Costume Design ~ April Foolish Oscar Predix

on the set of THE CURRENT WARCutting right to the chase tonight. Here's what I'm predicting for Oscar's Costume Design category in this first round of punditry

• The Current War (Michael Wilkinson)
• The Greatest Showman (Ellen Mirojnick)
• Murder on the Orient Express (Alexandra Byrne)
• Victoria & Abdul (Consolata Boyle)
• Wonderstruck (Sandy Powell)

[Here's the chart]

Sandy Powell is always a good bet of course with 12 past nominations and 3 wins and she'll obviously be having a great time with the dual time frames and actressing of Julianne Moore. The other designers are less regular with the Academy but they've all been nominated with the exception of Ellen Mirojnick. But Mirojnick is no slouch having designed iconic pieces seen in films like Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and recently she won the Emmy for Soderbergh's Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. She's got one of the year's (presumably) showiest gigs : Hugh Jackman's PT Barnum musical The Greatest Showman.

Ali Fasal stars opposite Dame Judi Dench in VICTORIA AND ABDUL

But that's just scratching the surface of what will surely be lots of fine threads in the movies this year from many talented designers. After the jump, a Beauty Break of Costume Design possibilities this year...

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Three Fittings: Fantastic Beasts' Odd Costume Win

New Series! Three Fittings celebrates costume design in the movies. The number is necessary self-restraint for we love the art of costuming too much.

By Nathaniel R

Dear reader, I didn't think I'd ever need to see Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016). I thought, solid reasoning given the golden trajectory of most franchises, that Oscar would want to move on after a year of regular craft nominations for the series. I thought, surely they'd never hand one of them an actual Oscar if they hadn't done so by now. But in the interest of completism, after Colleen Atwood's generous fourth statue for costuming this particular movie and its bluray release, I caught up. 

I was both impressed and utterly perplexed by what I found.

While Atwood does unusually understated work (for her), there are far fewer costumes than you might expect (approximately one per man, two per woman). Sussing out why they voted for this confident minimalism within a fantasy over more traditional costume perfection in Jackie, the primary color bliss of then-frontrunner La La Land, the erotic glamour of Allied, and the flouncy Most-ness of Florence, proves nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, here are three key looks to discuss:

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Barkhad Abdi is having a "Good Time"

by Murtada

You know who might be having a big 2017 in film? Barkhad Abdi. He has three interesting projects coming out, starting with Dabka which will play this month at the Tribeca Film Festival. Written and directed by Bryan Buckley (The Bronze) it’s the true story of a reporter’s risk-taking adventure that gave him an unprecedented first-person account of the pirates of Somalia. Evan Peters plays the reporter Jay Bahadur on whose best selling book, The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World, the film is based. Abdi plays a local fixer who helped Bahadur embed himself with the Somali pirates. So he hasn’t gone very far from the world of his Oscar nominated performance in Captain Phillips (2013).

with Evan Peters in Dabka

However Blade Runner 2049 could not be further away from his most famous role...

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Teasing "The Last Jedi"

Click to see the poster largeStar Wars: The Last Jedi opens this December to once again hog all the media attention and all the box office and probably 3 or so Oscar nominations, too. (Here is the new poster to the left.)

The hilariously drama queen thing about the title and Luke Skywalker's pronouncement at the end of the new teaser is that we (i.e. everyone on the planet with any sense) know there will never be a "last" Jedi. Not with literally billions to be made every single year from milking this franchise until no one cares anymore ... an event that surely won't occur in our lifetimes. 

Exhausting as it can be sometimes to live inside a film culture that wants the exact same things annually: two Marvels, two DCs scattered from spring to Fall, a Star Wars movie each Christmas, at least 15 concurrent bi-annual franchises and a few ever-discussed franchises that are infrequent (James Bond for one), Disney has done a bang-up job stoking the fire for annual Star Wars adventures, a fire that would burn bright without any stoking whatsoever!

But they stoke well you must admit. Here is the excellent teaser for The Last Jedi, which is mostly focused on Luke and Rey with a few key shots reminding us of the other players. 

What'cha think? 

On this day: Best Actress Tie, Lincoln Assassination... and a Tarzan and Jill Marriage.

On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...

1865 President Lincoln is assassinated. He's surely the President that's hit the movies the most often, most successfully in Steven Spielberg's fantastic Lincoln (2012)

1894 The first commercial motion picture house opens using Thomas Edison's "kinetoscope" device. You had to look through a peephole though so it was only one viewer at a time, though the venue had 10 of the machines. Coincidentally Thomas Edison will be played by Benedict Cumberbath in this year's Oscar hopeful The Current War which is about Edison's battle with George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) over sustainable electricity in America...

1904 Sir John Gielgud, one of the great British actors, was born. He won the Oscar for Arthur (1981) but his filmography stretches all the way from the silent era through Elizabeth (1998)

1925 Oscar regular Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront, The Pawnbroker, In the Heat of the Night) born

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