Sunday, January 10, 2016 at 8:51PM Technical issues with my TV and my phone and my computer tonight? -- someone did some voodoo on TFE for the booziest Hollywood party this year! They suck but their timing is pure evil genius so we bow down. Obviously there will be a bit more Globes tomorrow but for tonight, a quick list of winners, super brief thoughts and amusing tweets after the jump...
Sunday, January 10, 2016 at 4:49PM Leonardo DiCaprio is, as an actor, inarguably most attracted to roles where he is mentally or physically suffering often while mourning a dead wife (His infamous "Dead Wives' Club," already quite extensive, got another member this weekend with the spectral presence of his Native American love, never named, in The Revenant). But Leo DiCaprio, the celebrity and movie star, is more tied in the real world to the wildly wealthy playboys that occasionally dot the dramatic resume (Celebrity, The Great Gatsby, Wolf of Wall Street). This is not just because he commands an astronomical fee for acting and has been known to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but because his films in turn attract even deeper pools of money. In other words: he's worth what they pay him. Enter The Revenant, a brutal, arduous, and arguably very quiet drama with brief but intense flashes of excitement, making a mint in its first weekend. It's something virtually no other star could pull off. DiCaprio is just about the only movie star that can convince moviegoers en masse to show up for straight dramas these days -- superheroic powers, franchise branding, or stylized action not required.
Friday, January 8, 2016 at 2:50PM 
Jack Fisk at the Oscars for "There Will Be Blood" with his Best Actress wife Sissy SpacekThe Revenant, just nominated for eight (!) BAFTAs, opens nationwide today so here's our last interview of the week to celebrate this wilderness epic.
Jack Fisk, the Oscar-nominated Production Designer (There Will Be Blood) is no stranger to outdoor challenges. Many of his most famous films, due in no small part to his long collaboration with Terrence Malick, feel the spiritual pull of nature as does the man who designs them. He prefers to build on location and with the tools that would have been present at the time, whatever time the movie happens to take place in.
When he signed on for The Revenant, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gave him a copy of Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev which he used for inspiration of scale and detail. His longtime collaborators Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki (Cinematographer) and Jacqueline West (Costumes) Fisk -- who he had worked with on many projects though only once altogether (The New World, 2005) were also on hand to realize this brutal of frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) surviving bear attacks, bloody skirmishes, and mercenary Tom Hardy.
I asked Fisk about his onscreen life with auteur collaborators, his offscreen life with one of the great screen actresses, and his preference for outdoor cinema. Our conversation is after the jump...
Friday, January 8, 2016 at 3:33AM With the Oscar nominees less than a week away, the British Academy of Film and Television Awards, or BAFTA as they're more easily referred to, can often be a real indicator of where AMPAS might be headed come Thursday morning. It used to be that the British were quite idiosyncratic in their tastes, picking homegrown, grassroots produce like Fish Tank. Unfortunately recent years have seen even the Best British Film category taken a much more populist bent. Therefore, it's their taste in American films that can often be a huge indicator of what energy the British contingent might inject into their Oscar votes.
Eligibility rules can often cause an issue - Murtada gave a rundown of any possible hiccups the other day - but recent years have seen studios keen to align the two continents as much as possible, to avoid situations like Charlize Theron's Oscar-winning turn in Monster turning up a whole year later at BAFTA. So, never fear - Trumbo's still here!
Thursday, January 7, 2016 at 12:36PM 
Jacqueline West at the premiere of The Revenant.© Frazer Harrison for Getty ImagesClothing was always in her blood though Costume Design came later. Two time Oscar nominee Jacqueline West (Quills, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the daughter of an avante garde designer, originally pursued fashion. After building a successful clothing line of her own her career made a sudden fate-filled turn in the late 80s via a favor for a personal friend, the director Philip Kaufman.
Her filmography in the subsequent 25 years has been a grab bag of film genres -- her latest The Revenant (2015) is a 180 from Henry & June (1990) you must agree -- but the consistent throughline is that she's in demand with the auteur set. She's worked repeatedly with Terrence Malick, David Fincher, Philip Kaufman, and Ben Affleck. The Revenant marks her first, though one assumes not last, collaboration with Alejandro González Iñárritu. To get in the right mindset, she drew on her personal history -- she was intimately familiar with the Hugh Glass story before Inarittu and Leo were all about making it for the screen-- and eventually read a ton of journals by fur trappers, including the invaluable "40 Years as a Fur Trader on the Upper Missouri."
Our conversation starts with The Revenant but you know yours truly won't let this talented woman go without talking Henry & June and other more glamourous gigs...
NATHANIEL R: You've designed many gorgeous movie costumes over the years but for The Revenant your challenge is so different. I imagine a lot of your job this time was making the clothes look disgusting!
JACQUELINE WEST: [Laughter]
NATHANIEL: They're overworn. They're muddy. They're bloody. [More...]
