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      What Will Be Nominated for Oscars Next Week, and What Won’t?

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      While “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” are likely to do well, the directors race is hardly set and other categories are open, too.When it comes to predicting the Oscars, you ultimately have to go with your gut … and mine is in a state of agita.That’s what happens when there are simply too many good movies and great performances to all make the cut: Even the hypothetical snubs I’m about to dole out have me tied up in knots.Which names can you expect to hear on Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced? Here is what I project will be nominated in the top six Oscar categories, based on industry chatter, key laurels from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and the nominations bestowed by the Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America. Well, all of those things, and my poor, tormented gut.Best PictureLet’s start with the safest bets. “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” scored top nominations from the producers, directors and actors guilds last week and I expect each film to earn double-digit Oscar nominations. “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” are secure, too: Though they didn’t make it into SAG’s best-ensemble race, both films boast lead actors who’ve won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award. If this were an old-school race, these would be the five nominees.But there are five more slots to fill, and I project the next three will go to “Past Lives” and “American Fiction,” passion picks with distinct points of view, as well as “Maestro,” the sort of ambitious biopic that Oscar voters are typically in the tank for. I’m also betting that the French courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall” and the German-language Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” find favor with the academy’s increasingly international voting body. (Even the Producers Guild, which so often favors big studio movies over global cinema, found room to nominate that pair.)There are still a few dark horses that hope to push their way into this lineup, like “The Color Purple,” “May December,” “Society of the Snow” and “Origin.” But I suspect these 10 are locked and loaded.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      New (and Old) Moves for a Choreographer to Hip Hop’s Stars

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      For Fatima Robinson, choreographing “The Color Purple” was far more than a job. It was a callback to her youth, before becoming known for her pop work.The choreographer Fatima Robinson made her name, at 21, with an epic Michael Jackson video. Two decades later, she orchestrated the moves for 1,000 performers at a Super Bowl halftime show. Then she rose to become Beyoncé’s director of choreography.But among the most meaningful work of her career has boiled down to a series of handclaps.When Robinson was growing up in Los Angeles, her mother took her and her two younger sisters to see “The Color Purple” — a family milestone. After that, “I saw the movie probably every year of my life,” she said. The girls were inspired by the onscreen sisters’ patty-cake-style routine; they made the claps their own and share it to this day, often in emoji form. If “we’re getting on each other’s nerves,” Robinson said, it’s a symbol of peace. “We know that’s, like, that special love that we have for each other.”Now, as the choreographer for the latest version of “The Color Purple,” a movie musical directed by Blitz Bazawule, she helped devise the onscreen clapping pattern for the young siblings Celie and Nettie. “It was sooo special,” Robinson said. “That sister love in this movie is so what I have with my sisters.”“The Color Purple,” based on the Broadway musical of Alice Walker’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, arrives with a mantle of heavyweight backers and performers, including the producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg and the stars Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, Taraji P. Henson and Colman Domingo. In Robinson, 52, they added perhaps the most elevated hip-hop and R&B choreographer working today, who has worked in music, TV, film and live events, including Super Bowl halftime shows in 2022 and 2011. (She was also recently named a creative director for the Knicks City Dancers.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Ava DuVernay on the Emotional Journey of ‘Origin’

