Guilds-a-palooza: More honors for La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival, and... Suicide Squad

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and Eric Heisserer (Arrival) each won a WGA last night. But they're in the same category at the Oscars.

Last night's Writers Guild Awards were a good sign that Moonlight will take Adapted Screenplay. Competing in Original with WGA (Oscar's writing branch put it in adapted) it blocked La La Land or Manchester from taking that prize. With less fearsome competition at the Oscars it should be able to win... although to do that it will have to fend off the surging Lion and the well regarded Arrival which took home the WGA prize for Adapted and is up for the same prize at the Oscars.

Extensive writing and makeup guild honors after the jump...

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From Bedknobs to Balloons

Jason from MNPP here with a tidbit of movie news that hit over the weekend - it is official: after a few months of rumors the legendary Dame Angela Lansbury has joined the cast of Mary Poppins Returns, the sequel that Rob Marshall is currently directing with Emily Blunt stuffing her little feet into the great big sturdy shoes of Julie Andrews. The film will tackle elements drawn from the other seven books that Poppins author P.L. Travers (and tell me you don't immediately picture Emma Thompson when I say that name) wrote about the characters.

Lansbury is set to play "The Balloon Lady," and having never read the books I had to do some real digging to find out who the heck that supposedly "beloved" character was -- not even Wikipedia was any help. Thankfully Homorazzi knew what was up:

"Her character was introduced in Mary Poppins Comes Back, the second book of P.L. Travers’ series. She wreaks helium havoc in the park during one of Poppins’ outing with the Banks children."

Have any of you read the books? Is the character as beloved as they say? It's hard to think she won't be once Lansbury gets her hands on her. What a joy it will be to have this grand Dame back on the big screen. We've still got quite the wait on this movie though - it's not set for a release unti Christmas Day 2018.

Interview: on Jungle Book's live-action aping Visual Effects

You may not know the name Robert Legato, but you definitely know his work. He's been on the visual effects teams of all sorts of blockbusters (Armageddon, Interview with the Vampire) and won his first Oscar for groundbreaking work on one of the most popular films of all times Titanic (1997) before creating the system that allowed for Avatar (2009). Hes' got two Oscars (Titanic and Hugo), two BAFTAs (Apollo 13 & Jungle Book) and two Emmys (both for Star Trek series). Will a third Oscar follow next weekend? It looks likely for the live action photorealism of the not really live action Jungle Book. 

Though a lot of the particulars of his craft are still a mystery to me after our conversation, I've cherry picked some pieces to share with you that are more readily translatable from our moviegoing perspective. 

NATHANIEL R: Rob, I'm not sure where to even begin with your work on Jungle Book. The big takeaway was of course the animals. Are you trying to put all four legged creatures out of work? 

ROBERT LEGATO: That's really the bottom line cause behind all this. How can we prove that you don't need those bastards anymore!?

[Laughter]

The thing is we're not even allowed to use them. You can't bring them on to photograph them for a study. It's against the rules at Disney....

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The Furniture: A Canadian Air Show in Captains of the Clouds

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

The United States may have entered World War II late, but American studios didn’t wait nearly as long to start making propaganda. Hollywood produced a number of pro-Allied films before the American entry into the war, from A Yankee in the RAF to the comparatively subtle Sergeant York. Though this ruffled some feathers in Washington, the debate became moot in December of 1941.

Captains of the Clouds falls right on the cusp, shot before Pearl Harbor but released in February of 1942. The film, directed by Michael Curtiz, was intended to drum up support for the Canadian war effort. The first major Hollywood production to be shot north of the border, it’s a technicolor extravaganza starring James Cagney and the Royal Canadian Air Force.

It also received two Oscar nominations. Sol Polito was recognized in the Best Cinematography category for the film’s breathtaking aerial sequences, a no-brainer. 

The nominated work of art director Ted Smith and set decorator Casey Roberts, however, is less flashy...

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6 Days Until Oscar: Manchester vs Hacksaw vs Lion

With 6 days to go until the big show, let's play like we did with 8 days, and look at the Best Picture nominees with that particular number of nominations. Three movies received six nominations this time though they'll facing off less directly and only in the marquee categories at that. Nevertheless, remove the other nominees from the equation for this exercize and tell us who wins in these particular face-offs...

HACKSAW RIDGE	LION	MANCHESTER
Their six nominations
Picture	Picture	Picture
Director		Director
Actor Andrew Garfield		Actor Casey Affleck
	Supporting Actress Nicole Kidman	Supporting Actress Michelle Williams
	Supporting Actor Dev Patel	Supporting Actor Lucas Hedges
	Adapted Screenplay
		Original Screenplay
	Cinematography
Film Editing
	Original Score
Sound Mixing
Sound Editing

MORE AFTER THE JUMP

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