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    ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Is Big Winner at the Oscars

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    In the late 1960s, young cineastes shook up a moribund film industry by delivering idiosyncratic, startlingly original work. The moment became known as New Hollywood.When film historians look back at the 95th Academy Awards, they may mark it as the start of a new New Hollywood. Voters honored A24’s head-twisting, sex toy-brandishing, TikTok-era “Everything Everywhere All at Once” with the Oscar for best picture — along with six other awards — while naming Netflix’s German-language war epic “All Quiet on the Western Front” the winner in four categories, including best international film.The Daniels, the young filmmaking duo behind the racially diverse “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” won Oscars for their original screenplay and directing. (The Daniels is an oh-so-cool sobriquet for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. They are both 35.) The film, which received a field-leading 11 nominations, also won Oscars for film editing, best actress and best supporting actor and actress, with Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis honored for their performances.“Ladies, don’t let anybody ever tell you that you are ever past your prime,” Yeoh, 60, said when accepting the best actress Oscar. “Never give up.” She was the first Asian woman to receive the award.Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2023Quan’s win provided the Academy Awards with a hall-of-fame comeback story: After early success in movies like “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” his acting career grew so cold that he turned to stunt work. “Dreams are something you have to believe in,” Quan said as tears streamed down his face and A-list attendees gave him a standing ovation. “I almost gave up on mine. To everyone out there, please keep your dreams alive.”Curtis was also in tears by the time she reached the fiery conclusion of her acceptance speech. “To all of the people who have supported the genre movies that I have made for all these years,” she said, “the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people, we just won an Oscar together!”Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2023The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences spread nominations remarkably far and wide this year. Two blockbuster sequels, “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” made the best picture cut. So did the little-seen art films “Triangle of Sadness,” “Women Talking” and “Tár.” Voters also made room for a musical (“Elvis”) and a memory piece (“The Fabelmans”). In some ways, spreading nominations widely reflected the jumbled state of Hollywood. No one in the movie capital seems to know which end is up, with streaming services like Netflix hot then not, and studios unsure about how many films to release in theaters and whether anything but superheroes, sequels and horror stories can succeed. Over the weekend, “Scream VI” was the top movie at the North American box office, with an estimated $44.5 million in ticket sales.First-time nominees filled 16 of the 20 acting slots, with new stars like Austin Butler (“Elvis”), Barry Keoghan (“The Banshees of Inisherin”), Brian Tyree Henry (“Causeway”), Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”) and Stephanie Hsu (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) honored for breakthrough roles.But first-time acting nominations also went to Hollywood stalwarts like Curtis, Yeoh and Brendan Fraser. To some degree, the inclusion of Quan, Curtis, Fraser and Yeoh was seen as redemption for Hollywood: All had somehow been cast to the side at some point over their careers.An overcome Fraser, who won the Oscar for best actor for his performance as an obese professor in “The Whale,” thanked Darren Aronofsky, the film’s director, “for throwing me a creative lifeline.”Clip Courtesy A.M.P.A.S.© 2023The academy was also trying to balance old and new in the Oscars ceremony itself. The academy’s chief executive had promised a return to the polished, glamorous Oscar ceremonies of the past to recover from last year’s chaotic telecast, when an angry Will Smith walked onstage and slapped Chris Rock. In a change from last year, when eight categories were scuttled to a nontelevised portion, all 23 Oscars were handed out live on air.As host, Jimmy Kimmel arrived on the Oscars stage by parachute, moments after a pair of “Top Gun”-style fighter jets flew over the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles at 345 miles per hour. He then breezed through a self-assured monologue that left the A-listers seated before him cheering in support. He teased Steven Spielberg — gently — for his lack of recreational drug use and Fraser and Quan for once appearing together in “Encino Man.” It was the kind of affable ribbing that once made Billy Crystal the king of the Oscar M.C.’s.The host Jimmy Kimmel arrived on the stage via parachute and breezed through his monologue.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“And if any of you get offended by a joke and decide you want to come up here and get jiggy with it? It’s not going to be easy,” Kimmel said, addressing last year’s slap without directly mentioning Smith. He then joked that people like Michael B. Jordan, the “Creed” star, and Pedro Pascal, who plays the title role in “The Mandalorian,” were prepared to intervene.“Seriously, the academy has a crisis team in place,” Kimmel said. “If anything unpredictable or violent happens during the ceremony, just do what you did last year — nothing. Maybe even give the assailant a hug.”As expected, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” received the Oscar for best animated feature, and “Navalny” was honored as best documentary. Less anticipated was Ruth Carter’s win for her “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” costume design. (Most awards handicappers had predicted victory for the “Elvis” costume designer Catherine Martin. Carter also won for “Black Panther” in 2019.)The #OscarsSoWhite outcries from 2015 and 2016, prompted by all-white slates of acting nominees, continue to reverberate at the academy, which has been trying to diversify its membership by race, gender and nationality. Nearly 50 percent of the academy’s most recent class of new members came from overseas. About 25 percent of the academy’s total membership of 10,000 now comes from outside the United States.But the academy was criticized this year for not nominating any women in the best director category. For decades, women and people of color were almost entirely excluded from the directing race. In 2021, for the first time, two women were nominated: Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) and Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”), with Zhao winning. Last year, Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) won the Oscar for directing.This year, Sarah Polley (“Women Talking”) was left out even though her film was nominated for best picture. (Polley won for her adapted screenplay.) “I give up,” Patty Jenkins, whose directing credits include “Wonder Woman” and “Monster,” told Variety on Saturday about women being shut out of the category. “It’s still going to take a long ways to go. It’s going to take a lot more to really see truly more diverse awards.”The internationalization of the academy was on display among this year’s directing nominees. The Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”) and the British-born Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) were honored. Joining them were Todd Field (Tár) and the Daniels. Filling out the best director category was Spielberg — a director who was once part of that New Hollywood crew and is now a Hollywood elder statesman with nine total nominations for directing, this one for “The Fabelmans.”The academy emphasized that the ceremony would feel modern — part of an urgent effort to make the telecast more relevant to young people. The 2022 show drew 16.6 million viewers, the second-worst turnout on record after the pandemic-affected 2021 telecast. If the Nielsen ratings do not improve, the academy faces a financial precipice: Most of its revenue comes from the sale of broadcasting rights to the show. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. (The most-viewed Oscars telecast was in 1998, when 57.2 million people watched “Titanic” win the trophy for best picture.)Rihanna performed her nominated song from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Todd Heisler/The New York TimesBig musical stars, including Rihanna and Lady Gaga, sang their nominated songs; Lenny Kravitz performed during the “In Memoriam” segment. The best song Oscar went to “Naatu Naatu” from the Indian film “RRR.” The nominee pool for best picture had never before included more than one billion-dollar ticket seller, according to box office databases, and this year there were two. “Top Gun: Maverick” collected $1.5 billion, and “Avatar: The Way of Water” took in $2.3 billion. (Viewership tends to increase when popular films are nominated.)In another change, the red carpet was not red: Stars walked a champagne-colored rug, breaking with a 62-year tradition. The choice was made as part of an overhaul of the preshow spectacle, which, for the first time, was managed by members of the Met Gala’s creative team. In the days leading up to the Oscars, another in a series of rainstorms soaked Los Angeles, so much so that the academy sent an alert to the news media on Wednesday warning that it may “need to clear the carpet at a moment’s notice.” In the end, the weather cooperated, and it was a sunny 63 degrees. More

