Through Her Lens: 2016 (The 89th Oscars)

A series by Juan Carlos Ojano. Previous Episodes: 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | Introduction / Explanation

This year at the Oscars marked a landmark in representation. Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight became the first Best Picture winner to star an all-Black cast and the first that was LGBTQ+-themed. This win was even more remarkable as the film went up against the heavily nominated frontrunner La La Land, a romantic musical. This year also marked an unprecedented amount of racial representation in the acting categories, with seven out of 20 nominees being non-White, two of them winning.

However, this considerable victory in diversity did not extend to gender. In the directing category  all the nominees were male. At the time, not much discourse and coverage was given to gender as the focus on representation was mostly around race, especially after the two-year run of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign...

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Riley Keough is our queen!

by Cláudio Alves

Nepotism is alive and thriving in modern Hollywood. Just look at the enviable careers of Margaret Qualley, Maya Hawke, Emma Roberts, Dakota Johnson, and more. Another name to add to that list would be Riley Keough, daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and Dany Keough. Naturally, she's also the granddaughter of none other than "The King of Rock 'n' Roll" himself, Elvis Presley. 

Keough, like many current rising stars, was already born with a foot in the door and the benefit of her celebrity lineage in an otherwise tough business to break into. However, she has more than proven herself once inside. We'd go so far as to say that she's one of her generation's brightest rising stars, having shown excellence in a variety of tones, genres and acting styles across an already enviable young filmography...

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Sundance: A whole new Shia Labeouf in "Honey Boy"

Abe Fried-Tanzer reporting from Sundance

Shia Labeouf and Noah Jupe, pictured at Sundance, play father and son in "Honey Boy"

Shia LaBeouf’s career hasn’t gone how anyone expected. At age fourteen, he was starring on the popular Disney comedy series Even Stevens. By the time he turned twenty-one, he anchored the movie Disturbia and then blew up as star of the Transformers franchise. More serious performances like the one he delivered in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and his bizarre forays into public self-reflection and public self-destruction provide contradictory images of the actor, who is now thirty-two. 

His best performance to date was in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, but he may just have outdone himself in his new picture, which he also wrote based on his own experiences. Honey Boy is the feature film debut from respected documentary filmmaker Alma Har’e (Bombay Beach) and LaBeouf is at first almost unrecognizable as a version of his own father...

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Soundtracking: "American Honey"

NEW SERIES ALERT: Chris Feil will be talking soundtracks and music in movies every Wednesday! The first installment is on last year's Cannes winner American Honey:

Last year at Cannes, Andrea Arnold won her third Jury Prize for American Honey. The film follows Star (breakthrough star Sasha Lane), an Oklahoma teenager who leaves her rural life to sell magazines with a van full of forgotten youths. It’s a compassionate and condemning road movie, Arnold using music to provide a distorted reflection of the limits of the American Dream. You wouldn’t immediately think of Honey as defined by its soundtrack, but it is in so many rich ways.

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Podcast: Top Ten Lists

Nick and Nathaniel and Joe compare their top ten lists for the year -- only two movies are on all three lists.

Index (42 minutes)
00:01 Nick & Nathaniel talk Fire at Sea, The Lobster, Right Now Wrong Then, La La Land, allergies to directors and "delight" at the movies
14:00 Joe joins in for The Witch, Little Men, Ixcanul, and Francophonia  
23:00 Annette Bening's miracle performance and the bliss of watching 20th Century Women
28:30 More divisive films: The Handmaiden and American Honey
38:00 Things to Come and wrap-up

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? 

Our Top Ten Lists