In the wild world of James Cameron’s films, steering the ship was the job of Jon Landau, who died on Friday at the age of 63. Cameron may have been the obsessive visionary — brilliant, driven and meticulous — but Landau was his absolutely vital right-hand man.

From dealing with studio misgivings during the arduous and expensive production of “Titanic” in 1996 to organizing four (!) “Avatar” sequels in the 2020s, Landau was the guy who gave Cameron the freedom to be his obsessive self, the producer serving as the one who knew how to handle the obsessions and make the visions achievable.

He ran interference for Cameron sometimes, acted as a shield at other times, but was mostly an indispensable colleague who found ways to support some of the boldest ambitions in mainstream cinema. Landau could be brash, but more often he was simply passionate about cinema — and passionate about what he and his friend Jim were achieving.

While Cameron received most of the attention, Landau was there when needed. The director got COVID-19 the day before the Los Angeles premiere of “Avatar: The Way of Water” in 2022, and Landau was an able master of ceremonies in his place — and a few weeks later, when Cameron cancelled his appearance the evening of a Wrap screening of the film, Landau not only picked up the slack, he turned himself into a de facto second moderator, ably directing his own questions to actors Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver, costume designer Deborah Lynn Scott and composer Simon Franglen.

Essentially, he always figured out the job he needed to fill, and he always knew why he was doing it. “We use the term transportive,” he told TheWrap in 2022. “Why do people turn to entertainment today? To transport themselves away from the world that we live in and the news stories and everything. You can’t do that as well at home, because the world is still there. In the theater, you go in, the image comes up, and you get to escape our world and go on a journey with these characters.”

Landau was also the one who spread the love, making sure that all of those who worked with him received credit. If you remember only one thing about all the “Titanic” acceptance speeches at the Oscars in 1998, it’s probably Cameron quoting his own screenplay and saying, “I’m the king of the world!” But when the film won Best Picture, Landau took the lead, starting out by saying, “I can’t act and I can’t compose and I can’t do visual effects, so I guess that’s why I’m producing,” before he pulled out a piece of paper and rattled off more than 50 names in a rapid-fire one-minute barrage.

Did all that reading of names offend the Academy? Probably not, but it’s baffling that Landau’s application for AMPAS membership was turned down after he won the Best Picture honor. He was finally admitted to the Academy in 2010, after “Avatar” gave him his second Oscar nomination and made him a producer of the two top-grossing films in history. (At TheWrap’s Oscar party that year, he told us, “If they don’t invite me this year, that’s it. I’m never going to join.” But they did invite him, and he accepted.)

At the time of Landau’s death, he and Cameron were in the thick of delivering three more “Avatar” sequels.

“Jim is never satisfied with what he’s done in the past,” Landau told TheWrap. “If I could pick one word to describe him, I would say he’s an explorer. He explores in the real world — he goes to the Mariana Trench, you know — but he explores in his movies and he challenges people around him to do better than they’ve done before. And that’s really exciting.”

At present, the “Avatar” sequels are scheduled to be released in 2025, 2029 and 2031. It’s a generous timetable that has already endured a few delays — but one that could become much harder without the contributions that Landau made.

If James Cameron is an explorer, it’s hard to imagine his cinematic exploration running as effectively without Jon Landau manning the oar — steering the ship, as Cliff Curtis (and lots of other people) figured out years ago.  

The post Jon Landau Appreciation: He Gave James Cameron the Freedom to Be a Visionary appeared first on TheWrap.

Location Managers Guild Awards nominations were announced in three television and two film categories, as well as for commercials and film commissions. Winners will be announced on Saturday, Aug. 24 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills.

Also at the ceremony, supervising location manager Sue Quinn, whose work includes the “Harry Potter” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchises, will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award. Additional awards will be announced at a later date.

Past winners include “John Wick: Chapter 4,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “No Time to Die,” “Tenet” and “Judas and the Black Messiah” for film and “The Last of Us,” “1923,” “The White Lotus,” “Succession,” “Stranger Things” and “The Queen’s Gambit” for television.  

Additional information can be found at www.locationmanagers.org.