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      Inside the ‘Blood Sport’ of Oscars Campaigns

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      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Depending on how closely you’ve been following the Oscars race this year, you may or may not know the name Andrea Riseborough. Before Jan. 24, few outside of the film industry did. An actress from northeastern England, Riseborough began her career in​ theater and has worked steadily since. At 41, she has appeared in more than 30 films, including “Birdman,” “Battle of the Sexes” and “The Death of Stalin.” People like to say that the only reason she isn’t famous is that she inhabits roles so completely, she becomes unrecognizable. But on Tuesday, Jan. 24, Riseborough was nominated for a best-actress Oscar alongside Cate Blanchett, Michelle Williams, Ana de Armas and Michelle Yeoh. No one predicted Riseborough’s nomination. She did not appear on pundits’ shortlists. There were no profiles of her in glossy magazines. “To Leslie,” the film about an alcoholic West Texas lottery winner for which she was nominated, had earned just $27,322 at the box office.Within 24 hours, the reaction to Riseborough’s nomination went from surprise to scrutiny to backlash. It turned out that a small army of movie stars had championed Riseborough. Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Paulson and Gwyneth Paltrow hosted screenings. Others praised Riseborough’s performance on social media and beyond, including Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Patricia Clarkson, Pedro Pascal, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bradley Whitford, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Kate Winslet, Alan Cumming, Rosanna Arquette and even Blanchett. The campaign was described as organic and grass roots, but some celebrities had posted suspiciously identical language, describing “To Leslie” as “a small film with a giant heart.” That Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) were not nominated despite predictions to the contrary made it look as if a bunch of actors campaigned on behalf of a white actress, leading to the exclusion of Black actresses.Andrea Riseborough in “To Leslie.”Momentum PicturesThe Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscars’ governing body, opened an investigation. Oscar campaign regulations forbid direct lobbying, and it turned out that some of Riseborough’s supporters, including Mary McCormack, who is married to Michael Morris, the director of “To Leslie,” had encouraged academy members to watch the film and publicly endorse Riseborough’s performance. Cynthia Swartz, an awards strategist working on films including “Tár,” “Elvis,” “Women Talking,” “Till” and “Avatar: The Way of Water,” told me the campaign inspired her to look up the definition of lobbying, which is not comprehensively defined in the academy’s campaign regulations. “I don’t believe academy members should be posting about how they’re going to vote,” Swartz said, “or urging others to vote in a certain way.” Tony Angellotti, a consultant on “The Fabelmans,” put it less mildly. “There are very specific rules about direct outreach,” he said. “Clearly, here, those rules were broken.” Neither the director nor his wife are members of the academy. But consultants I spoke to said it didn’t matter. A couple joked that it was a little like the Jan. 6 insurrection: President Donald Trump may not have personally stormed the Capitol, but he encouraged others to do so.In February, the academy announced that Riseborough’s nomination would stand, promising to clarify its regulations after the awards. But the controversy reminded everyone of the reality of the Oscars: that despite the big show of sealed envelopes being delivered via handcuffed briefcases, the votes — in Hollywood as in Washington, D.C. — are a result of a highly contingent, political process, handed down not from movie gods but from the very people who stand to benefit from it. “To say that Andrea Riseborough took a nomination away from Viola and Danielle, you cannot have this conversation without having the whole conversation,” said a campaign strategist with a film in the race. “You have to look at: ‘OK, well, what money was spent on the other campaigns? And who’s spending it?’ This is just the tip of the iceberg.”Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. Sometimes several strategists work on a single film, and the war room of an Oscars campaign can grow to be as many as 10 or 20 people. All the stops along the campaign trail — screenings, events, other award shows — are an opportunity to workshop talking points and gauge the competition. And unlike the Golden Globes, which are voted on by 199 entertainment journalists, the Oscars electorate is a voting body of about 10,000 industry peers, which is nearly double what it was before the #OscarsSoWhite controversy that began in 2015.The Oscars race is split into Phases 1 and 2: before and after the nominations, which is akin to the divide between the presidential primaries and the general election. “Phase 2 is all about honing your narrative and defining yourself in the race,” Lea Yardum, who is working with a couple best-picture nominees this year, told me. “Some narratives form themselves but others are — I don’t want to say crafted by us, but they form themselves and we amplify them.”Think about everything you know about this year’s Oscar nominees and, chances are, it was proliferated by an awards consultant. “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the movie business with its nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is the exuberant sci-fi romp that created some much-needed opportunities for Asian American actors. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is the biggest antiwar film ever (despite still technically being a war film). Vote for “The Fabelmans” if you love Spielberg and the movies and “Tár” if you want to go with the unanimous critics’ pick.“Every year, everyone goes into a campaign armed with statistics — oh, the statistics!” Yardum told me. An Asian actress has never been up for an Oscar, so vote for Michelle Yeoh: It’s her time. Did you know Jamie Lee Curtis has never been nominated? She’s due. Spielberg hasn’t won a best picture Oscar since 1994. Is it helpful to know what gas prices were the last time he won? (A strategist has that handy: $1.11 a gallon!) Narratives don’t always work, but a good narrative can triumph over a bad movie. Just consider the moving comeback of Brendan Fraser, who was nominated for his performance in “The Whale,” a movie that was panned by critics.Negative narratives are usually attributed to the diabolical workings of rival strategists: the stories about abusive directors, overblown budgets, whether the real people behind biopics should really be celebrated. (See: “A Beautiful Mind.”) “They try to change someone else’s narrative by adding dirt to the layer,” Angellotti told me, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t really write “Good Will Hunting.” A more recent example that strategists still talk about is when “Green Book” was up for best picture in 2019. The week the nomination ballots went out, a story resurfaced about the director of the movie, Peter Farrelly, and a joke he used to play 20 years earlier that involved exposing himself. (Farrelly apologized the same day.) The film still won, but many believe another best-picture campaign planted the story.