Category: media

With films like Birdman and last year’s The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open and Oscar fave 1917 edited to appear as if they’re single shots, what’s the deal? The “single-shot” movie has become much more popular in the past few years, perhaps “the technical virtuosity required of a one-shot film marks its director as an auteur. And these films feel somehow pure — compared, at least to the CGI trickery and hyperactive editing of blockbuster superhero movies.” – NPR

Cool use of big data, no? Real shocker though: “When you look at the birthplaces of all the winners together, you can see the Academy tends to favor American-born talent, with Europe as a close second.” – Fast Company

Sandy Powell, nominated this year for The Irishman (which she finds odd since it’s mostly men in “normal clothes”), says that a large part of her job is helping actors maintain and improve their posture. She says also that the awards are “terrifying. It’s absolutely terrifying. You sit there and hope your name doesn’t get called.” – BBC

There was little overlap with the Oscar nominees as The Farewell took Best Picture and its older star Zhao Shuzhen won the best supporting actress award. Adam Sandler won for his role in Uncut Gems, and gave a “speech in which he joked about ‘a few weeks back, when I was quote, unquote snubbed by the Academy’ and recalled winning a best personality award in high school rather than best looking. The actor declared, ‘the Independent Spirit Awards are the best personality awards.… Their handsome good looks will fade in time while our independent personalities will shine on forever.'” – Los Angeles Times

Five of the nine Best Picture nominees are already available on Netflix or Amazon – and the others won’t be far behind, meaning that theatres don’t necessarily see much more money per screen after the awards ceremony. What about the four that aren’t streaming? Well: “For the record, the box-office Oscar bounce still exists for films that manage to hang on at the multiplex. Jojo Rabbit, Little Women and Ford v Ferrari have each made additional millions since the nominations were announced. And the war movie 1917 is doing so well, it feels almost like another Slumdog, exploding at the box office.” In short, longer theatrical runs mean more people see movies on the big screen. (But isn’t it nice to have The Irishman available at home?) – NPR

“In edited excerpts below, filmmakers, awards-watchers and academy members” — among them Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, and former Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs — “tell the inside story of how what began as a three-word hashtag forced an insular, $42 billion industry to change course.” – The New York Times

Wesley Morris: “Assembled, these distinct movies become a representative entity, and a person like me notices a theme that could poke out an eye. And whiteness is part of that story. It’s always been, of course. But this year feels different. A homogeneity has set in. The nominated movies start to look like picture day at certain magnet schools.” – The New York Times

Some non-binary actors, and audience members, are asking the Oscars, Emmys, and other awards to eliminate separate actor and actress categories — and they’re pointing to one set of awards that did have gendered categories and dropped them: the Grammys. – The Washington Post

“The culture secretary, Nicky Morgan, suggested the television licence” — an annual fee, currently £154.50 ($201.68), charged every household and business with a television — “was an increasingly outdated way of funding the BBC, saying that while she would guarantee its existence in the short term, it was time to look at new ways of subsidising public service broadcasting.” – The Guardian