Innholdsfortegnelse for 02/14/2024 i Variety

AWARDS CIRCUIT “Always a bridesmaid, never the bride” certainly applies to the plight of 19 of this year’s longest-suffering Academy Award nominees. Spanning all 23 categories, these actors, filmmakers and artisans — including actor Annette Bening, filmmaker Wes Anderson and costume designer Jacqueline West — share a peculiar bond. Collectively, they have racked up an impressive 107 Oscar nominations over the years without once stepping onto the Dolby Theatre stage to deliver an acceptance speech. By comparison, living titans Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep have together garnered 47 bids and taken home 13 trophies. The 96th ceremony may not change the narrative for many of these perennial favorites. Bening, on her fifth nod for “Nyad,” and Mark Ruffalo, rocking out with his fourth mention for “Poor…

Six of the eight songwriters nominated for this year’s original song Oscar already have the statue on their mantel. And very likely one of them will take home another come March 10. Two songs from “Barbie” lead the pack, and all four of those songwriters have visited Oscar’s podium before (two for “No Time to Die,” two for “A Star Is Born”). Veteran Diane Warren, on her 15th nomination, has never won a competitive Oscar, but has an honorary one. And Jon Batiste won for 2020’s “Soul,” but his co-writer is a newbie. Ditto Scott George, the Osage singer of the song from “Killers of the Flower Moon.” “The Fire Inside” from Flamin’ Hot Warren’s seventh consecutive nomination is for Eva Longoria’s film about a janitor who comes up with…

TV REVIEW Drama: Apple TV+ (10 episodes; all reviewed); Feb. 14 Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Juliette Binoche World War II is well-worn territory for prestige TV, but at first blush, “The New Look” has a novel way in. The Apple TV+ drama, created by Todd A. Kessler of “Bloodline,” traces the conflict’s impact on the Paris-based fashion industry, focusing on two titans of the craft: Christian Dior (Ben Mendelsohn) and Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche). For the purposes of “The New Look,” which begins under Nazi occupation, these peers are also foils. Dior is a sensitive dreamer whose younger sister, Catherine (Maisie Williams), joined the Resistance and spent time in a concentration camp. Chanel is a shrewd, self-made entrepreneur who infamously collaborated with the Nazis. “The New Look” bills itself as “the…

BAFTA AWARD NOMINEE FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE “THRILLING. A STORY OF HOW HUMANITY COMES TOGETHER FOR EACH OTHER IN THE WORST OF CIRCUMSTANCES.”DEADLINE SOCIETY of the SNOW (La SOCIEDAD de la NIEVE) A film by J.A. Bayona - Director of ‘The Impossible’ Scan here to watch the making of the Oscar® nominated film My name is Numa Turcatti. I’m 24 years old. It’s great that all these guys get to go. I Iook around and I barely know anyone here. But at the same time, it all feels familiar. Most of them are young men like me. Lovingly raised in houses near the sea. For some of them it’s their first trip away from home. J.A. Bayona, a masterful storyteller of epic survival stories, brings a personally important, lifelong…

“Barbie” is a cultural phenomenon, grossing nearly $1.5 billion and racking up eight Oscar nominations, all while launching scores of catchphrases and memes. So it’s understandable that Mattel, the company behind the iconic doll, is looking to capitalize on its cinematic success by developing roughly 45 movies based on its games and toys. Moviegoers can look forward to Barney, Bob the Builder and He-Man hitting the big screen in the not-so-distant future. But as Hollywood raids toy store shelves to feed its insatiable hunger for IP, it’s worth noting that when it comes to this type of film, for every “Barbie”-sized smash there’s a “Battleship”-like bomb. With that in mind, here are some of the movies that Mattel has in the works. 1 Barney KEY CREATIVE Daniel Kaluuya (producer and star)…

Sheila Nevins has produced documentaries for most of her professional life. But at 84, she’s still notching career firsts. Last month, Nevins added “Oscar-nominated director” to her résumé, having landed her first nod for co-directing the short “The ABCs of Book Banning” with Trish Adlesic and Nazenet Habtezghi. Nevins’ first Oscars as a nominee take place at the same time she is wrapping up her run as the head of MTV Documentary Films. Nevins joined the company in 2019 after 38 years at HBO. “I went there to raise the bar for the intellectual quotient of what MTV could produce in the documentary arena,” Nevins says. “I did highbrow and lowbrow at HBO, but when I got to MTV, I just did highbrow.” On Nevins’ watch, MTV produced 40 docs…

Cinema lovers celebrated and debated the international Oscar short list when it was revealed in December, but now that the race has narrowed to five, pundits have even more material for discussion. It’s a strong year for cinema in general, and an even stronger one for international, given that non-U.S. filmmakers, such as Yorgo Lanthimos, Jonathan Glazer and Justine Triet, pepper the Academy Awards nominations (not to mention an actress nom for Sandra Hüller and an animated feature one for Spain’s “Robot Dreams”). Here’s how they stack up: Io Capitano (ITALY) Matteo Garrone (“Gomorrah”) turns his eye on two teenage Senegalese cousins who yearn to go to Europe and pursue their dreams of music careers there. The story begins as a grand adventure but quickly the dangers of the journey,…

