Monday, March 8, 2021 at 9:47PM by Nathaniel R
As we did with the Documentary shorts finalists, we're reviewing the Oscar possibilities in Live Action short. Unfortunately this group is harder for audiences to see (at this writing) so we don't have screening links for all of them. We've been unable to track down Two Distant Strangers but let's discuss the other nine options, divvied up into four 'types'...
Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 6:00PM 
Director Shaka King (left) and Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (right)
Sean Bobbitt started as a news camera shooter, a photojournalist more than a cineaste. His first feature was Michael Winterbottom's 1999 Cannes Competition entry Wonderland, an auspicious beginning to what would become a splendorous filmography. The collaboration with British director Steve McQueen came to define the cinematographer's career, their work running the gamut from commercials to museum installations and award-winning films like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave. Despite all this, Sean Bobbitt has never been nominated for an Oscar. Thanks to Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, that sad state of affairs may be about to change…
Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 3:24PM by Ben Miller
This year’s Best Actress race is filled with powerful women going through big things. Viola Davis and Andra Day portray groundbreaking artists dealing with systems stacked against them. Frances McDormand and Vanessa Kirby are women trying to work through immense grief. Carey Mulligan is exacting revenge for monumental wrongs.
In The Assistant, Julia Garner portrays Jane, an assistant to a Hollywood big wig. Jane is not going through something big. She is just doing her job. Something big is happening nearby, she recognizes, but she can’t do anything about it...
Saturday, March 6, 2021 at 10:00PM There's nothing more wonderful about cinema, about art as a whole, than the ability to surprise. If I feel a film showed me sights I never thought possible, if it told me stories I could have never imagined, it instantly earns respect and a special place in my heart. Following that line of thinking, one must say that no other picture in this awards season surprised me quite as much as Masaaki Yuasa's Ride Your Wave. Mixing supernatural stylings and teenage melodrama, the Japanese director has managed to create one of the most painful portraits of loss and paralyzing grief in a long time. If you thought the sight of a girl talking to a water bottle would never make you tear up, think again…
Saturday, March 6, 2021 at 6:17PM by Nathaniel R
Pixar's Soul centers around a music teacher Joe, who feels he missed his calling. He always wanted to be a famous jazz musician. Through the course of the spiritually minded adventure, which takes us from Earth to The Great Beyond and The Great Before and back again, Joe comes to understand that his calling was to teach. None us know ahead of time where our lives and career might take us. For instance, I was certain I was going to be an illustrator and ended up in Human Resources and now identify as a writer. This is also true of Pixar's Mike Jones. He was once on our side of the movie world as an entertainment journalist but always planned to shoot movies. "I went to NYU film school to be a cinematographer. You have to take a writing course as an undergrad and the teacher took me aside and said, 'You want to think about writing instead?'" Jones continued to pursue cinematography but, as it turns out, the teacher was right and the seed was planted "I did start to kind of write on my own. And after I got out of film school, I kept writing." This led him to a brief entertainment journalism career until he made the leap to filmmaking, if not in the way he originally intended. Years later he has a thriving career at Pixar as a screenwriter.
We recently spoke to him about the process of developing Soul and what it's like to be a co-writer since Pixar generally has several creatives on each film...
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