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Everyone in the industry insists that negative campaigning has become less prevalent than it used to be. And yet when a veteran strategist with a client in the race told me how opportunistic it was for the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cast to visit the site of the Monterey Park shooting on the eve of the nomination announcements, I’m pretty sure I got to experience it firsthand. “Do they not know the shooter is Asian?” the strategist asked. “It’s not a racially motivated crime.”For those paying attention to this year’s narratives, it was not a mystery where the backlash to Riseborough’s nomination was coming from; or the backlash to the backlash, articulated by Christina Ricci (represented by the same public-relations firm as Riseborough) in a now-deleted Instagram post. “Seems hilarious that the ‘surprise nomination’ (meaning tons of money wasn’t spent to position this actress) of a legitimately brilliant performance is being met with an investigation,” Ricci wrote. “So it’s only the films and actors that can afford the campaigns that deserve recognition?” Suddenly, being backed by a studio had become a negative narrative of its own. Many awards consultants spoke to me on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to face repercussions from their studio bosses. Others didn’t want to be seen as taking credit. “We prefer to be invisible,” a strategist working on several films this year told me. And yet here they were, seemingly sparring out in the open.Oscars campaigning has been around as long as there have been Oscars, but the modern playbook was invented by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Weinstein popularized the practice of sending out VHS screeners, demanded that actors clear their schedules for awards season and relentlessly lobbied academy members. Studios generally held their noses at aggressive campaigning, but Weinstein, unable to compete with their budgets, wasn’t above a shameless publicity stunt.For “My Left Foot,” one of his first Oscar campaigns, he got Daniel Day-Lewis to go to Capitol Hill to speak with lawmakers about the Americans With Disabilities Act. For “Il Postino,” a 1994 Italian-language film about a mailman who befriends the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he persuaded more than a dozen celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson and Madonna — none of whom appeared in the film — to record poetry readings for the film’s soundtrack. “The thing that’s horrible when you think about it is Harvey was really persistent,” said Cynthia Swartz, who helped run Miramax’s awards campaigns for more than 10 years. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer from a celebrity to do a poetry reading or wear a Marchesa dress. Knowing what we know now, it’s chilling and frankly scary to think how far that that behavior extended. He was always asking celebrities for things and being extremely aggressive about it.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Weinstein was widely rumored to wage whisper campaigns against his competitors. The last time Spielberg won a best-director Oscar was in 1999 for “Saving Private Ryan,” which lost an epic behind-the-scenes battle for best picture to Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love.” “For Harvey, campaigning was a blood sport, and I don’t think it had ever been a blood sport before,” Terry Press, who was then Spielberg’s head of marketing at DreamWorks, told me. “Everybody wants to win. But Harvey wanted to win and kill everything else.” Many of the top consultants working today came out of the Miramax school, including Swartz, Angellotti and Lisa Taback, who went in-house at Netflix in 2018.‘Everybody hates Harvey, and he’s in jail, and he should be. He’s a criminal and he raped people. But people liked his results, and they still want them.’A number of regulations that the academy has issued since then to police campaigning have been in response to tactics pioneered by Weinstein. Today campaigners can reach out to academy voters only via approved mailing houses, and only once a week, and if a reception accompanies a screening it may only provide “nonexcessive food and beverage.” In Phase 2, no food or drink is allowed at all, including water. “I think the academy is full of it sometimes with this stuff,” a strategist with several films in the race told me. “You know, people have jobs. If you want them to see a movie at 7 p.m., and they’re coming from work, give them some popcorn and a water, my God! What are you trying to prove? I’m of the opinion that you could buy someone the most expensive lobster dinner and it is not going to change the way they vote. The only thing it might do is entice them to come see the movie — maybe.”The campaign industry that exists today has grown with and around the rules. With mailed screeners no longer permitted, films are typically uploaded to the academy’s online screening room at a cost of $20,000. Because campaigners can’t contact academy members directly, they try to reach them other ways, such as with $90,000 cover ads in the trades and paid email blasts through the guilds. Then there are the endless screenings, live score performances, dinners, trade round tables, precursor awards and special magazine issues — this publication also does one — all a part of a symbiotic ecosystem that is fed by the awards business.Once streaming platforms entered the arena and the best-picture category grew to 10 films, the campaign business expanded. Whereas a major studio might spend anywhere from $5 million to $25 million on an Oscars campaign, Netflix was estimated to deploy upward of $40 million on “Roma” in 2019, more than double the film’s production budget. The following year, Netflix spent a reported $70 million on its Oscar campaigns, which included “Marriage Story” and “The Irishman.” (A Netflix representative described those estimates as inaccurate.) Sometimes campaign spending has less to do with securing nominations than awards-hungry talent. “When there’s a race for the biggest names in the business, part of that is, ‘How are you going to support my film?’” an awards consultant told me. All of this is further reinforced by financial incentives. A nomination means that an actor’s or director’s fee goes up considerably. And the awards consultants who deliver those nominations get bonuses: upward of $25,000 for a best-picture nomination; another $50,000 for a win.“Winning awards has become the guiding principle of our industry, and it’s what’s destroying it,” Amanda Lundberg, the chief executive of 42West, which is working on the “Top Gun: Maverick” campaign, told me. (The publicity firm also consulted on “To Leslie” until December, when another firm took it over.) “It’s gotten to a place where every single filmmaker thinks their movie is an award contender.” Last year, Lundberg had a meeting with a filmmaker who wanted to discuss a best-picture campaign but hadn’t yet shown Lundberg the actual film. “It’s like we’re award fetchers,” she said. “Like you can just order that with me as if I’m 1-800-Oscar.”Lundberg worked for Miramax, starting in 1988 and again beginning in 2002. Despite all the new academy regulations, Lundberg believes the appetite for Weinstein’s tactics is as insatiable as ever. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Everybody hates Harvey, and he’s in jail, and he should be. He’s a criminal and he raped people. But people liked his results, and they still want them.” Lundberg continued: “People are desperate to win awards. And we’ve guided it here because we’ve rewarded it with money and prestige. So what happens when people want something that’s limited? Do the math. It causes all sorts of behavior, and people lose where the line is.”Riseborough may not have secured her nomination if it weren’t for the complex math behind how nominations are tabulated. In Phase 2, Oscar winners are voted on by the entire academy. But in Phase 1, with the exception of best picture, they’re selected by their peers — i.e., actors nominate actors, directors nominate directors and so on. Members of the acting branch list their top five choices in order of preference, but not all of them vote. In other words, you don’t need the whole academy to like you; only actors, and only a small fraction of them.Much of the criticism leveled at the Riseborough campaign has been about how strategic it seemed despite being described as organic. McCormack encouraged her social circle to post about the film daily, a directive that the actress Frances Fisher — she played Kate Winslet’s mother