Category: Oscar Week

By Gary Salem

Oscar Week celebrated three exceptional nominees at the annual Makeup & Hairstyling Symposium: “A Man Called Ove,” “Star Trek Beyond” and “Suicide Squad.” Branch governor and longtime host Leonard Engelman started the event with a favorite story about 20th Century Fox lobbying the Academy to award John Chambers with an honorary Oscar for “Planet of the Apes” in 1968. He was joined by fellow governors Kathryn Blondell and Lois Burwell in welcoming the nominees and giving an inside look at the bake-off and nomination process.

Burwell said the branch meets twice a year to discuss the films that members think should be viewed in a theater and considered for seven finalists. Branch members also communicate throughout the year to bring attention to outstanding work. The seven finalists are usually narrowed down to three nominees but there have been years with two and four nominees.

The audience included several past Oscar winners for makeup including seven-time winner, Rick Baker. He won the first competitive Oscar in 1982 with “An American Werewolf in London.” The Academy added the makeup category after receiving complaints that “The Elephant Man” wasn’t recognized for the incredible transformation of John Hurt.

Eva von Bahr and her husband, Love Larson, were nominated last year for “The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.” They returned this year for “The Man Called Ove” with the film’s star, Rolf Lassgard. They made a prosthetic that would cover the actor’s low hairline without restricting the expression lines around his eyes. But the prosthetic could be used only once so von Bahr, an expert wig maker, punched thousands of strands of hair into thirty silicon appliances that matched the different time periods of Ove’s life. They also used contact lenses to change Lassgard’s eye color to match the actor playing the young Ove. “A Man Called Ove” is also nominated in the Foreign Language Film category.

Joel Harlow and Richard Alonso, the nominees “Star Trek Beyond” were generous in sharing credit with the sculptors and artists on their team. Harlow originally planned to design forty six alien species until his wife reminded him it was the 50th anniversary of the Star Trek franchise. He ended up creating 56. Alonso developed a “bulletproof” makeup technique for Sophia Boutella’s character, Jaylah, that could withstand any moisture and used prosthetics for the face tattoos to give them a raised effect.

Suicide Squad was represented by Alessandro Bertolazzi, Giorgio Gregorini and Christopher Nelson. The gregarious Bertolazzi emphasized his freewheeling approach in creating new hair and makeup designs without being influenced by previous versions of the characters. He would start with simple concepts like “green hair” for the Joker played by Jared Leto, and develop the designs organically with input from the actors. The event came full-circle in an emotional way when Nelson, the artist responsible for “Killer Croc,” talked about growing up extremely poor and being told a career in makeup design wasn’t realistic. He then found the inspiration he needed when he saw Rick Baker win that first Oscar in the makeup category!

For a full list of nominees, please visit http://oscar.go.com/nominees.

The 89th Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live on the ABC Television Network at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. The Oscars also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.

From Left: Host Rory Kennedy with Documentary (Feature) nominees Gianfranco Rosi and Donatella Palermo, “Fire at Sea”, Hébert Peck, Raoul Peck and Rémi Grellety , “I Am Not Your Negro”, Roger Ross Williams and Julie Goldman, “Life, Animated”, Ezra Edelman and Caroline Waterlow, “O.J.: Made in America” and Spencer Averick and Howard Barish, “13th”.

On Wednesday February 22, the Samuel Goldwyn Theater hosted a celebration for ten powerful stories with this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature and Documentary Short Subject categories. Introducing the five Documentary Short Subject contenders, Academy Documentary Branch Governor Kate Amend pointed to the heroism that united their subjects: people who saved drowning refugees or victims of airstrikes, faced end-of-life decisions and created new lives in a foreign country.

After screening clips of each film, Amend brought up “Extremis” director Dan Krauss, “4.1 Miles” director Daphne Matziaraki, “Joe’s Violin”’s Cooperman and producer Raphaela Neihausen, “Watani: My Homeland” director Marcel Mettelsiefen and producer Stephen Ellis and “The White Helmets” director Orlando Von Einsiedel and producer Joanna Natasegara.

The filmmakers discussed how they gained their subjects’ trust. To Krauss, the ICU patients who agreed to let him record such personal moments “saw the camera not as this intrusive presence, but rather as a conduit to not feel alone.”

He admitted the difficulty of tackling end-of-life care: “It’s a subject that scares me, it scares a lot of us.”

Matziaraki, meanwhile, was drawn to the refugee crisis because of how close it hit to home. Originally from Greece and living in the U.S., she “felt very removed and detached from it all.”

She decided to follow a Greek town’s coast guard, a team of ordinary people, during rescue missions at sea. Initially set on maintaining an objective eye, Matziaraki faced a moral dilemma once on the boat: “When [the captain] told me, ‘Put the camera down and hold this baby,’ I honestly couldn’t care less about making a film.”

Marcel Mettelsiefen first approached the Syrian uprising as a still photographer in 2011. In 2013, with “Watani,” he decided to tell the story through the eyes of children. He and Ellis documented a family that seemed to embody the crisis, focusing on “four little kids who could speak poetically about their pain,” Ellis said.

Telling this story “was beyond compulsion, it was a necessity,” he added.

Von Einsiedel and Natasegara felt a similar urgency with “The White Helmets,” the story of 3,000 Syrian civilians—bakers, tailors, builders—who chose not to fight or flee, but to stay and save fellow citizens.

