“CODA” Wins Best Picture at a Wild Oscars
Well, we’d be living in a better world if the 94th Academy Awards would be remembered for CODA‘s remarkable Best Picture win. It was five years ago when we wrote about what we believed at the time was the most shocking night in Oscars history. That was when Damien Chazelle’s La La Land was announced as ...
Oscar-Nominated “The Power of the Dog” Editor Peter Sciberras on Building Unbearable Tension
Jane Campion’s tense, character-driven Western, The Power of the Dog, is a critical favorite and Oscar frontrunner. The film’s vast landscapes (shot in New Zealand, much to the chagrin of actors not involved with the movie) are a backdrop to a slow-moving family melodrama: sweet and earnest George (Jesse Plemons) marries widowed Rose (Kirsten Dunst), ...
“Flee” Director Jonas Rasmussen on His Historic Triple Oscar-Nominated Doc
Director Jonas Rasmussen remembers being a kid in Denmark and watching television news in 1990 when the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow, supposedly signifying a brave new world of post-Soviet capitalism. Rasmussen never could have imagined that the Afghan refugee standing just outside of the camera range would one day star in his acclaimed documentary ...
Oscar-Nominated Re-Recording Sound Mixer Paul Massey on “No Time To Die”
“When I started out, I had no objective whatsoever to become a re-recording mixer,” says Paul Massey, who may well be the most accomplished accidental Oscar winner in history. Growing up in London, Massey played trumpet in wedding bands, worked at a recording studio and then, he says, “I made a slow, totally unintentional transition ...
Oscar-Nominated “Dune” DP Greig Fraser on Taming an Epic Sci-Fi Beast
Denis Villeneuve is the director to finally tame a film version of Dune, Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel that, over the decades, accidentally spawned a cottage industry of unsuccessful visual projects (see: David Lynch’s 1984 Dune, the SyFy channel’s attempt in 2000, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, which never saw the light of day). Casting Timothée ...
How the Oscar-Nominated “tick, tick…BOOM!” Editors Evoked the Excitement of Live Theatre
The magic of live theatre is a precious element that is often elusive to the lens. Countless legendary Broadway performances have sparkled and faded in a night, rarely ever recorded. Even a long run of a popular musical will never see the exact same show cross the stage twice. Many movie adaptations of musicals are ...
Director Ben Proudfoot on his Oscar-Nominated Short “The Queen of Basketball”
Lusia “Lucy” Harris’s basketball resume includes leading Delta State University in Mississippi to three consecutive national titles and representing the US at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. She made history as the first woman to score a basket at the Olympics as she led the team to a silver medal and became one of ...
How “The Dress” Went from a Short College Film to an Oscar Nominee
Writer/director Tadeusz Lysiak didn’t plan on being nominated for a Best Short Film Live Action Academy Award when he started developing the script for The Dress while attending Warsaw Film School. The indie film is rife with emotion and puts an authentic lens on loneliness and sexuality through the eyes of Julka (Anna Dzieduszycka), a ...