in “Titanic” — seemingly took to heart. She posted about Riseborough almost every day during the week of nominations voting. “Hello actors branch of the academy!” Fisher wrote on Instagram, addressing the voters directly. In another post, Fisher broke down the math of just how few of their votes it would take to get Riseborough nominated, citing a story in Deadline Hollywood: “#AndreaRiseborough can secure an #Oscar nomination if 218 (out 1,302) actors in the Actors Branch nominate her in 1st position for #BestActress.” (The academy disputes the accuracy of those numbers; Fisher declined to comment.) And though campaign regulations forbid mentioning competitors by name, Fisher urged the acting branch to choose Riseborough, because it “seems to be that Viola, Michelle, Danielle & Cate are a lock for their outstanding work.”A best-actress campaign can run to $5 million. There is no question that the distributor of “To Leslie,” Momentum Pictures, did not spend that. The movie itself was made for less, and Riseborough and Michael Morris helped pay for the campaign themselves. Still, P.R. firms were hired. A social-media campaign was organized. And several people worked their phones to drum up support, including McCormack and McCormack’s and Riseborough’s manager, Jason Weinberg, whose roster of clients includes some of the movie stars who endorsed the actress. “Hand-to-hand combat,” as this style of campaigning is known, is not unheard of. Everybody does it, consultants told me, but they’re usually less overt about it. “You know, it wasn’t just, ‘We’re the little engine that could,’” a seasoned strategist with a few clients in the race told me. “It was more than that.”The thing with actors is they tend to like a certain kind of performance — big, physical and full of interesting “choices,” all of which Riseborough’s is. (Kate Winslet called it the greatest performance by a female actor she had ever seen.) The actors who campaigned for Riseborough probably believed they were simply championing an overlooked and worthy performer. Is it possible that some didn’t know they were violating regulations? Of course it’s possible. Have you seen what happens when actors come together for a cause? It can be clueless, but it is usually well intentioned. (See Gal Gadot’s “Imagine” video from the early days of the pandemic.) But in the process, they circumvented the vast Oscar machinery that has arisen since those early Miramax days.The academy’s regulations are a bit like the Talmud: maddeningly specific in certain places — mailings about a film may include only “an unembellished, creditless synopsis” — and vague in others. There’s even a clause that basically says, Mind the spirit of these rules, as they apply to things we haven’t even thought of yet. Every year campaign strategists call the academy, asking if certain things are OK, such as menus and party invitations. If anyone with a good Rolodex could bypass this system, then what is the point of the Oscar consultants hired to navigate it?But it also seemed to open a larger question of who the true underdog is in an Oscars race. Is it the actress without a studio or millions of dollars behind her, or the one with studio support and fewer connections? Gina Prince-Bythewood, the director of “The Woman King,” a blockbuster released by Sony, argued the latter in The Hollywood Reporter, addressing Riseborough’s nomination directly. “My issue with what happened is how people in the industry use their social capital,” she said, adding, “people say, ‘Well, Viola and Danielle had studios behind them.’ But we just very clearly saw that social capital is more valuable.” Perhaps, but surely starring in a $50 million critically acclaimed studio film is valuable too and is the entire reason that those working in obscurity make a play for an Oscar. At the end of the day, the campaign game is about finding the most compelling narrative, one that inspires people to root for you.The academy most likely upheld Riseborough’s nomination because she didn’t personally violate campaign rules. But few expected the ruling to go any other way. Penalizing those involved with the campaign would mean a move against Hollywood’s biggest names, whom the academy needs to star in their movies and show up to the awards. “This town doesn’t move without actors,” one veteran strategist told me. “If they came down on this campaign, well, that’s an indictment of Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton. But the truth is, if I did it, I would be in academy jail.”It is worth remembering that the Academy Awards were created as a marketing device to entice people to see movies and, like football, used to air on Monday nights to boost ratings. “This is not the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lundberg told me. That doesn’t necessarily stop some Oscar winners from acting as if it is. At best, a nomination can extend the theatrical release of a film and drive more people to watch it long after it has left theaters. But it is just that: an ad created by a professional organization to sell you on movies even if — and especially as — their quality is in evident decline. “Every year, everyone talks about what a magnificent year this has been for movies,” Angellotti told me, “and the public is going, ‘Really?’”Many of the films nominated this year are a product of the Covid years. Spielberg wouldn’t have made “The Fabelmans” if he wasn’t stuck at home, contemplating mortality and wondering which stories he hadn’t told yet. (The answer turned out to be his own.) “Everything Everywhere All at Once” had to shut down production early and film Yeoh over Zoom, which is also how Blanchett learned to conduct for “Tár.” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” filmed on remote islands with a small cast, was an especially pandemic-friendly production. Movie theaters, meanwhile, have closed faster than audiences could keep track of, and 2022 box-office numbers fell short of the year’s meager predictions. (Theatrical attendance has shrunk by half in the last four years.) All of this is a reason to ask just how much Oscars drama, this year or any other, is manufactured by the very people whose job it is to get us to watch. The Riseborough controversy, though unpleasant for those involved, has ultimately led to many more people seeing “To Leslie.” (Momentum Pictures re-released the film in select theaters.)Looking ahead, some wondered if the only way to save the movie business from itself is to go back to the innocent pre-Miramax days of more restrained Oscar campaigns. If running a rule-abiding campaign can’t be done without millions of dollars, then the next logical step would be addressing those inequities. But instituting spending caps is a nonstarter, as it would mean big losses for the trades, screening rooms, caterers, consultants, stylists and any other entity that benefits from awards business. “Who’s going to call The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter and say we can’t take out ads anymore?” Angellotti said. “That’s called restriction of trade. I don’t see it as a viable situation.” Not to mention that many Oscar strategists are themselves voting members of the Marketing and Public Relations branch of the academy.This year, Terry Press is once again working with Spielberg, who has a well-documented aversion to Oscar campaigning. She admitted that spending limits were an intriguing if unrealistic idea. “I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face here,” she said, “but I would love to see somebody go all the way and spend nothing on any of this.“Because then,” she added, “it’s really going to be about the movie.”Irina Aleksander is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her last feature article was about Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian filmmaker navigating widespread calls for a boycott of Russian culture. Javier Jaén is an illustrator and a designer based in Barcelona, Spain. He is known for his translation of complex ideas into simple images, often with a playful tone. More

