FYC: "Ride Your Wave" for Best Animated Feature

by Cláudio Alves

There's nothing more wonderful about cinema, about art as a whole, than the ability to surprise. If I feel a film showed me sights I never thought possible, if it told me stories I could have never imagined, it instantly earns respect and a special place in my heart. Following that line of thinking, one must say that no other picture in this awards season surprised me quite as much as Masaaki Yuasa's Ride Your Wave. Mixing supernatural stylings and teenage melodrama, the Japanese director has managed to create one of the most painful portraits of loss and paralyzing grief in a long time. If you thought the sight of a girl talking to a water bottle would never make you tear up, think again…

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Interview: Pixar's Mike Jones on co-writing "Soul" and "Luca"

by Nathaniel R

Pixar's Soul centers around a music teacher Joe, who feels he missed his calling. He always wanted to be a famous jazz musician. Through the course of the spiritually minded adventure, which takes us from Earth to The Great Beyond and The Great Before and back again, Joe comes to understand that his calling was to teach. None us know ahead of time where our lives and career might take us. For instance, I was certain I was going to be an illustrator and ended up in Human Resources and now identify as a writer. This is also true of Pixar's Mike Jones. He was once on our side of the movie world as an entertainment journalist but always planned to shoot movies. "I went to NYU film school to be a cinematographer. You have to take a writing course as an undergrad and the teacher took me aside and said, 'You want to think about writing instead?'" Jones continued to pursue cinematography but, as it turns out, the teacher was right and the seed was planted "I did start to kind of write on my own. And after I got out of film school, I kept writing." This led him to a brief entertainment journalism career until he made the leap to filmmaking, if not in the way he originally intended. Years later he has a thriving career at Pixar as a screenwriter.

We recently spoke to him about the process of developing Soul and what it's like to be a co-writer since Pixar generally has several creatives on each film...

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Best Editing: The Art of Disorientation

by Cláudio Alves

There seem to be two big schools of thought regarding what good film editing is. On the one hand, classic Hollywood precepts indicate a preference for the invisible, cutting so organically enmeshed with the rhythms of the story one barely notices its mechanisms. On the other hand, there's a showier style, editing that calls attention to itself and demands applause, especially in the realm of action cinema. In either case, an unwritten rule posits clarity of information and storytelling as a defining tenet. Editing should facilitate the movie-watching process by allowing the audience to follow along with the narrative or thesis, its emotional beats, spatial awareness, and chronology. Nonetheless, two of this year's biggest contenders in the race for the Best Editing Oscar do the exact opposite, choosing to engage with the art of editing as a tool of disorientation rather than clarification, chaos instead of order…

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Lunchtime Poll: English Patient, Last Emperor, or Gigi?

9 DAYS TIL OSCAR NOMINATIONS! Three films in Oscar history have won exactly 9 Oscars. They are the musical Gigi (1958), the epic biopic The Last Emperor (1987), and the sweeping romantic drama The English Patient (1996).

GIGI	LAST EMPEROR	ENGLISH PATIENT
Picture	Picture	Picture
Director	Director	Director
		Supp. Actress
Screenplay	Screenplay
Production Design	Production Design	Production Design
Costume Design	Costume Design	Costume Design
Cinematography	Cinematography	Cinematography
Editing	Editing	Editing
Score	Score	Score
	Sound	Sound
Original Song
lost: nothing (clean sweep)	lost: nothing (clean sweep)	lost: Actor, Actress, Screenplay

Lunchtime Poll: They can only keep 9 Oscars between them. Which wins will you allow each film to keep?

 Sound off in the comments!

Showbiz History: La Traviata, plus Sandra Bullock "Best" and "Worst" simultaneously

On this day, March 6th, in showbiz history...

1853 La Traviata, Verdi's popular opera premieres in Venice. Have you ever seen the 1982 film version by Franco Zeffirelli? My parents took us, if I recall correctly. I wasn't sure what was going on but I remember it being quite beautiful. Oscar voters thought so too nominating in 'the Moulin Rouge! categories' (Costume Design + Art Direction) 

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