Tarantino's Best Costumes

by Cláudio Alves

Despite some misgivings regarding this year’s highly unimaginative Best Costume Design line-up, there's much to rejoice about that Oscar category. One of the biggest reasons to celebrate is Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood's deserved nod for Arianne Phillips’ designs. As it happens, this is the first time any Quentin Tarantino film has been nominated for this particular award. Considering the director's ability to create memorable images and influential bits of cinematic iconography, this is somewhat preposterous. Better late than never.

Still, to shed light on the many costume delights of Tarantino's colorful oeuvre, here's a list of the ten best costumes in this director's films…

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Blueprints: Standout sequences in Original Screenplay winners

by Jorge Molina

Last Sunday, in a ceremony filled with joyful surprises, heartbreaking disappointments, and Emma Stone’s shocked tears, Green Book won Best Original Screenplay.  Instead of driving into Peter Farrelly, Brian Currie and Nick Vallelonga’s screenplay, let’s take a look at the last ten years of winners of Best Original Screenplay (2008-2017), and a standout sequence in each. Because somehow Viggo Mortensen folding a pizza in half and Mahershala Ali learning how to eat fried chicken are now among their peers.

The King's Speech, Django Unchained, Her, Birdman and more are after the jump...

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Eisner Award Nominees

The Eisner Awards, the "Oscars of Comics" have announced their nominations for the current season (they follow more of a Tony Awards timetable) and the results are heavy on Image comics with Marvel scoring in the top "continuing series" category with the current run of Hawkeye. Maybe there's hope for Jeremy Renner's unloved movie hero after all?  Or maybe not. It's up against last year's winner Saga. 

I want to share two categories that have particular appeal to us here at TFE. They have an adapted category (which sometimes pulls from movies) and a digital comics category and you know I keep trying to start one though admittedly I never fully commit.

Best Adaptation from Another Medium

• The Castle, by Franz Kafka, adapted by David Zane Mairowitz and Jaromír 99 (SelfMadeHero)
• The Complete Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, adapted by by Rob Davis (SelfMadeHero)
• Django Unchained, adapted by Quentin Tarantino, Reginald Hudlin, R. M. Guéra et al. (DC/Vertigo)
• Richard Stark’s Parker: Slayground, by Donald Westlake, adapted by Darwyn Cooke (IDW)
• The Strange Tale of Panorama Island, by Edogawa Rampo, adapted by Suehiro Maruo  (Last Gasp)

Django Unchained, huh? I was hoping everyone was over that post 12 Years a Slave. Please tell me they drew Jamie Foxx's upside down penis in that torture sequence and did justice to the only brilliant part of that movie: Samuel L Jackson as Stephen

Best Digital/Webcomic

• As the Crow Flies, by Melanie Gillman
• Failing Sky, by Dax Tran-Caffee
• High Crimes by Christopher Sebela and Ibrahim Moustafa
• The Last Mechanical Monster, by Brian Fies
• The Oatmeal by Matthew Inman

The only one of those I'm familiar with (and love) is The Oatmeal. It received another nomination for its wondrously funny and sad short story "when your house is burning down you should brush your teeth" which I've read like five times. But I'll be sure to check these others out. i09 has other days pointing out 51 webcomics that weren't mentioned. I wasn't aware of this but apparently webcomic creators don't think highly of the Eisner committees understanding of webcomics. Like most new media of any medium it takes a while to be understood by old media and the Eisner's have a long long history with print comics.

9 Days Til Oscar. Should 9 Times Nominated "12 Years" Worry?

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, once the Oscar frontrunner and perhaps still, has nine nominations. As we move into the final days of voting (ballots are due on Tuesday the 25th), how many of its categories can it win? I'm thinking about 12 Years again today due to Harvey Weinstein's awful potshot at it over at Deadline where he suggested that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained was better at covering slavery.

I liked 12 Years A Slave, but Quentin covered a lot of that ground first, and dealt with violence, slavery and oppression, shining a light on the American holocaust, as he called it.

Oy!

I'll flesh out some of the following thoughts in the "final predictions" article a week from now but until then, let's discuss it's upcoming Oscar battles... 

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Podcast: Cheetah Tattoos & Broken Sailboats

Nathaniel, Nick and Joe welcome back Katey, who's been in London gazing into Chris Hemsworth's eyes at the Thor junket. We gathered to discuss J.C. Chandor's All is Lost but as per usual, the conversation turned.

Topics include but are not limited to...

• Gotham Nominations: Blue Caprice & Inside Llewyn Davis
• Awards Futures for The Butler & Frances Ha
• The Counselor & Cameron Diaz
• Actor Retirements from Goldie Hawn to Leonardo DiCaprio
• Wolf of Wall Street & Release Date Swappage

... and a few leftover feelings from 2012 from Bad Teacher to Django Unchained turn up, too! You can listen at the bottom of the post or download it on iTunes. Join in the conversation in the comments.

 

supplemental reading: this tweet, this post

All is Lost for the Counselor in Gotham