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      A Conductor’s Battle With a Classical Music Gender Barrier

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      Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime fighting sexism and forging a path in a male-dominated profession. Her next targets: pay gaps and age discrimination.This article is part of our Women and Leadership special report that profiles women leading the way on climate, politics, business and more.The baton-waving bully conductor played by Cate Blanchett in “Tár” has earned a series of Oscar nominations and captivated audiences worldwide. That may be, in part, because of her novelty: Until recently, conducting was almost exclusively a male profession.The French conductor Claire Gibault has spent a lifetime battling that gender barrier. In 2019, she co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.“Giving confidence and visibility to the talented women who are emerging as orchestral conductors is a cause La Maestra will continue to champion with commitment and passion,” said a news release inviting contestants for the next competition, in March 2024. The competition, founded with the Philharmonie de Paris, awards prizes of 5,000 to 20,000 euros ($5,300 to $21,400) to finalists who are provided numerous musical opportunities, too. Ms. Gibault also founded the Paris Mozart Orchestra in 2011, one of France’s few female-led orchestras.Born in 1945 and raised in Le Mans in northwestern France, where her father taught music theory at the conservatory, Ms. Gibault was studying violin when she discovered conducting and persuaded the conservatory to teach it.She went on to make classical music history by becoming the first woman to conduct a performance at La Scala in Milan (where she was an assistant to her mentor, the late conductor Claudio Abbado, who was then La Scala’s music director). She also was the first woman to conduct the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.The Run-Up to the 2023 OscarsThe 95th Academy Awards will be presented on March 12 in Los Angeles.Asian Actors: A record number of actors of Asian ancestry were recognized with Oscar nominations this year. But historically, Asian stars have rarely been part of the awards.Hong Chau Interview: In a conversation with The Times, the actress, who is nominated for her supporting role in “The Whale,” says she still feels like an underdog.Andrea Riseborough Controversy: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why the “To Leslie” star’s nod was controversial.The Making of ‘Naatu Naatu’: The composers and choreographer from the Indian blockbuster “RRR” explain how they created the propulsive sequence that is nominated for best song.Ms. Gibault, 77, has been busy and much in the news lately, especially with the Academy Awards on March 12. She discussed her career, her views on “Tár” and sexism in classical music in a phone interview from Paris. The conversation was translated from French, edited and condensed.Why did you decide to set up the La Maestra competition?In 2018, I was the only female jury member of a conducting competition in Mexico. There were such sexist attitudes on the part of certain jurors that I was shocked. One man on the jury even said that women were biologically incapable of being conductors, because their arms were naturally turned outward to hold babies. Whenever a female contestant came up in the competition, this man would cover his face with his jacket, close his eyes and plug his ears. One female finalist who was very musical and very talented received as many votes as a young man to whom the jury gave the first prize. I found that very unfair.The competition in Mexico was a trigger for me. I was furious. When I got back to Paris, I met with a patron, Dominique Senequier, [founder and] president of the private investment company Ardian. I told her that a lot of female talents were invisible, and that it would be interesting to do something for them. She encouraged me to set up a prestigious competition for female conductors and said she would finance it.The International Conductors Competition La Maestra, at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022. The three finalists, with bouquets from left, are Beatriz Fernández Aucejo (3rd Prize, ARTE Prize), Joanna Natalia Ślusarczyk (2nd Prize, French Concert Halls and Orchestras Prize, ECHO Prize) and Anna Sułkowska-Migoń (1st Prize, Generation Opera Prize).Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasWhat impact has the competition had?The impact has been extraordinary. Female conductors are now viewed as a very modern phenomenon. Yet we have to be careful and very vigilant: make sure that it’s not just the young and attractive conductors who are being recruited. There is a flagrant degree of age discrimination in the world of classical music. For that to change, we need more women in management positions.What was your own experience as a young female conductor in a profession with almost no women?Audiences took it very well. The problem was the condescension of colleagues — of certain male conductors and of the male managers and directors of orchestras and cultural institutions. For them it was fine to hire women as long as they were assistant conductors, especially if they were very good assistants. I worked on pieces that the men didn’t want to work on, such as new compositions. I knew that this was a battle I had to wage with a smile, never complaining, never whining. That’s the way it worked.Why did you set up the Paris Mozart Orchestra?In my career, I experienced aggressive behavior on the part of musicians who made my job very hard, orchestras that didn’t want to play at my tempo. It was sometimes very difficult. I wanted to be able to choose the program. And I didn’t want to wait to be chosen.What did you think of the movie “Tár”?I found it disturbing, yet fascinating. What I like about the movie is that it’s a fable about power: how power can transform human beings, be they men or women. It’s like a Greek tragedy.Ms. Gibault co-founded La Maestra, a biennial international competition for female conductors in Paris that draws more than 200 contestants from some 50 countries.Maria Mosconi/Hans LucasDid you feel that it was about you?I don’t think we should be egocentric about it. It’s not because I’m a woman conductor that I felt directly concerned. It’s true that when you’re fighting for the cause of female conductors, it’s disturbing to see a woman who accumulates so many reasons to be hated: who takes advantage of her power, who takes drugs, who flirts with the young women in the orchestra. Of course, if a man behaved in that way, it would be a lot less shocking because we’re used to it.That kind of male behavior in classical music is now being called out. I think it’s high time for that behavior to stop. Not only is there abuse of power and sexual misconduct, but male conductors are also overpaid. That’s unacceptable given the economic crisis that the world of culture is going through.You mean the pay gap between male and female orchestra conductors?Yes, but also the pay gap with the musicians in the orchestra. And this incredible disdain that some male conductors have for the musicians that they’re conducting. We need to revolutionize this world from the inside. We need a different set of values.What do you need to revolutionize?The economics of culture. And the fact that careers are being built on notoriety, so the focus is on boosting people’s fame. There are people who are very famous and who are extraordinary artists, and others who are a little less so. I know extraordinary artists who are not famous at all.So there’s a cult of personality?Yes — for purely economic reasons. More

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      ‘Tár’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      This Year, the Berlin Film Festival Sparkles