This year’s contenders for the original score Oscar are a fascinating cross-section of classic and modern approaches to music for films. John Williams, now 92, is on his 54th nomination (his fourth for an “Indiana Jones” movie), while Ludwig Göransson, 39, is seeking his second Oscar, for “Oppenheimer.” The late Robbie Robertson is only the seventh composer in Oscar history to receive a posthumous nomination in this category; he died Aug. 9 after finishing “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Laura Karpman, who scored “American Fiction,” is just the fifth woman to be nominated in this category and only the second of those to be American; she and English composer Jerskin Fendrix, for “Poor Things,” are first-time nominees. American Fiction Karpman created a jazzy backdrop for Jeffrey Wright’s author character, named after…

When Bonnie Timmermann is helping Ridley Scott or Michael Mann find the perfect person for a role in films like “Black Hawk Down” and “Heat,” she will buy auditioning actors pizza and grill them about their lives and ambitions. Sooner or later, they’ll get around to reading the scenes, but Timmermann has an innate sense of how to put performers at ease. “You need to understand who they are, so when they get in front of a director you know how to help them deliver their best work,” she says. “The only way you can do that is to understand their psyche.” And when she’s not overseeing casting calls, you’ll find Timmermann at screenings or plays on the prowl for talent. She likes to keep Polaroids and videos of actors…

1 ‘Saving Pelican 895’ 2011 The 39-minute doc tracks the rehab of a single pelican rescued after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The moment of truth arrived when the pelican was returned to the wild. Producers “didn’t know if he would get up and fly or not, but then he lifted his little wings up and soared,” Nevins recalls. 2 ‘Paradise Lost’ Trilogy 1996, 2000, 2011 Nevins hired directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky to investigate the case of three Arkansas teens accused of murder. Two decades and three documentaries later, the men were released from prison thanks in part to questions raised by the HBO docs. 3 ‘Wishful Drinking’ 2010 ‘Bright Lights’ 2016 Nevins worked with Carrie Fisher to adapt her Broadway show “Wishful Drinking.” Later she collaborated with Fisher and her…

A few months after Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck were married in 2022, Lopez got a call from Jane Fonda. The two had been friends since 2005’s “Monster-in-Law,” and it was Fonda who had introduced J. Lo when she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Fonda was reaching out because Lopez had asked her to appear in a yet-undefined film (with music) that would examine Lopez’s romantic failures in some kind of meta way. Lopez wanted Fonda to play a member of her Zodiac love council. (More on that later.) Fonda had her doubts. So before deciding, she talked to Benny Medina, Lopez’s longtime manager, expressing skepticism about any project that seemed to excessively celebrate the Affleck-Lopez reunification. Medina relayed to Lopez Fonda’s thoughts: “I believe that…

The Academy’s nonfiction branch whittled down a strong shortlist to five films vying for the documentary feature trophy: “20 Days in Mariupol,” “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” “Four Daughters,” “The Eternal Memory,” and “To Kill a Tiger.” Notably, each director in the category is an international filmmaker, three are women, and only two films have distribution by a major streamer. 20 Days in Mariupol (PBS/FRONTLINE) In February 2022, AP journalist Mystyslav Chernov began filming Russia’s invasion of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Chernov ended up recording more than 30 hours of footage, which depicted a maternity hospital being bombed, mass graves and people looting shops for food. Critically acclaimed as a strikingly immediate record of citizens under siege, the film premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it garnered…

Three years ago, in a kudos season narrowed and clouded by the global pandemic, the BAFTA awards served as an unprecedentedly accurate Oscar bellwether, matching the U.S. academy’s eventual selections in all but one of 19 feature film categories — from “Nomadland’s” best film victory to acting wins for Anthony Hopkins and Frances McDormand. (In the one exception, David Fincher’s “Mank” trumped BAFTA winner “Nomadland” to win the cinematography Oscar.) If awards pundits welcomed the foresight, others — particularly within the British industry — wondered if the U.K.’s most prestigious film awards had aligned a little too closely with their transatlantic equivalent. Ever since BAFTA organizers shifted its place in the calendar to precede the Academy Awards back in 2001, the tension between anticipating the Oscars and asserting their own…

FILM REVIEW Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green Starring: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch “Bob Marley: One Love,” a drama about the most larger-than-life of all reggae superstars, is a movie that ardently follows the new biopic rules, ditching the old cradle-to-grave sprawl in favor of focusing on a crucial time period in its subject’s life. The movie opens in 1976, when Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir), lean and majestic in his bouncing dreadlocks, heading toward the height of his fame, is getting ready to play a peace concert in Kingston. His goal is to heal the violent factionalism of Jamaican politics. It’s an uphill battle. The Jamaica we see is a war-torn mess — a morass of post-colonial chaos, with rival political parties and gang leaders fighting for turf. Even Marley can’t seal…