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      Ava DuVernay and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor were in the middle of shooting their new drama, “Origin,” when Ellis-Taylor gave the writer-director some last-minute homework.The two were hours away from filming a scene in which the actress’s character, Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” gets into an argument with her husband, Brett (Jon Bernthal), after a party. Ellis-Taylor felt the scene required a few extra beats of dialogue and asked DuVernay to write some.“She said, ‘I think we need something here,’” recalled DuVernay, who agreed to write the new material during her lunch break. “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about.”That level of trust, amid the daily high wire act of a modestly budgeted production — filmed at a brisk pace across three continents — was typical of a collaboration that DuVernay called her deepest with an actor since working with David Oyelowo on “Selma,” her breakout film released nearly 10 years ago.Jon Bernthal with Ellis-Taylor in a scene from “Origin.”NeonIn Ellis-Taylor, DuVernay saw an actor of “outsized power,” capable of giving her imaginative take on the making of Wilkerson’s book a vital emotional anchor. Ellis-Taylor, nominated for an Oscar in 2022 for “King Richard,” saw in DuVernay a “director of consequence,” perhaps the only person who could successfully adapt “Caste” — a best-selling, Big Idea book that links systems of oppression in the United States, Nazi Germany and India.“She is a freedom fighter,” Ellis-Taylor said. “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists.”In a joint interview last month in Manhattan, the actor and filmmaker discussed finding the heartbeat of the critically acclaimed drama in personal material not included in the book, the transformative influence of shooting in Berlin and Delhi and the importance of Bernthal’s swagger. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Ava, one of the fascinating things about this film is that it’s not a typical adaptation. It’s part adaptation and part bio-drama, tracking a harrowing period of Wilkerson’s life while she was researching and writing “Caste.” What led you to make that decision?AVA DUVERNAY I needed a character who could personalize the concepts — the psychology and the history and the legacy of caste. I didn’t know [Wilkerson], but I watched interviews with her and thought that she could be the one to take us on this journey. When I pitched her, I told her I would need to hear the stories that are behind the book, none of which are in the book, and she very generously shared them with me. As a writer, I think she instinctively knew that I would need freedom to interpret the story. And she gave me that.With DuVernay’s films, “There are consequences and repercussions because of the work that she does, and that separates her, I believe, from most artists,” Ellis-Taylor said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesAunjanue, you didn’t meet Wilkerson before filming. What did you draw on to create your performance?AUNJANUE ELLIS-TAYLOR I watched her famous TED Talk about “The Warmth of Other Suns” [her award-winning 2010 book about the Great Migration] and her interviews with Bryan Stevenson and Michael Eric Dyson. But [“Caste”] was my bible. Her writing is so intimate and personal — you can feel her blood coursing through every sentence. Often, she’ll be talking about a subject, and she’ll say, “This happened to me, too.” I felt like I knew where she was coming from just by reading her words.The film is inventive in the way it turns the book’s ideas into visual entertainment. Scenes of Wilkerson honing her thesis with friends, family and colleagues alternate with dreamlike, historical re-enactments of some of the central stories she is citing. How did you figure out what was enough and what was too much when it came to unpacking the concepts and the history?DUVERNAY One thing that was really important was just to have people to talk about it with. I had a handful of people who were living inside the book with me and who were fluent in its ideas. Aunjanue; my producing partner, Paul Garnes; my cinematographer, Matt Lloyd; and my friend Guillermo del Toro. David Oyelowo read the script and was really helpful, too. They helped me figure out how to turn the book into a springboard to conversations about these things.Wilkerson’s husband, Brett, is mentioned only briefly in the book’s epigraph and acknowledgments, but he is central to the movie’s emotional arc. What made you think of Bernthal?DUVERNAY As soon as Aunjanue said yes, we had the challenge of who could hold the frame with her. Jon not only believed in the project, he was very interested in working with Aunjanue, specifically. [The two co-starred in “King Richard.”] He flew out to Savannah, where I was working, just to meet with me, on his own dime, which is something that doesn’t happen to me very often. Plus he had the appropriate swagger — that was important. I had to be able to look at this guy and think, “He can pull her.”ELLIS-TAYLOR He is just a lovely and generous human being. He supported me in a way that our performances felt lived in — they didn’t feel performed.Did filming on location — in Berlin and Delhi — influence the way you told the story, or even your understanding of the text?ELLIS-TAYLOR In every way. Because Isabel going to India, smelling things that she had never smelled before, learning things that she had only heard about, all of that stuff was happening to Aunjanue, to me personally. I’m not a scholar, but I was able to get a sense of what that experience was like. I’m so grateful to Ava for insisting that we go to these places.When Ellis-Taylor asked for a scene rewritten, “I trusted that she, inside the character, knew what she was talking about,” DuVernay said.Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York TimesDUVERNAY Paul Garnes and I, we always knew that, even though we were on this very finite independent budget, we needed to get to the real places. We needed to be in the real square of Bebelplatz [in Berlin], where the books were burned. [In 1933, a Nazi group and supporters burned more than 20,000 blacklisted books in the square.]Could I have found a square in Georgia to do it and enjoyed the tax credit? Probably. Would it have felt as emotionally resonant as it was for everyone when we were actually standing there in the place where it happened? Certainly not. Or to go to Delhi, in a country that is closely associated with caste, and to be there as an African American and just fall into a sea of beautiful Brown people. To understand that even as I look at them all and see them as one, they don’t see each other that way? That these divisions have been ingrained in their faith, culture and society?For me, coming from a society where it’s all about skin color, it helped me understand that we as human beings will always figure out how to bifurcate and categorize and create hierarchy. That’s the core of so many of our problems. If you don’t know that, then you’re treating the symptoms and not the disease.Ava, there’s a way in which this movie feels like a synthesis of all the work you’ve made since your narrative feature debut more than a decade ago. There’s a meditation on grief à la “I Will Follow,” an intimate love story like in “Middle of Nowhere,” and historical figures involved in the struggle for racial justice as in “Selma” and “13TH.” Were you conscious of that while you were making it?DUVERNAY I wasn’t. But my editor, Spencer Averick, who I’ve worked with since my first movie, said that to me at one point. I feel like everything I’ve done before, even shooting internationally for “A Wrinkle in Time,” which is a whole different discipline, prepared me for this film. I felt really in the pocket. There was nothing on set that was like, “I don’t know how to do this scene,” or, “I don’t know what’s next.” It was, “I got this,” which was an overwhelmingly fulfilling experience.I felt like, if tomorrow I decided I just was going to be a painter or, I don’t know, go back to being a publicist, I could, because making this movie was so satisfying. In the past, I would finish a movie and feel like, “I hope they like it!” But this time was different. I think a lot of that feeling comes from using their money — the Hollywood machine. This was made outside of the machine, and it felt very free and very liberating. More