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      After two years of pandemic disruptions, the festival returns in full, with Kristen Stewart as the jury president and gems like Celine Song’s “Past Lives.”In February, when the Berlin International Film Festival takes place, the German capital is reliably what meteorologists term “bloody cold.” The overriding fashion aesthetic is puffer jackets, the puffier the better, accessorized with a scarf and a scowl.That might be one reason that, contrary to other major European festivals in Venice or Cannes, the Berlinale, as it’s also known, has never acquired much of a reputation for glamour: One can’t expect too many stars to hazard shoulder-frostbite in red-carpet gowns, especially as Oscar night looms in a couple of weeks.But this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, feels a little different. Call it the trickle-down effect of appointing Kristen Stewart — whose effortless, dressed-down cool and sulky, up-all-night charisma make her very much the Berlin of American movie stars — as the jury president. Or perhaps it’s the result of Steven Spielberg being in town to receive an honorary lifetime achievement award presented by Bono, or the fashionably late arrival of Cate Blanchett, alongside her German co-star Nina Hoss and the director Todd Field, to toast the German premiere of “Tár.”Most probably it’s the rising tide of an unusually strong of lineup — which has scattered high-profile titles among debuts, documentaries and world-cinema darlings — that has lifted all ships. After an online festival in 2021, and a restricted, in-person 2022 edition, the Berlinale Bear has fully emerged from pandemic hibernation ‌‌this year, set to dazzle its attendees, however bulky their outerwear.Kristen Stewart, the jury president for the film festival, on the Berlinale red carpet.Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s a tricky line to walk, including starrier U.S. titles without seeming to be pandering. But not even the snobbiest cinephile could grumble at the selection of the American director Tina Satter’s “Reality,” based on her Off Broadway play “Is This a Room?” and starring a de-glammed, deeply convincing Sydney Sweeney as the whistle-blower Reality Winner. Using dialogue exclusively taken from an F.B.I. transcript, it is a gripping look at the mechanisms of state power brought to bear on an individual; every sniff, every pause and every non sequitur, culled from the original ‌recording, somehow highlight just how unreal reality can be.‌In tension-building, closed-space prowess, that film is matched by Ilker Catak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge,” a thornily unsettling drama of clashing social and generational values set in a German school where a teacher (Leonie Benesch) copes with an outbreak of theft. Then there is Ira Sachs’s excellent, sexy and conflicted “Passages,” starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Such is the strength of the year’s selection that these two excellent films, along with “Reality,” played in the Panorama sidebar, when they could easily have slotted into the competitive sections.Not that the main competition lacks in luster. After premiering at the ‌Sundance ‌Film Festival last month, Celine Song’s shimmeringly soulful debut “Past Lives” provides Berlin with some radiance. Greta Lee plays Nora, a Korean-Canadian playwright living in New York City, like Song herself, who reconnects with her Seoul-based childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) before meeting and marrying an American writer (John Magaro). It sounds like a standard love-triangle setup. In fact, it is anything but, unfurling into a gorgeous, glowing, aching thing that connects with viewers from every conceivable background, so universal are its highly specific observations on love and friendship.Naíma Sentíes in the feature “Tótem,” in which a family gathers to celebrate the birthday of a dying man.LimerenciaIf “Past Lives” doesn’t grab the Golden Bear, the festival’s highest honor for a feature film, my pick would be “Tótem,” the second film from the Mexican director Lila Avilés (“The Chambermaid”), a vibrant child’s-eye portrait of an extended family gathering to celebrate the birthday of a dying man. Blithely ignoring the W.C. Fields adage about never working with children or animals, Avilés manages to corral both, often in the very same shot, delivering deceptively naturalistic performances that plunge us into a young girl’s first experience of the terrible and beautiful coexistence of life and death.The flagship German festival always debuts some outstanding homegrown work. “Afire,” from Christian Petzold, has many of the hallmarks of the celebrated director’s recent work: a woozy edge of ever-so-slight surreality; the transformative deployment of a music track, here “In My Mind” by Wallners, an Austrian band; the actress Paula Beer. But it’s also subtly different from Petzold’s recent titles “Undine” and “Transit,” unfolding largely in a chatty, Rohmerian register. Petzold’s films are many things, but rarely are they as funny as this discursive tale of an insecure writer struggling to finish his book — the press corps’ laughter felt ruefully self-directed — during a beachside getaway with a friend, while forest fires threaten nearby.At the opposite end of the accessibility spectrum, there’s the severe German formalist Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” a beautifully composed but extraordinarily opaque riff on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” It’s the definition of not for everybody, but if you’re the kind of masochist who enjoys the Sisyphean challenge of a movie that refuses to give up all its secrets, no matter how much you mentally wrestle with them, it might be for you.The contrast between those two titles highlights the exciting diversity of this year’s thoughtful curation. One can only applaud a competition selection that includes a fun, true-story, rise-and-fall comedy from Canada (Matt Johnson’s “Blackberry”); a stark, despairing Australian colonial-oppression allegory (Rolf de Heer’s inaptly titled “The Survival of Kindness”); and a Spanish trans-themed coming-of-ager (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s “20,000 Species of Bees”).The competition also featured three pleasantly eccentric Asian titles: Zhang Lu’s “The Shadowless Tower,” a personal favorite; Makoto Shinkai’s wild-ride anime “Suzume”; and Liu Jian’s animated slacker memoir “Art College 1994.” Even the films that did not appeal to me — such as Philippe Garrel’s “The Plough” or Margarethe von Trotta’s “Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey into the Desert” — added something to the overall picture, both representing the old guard of European auteur cinema.Toward the end of a festival I always get a little sentimental — chalk it up to lack of sleep or a surfeit of stories vying for space in my addled brain. But this robust, often sparkling edition of my beloved Berlinale has earned certain indulgences. When I sit in the Berlinale Palast for the last time this weekend, the lovely starburst trailer — my favorite festival ident, a glittering rain of gold briefly coalescing into the outline of a bear — will feel starrier still. More

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      ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Wins Big at the BAFTAs

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      The German-language antiwar movie won best film, best director and five other awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards.Felix Kammerer starred in the antiwar movie “All Quiet on the Western Front,” which won best film at the BAFTAs.Reiner Bajo/Netflix, via Associated PressIn a shock to this year’s awards season, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language movie set in the trenches of World War I, was the big winner at the EE British Academy Film and Television Arts Awards in London on Sunday night.The Netflix movie was named best picture at the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs. The antiwar film beat four higher-profile titles, including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the sci-fi adventure starring Michelle Yeoh, and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about the ending of a friendship on a small island.“All Quiet” also beat Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic and “Tár,” Todd Field’s drama about a conductor accused of sexual harassment. Based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same title, “All Quiet on the Western Front” won six other awards, including best director for Edward Berger, best adapted screenplay and best film not in the English language.During the ceremony, Berger seemed overcome by the wins. While accepting the award for best adapted screenplay, he mentioned the movie’s antiwar message and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.One Indelible Scene: An episode of generational and ideological strife involving Lydia and an earnest student is more complicated, and simpler, than it might seem.“There are no heroes in any war,” he said.Edward Berger won best director for “All Quiet on the Western Front” at the BAFTAs. He mentioned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in his acceptance speech for best adapted screenplay.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“All Quiet” was expected to do well at the awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars. When the BAFTA nominations were announced last month, it secured 14 nods and tied with Ang Lee’s 2000 action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” for the highest number of nominations for a movie not in the English language.British critics raved about the movie upon its release. Danny Leigh wrote in The Financial Times that Berger “expertly handled” the challenge facing any antiwar film: how to stop war from looking glamorous. “Here, dawn quagmires lit by dots of orange flame and troops mad-eyed with animal fear register both as fine cinema and potent fury,” Leigh said.Peter Bradshaw said in The Guardian that “All Quiet” was “a powerful, eloquent, conscientiously impassioned film.”American critics were less effusive. Ben Kenigsberg, writing in The New York Times, said the film “aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality.”The BAFTAs have long been seen as a bellwether for the Oscars, scheduled for March 12, because of an overlap between their voting bodies. “All Quiet” is nominated for nine categories at those awards, including for best film.Steven Spielberg’s award favorite “The Fabelmans” wasn’t nominated for best movie or best director at the BAFTAs; it received one nomination, for best original screenplay.Before “All Quiet” swept the main prizes, this year’s BAFTAs, held at the Royal Festival Hall in London, had a variety of winners, with the major acting gongs being shared by three different films.Cate Blanchett won best actress for playing a conductor in crisis in “Tár.” She beat nominees that included Viola Davis for her performance in “The Woman King,” Danielle Deadwyler for her role as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till,” and Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Accepting the prize, a tearful Blanchett thanked her fellow nominees for “breaking the myth that women’s experience is monolithic.”Cate Blanchett won best actress for playing a conductor in crisis in “Tár.” Henry Nicholls/ReutersAustin Butler won the best actor award for his title role in “Elvis.” Butler last month took the same prize at the Golden Globes and was nominated for best actor at the Oscars.“The Banshees of Inisherin,” one of this award season’s most highly touted movies, did not leave the BAFTAs empty-handed, taking four awards, including best original screenplay, best supporting actor for Barry Keoghan and best supporting actress for Kerry Condon.The ceremony, hosted by Richard E. Grant, was short on drama, though Carey Mulligan, nominated for “She Said,” was accidentally announced as the best supporting actress instead of Condon.The incident occurred when Troy Kotsur, the deaf star of “CODA,” was announcing the category’s winner with an interpreter. The mistake was edited out of the show’s television broadcast in Britain. More

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      ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

