Oscar Race

Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander talks ‘The Danish Girl’

January 28, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Alicia Vikander is 'The Danish Woman'

Here is what Vikander told me when I interviewed her for The Hollywood Reporter:

It was wonderful to have Gerda’s art, her personality came through. She was successful in her own time, experiencing that struggle any artist undergoes trying to find their own voice and be true to it. Other people will start to appreciate the work once you find your own voice. Gerda started to become very successful when she found her muse in Lily [Eddie Redmayne’s transgender artist]. It’s pivotal in the beginning with Gerda starting to paint Lily — both of them go on the journey of allowing Lily to step forward and see her true self. Gerda goes on a journey, too. With transgender people, and the loved ones or friends of transgender, you realize that every single story is different. People forget that the wife was on a transition as big as her partner. They were a couple going thru a big change together. I was privileged that my emotions, that are my tools, were employed to portray such an extraordinary woman, the pain and tough road that she also travelled. Gerda always knew that the most important thing was that the person she loved became what she wanted. That sort of unconditional love is inspiring.

Don’t Laugh: Comic Actor Jason Segel Deserves an Oscar Nomination

June 26, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Sacrilege! Could Jason Segel of TV’s How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall merit a Best Actor nomination? Yes!

Segel’s performance as brilliant but troubled Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, opening July 31, could be forgotten under the thundering hooves of autumn Telluride and Toronto Oscar vehicles. Think of Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in Get on Up, an Oscar worthy performance that opened last year on August 1 and was all-but-forgotten in last year’s competitive Best Actor race.

Appreciating the bromantic duet between Segel’s Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg’s (compelling) Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky for a second time at the Nantucket Film Festival increased my passion for Segel’s performance. He restores Wallace not as that author you should have read (and probably didn’t) but as a brilliant writer who might not have been the most brilliant conversationalist or company.

With very little action, and articulating lines that are often intentionally inarticulate (Donald Margulies wrote the emotionally satisfying script), Segel creates a multi-layered portrait of a petty, generous, dog loving, soul searching, depression coping, American TV addict. His bandana-wearing Wallace struggles to carve out an authentic life in Bloomington, Indiana far away from the Manhattan literary buzz, which his character describes as the sound of egos rising and falling. What’s strong about the performance is that very lack of ego. It doesn’t take long before Segel loses himself in Wallace, alternately charming and antagonizing both Eisenberg’s Lipsky and the audience.

It will be an uphill battle for Segel. And one fought previously by actors who have made their reputations first as comedians: Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), Will Forte (Nebraska), Robin Williams (One Hour Photo), Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig (The Skelton Twins), Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple) and even Jerry Lewis (The King of Comedy). The buzz that started at Sundance continues here.

Julianne Moore’s Long Red Carpet to the Oscars

May 21, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Julianne Moore sighs over a mondo coffee cup in ‘Maps to the Stars’ and wins Best Actress at Cannes 2014

Can it be only a year since Julianne Moore owned the red carpet at Cannes — and won the festival’s Best Actress — for playing a diva on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Maps to the Stars? And then David Cronenberg’s bitter little Hollywood pill lost its way to the theaters and what had once seemed like Julianne’s yearstumbled. And then came Alice, Still Alice and Moore was back in play. Here’s my interview of Moore for the New York Observer that appeared on January 21st on finding Oscar without a map:

It was a lunch at Le Cirque, it was star-studded, and actress Julianne Moore was at Table One. The star of Still Alice—a tough, raw portrait of an academic, wife and mother coping with the disintegration of her identity due to early-onset Alzheimer’s—looked, at 54, terrific. Friends surrounded her: Kate Capshaw, wife of Steven Spielberg, on her right; Ellen Barkin to her left. The mood was hopeful, even giddy, with a side of wood-knocking: Ms. Moore was and is the frontrunner for the Best Actress Academy Award. Last week, she received her fifth nomination and, if it happens February 22, this would be her first win.

It’s no coincidence that Cate Blanchett held down that same circular table last year on her juggernaut to the Oscar for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, also, not coincidentally, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. But while Ms. Blanchett held the Best Actress lead from a midsummer release to the Oscars, it’s not an easy position to maintain. Ms. Blanchett’s frontrunner status could easily have been torpedoed by the abuse scandal surrounding director Woody Allen [Read more…]

Contenders 2016: From the Palmes d’Or to the Oscars

May 18, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Cate Blanchett in the title role

We hate to be looking over someone’s shoulder like Carol/Cate but we know that somewhere, beyond next winter, the movies of sunny spring will be competing for Oscar. And right at the front of that long red-carpet march is Blanchett, only two years out from her Best Actress win for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine. (Like Blanche DuBois, we’re constantly looking at the past and struggling with the disappointments of the present.) Blanchett was the queen of Cannes 2013 — and no one could catch her. So, I’m tossing out some ideas generated by Cannes for Contenders:

BEST PICTURE

Carol

Youth

BEST DIRECTOR

Todd Haynes (Carol)

Paolo Sorrentino (Youth)

BEST ACTRESS

Cate Blanchett (Carol)

Emily Blunt (Sicario)

Marion Cotillard (Macbeth)

Emma Stone (Irrational Man)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Rooney Mara (Carol)

BEST ACTOR

Michael Caine (Youth)

Michael Fassbender (Macbeth)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Woody Allen (Irrational Man)

Yorgos Lanthimos, Elthymis Fillipou (The Lobster)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Phyllis Nagy (Carol)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Son of Saul
The Assassin

Dheepan
The Other Sister

BEST ANIMATED FILM

Inside Out

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Amy

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Richard Deakins (Sicario)

Edward Lachman (Carol)

Outtakes: Oscar Winner Catherine Martin on the Nexus of Costume and Production Design

May 6, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Baz Luhrmann and wife — CATHERINE MARTIN!!! — at the Met Gala

Despite hubby Baz Luhrmann and the preening, prawning Gatsby of Leonardo DiCaprio, Costume and Production Designer Catherine Martin squeezed two Oscars out of that sad puppy. And I doubly respect her. When we talk about women in Hollywood, sometimes we overlook the crafts where women dominate, like costume design and casting. I recently wrote a Tribeca Film Festival preview piece for Variety and interviewed Martin at medium length. We only used one quote about New York. No worries. That’s the collaborative process. But here are the outtakes from that interview — and they’re fascinating.

Me: How rare is it to be both production and costume designer – and how do the two influences each other in your work?

Catherine Martin: When you live it, it’s very difficult to imagine another way of being, and you don’t think of
yourself as a rare bird. I think one of the great advantages for me, in terms of being a costume and production designer is you get to harmonize how the costume and set work together in a very instantaneous and very real way.

Leo the tasty macaron in a vivid example of Martin’s complementary production and costume design.

Can you address ways in which your costume design has influenced contemporary fashion – and, how, inversely, in films like The Great Gatsby you researched the historical period and then creatively reinvented the looks in collaboration with you husband, Director Baz Luhrmann, and his thematic re-imagining of the period?

CM: Oh my goodness, this is a very complicated question. I think you never go into a work, thinking very much about how you’re going to influence someone, rather you go into a work trying to understand the director’s vision, the vision of the author, the lives of the characters, and if they fit in historical context, what existed at the time, what were the signs and symbols that the clothing of the time captured, what do they say to the contemporary audience when you saw someone walking down the street. So I think very much one of Baz’s focuses on all the films is to really examine in the fullest possible way, how it felt to be a character in a period that you’re exploring, how it felt to wear their clothes, how it felt to walk in their shoes, and those signs and symbols that those garments gave off to their contemporaries. [Read more…]