MTV Movie Awards Really Love Daisy Ridley

The Oscars are apparently not the end of awards season, as the MTV Movie Awards nominations were announced today. Star Wars: The Force Awakens led the field with 11 nods and despite being in theaters for less than a month Deadpool scored 8 nominations. Joining the two in the best film category are Avengers: Age of Ultron (6 nominations), Creed (only one other nomination for its star Michael B. Jordan), Jurassic World (3 nominations) and Straight Outta Compton (3 nominations).

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The Mad Six

Glenn here helping out with the post-ceremony rush. The highlight of last night’s Oscars was surely the six wins for Mad Max: Fury Road. That haul solidified its place as not just one of the most successful Oscar titles of all time, but no doubt the strangest, too.

We may all say that most people were predicting at least four of five of those, but the path to those six wins has been rather extraordinary in the truest definition of that word. Who among us a year ago truly could have predicted that we would be here a year later celebrating six Oscars to a movie about a renegade road warrior, an amputee heroine, and a group of sex slaves rising up against an evil warlord in a post-apocalyptic future with the aide of a gang of elderly motorcycle ladies? While we can be disappointed – very disappointed – that they didn’t add a seventh for George Miller’s direction, any movie winning six golden statues is not only a rarity, but a moment to be extremely proud of so hats off to the team behind Max. It won as many awards as the last two best picture winners combined and it doubled the amount of awards of the next highest winner (The Revenant) on its big night. You done good, Max! May more films like you spring forth from your imposing shadow.

Mad Max: Fury Road joins some fine company, with only 26 films having ever won more awards. 26 over 88 years ! More impressive still, is that Miller’s post-apocalyptic action spectacle is a member of an even smaller collective of only five films to have won half a dozen golden statues without a Best Picture prize to go with them. It’s an interesting quintet to say the least.

The five classics after the jump...

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Breaking Down Oscar's Production Design Nominees

Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock with their Grand Budapest Hotel OscarsDavid here with a closer look at this year’s Oscar nominees for Production Design. Not too close, mind: this is all about the big picture. The PD is responsible for the entire art department, and as such, the entire visual look and feel of a film. If it’s difficult to separate that idea from what cinematographers and costume designers do, well, that’s the difficulty in awarding all these disciplines as if they act independently of one another. Such is the nature of the awards season beast.

The origin of the title is an amusing, unsurprising fable: William Cameron Menzies, coined it to describe his own function on the set of Gone with the Wind (a mammoth task, to be sure) after David O. Selznick instructed everyone that "Menzies is the final word” on the set on every technical aspect of the visual production. Menzies, incidentally, was the first Oscar winner of the award, under the label ‘Best Interior Decoration’ - the award changed to 'Best Art Direction – Set Decoration’ in 1947, and didn’t become ‘Best Production Design’ until 2012.

As we saw earlier in the week when the Art Directors Guild gave out their awards, the Oscar race seems to be a two-horse race. [More...]

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Action Sequences: Man vs Bear, Max vs Furiosa.

The Film Bitch Awards "extra" categories have commenced. We've already discussed Ensembles, Breakthrough, and Casting and now we hit Action Sequences. These are sometimes hard to define as with the much celebrated fourth installment of Mad Max which could be described in its entirety as "chase sequence" but I've tried to break it down a bit for these purposes. Given the choreography, wonder and passion happening on Fury Road the bar was high and even hugely entertaining fight sequences that I thought would be easy placements for the category like the "Hulkbuster" fight in The Avengers: Age of Ultron or technical wows like Johnson vs. Sporino in Creed (all in one continuous shot!) were edged out.

Films with standard action setpieces, whatever their other strengths, like the two biggest blockbusters of the year (The Force Awakens and Jurassic World) or films with inventive brief moments that didn't quite transcend their otherwise rote action beats (Ant-Man) didn't really stand a chance in this high energy competition that put the motion in motion pictures.

Click the image for more on fine action sequences of the past year in cinema

Art Directors Guild Winners: The Revenant crawls out in front?

David here to wish a happy 20th anniversary to the Art Directors Guild’s annual Excellence in Production Design Awards! The group handed out their 2015 awards last night, and their three film categories saw all three winners taken from this year’s pool of Oscar nominees. The Revenant, in the Period category, beat out the remaining two Oscar match-ups, Bridge of Spies and The Danish Girl, while The Martian triumphed in the Contemporary category and Mad Max: Fury Road took the Fantasy gong.

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