Diminishing Legos

Did you see The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part this weekend? It's actually the fourth animated LEGO feature, the first becoming an unexpected blockbuster five years ago... But returns have been diminishing so perhaps they've overestimated the demand with their intense supply?

Weekend Box Office Estimates February 8th-10th (ESTIMATES) 🔺 = New or Expanded Theater Count /  ★= Recommended
W I D E 800+ screens	PLATFORM / LIMITED excluding prev. wide
Lego Movie Part 2	Oscar Shorts Program
1 🔺 The LEGO Movie Part 2 $34.4 *NEW*	1🔺  Oscar Nominated Short Films $912k *NEW* Oscar Chart ★

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It's BAFTA Time

As per usual the BAFTAs aren't broadcasting live but tape delayed but we'll be watching the arrivals and sharing the winners as we hear about them after the jump...

Right now we're watching clips from the nominee party yesterday and we learned that Melissa McCarthy is a huge fan of The Favourite, saying:

The Favourite broke my brain in the best possible way.

Ours too, Melissa, ours too...

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Great Moments in Screen Kissing: Notorious (1946)

For the next few days Team Experience will be sharing favourite screen kisses. Here's Seán...

Seán here in Berlin, saying hallo! to you with the adequate amount of Prussian warmth. I'll be filling you in with all my hot takes on only a handful of the myriad of films premiering at the Festspiele. But first a quick wink to one of my favourite on-screen kisses (the whole lot of them).

Alfred Hitchcock was a master of genre and form, leaving behind a body of work admired by scholars and movie lovers alike. Aside from being a good, old, problematic trickster on set, he also knew how to do it within the confines of the screen. The Production Code which outlined what was decent and indecent on film had a long list of cuttable offenses. Even toilets were verboten. But what if the inclusion of one was essential to the story, as it was when Marion Crane disposes of a letter in Psycho? Hitchcock knew how to skirt the rules and Notorious (1946) is one of the best examples of this...

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14 days til Oscar - Costume Design Lists!

Photography by Brigitte Lacombe

With 14 days until Oscar we're thinking about Queen Sandy Powell, now with a towering 14 nominations for costume design via her double nod this year for Mary Poppins Returns and The Favourite.  We interviewed her in the year of Carol and Cinderella (2015), also a double nominated year. The only time she's ever won while double nominated was the first time...

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Beauty Break: ASC Tributes + Best Cinematography Honors

The American Society of Cinematographers will hold their annual awards dinner tonight where they'll be honoring Jeff Bridges with their Board of Governors Award, three-time Oscar winner Robert Richardson (Hugo, Aviator, JFK) with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and two time Emmy winner Jeffrey Jur (Carnivàle, Bessie) for the Career Achievement in Television Award. They'll also hand out some competitive prizes and presumably give Alfonso Cuarón yet another trophy for his mantle (let's hope he has steel reinforced shelving at home given this season's worth of hardware.) UPDATE: oops we were wrong and Cuarón lost for practically the first time this season.

Let's look at that beautiful imagery from the winners and nominees again with a few bonus gifs... 

• WINNER: Łukasz Żal, PSC for “Cold War” 

What an incredible DP Żal is. After the consecutive Pawel Pawlikowski's successes of Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), will he be in demand in Hollywood or just stick to work across the ocean? While his best work has been in black & white in Poland he does color and cinema from other countries as well...

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