"Nomadland" and "Sound of Metal" dominate the Spirit Awards

by Nathaniel R

Last stop before the Oscars! The Spirit Awards were held last night and the big winner was Nomadland which fits the Spirits like a glove. Congratulations to Chloe Zhao and her team. Less expected but wonderful news is that Sound of Metal collected three prizes: First Feature, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor, finally also getting its due. This 'spread the wealth' awards season was surely accidental but it's been beautiful as art is subjective and there's no reason to pretend that only say, four people and one movie are worthy of any prizes each year. In this one way, this season has been the best. In the other ways, zoom ceremonies... never seeing anyone holding their trophies or mingling in rooms together or on the red carpet has been quite glum. But we're in the last weekend now. Hoorah.

After the jump the winners and their acceptance speeches if we found them. Melissa Villaseñor hosted and if you missed her opening monologue here it is...

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93rd Academy Awards: Best Production Design

by Daniel Walber

Is it a good year for the Best Production Design category at the Oscars? Is it a bad year? What does the word “good” even mean? Or, for that matter, the word “year”? Certainly not the same thing as “eligibility period,” given the way things have shaken out with the 93rd Academy Awards. Pour one out for First Cow.

But I digress. We have five films nominated for Best Production Design, and they’re a relatively modest batch. There’s the eternal joke about the Oscars nominating movies for “most” rather than “best” design, but by some miracle that hasn’t happened this year...

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John Waters @ 75 : Desperate Living (1977)

Team Experience is celebrating John Waters for his 75th birthday this week

by Camila Henriques

The final chapter of John Waters's so called "Trash Trilogy" has everything you would expect from the filmmaker. Except for one pivotal thing: it doesn't have Divine, the iconic star that made the two previous excerpts from the trilogy - "Pink Flamingos" and "Female Trouble" - true camp classics. But even if her magnetic screen presence is always a sight in Waters's filmography, you needn't worry about Desperate Living, as the 1977 film represents the raunchy brand of comedy camp that makes the director one of our most fascinating auteurs...

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Doc Corner: Raoul Peck's brilliant 'Exterminate All the Brutes'

By Glenn Dunks

I suppose I could beat around the bush. I could skirt around the issue and try to temper my praise, worrying that people could accuse me of mere hyperbole. But what’s the point? Instead, I will just say it: Raoul Peck’s new four-part HBO documentary miniseries, Exterminate All the Brutes, is one of the finest works of art I have ever had the privilege to watch. A soaring epic that takes viewers on a journey over thousands of years—at one point to even the dawn of man—through humanity’s worst impulses for racial supremacy and colonial barbarism.

Peck pilfers from cinema (classic and otherwise), paintings, photography, music, archival footage, and adds dioramas, animation, graphic aids, anachronistic diversions, and dramatic interpretations. He rips a fierce and violent tear through history, yet with the precision and delicacy of a surgeon with a scalpel...

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The Furniture: John Waters, Small-Business Advocate

Team Experience is celebrating John Waters for his 75th birthday. So here's a special episode of "The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, our series on Production Design. 

Pecker is a rare, quiet(er) film in the John Waters filmography. It’s not as outrageous as Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble, nor as bombastic as Hairspray or Serial Mom. It’s plenty lewd, of course, and it’s hardly devoid of yelling. But it’s understated.

After all, it’s a movie about photography - pictures over words, that sorta thing. It’s about capturing the essence of Baltimore in crisp snapshots. The titular Pecker (Edward Furlong) is an amateur photographer with a passion for the little moments of his life: a burger on the grill, the Hampden neighborhood welcome sign, rats mating in an alley...

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