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      ‘June’ Review: More Than Johnny Cash’s Wife

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      A new documentary by Kristen Vaurio details the life and career of the singer-songwriter, who was a member of country music royalty.The singer June Carter Cash was born in 1929 into the Carter Family, an influential early country music group, and toured with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. She married Johnny Cash in 1968 and became part of his touring show. She also wrote, with Merle Kilgore, of one of Cash’s greatest hits, “Ring of Fire.”Despite her contributions to music, her solo endeavor in 1999, “Press On,” elicited little interest from the major labels, but the album went on to win a Grammy regardless. Archival footage of its making anchors the new documentary “June,” directed by Kristen Vaurio.The phrase that gave that album its title, “Press On,” is a neat encapsulation of June’s life philosophy. Her love story with Cash, and her perseverance as he battled addictions, is one of the most renowned in the annals of 20th-century celebrity.“I thank God for people like her who still thought I had a little good in me,” Cash said in an archival interview. And John Carter Cash, the sole child of June and Johnny, says of the love his parents shared: “To get a window on that strength and beauty we have but to listen” to their music.The critic Robert Christgau once characterized Carter Cash, who died in 2003, as “that rare thing, an interesting saint: fiery, feisty, creative, proactive.” Contemporary interviews here with the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Carter Cash’s stepdaughter Rosanne Cash and Carter Cash’s daughter Carlene Carter, expand on her gifts, both musical and maternal.The bare facts of Carter Cash’s story are such that the filmmakers would have had to really mess up to not produce a movie that entertains and moves a viewer to tears. “June,” rest assured, does the job well.JuneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Lawsuit Claims James Dolan Pressured Woman Into Sex

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      In the court filing, the woman also says Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted her in a 2014 encounter that she believes was set up by Mr. Dolan. Both men denied her accusations.A woman filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday accusing James L. Dolan, the entertainment and sports mogul behind Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks, of pressuring her into unwanted sex and then coordinating an encounter with Harvey Weinstein, whom she accused of sexually assaulting her.The woman, Kellye Croft, says in the court filing that she told Mr. Dolan — a former friend and business associate of Mr. Weinstein’s — about the alleged incident after it occurred in early 2014, years before Mr. Dolan made public statements that he had been unaware of Mr. Weinstein’s history of misconduct.In her suit, filed in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, Ms. Croft says that in late 2013, when she was 27, she was hired to work as a massage therapist on a tour by the classic rock band Eagles. Mr. Dolan — who moonlights as a blues-rock musician — was an opening act with his band JD & the Straight Shot.In court papers, Ms. Croft describes the experience as a dream gig that went awry because of the misconduct of two men who were among the most powerful figures in media and entertainment. First, Ms. Croft’s suit says, she was pressured into unwanted sex with Mr. Dolan, and then found herself alone in a Beverly Hills hotel room with Mr. Weinstein, who chased her down a hallway, held her down and penetrated her against her will.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Critics Choice Awards Winners 2024: See the Full List

