The Girl With the CDG Statue

Awwwww, Clint Eastwood looks so happy at the Costume Design Guild Awards. They were honoring Deborah Hopper (second from left) and the man himself with their "Distinguished Collaborator" Award. (Many of the guilds like to honor directors outside their own profession at their particular ceremonies... but we like this joint award definition since films are such team efforts.) 

This photo is giving me such 2003 flashbacks with Mystic River's Marcia Gay Harden and The Last Samurai's Ken Watanabe all snuggled up with Clint and Deborah.

Strangely Hopper has never been Oscar nominated despite working with such an Oscar magnetized director. Not even those cloche hats from Changeling won her a shortlist spot. She's been working with Clint since Space Cowboys (2000).

This year's winners, more photos, and a fun "Revenge" moment after the jump.

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6 Days Till Oscar. Remember When...?

Remember when costume designer extraordinary Sandy Powell won her third Oscar for Young Victoria and she was so over it, dedicating it to costume designers on contemporary films who never get recognized? That was kind of great and terrible simultaneously.

Um. I already have two of these."

Sandy Powell is one of the greatest designers in the history of the movies, previously winning for The Aviator (2004) and Shakespeare in Love (1998). But if you ask me she won her first for the wrong film. She beat herself in 1998 as she was double nominated. Velvet Goldmine. Come on.

Winning for the Aviator (2004) and Shakespeare in Love (1998)Do you think Powell can pull off Oscar number four on Sunday?

Consider...

• Oscar loves period pieces, the older the period the better, which gives Anonymous and Jane Eyre the edge.
• Oscar loves gorgeous costume work and a whole unmistakable heap of them, which gives Arianne Phillips work on W.E. the edge. 
• Oscar loves royalty porn which gives Anonymous and W.E. the edge. 
• Oscar loves Best Picture frontrunners which gives The Artist the edge. 
• Oscar loves Sandy Powell and Best Picture nominees in general which gives Hugo the edge.

With such a wide range of possibilities that might be attractive to the voters, I'm guessing it's a five way race which slides this over into the win column for The Artist. But you never know on the below the line categories. Weird things can occur.

Jane Eyre. Formidable competition? Tough to say.

OH. I ALMOST FORGOT. Here are my costume design nominees! which completes the traditional Oscar-like categories in The Film Experience's annual Film Bitch Awards so I've added in the tallies at the end of that page. I'll announce my winners tomorrow I think. Let me sleep on the tough calls.

I'll also start the Final Oscar Predictions tomorrow. Wheeeee, we're almost there.

Interview: Oscar Nominee Arianne Phillips

It's long been my goal to up the visibility of the craft of costume design here at The Film Experience. So when the W.E. team was making the press rounds, I jumped at the chance to talk with Arianne Phillips, who has long been a designer I admire both for her technical and visual invention and for her uncanny ability to hit the pop cultural bullseye with instantly memorable looks whether she's designing for musicians (including longtime collaborator Madonna) or for actors. Her film career took off with the one-two comic book punch of The Crow (1994) and Tank Girl (1995). And it's continued to fascinate through Hedwig and the Angry Inch and on to her first Oscar nomination for Walk the Line (2005).

Arianne Phillips in front of her W.E. costumes. Photo via Society News

She received her second nomination last month for W.E. (2011) which has an absurd amount of use for her skills. In my mind they really ought to have done away with typical star "billing" and listed Arianna Phillips up top. No disrespect intended to Abbie Cornish and Andrea Riseborough, who lead the picture through its double-sided narrative.

Years before W.E. materialized Phillips has been living her own double-sided career "by design". Arianne speaks with a mixture of confidence, sincerity and appreciated bluntness: she agrees that costume designers don't get enough credit calling it an "a gorllina in the room. It's such an annoyance" but she corrects my slight misunderstanding about her past collaborations with musicians. She freelances as a stylist and editor for print photography, concerts and music videos. She doesn't dress stars for events.

a recent Madonna/Riseborough photoshoot styled by Arianne

I do videos and album covers, mostly narrative based: fantasy, illusion and character. It's very connected to film. You're creating the fantasy of who that person is.
-Arianne Phillips on her second career as a fashion editor and stylist.

Continue for... Madonna, Larry Flynt, Biopic & Concert Tour Challenges

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A Quick Exchange With "W.E."'s Andrea Riseborough

I don't normally attend roundtable interviews since there's little you can do about every other article on the person having the exact same quotes but to finally meet Madonna (on the W.E. campaign trail) it was worth it. When we were done with the Queen, Andrea Riseborough breezed into the room. It's been pretty clear on the promotional trail that Andrea and Madonna get along famously. (Andrea describes their relationship as "artistically complicit.") She's one of those actresses that totally seizes your attention onscreen, but you might actually walk right by her on the street without noticing her. She's a tiny slip of a thing who comes fully alive on the screen through some sort of magical alchemy with the camera.

Andrea and Madonna, artistically and sartorially complicit at the Globes

Not that she isn't engaging in person. The thirty-year old rising star was erudite, thoughtful and talked a mile a minute, each question setting off a flurry runaway train of thought. Upon entering the room a reporter bizarrely asked her who she was wearing though no red carpet was anywhere in sight. Riseborough, rolling with the odd start, spun her head a bit as she took her seat.

"You almost made me do that thing in Death Becomes Her where she turns her head around," she said bemused. (Alberto Ferretti if you must know.)

She talked a lot about the film's aesthetic, Wallis Simpson's own aesthetic, humorously blaming Wallis for being one of those women who forced actresses into near androgyny with expectations of rail-thinness. "'You can't be too rich or too thin' was such an honest statement but also she was sending her own frivolity up. But also she had terrible stomach ulcers. Work with what you got. Make the absolute best of what is there. Because really you can work a lot. And at times she had very little. She looked virtually anorexic. She was ill really. So she made it chic. She was very pragmatic in that way."

After the jump: Andrea on the Oscar nominated costumes and answering my question about dancing FOR Madonna...

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Eiko Ishioka (1939-2012)

Deneuve with Ishioka on Oscar night 1993The cinema lost one of its few truly unique visionaries this week. We've paid homage before and multiple times. 73 year old costume giant Eiko Ishioka, who didn't work in the cinema frequently enough for our tastes succumbed to cancer on Thursday.

We first fell in love with her work via Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and it was hardly an idiosyncratic crush. Millions were instant converts and she won the Oscar for her spectacular creations, from inside out red musculature armor to dazzling perverse lizard-like bridal wear for vampire brides. Just stunning stuff.

I'd be very disappointed/surprised if some goth girl somewhere hasn't tried to copy Sadie Frost's indelible vampire bride look for her wedding night.

Sadie Frost in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Best single costume of the 1990s? Maybe.

In the past decade Ishioka wowed again through Tarsem Singh's filmography (The Cell, The Fall, and Immortals)

Bjork, Grace and a few more film pics after the jump...

Kellan Lutz filming a scene from Immortals (2011)

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