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The Guardian wonders if dog actors are a thing no more after Call of the Wild. This makes us sad. Though wild animals as CGI makes sense, dogs actually love training/performing/playing with humans.
/Film Bong Joon Ho has floated the idea that he'd like to make a musical. Unlike /film, we don't approve given his comments. We've been saying this since the days of the early Aughts 'filmmakers who are non-fans or embarrassed by the musical form SHOULD NOT make them.' Periodt.

after the jump more on the coronavirus and Hollywood, Lyle Waggoner RIP, and more...

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New Oscar trivia from the Hollywoods big night

by Nathaniel R

A FEW FIRSTS!

• Laura Dern became the first person in her highly acclaimed family to win the Oscar and is now (3/1) in her nomination/win stats. Her mother Diane Ladd (3/0) and father Bruce Dern (2/0), who she name checked as her heroes in her speech have never won. 
• Parasite became the first South Korean film to win ANY Oscars and it won 4 of them. The individual wins from Bong Joon Ho, Kwak Sin-ae, and Han Jin Won are the first times any Asian has won Best Picture or a writing category...

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Almost There: Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"

by Cláudio Alves

History repeats itself, especially when it comes to the Academy Awards. Throughout its 92 years, very few Asian actors have been recognized, even when their films were otherwise embraced. This year, the victim of the insidious trend was Parasite, which won the SAG for Best Ensemble but couldn't muster enough support for a single acting nomination at the Oscars. Thinking back to the last non-English speaking Asian production to score a Best Picture nomination, we see the same phenomenon.

In 2000, Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon conquered a remarkable 10 nominations, including for Picture and Director but none of the nods were for acting. In the end, the blockbuster won four of its categories. Despite the acting branch's oversight, Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi received many nominations elsewhere, including the BAFTAs. The younger actress even conquered the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress…

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Prizes for the Parasite actors... and other Korean Awards

Jo Yeo Jeong wins Best ActressWith the SAG Awards approaching TONIGHT and our hopes not high for an all-Korean win for "Outstanding Cast" (even though Parasite features an absolute dream of an ensemble performance), we've been thinking about whether the cast has been truly undervalued or whether we've just got American blinkers on. So let's take a look at the prizes and nominations that the cast has actually won.

At Korea’s two big awards ceremony, the Blue Dragon Film Awards and the Buil Film Awars, Parasite was the big winner. The best part of its dominance at both was that some of the actors won prizes. The winners of those two awards shows and a few other accolades for Parasite after the jump...  

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Review: Weathering with You

By Tim

Makoto Shinkai, the Japanese animation director whose new film Weathering with You opens this weekend in the US, has honed in on a few particular aesthetic preoccupations with laserlike intensity over the years. One of these is rain and the way that each droplet catches and reflects the diffuse light of a cloudy day; one is the brilliance of sunbeams piercing their way into shady areas, with fuzzy, dusty edges blurring the difference between light and dark; one is the way that riding in trains forces a lateral flatness onto the perception of the rider, transforming landscapes into planes of action moving across each other. He also favors stories about the extreme emotional states of teenagers, starting with but not limited to youthful romantic passion, and these stories tend to end in lopsided sentimentality expressed with as much unsatisfying contrivance as a decent filmmaker would dare throw into an otherwise satisfying screenplay.

Weathering with You, comes with a scenario that has been created with the apparent goal of specifically enabling him to chase every one of those things as far as a person possibly could. It's about a near-future Tokyo where it's always raining, and a teen girl who has the ability to create localized pockets of rainless sunshine...

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