Looking Ahead at Best Original Song

Chris here. What with Nathaniel's updated Oscar predictions and my regular Soundtracking duties, my mind has been on that ever pesky Best Original Song category. How will this year shake out for the sometimes maligned category?

Per usual we haven't had many obvious contenders, though I would argue that Beauty and the Beast's "How Does A Moment Last Forever" is one of the film's bright spots - can you just imagine Celine Dion taking the Oscar stage for the first time since Titanic. Perhaps our best chance at an Original Song behemoth like last year's La La Land and Moana were is The Greatest Showman, this season's original musical. But other questions and curiosities remain: what documentary song will surprise this year? Can credits song queen Sia finally land a nomination (she'll at least have one option with Wonder Woman)?

One contender I'm already hoping has some staying power is A Ghost Story's "I Get Overwhelmed" by Dark Rooms. The track flows fluidly in and out of Daniel Hart's score (naturally, he heads Dark Rooms), encompassing both the film's intimacy and cosmic expansiveness. Lyrically, the song carries meaning for Casey Affleck's songwriter and has a whole new context in the afterlife - so it carries the kind of narrative weight the Academy's songwriting branch has been seeking. But will it even make the eligibility long list?

Do you have any Original Song hopes already?

Review: The Emoji Movie

By Sean Donovan

The internet has spent the past few days savagely ripping apart The Emoji Movie, the animated film about sentient emojis and the adventures they have within your smartphone. This is a film made specifically for children of the internet, who might gaze upon this Sony vertical integration monstrosity of app references and infomercials for about a minute before heading back to their own smartphones. It’s tough to review The Emoji Movie, because it’s tough to take its lack of creativity and basic construction seriously when such cynicism and apathy burns off the screen. It singes your eyebrows. No one cared about making this movie; I can’t imagine anyone coming up with a criticism the filmmakers would even protest. The Emoji Movie is the unadulterated heart of capitalism pumping out disinterested beats, an infomercial for WeChat here, a paid ad for CandyCrush there, Sony everywhere you look...

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Sam Shepard (1943-2017)

by Eric Blume

Sam Shepard in the early days of fame

Although it’s been well over a decade since we’ve had a major contribution from Sam Shepard, his death yesterday at age 73 feels momentous.  He’s our only American playwright to have won a Pulizer Prize as a writer and then gone on to an Oscar nomination for his acting.  He was a symbol of masculinity and a man of great mystery...   

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Beauty vs Beast: Children of the Night

Jason from MNPP here with this week's brand new edition of "Beauty vs Beast." Isn't it weird that Marvel says they have no current plans to reboot the Blade series? I know, I know, we're supposed to be against reboots. But Blade is a great character with great name recognition, and he's a great character with great name recognition of color on top of that, so maybe we should set aside our prejudices in this instance. It has been thirteen years since the last film, after all. I really like the original Blade trilogy though, and so here on Wesley Snipes' 55th birthday let's give some love to the original 1998 film, which I've always in particular had a soft spot for... especially with regards to its bad guy played by a sleazily charismatic Stephen Dorff.

PREVIOUSLY Last week we wandered into the land of Gilead and faced off the Emmy nominated ladies of The Handmaid's Tale - sure enough voting for a bitter pill like Ann Dowd's villainous Aunt proved difficult in our current political situation and Elisabeth Moss took a whopping 80% of your vote. Said Duncan Dykes:

"Such great scene partners - feeding off of each other and selling the dystopian world better than any production design or visual effects could.... Points to Ann Dowd for consistently unexpected characterization - her apparently genuine care for some of the girls (Janine in particular, striking considering her initial torture of her) adds shades of humanity to her in most unnerving ways. She speaks more like a preacher or particularly disapproving parent than a general or warden, which makes the character all the more intriguing.

Ultimately however you have to go with Elisabeth Moss for a spellbinding symphony of a performance - deeply felt humanity, her drained voice and face, the precision of her furtive glances of longing or fear or paranoia or anger. She spends such stretches of the show with everything on the inside that when she gets to let loose and expose traces of the fury she feels regarding her situation, it leaves you shaking. Brava."

The Furniture Index

Can we have a break for applause for Daniel Walber's The Furniture column. His incredible series has been filled with sharp insights, a keen eye, and rich Hollywood anecdotes. Here's everything he's covered in the first three seasons, all 103 episodes stretching from a musical in 1935 to an erotic thriller from 2018. Please show your love in the comments if you look forward to these each week.