The full list of nominees:

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES
“Fargo” – Season 5 – FX
“The Gentlemen” – Netflix
“Mr. & Mrs. Smith” – Amazon
“Reservation Dogs” – Season 3 – FX
“Slow Horses” – Season 3 – Apple TV +
“Sugar” – Apple TV+

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD TELEVISION SERIES
“Bridgerton” – Season 3 – Netflix
“The Crown”- Season 6 – Netflix
“Fallout” – Amazon
“The Gilded Age” – Season 2 – HBO l Max
“Palm Royale” – Apple TV+
“Tokyo Vice” – Season 2 – HBO l Max

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A TV SERIAL PROGRAM, ANTHOLOGY OR LIMITED SERIES  
“Baby Reindeer” – Netflix
“Feud: Capote vs. The Swans” – FX
“Griselda” – Netflix
“Masters of the Air” – Apple TV+
“Ripley” – Netflix
“True Detective: Night Country” – HBO l Max

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY FEATURE FILM
“Civil War” – A24
“Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning”- Part One – Paramount Pictures
“Saltburn” – Netflix
“The Fall Guy” – Universal Pictures
“The Killer” – Netflix

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD FEATURE FILM
“Dune: Part Two” – Warner Bros.
“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” – Warner Bros.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” – Apple Studios/Paramount Pictures
“Napoleon” – Apple Studios/Columbia Pictures
“Oppenheimer” – Universal Pictures
“The Zone of Interest” – A24

OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A COMMERCIAL
Carhartt – “History in The Making”
Coca Cola – “Santa Stories – The Note”
NFL Super Bowl LV111 – “Born to Play”
Tesla – “Cybertruck”
Toyota – “Present from The Past”

OUTSTANDING FILM COMMISSION
City of Sydney & Screen NSW – “The Fall Guy”
Film in Iceland – “True Detective: Night Country”
Glasgow Film Office – “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”
New Mexico Film Office – “Oppenheimer”
The Oklahoma Film + Music Office and the Tulsa Office of Film – “Killers of the Flower Moon”
The Royal Film Commission – Jordan – “Dune: Part Two”

The post ‘Ripley,’ ‘Baby Reindeer,’ ‘Fallout’ Nominated for Location Managers Guild Awards appeared first on TheWrap.

The award will come less than six weeks after Kevin Costner premiered his film “Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1” at the Cannes Film Festival, making “The Dead Don’t Hurt” the second recent Western set in the 1860s and directed by a person better known as an actor to have a splashy European screening.

Like “Horizon,” Mortensen’s film jumps between stories — but instead of moving between different characters across a number of different territories, “The Dead Don’t Hurt” moves back and forth in time. It begins with a flurry of deaths and then backs up to tell the story of a multi-lingual Danish sheriff, Holger Olsen (Mortensen) in a small Nevada town, and a French woman, Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), he meets on the San Francisco waterfront and brings to live in a dusty shack that she prefers to the luxurious life she could be living with her pretentious and well-heeled beau.

TheWrap called the film “a period Western that introduces cliches only to subvert or twist them” when it premiered last fall at the Toronto International Film Festival. It had a brief U.S. release in May before Mortensen took the film to Karlovy Vary, where he joins Clive Owen, Daniel Brühl, Steven Soderbergh and Nicole Holofcener in receiving honors from the Central European festival.

“The Dead Don’t Hurt” is Mortensen’s second film as a director, after the subtle family drama “Falling,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. As Mortensen told TheWrap in this unpublished conversation from Toronto, the 65-year-old actor, author, musician and filmmaker best known for the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and for films like “A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises” and “Captain Fantastic” is determined to make directing a career focus going forward.

You must’ve written “The Dead Don’t Hurt” during Covid, right?
I did. I had an image in my head of my mom. I have these books from her, picture books from the ’20s and ’30s. She read those as a kid, and I knew she was something of a free spirit who had a relationship with nature. I was just imagining this girl and thinking, “OK, what does this girl become? How does she become a woman?”

How did that turn into a story?
I thought I would start with the end, because then as I see characters throughout the story, I’ll know something about where they’re going. As an audience member, you’re ahead of the characters. I think that can be interesting in a novel — and when it’s done right, it can work in a movie.

I know it’s risky because some people don’t take to it, although I think there’s an appetite these days for that. But usually, I see it in series. I remember “Breaking Bad” doing that, taking time jumps. When it works, it’s great. It’s more of a risk to do it in a movie, but it can be done.

Was there any resistance to structuring the movie that way, without clear indicators when you make jumps in time?
When the actors first read the script, my question was, “Are you following what’s going on?” And when I first showed the movie, just trying it out in the editing process, I was really attentive to whether people were confused about where they were. Once nobody was, I was like, “OK, we’re there.”

Most people seem to find their way and even like it. You see a character hanged in the beginning of the story, and then you get to know him. Or you see Weston (a villainous local played by Solly McLeod) coming to visit Vivienne, and as an audience member, you know it’s not good that she’s alone with this guy. The audience is ahead of the character, and what she’s reading as politeness, we’re reading as manipulation.

As you were writing the film, was it always a Western in your head?
Not at first. The little girl I was picturing was definitely in the 19th century. And then I sort of thought, OK, what was going on in the 19th century? And when I decided to make her French-speaking, I thought about the history of the French speakers in North America and the northeast in the late 1800s. There was stuff going on between the British inhabitants and the French, and I just put that in historically. And it was a way of introducing the idea of men going off to war.

