I've been obsessing over this shot in "Us"

by Nathaniel R

Not sure if there's an audience out there for a return of our Hit Me With Your Best Shot series but Jordan Peele's horror smash Us would certainly be a worthy candidate for the treatment. Lately I've been obsessing over this particular image (above) in which Red (Lupita Nyong'o) has handcuffed Adelaide (Lupita Nyong'o) to her own coffee table. It's not just the slow upsetting crack of the glass, or Lupita's stunning dual performance...

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Open Letter to the Academy -xo

For Valentine's Day we would just like to smooch every prominent artist in Hollywood who signed this letter, quoted here in full:

An Open Letter to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and The Producers of the 91st Annual Academy Awards Broadcast:

On Monday, February 11, 2019, John Bailey, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, announced that this year’s Oscar presentations for Best Cinematography — along with Film Editing, Live Action Short and Makeup and Hairstyling — will not be broadcast live, but rather presented during a commercial break. This decision was made to reduce the length of the show from four hours to three. The vocal response from our peers and the immediate backlash from industry leaders over the Academy’s decision makes it clear that it’s not too late to have this decision reversed...

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10 Days til Oscar... The Past 10 Years of Stats

Happy Valentine's Day y'all ❤️. It's officially 10 days until the Oscars so it's a perfect time to go list crazy and look at the past 10 years of Oscar honors (2008-2017) for multiple top tens, don't you think? Not that we need excuses to go list-crazy. We make them up when they don't present themselves!  How have the past ten years been for you? We hope you'll share in the listing fun. In addition to ranking the Oscar winners we've notated whether the same achievements medalled in our own annual film bitch awards that year.

PAST TEN BEST PICTURE WINNERS RANKED 

1. Moonlight (2017) *silver medal
2. The Hurt Locker (2009) *gold medal
3. Birdman (2014) *silver medal...

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#PresentAll24

This just in. The Academy has announced their plans for which awards aren't going to be shown live this year and it's not actually as bad as we thought it would be in that it is not as MANY as we though it would be. They're leaving four off the air: cinematography, editing, makeup, and live action short. Not being as bad as we thought, though, is NOT to say that it is any less horrific. The decision remains as tone deaf in its disrespectful, self-destructive, and against-the-point way as it always was. It's easily in the top two or three most terrible decisions that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has made in its entire 91 years.

Once you start demoting categories to "less important" you're sending a message to the world that the craft of filmmaking doesn't really matter; just look at the gowns and sit through the commercials which make us money...

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Beauty Break: ASC Tributes + Best Cinematography Honors

The American Society of Cinematographers will hold their annual awards dinner tonight where they'll be honoring Jeff Bridges with their Board of Governors Award, three-time Oscar winner Robert Richardson (Hugo, Aviator, JFK) with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and two time Emmy winner Jeffrey Jur (Carnivàle, Bessie) for the Career Achievement in Television Award. They'll also hand out some competitive prizes and presumably give Alfonso Cuarón yet another trophy for his mantle (let's hope he has steel reinforced shelving at home given this season's worth of hardware.) UPDATE: oops we were wrong and Cuarón lost for practically the first time this season.

Let's look at that beautiful imagery from the winners and nominees again with a few bonus gifs... 

• WINNER: Łukasz Żal, PSC for “Cold War” 

What an incredible DP Żal is. After the consecutive Pawel Pawlikowski's successes of Ida (2013) and Cold War (2018), will he be in demand in Hollywood or just stick to work across the ocean? While his best work has been in black & white in Poland he does color and cinema from other countries as well...

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