography, Dan Laustsen; and best picture. Guillermo del Toro is director, co-writer, and one of the three nominated producers. And while filmmaking greats including Martin Scorsese have praised “Alley,” some audiences were caught off-guard because it isn’t what they expected. “It’s the first film of a different period in my life,” del Toro tells Variety, marking a new style and outlook of the physically beautiful film. “I wanted a dark jewel, a dark splendor. If you have a movie that talks so brutally about the human spirit, you’re weakening the material if you make it hard to look at.” Praising his nominated colleagues, del Toro says, “It is so moving…

For nearly 100 years, the MPA data-research team has served as a valuable resource for members and for workers in the media, the government and the general public. The data efforts don’t date back to the first years of the association, “unfortunately,” says Julia Jenks, VP of worldwide research. But since the fact-gathering began, the mission of those who assemble and analyze “the numbers” is rooted in the original MPA charter of purpose: An association designed to serve its members with impeccable accuracy and integrity. Providing high-quality research is essential to the industry’s lobbying efforts with government and public relations and, as a central clearinghouse, the MPA is uniquely positioned to process that data. Truly industry-wide analytics would be well-nigh impossible for any one member to collect from others, given…

Robert Lopez and wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez are no strangers to writing musical earworms. They’ve won Oscars for “Let It Go” from “Frozen” and “Remember Me” from “Coco” and an Emmy for “Agatha All Along” for “WandaVision.” Now they’re reuniting with friends and family, penning “You Are the Music” for Apple TV Plus animated comedy “Central Park,” which returns to the streamer March 4. Songwriters Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson (Kristen’s sister) invited the duo to write a song, and it was an offer they couldn’t turn down. “The family ties to ‘Central Park’ are huge,” says Anderson-Lopez. Rory O’Malley was in the Broadway show “The Book of Mormon” (which Lopez co-wrote and for which he won a Tony Award), and Josh Gad voiced Olaf in Disney’s “Frozen.” The scripts for…