In the second half of the evening, Documentary Branch Governor Rory Kennedy screened clips of the Documentary Feature nominees, and invited the filmmakers to the stage. “Fire at Sea” director Gianfranco Rosi and producer Donatello Palermo, “I Am Not Your Negro” director Raoul Peck and producers Rémi Grellety and Hébert Peck, “Life, Animated” director Roger Ross Williams and producer Julie Goldman, “O.J.: Made in America” director Ezra Edelman and producer Caroline Waterlow and “13th” editor Spencer Averick and producer Howard Barish spoke about their journeys and inspiration.

The seed for Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” was planted decades ago, when Raoul received his first copy of James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” As an 18 year old, “it changed my life and my way of seeing these problems,” he said.

According to Hébert, the source material’s timeliness is telling. “We feel that Baldwin has written these words this morning. That must mean two things: that he’s an incredible writer and that if those words, that have been written 40, 50 years ago, still have such meaning, then we still have a long way to go.”

According to Barish, who hopes “13th” becomes mandatory viewing, his team began with a macro look at the American prison system. This led to an investigation of its history and racial disparities. Spencer and director Ava DuVernay “found a way to connect the dots.”

Edelman’s nearly eight-hour O.J. Simpson documentary also took a historical approach. “I wasn’t interested in the murder case,” Edelman said. “That conversation was so reductive.”

Instead, he used O.J. “as a lens through which to talk about our culture”: ambition, identity, masculinity and the quest to fulfill the American Dream.

“I came very quickly to realize this was the defining cultural story of our time,” Edelman added.

Roger Ross Williams, also a Documentary Branch governor, took a unique approach to the intimate story of “Life, Animated.” When interacting with Owen—an autistic child who communicates using Disney films—he used an Interrotron camera, a system invented by Errol Morris whereby the interviewer interacts with the subject from another room through a screen.

“When we came up with that idea, it was like a eureka moment,” Williams said. Owen would be able to tell his own story, and the audience could “get inside his head… and see the world through his eyes.”

Throughout the night, the filmmakers revealed the passion and persistence that allowed them to shed light on important issues.

As Kennedy put it, “When we watch these films, we feel. And we feel not because we’re told to feel, but simply because we can’t help ourselves.”

For a full list of nominees, visit http://oscar.go.com/nominees.

In the week leading up to the 89th Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present a series of public programs celebrating this year’s nominees in the Animated Feature Film, Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, Foreign Language Film, Makeup and Hairstyling, and Animated and Live Action Short Film categories. All events will be held at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

WAMG attended the annual AMPAS reception featuring the 2016 Oscar nominated films in the Animated and Live-Action Short Film categories. The program featured screenings of all the nominated films in these categories, plus an onstage discussion with the filmmakers.

The evening was hosted by director Tim Miller (Deadpool), who himself was nominated in the Animated Short category in 2005 (Gopher Broke). In his opening comments, a clearly emotional Miller spoke about shorts being, for most filmmakers, a labor of love rather than a means to getting awards and accolades. “That’s not why we do this,” he said. “The reason to do this is because you love it… Never get caught up in the other stuff.”

Short Film (Animated)
“Blind Vaysha” – Theodore Ushev
“Borrowed Time” – Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj
“Pear Cider and Cigarettes” – Robert Valley and Cara Speller
“Pearl” – Patrick Osborne
“Piper” – Alan Barillaro and Marc Sondheimer

Short Film (Live Action)
“Ennemis Intérieurs” – Sélim Azzazi
“La Femme Et Le TGV” – Timo von Gunten and Giacun Caduff
“Silent Nights” – Aske Bang and Kim Magnusson
“Sing” – Kristof Deák and Anna Udvardy
“Timcode” – Juanjo Giménez

The nominated animated shorts were the usual fare, including the now expected entry from Pixar (Piper), as well as some interesting takes on suicide and loss (Borrowed Time), family bonds and memories (Pearl), and ultimate friendship and compassion (Pear Cider and Cigarettes).

For Ushev (“Blind Vaysha”), receiving the nomination wasn’t just personal. “It’s the first time ever that Bulgaria is nominated for an Oscar,” he said to applause.

His film’s message, however, is universal. “I always wanted to make a film about our inability to live now, about our nostalgia for the past and our fear for the future,” Ushev said. The subject is a woman who can see only the past in one eye and the future in the other.

His style was influenced by woodcut prints, which allowed the story to resemble an “old book you found in your grandparents’ attic,” a relic of “lost knowledge” in the style of Middle Age paintings and manuscripts.

The live action category was populated with 5 foreign films representing the best of the year, the most touching being a story about standing up for yourself and others (Sing), and the timeless tale of not letting life pass you by (La Femme Et Le TGV).

The group discussed the emotional currents of their films and how they hope their work is received. “We wanted to be unpredictable,” Giménez said of his short, which follows two parking lot security guard during their shifts. “Maybe everyone in the audience knew what was going to happen… but I doubt it.”

Here’s wishing the best of luck come Oscar night to the filmmakers who clearly put their heart and souls into each of these films!

For a full list of nominees, visit http://oscar.go.com/nominees.

The 89th Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, and will be televised live on the ABC Television Network at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. The Oscars also will be televised live in more than 225 countries and territories worldwide.