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      The German-language movie received 14 nods and will compete for best film against the likes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”“All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language movie set on the battlefields of World War I, emerged on Thursday as the surprise front-runner for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.“All Quiet,” a Netflix-backed movie about the futility of war, secured 14 nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs. Those included best film, where it is up against four higher-profile titles including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a sci-fi adventure starring Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner who traverses universes; and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about two friends who fall out while living on a small island, both of which received a total of 10 nominations.Also competing for the main BAFTA prize is Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic and “Tár,” Todd Field’s drama starring Cate Blanchett as a conductor accused of sexual harassment.On its release in Britain, critics gave the Edward Berger-directed “All Quiet” rave reviews. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times of London, said that the movie was “more visceral, more spectacular and certainly more harrowing” than any previous adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same title. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix,” Mr. Maher added.American critics were less effusive. Ben Kenigsberg, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, said that it “aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.”Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.The 14 nods for “All Quiet” is the highest number of BAFTA nominations for a movie not in the English language, tied with Ang Lee’s 2000 action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” according to BAFTA officials.Michelle Yeoh, left, and Jing Li in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.Allyson Riggs/A24Most of the nominations for “All Quiet” are in technical categories. But Berger also secured a best director nomination. He will compete for that award against the directors of “Banshees of Inisherin” (McDonagh), “Tár”(Field) and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Park Chan-wook, the director of “Decision to Leave,” about a policeman who falls in love with a suspect, also secured a best director nod, as did Gina Prince-Bythewood for “The Woman King,” about the women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Prince-Bythewood is the only female director among the nominees.There was one upset among the best director nominees: Steven Spielberg didn’t get a nod for “The Fabelmans,” his semi-autobiographical tale of a budding filmmaker coping with a fractious home life, which won him best director at last week’s Golden Globes.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, have long been seen as a bellwether for the Oscars because there is overlap between their voting bodies. Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday and “All Quiet on the Western Front” has been tipped as a potential nominee in the best picture category.In recent years, the BAFTA organizers has made efforts to widen the diversity of nominees, including requiring voters to watch a variety of movies before they can make their selections.Last year, that led to several unexpected nominees in the best acting categories, many from low-budget British movies. But there are fewer upsets this year. The best actress nominees include Blanchett for “Tár,” Viola Davis for “The Woman King,” Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Emma Thompson for her role in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” in which she plays a widow who hires a prostitute.They will compete for that prize against Danielle Deadwyler for her role as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” and Ana de Armas for “Blonde,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.The best actor category sees Austin Butler, the Golden Globe-winning star of “Elvis,” up against Colin Farrell, for his role in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” and Brendan Fraser, for his transformation into an obese, grief-stricken writing instructor in “The Whale.” Also nominated are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal, for his role as a young father taking his daughter on holiday in “Aftersun,” Daryl McCormack, for playing the prostitute in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” and Bill Nighy, for “Living,” about a bureaucrat given a life-changing medical diagnosis.Whether the nominations for “All Quiet” translate into trophies will be revealed on Feb. 19, when the BAFTA winners are scheduled to be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. More

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      Producers Guild Awards Nominate Several Blockbusters and Omit Films by Women

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      ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Top Gun: Maverick” made the cut. “The Woman King” and “Women Talking” were snubbed.After a hectic few days of guild nominations and awards shows, the Producers Guild of America announced the 10 nominees for its best feature film award on Thursday, and this list may be the most consequential yet when it comes to predicting the strongest Oscar contenders: Over the last four years, only three movies made it into the Oscars’ best-picture lineup without first being nominated for the PGAs.Here is the producers’ list of feature-film nominees:“Avatar: The Way of Water”“The Banshees of Inisherin”“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”“Elvis”“Everything Everywhere All at Once”“The Fabelmans”“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”“Tár”“Top Gun: Maverick”“The Whale”The producers guild has historically been inclined toward blockbuster product, and this list includes several big-screen success stories, including three of the highest-grossing films of 2022 — “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — and two other box-office hits, “Elvis” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”But the exclusion of epic-scaled projects like the glitzy “Babylon” and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s action drama “The Woman King” may doom those films’ chances at making the Oscars’ best-picture lineup: When academy voters replace a PGA pick with one of their own choices, they typically substitute an indie or international film instead.Another notable snub was the Sarah Polley-directed drama “Women Talking,” which debuted at the fall film festivals with plenty of buzz but has struggled since its theatrical bow during the crowded Christmas holiday. None of the films on the PGA list were directed by women, and if “Women Talking,” “The Woman King” and Charlotte Wells’s acclaimed “Aftersun” fail to make the Oscars best-picture list, it will be the first time the category has excluded female filmmakers in four years.Only three films earned nominations from the producers, directors and actors guild this week: Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” the sci-fi hit “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and the dark feuding-friends comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin.” That trio should be considered the strongest Oscar contenders as voting for the Academy Awards begins Thursday.The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Feb. 25. Here is the rest of the Producers Guild list:FilmAnimated Feature“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”“Minions: The Rise of Gru”“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”“Turning Red”Documentary“All That Breathes”“Descendant”“Fire of Love”“Navalny”“Nothing Compares”“Retrograde”“The Territory”TelevisionEpisodic Drama“Andor”“Better Call Saul”“Ozark”“Severance”“The White Lotus”Episodic Comedy“Abbott Elementary”“Barry”“The Bear”“Hacks”“Only Murders in the Building”Limited Anthology Series“Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”“The Dropout”“Inventing Anna”“Obi-Wan Kenobi”“Pam & Tommy”Television Movie“Fire Island”“Hocus Pocus 2”“Pinocchio”“Prey”“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”Nonfiction Television“30 for 30”“60 Minutes”“George Carlin’s American Dream”“Lucy and Desi”“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy”Live, Variety, Sketch, Standup and Talk Show“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah”“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”“Saturday Night Live”Game and Competition Television“The Amazing Race”“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars”“Top Chef”“The Voice”Sports Program“Formula 1: Drive to Survive”“Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Detroit Lions”“Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers”“McEnroe”“Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Come Off”Children’s Program“Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock”“Green Eggs and Ham”“Sesame Street”“Snoopy Presents: It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown”“Waffles + Mochi’s Restaurant”Short-Form Program“Better Call Saul: Filmmaker Training”“Love, Death + Robots”“Only Murders in the Building: One Killer Question”“Sesame Street’s #ComingTogether Word of the Day Series”“Tales of the Jedi” More

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      Will These Be the 10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees?