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      “The Holdovers” wins early trophies. Going into the night, “Barbie,” with 18 nominations, led the field. Its closest rivals, with 13 apiece, were “Oppenheimer” and “Poor Things.”Stars from “The Holdovers” were early were early winners in the Critics Choice Awards on Sunday. Da’Vine Joy Randolph won best supporting actress and Dominic Sessa won the newcomer award. Going into the evening, “Barbie,” packed with a cast of household names and filled with hit songs, had by far the most nominations — 18, far ahead of its rival all season, “Oppenheimer,” and “Poor Things,” with 13 each. “Killers of the Flower Moon” also made a strong showing, with a dozen nominations.Whether multiple nominations will translate into wins remains to be seen. The ceremony is being broadcast on the CW with Chelsea Handler as the host. We’ll be updating the winners’ list all evening long.FilmBest Supporting ActorRobert Downey Jr., “Oppenheimer”Best Supporting ActressDa’Vine Joy Randolph, “The Holdovers”Best Young Actor or ActressDominic Sessa, “The Holdovers”Best Animated Feature“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”TelevisionBest Supporting Actor, Drama SeriesBilly Crudup, “The Morning Show”Best Supporting Actress, Drama SeriesElizabeth Debicki, “The Crown”Best Supporting Actor, Limited Series or TV MovieJonathan Bailey, “Fellow Travelers”Best Supporting Actress, Limited Series or TV MovieMaria Bello, “Beef” More

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      ‘Mean Girls’ and the New (Home-Schooled) Kid in Class

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      As our critic knows, missing out on the shared experience of school is deeply strange. It’s something Hollywood rarely acknowledges, except in these films.The original 2004 movie “Mean Girls” contained something unusual, both then and now: a main character who was home-schooled. But not that kind of home-schooled.“I know what you’re thinking,” Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) tells us in voice-over. “Home-schooled kids are freaks.” The movie cuts to a tiny bespectacled girl spelling “xylocarp” at the National Spelling Bee. “Or that we’re weirdly religious or something,” Cady continues. A family of boys in suspenders appears; behind them are sandbags displaying paper targets with human outlines. “And on the third day,” one of the boys drawls, “God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.”“Amen,” his brothers chime in.It was a funny bit no matter who you were back in 2004, dependent on Bush-era perceptions of home-schoolers as, well, weirdly religious, survivalist freaks who insisted that God made the world in six days around 6,000 years ago. Like everything in “Mean Girls” — and, indeed, Tina Fey’s entire body of work — it was an exaggerated caricature based on a kernel of truth. Home-schooling in the 1990s, at least in the United States, was largely insular, and mostly the purview of conservative evangelical Christians with views that could appear extreme even to others in the same pew.I was a junior in college when “Mean Girls” first hit theaters, and the joke tickled me because I’d spent the last few years trying to figure out hierarchies myself: I’d been home-schooled, just like Cady.Well, not just like Cady. I left my private school after the fifth grade to be home-schooled, and a number of the communities my family dipped into along the way were similar to the gun-toting, dinosaur-loving kids from the movie. (The first time I really felt like my youth was represented onscreen was last year’s documentary series “Shiny Happy People.”) I went to seminars where we were taught that dinosaurs did roam the earth at the same time as humans, that the fossil record was designed by God to mess with scientists, and a whole lot of other things.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Mean Girls’ Costume Designer Talks Cast Wardrobe and Addresses Critics

