Links

Your Evening LOL
Elite Daily "A Letter From The Oscar Board On Why Carol Was Totally Snubbed"

Link Love
This Had Oscar Buzz Joe Reid's hilarious tumblr of lost (on-paper) dreams
MNPP Pic of the Day Tom Hiddleston welcomes you to High-Rise... without pants
Coming Soon Steve Coogan and John C Reilly will headline the upcoming biopic Stan & Ollie about the movie comedy duo Laurel & Hardy - any guesses as to who pretends to be supporting for the Oscar campaign?
CHUD on the major changes from book to screen for The Revenant (obviously spoilers) including its completely different ending

Twitter Assassins Creed starring Michael Fassbender is a wrap. It's still nearly a year from theaters though (Dec 21st) 
Variety Anne Hathaway to headline the sci-fi comedy The Shower which is being described as 'a cross between Attack the Block and Bridesmaids.' Hmmm
Variety apparently Connie Nielsen has replaced Nicole Kidman as the Queen of the Amazons for Wonder Woman. (Is this really Connie Nielsen in the photo? She looks nothing like her old self) 
Salon Glenn Frey, lead singer of The Eagles, has died at 67. 2016 is not letting up.
The Guardian David Lang, Oscar nominated for his Youth song "Simple Song No. 3" talks about musicians he loves from Adele to Shostakovich   

#OscarsSoControversial
Stereogum because no Oscar year is complete without a Best Original Song controversy now there's online hubbub that Lady Gaga only contributed a few words to tbe Diane Warren song that won her an Oscar nomination "Til It Happens To You"
The Gold Standard is rooting for The Big Short's political aisle crossing to take home the Oscar -- I am stunned to hear that they're recommending it on Fox News since Repubs are so anti-regulation and the movie shows how important regulations are at preventing horrific abuses of the system. Did they misunderstand the message of the movie?  
Will Packer (Executive Producer of Straight Outta Compton) slams the Oscars on facebook 
Spike Lee boycotting the Oscars over the lack of black actors nominated 
Variety John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) isn't upset about it, citing that time will sort things out as it did with Oscar snubs Do The Right Thing and Singin' in the Rain, telling Variety:

It’s like every year people complain. People even complain even when we have a lot of nominations. It is what it is. I’ve been in the game for 25 years. You never know — it’s the luck of the draw for you. To me, I’m not surprised. I’m not disappointed either, as much as other people are disappointed.

...I know there are other works that will be recognized by a more diverse Academy and I know there will be other years when work that is really deserving doesn’t get recognized.

 That last sentence is the truest sentence ever spoken about the always volatile Oscars -- unlike the Emmys they have an entirely new crop of work to judge each year. Sometimes they make good calls. Other times...  

First Impressions: Oscar's Best Screenplay Nominees Say "Hello"

Manuel here. Getting a new batch of Oscar nominations is always overwhelming but since right now it’s all about first impressions, I figured we’d check in with the recently minted Oscar nominated scripts and see how they quite literally introduce themselves.

As most of these screenplays are cannily available online as FYCs (links here take you to the script), find below the very first line uttered in each nominated screenplay of 2015.

Think of it as a way of saying "Hello!" to these ten contenders...

Best Adapted Screenplay

Perhaps it's the inclusion of Nagy's beautiful adaptation but I kind of love this category, give or take the McKay script. Also, the doodle on The Martian's script is courtesy of Ridley Scott who sent that page out into space!

MODERN TRADER (V.O.)
In the late seventies banking was not a job you went into to make large sums of money. It was a good stable profession like selling insurance or accounting.

— The Big Short, Adam McKay, Charles Randolph

EILIS (mouthing)
Go back to bed.

— Brooklyn, Nick Hornby

eight more opening quotes after the jump...

Click to read more ...

USC Scripter Nominations Add a TV Category. (But Where's "Carol" in Film?)

The USC Scripter announced their nominations today. They honor authors of original printed works alongside the screenwriters who have adapted them. They are a group of Academics and writers who somehow have been in lock and step with Oscar in choosing the same winning Adapted screenplay for the last 5 years. The Social Network (2011), The Descendants (2011), Argo (2012), 12 Years A Slave (2013) and The Imitation Game (2014).

This year they have expanded their awards - which will be presented February 20 - to include TV adaptations. Their nominees are after the jump... 

Click to read more ...

Interview: Phyllis Nagy on Patricia Highsmith, Sunset Blvd, and "Carol"

Phyllis Nagy in Palm Springs with Cate BlanchettMonday night through Tuesday evening was a special 24 hours in the lives of Team Experience. At the NYFCC awards gala, Alec Baldwin, presenting the Best Director prize to Todd Haynes (Carol), quoted a Film Comment piece by our dear friend and podcast mate Nick Davis. That same night Phyllis Nagy was honored for Best Screenplay by the Pulitzer winning playwright/screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America, Lincoln) himself. Though I was not in attendance for the Carol-heavy NYFCC gala on Monday night where the film also took Best Cinematography and Best Film), I had the opportunity to congratulate Nagy the next evening on her fine work adapting the year's best film from the original 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel "The Price of Salt." The occassion was a cocktail event for the movie hosted by former and future Todd Haynes muse Julianne Moore (here are a few photos of that reunion.)

It was our second chat with the sharp and talented Phyllis Nagy, who up until Carol had been best known for her stage plays and the HBO film Mrs Harris (2006) which she wrote and directed.

Here's our original conversation which we hope you'll enjoy...

NATHANIEL: So Phyllis I started this  as kind of a joke to myself but then decided to commit to it and have literally asked every person I interviewed from Carol ... How come you're such a genius? 

PHYLLIS NAGY: Well, practice. [Laughs] In this case, yeah, practice, many years of it. Which ultimately aided it, it didn’t hurt it, it may have felt like that from time to time...

NATHANIEL: You mean the long gestation period?

PHYLLIS NAGY: Yeah, when no one wants to [make a film], it gives you the opportunity to obsessively go over it again and again on your own time, at least make it a document that you’re proud of. So, luckily...

[Patricia Highsmith's interiority, great actors, and tough rewrites after the jump...]

Click to read more ...

Interview: Lucinda Coxon's 11 Years With "The Danish Girl"

One of this season's most talked about movies, The Danish Girl, set tongues wagging long before anyone had seen a single frame. Years before in fact. It wasn't just the subject matter, though the subject matter would have been enough. The Danish Girl tells the true story of married painters Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander) and Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne) who struggle to come to grips with Einar's true identity, Lili Elbe. Lili was one of the first trans women to ever undergo gender confirmation surgery which was then an experimental series of surgery. It's a difficult subject to dramatize, and a difficult subject to talk about particularly given how quickly the verbiage and discourse has changed across the decades. People didn't know how to talk about it in 1930 when the story was a very current sensation in Denmark and Germany and do people really know how to talk about it now? A quick perusal of any trans story around the internet will tell you the answer is still no. 

It's always a particular challenge for heavily buzzed pictures to get out into the marketplace and form their own identity outside of everyone's pre-screening perceptions of them. Oscar winner Tom Hooper's (The King's Speech) latest is definitely no exception. Even the casting, which wouldn't have been all that controversial even a handful of years ago other than in a rubber-necking kind of "Oscar bait" way, has been the subject of spirited debates along the lines of "shouldn't a trans actor be playing the part?" But films take a long time to make. Who could have known the happy development in the past few years in regards to trans visibility in Transparent, Tangerine, Orange is the New Black. 

The Danish Girl's complicated gestation period is where I began when i sat down with the woman who'd been with the project the longest, its screenwriter Lucinda Coxon. Our interview is after the jump... 

Click to read more ...