Early Cinema
• Top Hat (1935) Dancing sets

The Forties
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) moons and mountains
• Hold Back the Dawn (1941) Bored at the border
• How Green Was My Valley (1941) Designing dignity
• Ladies in Retirement (1941) Into the marshes with Ida Lupino
• That Hamilton Woman (1941) High ceilings
• Captain of the Clouds (1942) A Canadian air show
• The Magnificent Andersons (1942) Victorian Palace / Manifest Destiny
• My Gal Sal (1942) Nonsense Gay Nineties
• The Shanghai Gesture (1942) Appropriating Chinese design
• Gaslight (1944) Lighting of and in the set
• Black Narcissus (1947) Mad for matte paintings

The Fifties
• David and Bathsheba (1951) A humble palace of moral struggle
• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) Decorative madness
• My Cousin Rachel (1952) Ghosts of property
• Knights of the Round Table (1953) Reframing King Arthur
• The Night of the Hunter (1955) American expressionism
• Lust for Life (1956) Van Gogh's inspiration

The Sixties
• How the West Was Won (1962) Saloon kitsch
• Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) weird wonders
• Come Blow Your Horn (1963) Comedy by design
• Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) Your house is listening
• A Shot in the Dark (1964) Charmingly ridiculous
• What a Way To Go! (1964) Death by excess
• Fantastic Voyage (1966) Absurd anatomy
• The Oscar (1966) Celebrate the tackiness!
• Camelot! (1967) A silly and furry place
• Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Doctor Dolittle (1967) matte paintings
• Is Paris Burning? (1967) Is patriotism subtle? Not very
• The Taming of the Shrew (1967) A scenery buffet for the Battling Burtons
• Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) Extravagant concentrated nostalgia

The Seventies
• The Exorcist (1973) A possessed bedroom
• Tom Sawyer (1973) Stovepipe and steamboat nostalgia
• Fellini's Casanova (1976) Grotesque extravagance
• The Molly Maguires (1970)  Demolition and preservation
• The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) Supertanker
• All that Jazz (1979) The creative erotics of scaffolding

The Eighties
• Querelle (1982) explicit architecture
• Amadeus (1984) Paper opulence
• Brazil (1985) Duct soup
• Beaches (1988) Color schemes
• Batman (1989) Nightmare at the museum
• Fanny & Alexander (1982/1983) theatrical magic
• Querelle (1982) explicit architecture

The Nineties
• The Age of Innocence (1993) a living museum
• Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) Dracula's astounding castle
• Orlando (1992) Otherworldy pageantry
• Toys (1992) Surreal spaces
• Addam's Family Values (1993) Setting fire to Thanksgiving
• The Madness of King George (1994) Cluttered musty madness
• Sleepy Hollow (1999) Historical realism meets nightmarish fantasy
• Topsy Turvy (1999) Imperial fantasy in Gilbert & Sullivan's London

Sidebars to TV and Oscars
• Best of Absolutely Fabulous - Special Report
• Emmy Production Design 2016 - Should win? Penny Dreadful, Veep, etc
• Emmy Production Design 2017 - Should win? The Young Pope, Feud, etc
• Oscar Set Design 2016 - Art Deco Again
• Oscar Set Design 2017 - Swarovski Crystal Diamond Mine
• The Furniture's Personal Oscar Ballot 2017 The Beguiled and more... 

2000-2015
• Dreamgirls (2006) Fame flattens your dream(girls), boys
• Pan's Labyrinth (2006) Feasts of flesh
• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) Chicanery and posterity
• The Skin I Live In (2011) Decorating obsession
• Brooklyn (2015) and Carol (2015) Dramatically different department stores
• Joy (2015) Emerald city of home shopping
• Lady in the Van (2015) Crime scene home
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) The Forest

Recent Cinema
• 20th Century Women (2016) Unfinished house, collaborative kitchen
• Arrival (2016) and Passengers (2016) Lost in space and time

• Atomic Blonde (2017) Neon nihilism
• The Beguiled (2017) A plaster haze
• Beatriz at Dinner (2017) Tacky muted mansion
• Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Canadian brutalism in LA
• Childhood of a Leader (2016) Cruel curtained childhood
• The Conjuring 2 (2016) Malevolent secret codes
• Colossal (2017) Hoarding and emptiness
• Deadpool (2016) Junkyard
• Double Lover (2017/2018) cracked mirrors 

• Embrace of the Serpent (2015/2016) The venomous and fanatical
• The Eyes of My Mother (2016) Stark contrasts and devotional objects
• Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) 70's sitcom styles
• Fantastic Beasts (2016) and La La Land (2016) Magic unreality
• Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) Exuberant fandom
• Frantz (2017) Decorating for a lost generation
• Get Out (2017) Beige house of colonial horrors
• Ghostbusters (2016) Shrieking color scheme
• Hail Caesar (2016) Merrily We Dance
• Hell or High Water (2016) Old West descendants
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) A warm welcome

• Jackie (2016) and Paterson (2016) Home décor
• King Arthur Legend of the Sword (2017) Reframing King Arthur
• The Lobster (2016) Phony flowers
• The Lost City of Z (2017) deranged ambitions and indulgent fantasies
• Love and Friendship (2016) Country charm
• The Love Witch (2016) A tarot reading
• Mudbound (2017) architectural metaphors

• Personal Shopper (2017) Framing the unseen
• A Quiet Passion (2017) floral punctuations
• The Salesman (2016/2017) Crafting his own stage

• The Shape of Water (2017) A neon green future
• Slack Bay (2017) Giddy grotesqueries
• Star Trek Beyond (2016) Terrestrial fun
• Toni Erdmann (2016) The dangers of corporate upholstery
• Wiener-Dog (2016) Sickly green cages
• The Witch (2016) Design heralds doom