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      Some people have roasted the outfits in the new film, but there were reasons the Plastics got a Gen Z spin. (Among them: social media, fast fashion and the pandemic.)When fans first glimpsed outfits in the new adaptation of “Mean Girls,” they were not shy with feedback on the film’s pink miniskirts and mesh bustiers.On social media, some said the costumes looked cheap, as if they had come from fast-fashion retailers. Others said they did not lean heavily enough on the Y2K style of the original “Mean Girls,” released in 2004. And one online commentator said the costumes seemed like an A.I. image generator’s clumsy response to the prompt: “What do trendy teenagers wear today?”The wardrobes for the film, which was released on Jan. 12, were not created by artificial intelligence but by Tom Broecker, the costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” where he has worked for nearly 30 years. Mr. Broecker, 61, had no involvement in the original “Mean Girls.” He joined the crew of the adaptation after working with Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels — who were involved in both films — on costumes for “S.N.L.” and for “30 Rock.”Mr. Broecker said the criticism of his work had made him “super, super, super anxious” for the new film’s release. His goal was to reference — but not redo — the wardrobes from the original movie, which were created by the costume designer Mary Jane Fort, by imagining how its high-school-age characters might dress as members of Gen Z.He cited the “sexy Santa” costumes for a holiday talent show scene in both films as an example. In the adaptation, those outfits were influenced by Ariana Grande’s music video for the song “thank u, next,” he said, so he made them a little more sparkly than the plasticky red skirts in the original.More than 600 looks were created for the adaptation by Mr. Broecker and his six-person design team. In the edited interview below, he explains how they came up with the wardrobe — which, he said, should not be judged by trailers and teasers alone.“You’re only getting the bread crumbs,” he said, “when you really want to have the whole 10-course meal.”What did you think of the costuming in the original film?When I saw it then, I thought, This is fun, this is high school in 2004. Watching it now, I go, Oh my God, those poor girls were so sexualized. But that’s 2024 eyes looking at 2004. I know they didn’t feel that way at all, but you look at it now and realize that the world has changed.Where did you look to find inspiration for how Gen Z is dressing?We were very influenced by Instagram and TikTok, and by celebrities like Billie Eilish, Jenna Ortega and Sydney Sweeney. I have a niece who graduated from high school in Indiana last year. I looked through her closet and her Instagram. And I live near N.Y.U., so packs of students walk by my apartment all the time in light-wash, straight-leg jeans, white Nike sneakers and crop tops.What did those references reveal about how people dress now?The early aughts are very influential in the visual landscape of clothing right now. Sometimes I would show Tina certain things and she’d say, Oh my God, I think I wore that before.Other things have changed. Gender fluidity is a big thing for kids. And everyone wants to be comfortable, especially after the pandemic. So I dressed the high schoolers in the movie in athleisure, like North Face, Patagonia and Champion hoodies.Fast fashion has changed how young people shop. How much of that did you include?Probably more than we should have. Two brands we used were Cider and Princess Polly. I stayed away from Shein, but I did find a piece or two secondhand.I kept saying that we have to get into the mind of a high-school student, and that’s how they shop. The directors got rid of a mall scene that was in the original because kids don’t go to the mall anymore.After visuals from the new film were released showing Regina, center, in Isabel Marant trousers and a Bardot mesh corset top, some fans moaned that the film’s costumes looked like A.I.’s idea of how trendy teens dress.JoJo Whilden/Paramount PicturesHow did you differentiate costumes for the Plastics — the three popular girls — from those for the students they reign over?Everyone in the high school has big bags and sneakers, except for the Plastics, who have little purses and heels. They are different than the people who are weighed down by their books and grounded to the floor with their shoes.Did you spend more of your budget on clothes for the Plastics?Basically the Plastics got all the money. For Regina George (Reneé Rapp), we did Isabel Marant, streetwear like Off-White and a lot of vintage stuff. Tom-Ford-era 1990s Gucci was the inspiration for her homecoming dress.Regina’s black homecoming dress with a front leg slit was inspired by clothes Tom Ford designed for Gucci in the 1990s, a decade that has influenced Gen Z style.Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesWhy do you think people have reacted so strongly to the costumes in the adaptation?I didn’t realize the nostalgia for the original. It’s hard to have something stand on its own when something exists that people love. But this is not that, and 2024 is not 2004. We have changed how we feel about a lot of things. As the tagline says, this isn’t your mom’s “Mean Girls.” More