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      Now that critics’ laurels and box office results are in, the race for the top honor is clearer. But there’s still room for an outside contender to slip in.Earlier this week, I got a text from a harried colleague. “I’m not ready for Oscar season,” she wrote.I blinked for a second before responding. Ready? This season has been going for months!Of course, I took her point: January ramps things up considerably, since we’re about to get televised awards shows (the Golden Globes on Tuesday followed by the Critics Choice Awards the following Sunday), nominations from the acting, directing and producing guilds, and then the all-important Oscar nominations, which will be announced Jan. 24.But we can already make an educated guess about the titles we’ll hear that day, since your Projectionist has spent the last few months weighing valuable factors like voter buzz, box office battles, laurels from critics groups, below-the-line Oscar shortlists, and influential citations like the Gothams and the American Film Institute Awards. With all that in mind, I’ve arrived at a list of 10 movies that I think currently have the greatest shot at making the best picture lineup.Still, this is an unusual year when even the strongest movies come with significant debits, which means there’s still room for big-budget entertainments (like “Babylon,” “Nope,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), foreign-language films (including “RRR,” “Decision to Leave” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”), and indie films with strong performances (like “The Whale,” “Till,” “She Said” and “Aftersun”) to pull through. At this time last year, “CODA” looked like a middle-of-the-road contender, but a few consequential weeks later, it won enough hearts to clinch the best picture Oscar.So consider these 10 films to merely be the starting lineup, ranked in descending order according to their certainty.Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Allyson Riggs/A24After making a film with sci-fi trappings and outlandish dildo fight scenes, the directors of “Everything Everywhere” never expected it to become an awards-season sensation. Still, if you look under the hood, this movie has everything Oscar voters typically spark to: It’s a critically acclaimed box office hit with a veteran star in a showcase role (Michelle Yeoh), a wildly rootable actor making his long-awaited comeback (Ke Huy Quan), and an original, inventive story that concludes with a series of heartwarming scenes. The only downside (and it could prove to be a potent one) is that many older voters just can’t get past the aforementioned sci-fi trappings and dildo fight scenes, and the film’s appeal is therefore lost on them. Will the passion of the academy’s younger and hipper voters be enough to make up that shortfall and push “Everything Everywhere” to the top?‘The Fabelmans’Though we may think of Steven Spielberg as an Oscar staple, it’s been more than two decades since he won his last statuette, for “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). If voters consider the most successful director of all time to be overdue for another little gold man, they might think it fitting to reward him for “The Fabelmans,” the most personal project he’s ever made. This semi-autobiographical family drama was hobbled by headlines about its meager box office take, but it’s hardly the only prestige drama to struggle in theaters this year. And once the nominations are sorted, the film should fare very well on the preferential ballot for best picture, which favors consensus crowd-pleasers.‘The Banshees of Inisherin’Could nearly half of the 20 acting nominations be sewn up by just two movies? If “Everything Everywhere” overperforms, Yeoh, Quan, and supporting actresses Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis could all be nominated. Ditto Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which I think has an even better shot at earning nominations for all four of its principal actors: leading man Colin Farrell and his supporting co-stars Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon. (Sadly, Jenny the donkey was not eligible last time I checked.) And though McDonagh failed to make it into the best director lineup for his last film, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the stunningly photographed vistas of “Inisherin” ought to put him over the top this time.‘Tár’Don’t be fooled by the recent best picture wins for simple-pleasure dramedies like “CODA” and “Green Book”: There is still a significant bloc of highbrow voters within the academy, and I suspect “Tár” will serve as their standard-bearer. Todd Field’s ruthlessly contemporary drama about a disgraced conductor has already entranced critics: The New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association both awarded Cate Blanchett’s lead performance and voted “Tár” the best film of the year (though the West Coast group split the difference on the latter, claiming a tie between “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere”). Field made the best picture lineup back in 2002 for his first film, “In the Bedroom,” and voters will be pleased to see that their early bet on him has more than paid off.‘Avatar: The Way of Water’From left, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in “Avatar: The Way of Water.”20th Century StudiosJames Cameron’s first “Avatar” was presumed to be the runner-up in 2010’s best picture race, which ultimately crowned his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s military drama “The Hurt Locker.” Can “The Way of Water” succeed where the first film failed? I don’t think it’s got much of a chance at actually winning best picture, since Cameron has often said that the franchise is mapped out over five movies, and voters will probably wait until the far-off denouement to decide the ultimate worth of the series, as they did with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Still, a long list of nominations is all but certain, since the movie is both a blockbuster triumph and a dazzling auteurist work that only Cameron could have pulled off.‘Elvis’It’s been 21 years since director Baz Luhrmann scored an Oscar breakthrough with the musical “Moulin Rouge” — which was nominated for eight Oscars and won two — and I expect he’ll be welcomed back in a big way for this glittery biopic of the iconic singer, played by surefire best actor nominee Austin Butler. One of the year’s only adult dramas to succeed in theaters, “Elvis” plays as though “Bohemian Rhapsody” were executed with actual panache, and Luhrmann’s maximalist aesthetic could even push him into the best director lineup, since that branch goes gaga for technical audacity.‘Top Gun: Maverick’If a well-reviewed action sequel becomes the biggest movie of the year and helps bolster struggling theaters, shouldn’t that be enough to cram it into the best picture race? Well, that argument didn’t get “Spider-Man: No Way Home” into last year’s lineup, but domestic box office champ “Top Gun: Maverick” is already off to a better start, picking up best film nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards that eluded Marvel’s web-slinger. But is this Tom Cruise star vehicle actually about something, or is it just a high-flying entertainment? Oscar voters tend to turn their nose up at action sequels — the only one nominated for best picture in the last 15 years was George Miller’s astonishing “Mad Max: Fury Road” — and the next phase of this awards campaign will have to convince them that there’s more to “Top Gun: Maverick” than meets the eye.‘Triangle of Sadness’After “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival nearly four years ago, the upstart film studio Neon successfully leveraged the movie’s international appeal and turned it into an awards-season darling. Can the studio pull off the same feat for Ruben Ostlund’s social satire “Triangle of Sadness,” which also took the Palme and similarly mines class warfare for big laughs and shocking set pieces? It helps that this cruise-ship comedy has a secret weapon in supporting-actress contender Dolly de Leon, who plays a maid-turned-despot: At a time when most contenders are still wary of ascribing too much weight to the controversial Golden Globes, the Filipina actress has drawn headlines for discussing how much the Globe nomination means to her, and many Oscar voters will be eager to extend her awards-season moment.‘Women Talking’Judith Ivey, left, and Claire Foy in “Women Talking.” Michael Gibson/Orion PicturesAfter a big fall-festival launch, Sarah Polley’s well-reviewed Mennonite drama may have waited a little too long to come out in theaters: It was swallowed in limited release over the Christmas weekend, and will have a rough go expanding into new locations until the Oscar nominations are announced. Still, Polley is a respected actress-turned-director, the ensemble is filled with awards-friendly ringers like Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand, and the film’s bracing conversations about gender and sexual assault make a strong case for its relevance.‘The Woman King’Gina Prince-Bythewood’s well-mounted action epic about female warriors in 19th-century Africa has an Oscar-winning star in Viola Davis and a lot of handsome tech elements, though I’m concerned that it didn’t manage to make the Oscar shortlists for its superlative costume design and hair and makeup. (At least Terence Blanchard’s thundering score made the cut in its category.) Next week’s Producers Guild nominations could foretell the film’s ultimate fate, since that group likes to recognize rousing theatrical successes and “The Woman King,” which earned a worldwide gross nearly double its $50 million budget, will almost certainly show up there if it’s got the mettle to impress awards voters. More