The Furniture: Lost in Space and Time with "Passengers" and "Arrival"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. This is the second of two columns discussing this year's Oscar nominees. Here's Daniel Walber...

On the surface, Arrival and Passengers appear to be the most similar of this year’s Best Production Design nominees. They’re both science fiction films set in the near future. Yet the similarities end there. Passengers is set entirely on an extravagant, colorful spaceship. Arrival splits its scenes between the interior of a minimalist UFO and densely packed military tents.

There is also one more essential difference...

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"Here" and "There" with The Bening

Why doesn't Annette Bening have every award that was ever invented including the Pulitzer, the Heisman, and an Emmy from 1993 Sesame Street... 

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BAFTA Winners: La La Land, Daniel Blake, and... Lion's Dev Patel!

Dev Patel struggles to find "words words words" when he wins the BAFTA.

Confession: Despite The Film Experience's devout love of awards season, your host does not actually watch the BAFTAs. I gave up years ago when it was clear that they were never going to change their announce-the- winners and then tape-delay-broadcast-highlights-of-show. It's just not pure enough for my spiritual devotion to the holy act of passing out trophies. I can't stomach it.

The winners with commentary (and videos once they're available) follow...

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Podcast: The Oscars are coming! How many will 'La La' win?

Nathaniel, Joe, and Nick discuss the Oscar nominations with just two weeks to go until the High Holy Night.

Index (42 minutes)
00:01 Nomination morning formats
05:45 How much did Amy Adams miss by?
07:35 Cinematography & Score
10:30 Deepwater Horizon
13:00 Which categories will La La Land lose and to which: Lion? Jackie? Hacksaw?
23:00 Denzel vs Casey / Emma vs Isabelle / Salesman vs Toni Erdmann?
30:25 Picture & Director splits. Spreading the wealth. (Remember The Revenant? No?)
39:00 Ryan Gosling & Visual Effects. Byeeeee!

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Pre Oscar Show Part 1

Box Office: Street Cats, Kinky Sex, Lego Superheroes

This weekend's box office charts are deceiving in their rankings. Lego Batman and the Fifty Shades sequels topped the weekend but both opened well below their predecessors while #3 was a huge success. John Wick's second outing doubled its original's opening weekend gross suggesting that the fanbase grew exponentially once the 'first chapter' was available for home viewing. This kind of thing we used to see far more of in the early days of VHS but now in the age of franchises, generally you don't see that kind of word-of-mouth "discovery" growth. You're either a behemoth or you're not. 

Three more items of note that don't really show in these charts...

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