The Furniture: Celebrating the Tackiness of "The Oscar"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Tomorrow is twice blessed. You’re probably already excited for the first reason, the Oscar nominations announcement. It’s also the centennial of Ernest Borgnine, an actor I have never particularly liked. But this coincidence makes today a perfect opportunity to talk about one of the worst movies ever produced by a Hollywood studio: 1966’s The Oscar.

The film begins and ends at the Academy Awards, where fictional Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) is as Best Actor nominee for Breakthrough, perhaps the most on-the-nose fictional title of all time. His newly estranged best friend Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett, in his film debut), glares at him from the next row. Bennett would retire from acting immediately after The Oscar, for reasons that are obvious from the moment he starts talking...

Click to read more ...

Oscar Predix & Personal Ballots: The Moulin Rouge! Categories...

If you've read The Film Experience for any length of time beyond let's say, a week, you'll know that we live for eye candy. Three of the cinematic arts that most regularly provide this are, outside of beautiful movie stars in the acting categories, Production Design and Costume Design i.e. the Moulin Rouge! categories. We love these categories so much we have two weekly series for them, Daniel Walber's "The Furniture" and my own forthcoming costume series "Three Fittings".

Anyway, it's time to make our final predictions for Oscar but it's also time to get those Film Bitch Awards (my own long running awards jamboree) going. So herewith my personal ballot and, putting the pundit hat on, my Oscar predictions. These two modes should not be confused... so apologies for discussing them simultaneously. This is what happens when you procrastinate!

Will Stuart Craig receive his 5th nomination directly from the Potterverse (he had 6 nominations and 3 wins before the Potterverse took over his life)

Production Design - Oscar Predictions
I figure this is a slot for the BAFTA surging Nocturnal Animals and I'm predicting that at the expensive of the haunting minimalistic sci-fi of Arrival (work I really really love. Sigh). That damn outdoor potty and the opening art world light slabs will do it. This is an interesting category, though, and I'm going to predict The Handmaiden both because it is hugely deserving and because of all the critics foreign film prizes and the LAFCA prize in this very category. If Park Chan Wook's brilliant film is going to score anywhere it will be here (with an outside shot at costumes, too). There's plentiful buzz around Doctor Strange and Fantastic Beasts (they do love the Harry Potter films in this category but come one, how many times do we need to dip in that well with so many richly art directed films of all genres happening each year ?!?). Question: is Doctor Strange really well liked enough to score multiple nods when so many other Marvel Studio films couldn't do it? 

• NATHANIEL'S BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN BALLOT
• DANIEL, WHO WRITES "THE FURNITURE," ALSO NAMED HIS 5 FAVORITES 

Costume Design
If you really give in to the predictive mania of at home Oscar punditry costume design will surely drive you craziest. What an impossible category to predict this year!  Since the CDG has multiple categories they've covered a ton of possibilities  and the ones they didn't still have buzz for costumes anyway. Just thinking casually about the films won't help. On paper you might think: oh easy, period pieces + a little Colleen Atwood and you're done (Jackie, Florence Foster Jenkins, Hidden Figures, Love & Friendship, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them). But not so fast. Silence, Hail Caesar, and Allied also feature period costumes and they're both buzzing for this category which is easily understandable if you've seen them given the gorgeous work. Even stranger, at least in terms of Oscar history, is that people are talking up not one but two contemporary films: Captain Fantastic as a dark horse (yes please) and La La Land as a sure thing. And that's before you even consider outside possibilities like Kubo and the Two Strings (which wants to be the first animated film nominated here, with all those lovingly detailed miniature costumes), less showy period fare like Fences, Cafe Society or Loving, a costuming legend in Albert Wolsky (Rules Don't Apply). Finally there's a foreign possibility in this category, too, via the The Handmaiden. Here's my best guess though I'm prepared to go 1 or 2 for 5 because I've taken quite a chance on two of them that aren't anything like sure things (The Dressmaker and Hidden Figures) but who the hell knows!?!

• NATHANIEL'S PERSONAL COSTUME DESIGN BALLOT

The Furniture: Appropriating Chinese Design in "The Shanghai Gesture"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. This week Daniel Walber looks back at one of the Art Direction Oscar nominees of 1942 for its 75th anniversary.

While Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture was still in production, the studio received a letter from T.K. Chang, the Chinese Consul to Los Angeles. Having read the script, he objected to its vicious and absurd portrayal of Shanghai’s underbelly and cautioned the producers to take “consideration of Chinese sentiment.”

Producer Arnold Pressburger defended the film as merely a fantasy. “This imaginary world has no connection with the realistic aspects of today,” he replied. This argument even wound up in the final cut, in the form of an opening title card: “Our story has nothing to do with the present.”

Chang saw right through Pressburger’s nonsense. “Such imaginations always prove to be constructed from the raw material of realities,” he wrote back. He was right. The Shanghai Gesture attempts a menacingly ahistorical flare by appropriating specifically Chinese decor. This is, of course, impossible. But the Oscar-nominated failure of art director Boris Leven (West Side Story) is fascinating...

Click to read more ...

Interview: Denis Villeneuve on "Arrival" and his Future with Sci-Fi

by Nathaniel R

Though awards season is a roller coaster of emotion each year, one of its purely happiest annual trends is the sudden recognition of talent that have been doing consistently fine work all along. This year's "it's about time!" contender is surely 49 year old French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. A famous director at home with six wins at Canada's own Oscars, "the Genies," people are still learning his name in Hollywood and beyond. His international breakthrough was Incendies (2010) about twin siblings journeying to the war torn Middle East. It was nominated for the BAFTA and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film. Since that breakthrough his profile in Hollywood has steadily risen and he's shown a gift for directing movie stars, versatility with genre, and a particularly refined skill at building and maintaining tension at feature length which has provided thrilling moments in all of his recent films from Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), Sicario (2015), and on to his current biggest hit yet  Arrival (2016).

Today he received a DGA nomination for Best Director, the surest awards season sign that a movie will be a Best Picture contender at the Oscars. Our conversation follows...

Click to read more ...

The Furniture: A Last-Minute FYC for the Home Décor of "Paterson" and "Jackie"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Oscar balloting has begun! As Nathaniel explained last week, AMPAS branches have received their nomination ballots. They’re due on the 13th. The Academy’s production designers occasionally make offbeat choices, though they don’t do it as often as the costume designers or the makeup artists. So here’s a final nudge on behalf of the best work of the year.

I’ve already written about three of the five movies I’d nominate, were I in charge. The crazed fandom of the apartment in Florence Foster Jenkins is a work of precision and inspiration. So is the heavily curtained metaphor that is the mansion in The Childhood of a Leader. The hotel in The Lobster, meanwhile, is as perfectly sterile as the above settings are feverish. All three would be a thrilling surprise on nomination morning.

My other two have become less present in the awards conversation than I’d guessed...

Click to read more ...