The Road To Oscar Annual Series
Composer Justin Hurwitz is a four-time Oscar nominee, the latest nod coming in January for Best Original Score on the strength of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (Paramount Pictures). Hurwitz’s first three nominations came in 2017 for Chazelle’s La La Land with the...
Triangle of Sadness (Neon) has garnered a trio of marquee Oscar nominations--Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay. Individually receiving the latter two honors is writer-director Ruben Östlund, quite a distinction for the Swedish filmmaker on his first English-language feature...
The lack of female nominees for the Best Director Oscar this year has received much deserved scrutiny. But seemingly flying under the radar are those women directors who have made a mark in this season’s Academy Awards derby such as Sara Dosa whose Fire of Love is nominated for the Best...
Among the prime challenges posed by All Quiet on the Western Front (Netflix) to make-up and hair designer/SFX designer Heike Merker were:
- Doing justice to an ambitious period piece that takes us back to World War I.
- Capturing the authentic look and feel of war’s ...
The Banshees of Inisherin (Searchlight Pictures) marks the fourth feature on which composer Carter Burwell has collaborated with Martin McDonagh, dating back to the writer-director’s feature debut, In Bruges, followed by Seven Psychopaths and then Three Billboards...
The awards season norm has seen the nearly annual occurrence of at least one difference between the lineups of Best Director Oscar and the DGA Award nominees. In only five of the 75 years of the DGA Awards have the Guild nominations exactly mirrored their Academy Award counterparts.
This...
Last week, Matthew Heineman garnered his fourth career DGA Award nomination, this time for Retrograde (National Geographic Documentary Films, Picturehouse). Three of the nods, including for Retrograde, have come in the Documentary category. The other nomination came four years...
The Whale (A24) added to the collaborative bond between cinematographer Matthew Libatique, ASC and director Darren Aronofsky spanning such films as Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, Noah, mother! and Black Swan. The latter earned Libatique his first Best...
It’s already been an eventful awards season for Gina Prince-Bythewood. On the strength of her epic feature The Woman King (Sony’s TriStar Pictures), she earned a Critics Choice Award nomination for Best Director. This came after Prince-Bythewood won the Agnes Varda Award for Directing...
Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu has seen her class-conscious horror thriller Nanny gain historic recognition--and perhaps more importantly evoke an empathy for its title role protagonist Aisha (portrayed by Anna Diop) which translates into a heightened social consciousness of motherhood,...