I also liked it being in that century because that’s why Westerns became interesting. They were often about the expansion westward, the opening of a frontier, and eventually the late Westerns were about closing the frontier. At this point, 1860s, it’s still a bit lawless. You don’t know what’s gonna happen.

And women and girls, no matter what their strength might be, had to adapt to a man’s world. So I thought that was a good place in which to set this story, which is essentially about a woman who’s creating new frontiers just by being herself.

Putting a woman and immigrants at the center of a Western story is a break from what you normally see in that genre.
Right. You would expect the sheriff to not have a foreign accent. And the lead woman, she could be French – that’s more or less what you saw in “Heaven’s Gate.” But for both the main characters to be clearly not native-born English speakers is unusual in the Western.

But the West was a melting pot. There were people from all over the world: Chinese, Irish, Russian, English, Welsh, French, Italians, Mexicans, Spanish, Portuguese. In the waterfront scene in San Francisco, you hear a lot of accents. And even in the town where they are, there’s a mixture of people from different places, a mixture of Mexicans and Anglos.

You’ve now directed two movies in the last four years. Are you planning to focus on directing from here?
I would love to. It’s hard to do, because you have to find someone to finance the project. If I had permission, I’d love to make a movie every year, every year and a half. But that’s unlikely. I mean, the first one took me a few years to find the money and a full year to shoot, edit and all that. Same thing with this one.

Does your directing experience make it harder for you to take roles just as an actor now?
No, I still like acting. It’s all part of that collective team effort. Being an actor, I think, is an important element. You’re on screen obviously, and it’s also what gets a movie made, depending on who’s in it. Maybe someday people will want to go see a movie just because I directed it. I don’t know. I don’t expect that that’s true yet.

I mean, if you said to me, “Would you rather act in a movie or direct a movie next?” I would say I’d rather direct. But also, at least with these first two movies I’ve directed, I’ve not really made any money – or any money that I made, I put into the production to finish it. Essentially, I either made no money or I lost money. But I got to make the movies on my own terms.

So I feel really fortunate that I can support myself going back to acting. It’s something I can do and make some money doing, sometimes. Not that I’m necessarily drawn to movies that are gonna pay really well. (Laughs) I look for good stories. Sometimes you get paid well, sometimes you don’t.

Do you see yourself directing movies that you don’t act in?
Oh, yeah. The next one, definitely. (Pauses) I mean, I said that about this one. We had an actor for six months that was paired with Vicky, and then he suddenly decided he was going to go do something else. That was not long before pre-production. I was like, “Holy s–t.”

When this guy dropped out, I tried with other actors, and it just didn’t work. We were getting to the point where we wouldn’t be able to make this movie, and I thought, Well, I could do it and that would work for the financier. So I asked Vicky, and she said, “Man, I always thought you’d be Holger.” I said, “Doesn’t the age difference bother you?” She said, “Nah.” So I put in the line where she says, “You’re too old to go to war.”

It wasn’t my intention to do it, because it’s a lot of work and it takes your focus away from the job of directing. It worked out, but I think on the next one, I wouldn’t do it.

Do you have ideas for what the next one will be?
Yeah, I have three scripts. Another one I wrote in the pandemic, and then one I’ve had for many years. And then one that someone else has that I like. It’s different from my style, but if I was allowed to write a little bit to make it more of an original movie, it’s a story I really like. And it happens to be linear, which I think would be fun.

So yeah, there’s stuff I’d like to do. There’s just this question of finding the money for it.

The post Why Viggo Mortensen Put Women and Immigrants at the Center of His Western ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ appeared first on TheWrap.

The list of prospective new members, which is the largest group to be invited in four years, contains a number of other 2024 Oscar nominees as well: among them are actresses Danielle Brooks, Lily Gladstone and Sandra Hüller; composer Jerskin Fendrix; producers Ben LeClair and James Wilson; writers Samy Burch, David Hemingson and Tony McNamara; and writer-director Celine Song.

Jefferson, Song and Triet were all invited to join both the directors branch and the writers branch, and must choose one branch if they accept the Academy’s invitation. Others invited by multiple branches were Michael Andrews (film editors/short films and feature animation), Bahrām Beyzāêi (directors/writers), İlker Çatak (directors/writers), Nadim Cheikhrouha (documentaries/producers) and Christine Turner (documentaries/short films and feature animation).

Invitations also went out to actors Jessica Alba, Jason Clarke, Greta Lee, Kate Mara, Stephanie Beatriz, Erika Alexander and Catherine O’Hara; directors Boots Riley, David Yates and S.S. Rajamouli; documentary filmmakers Sergei Loznitsa, Nisha Pahuja and Frédéric Tcheng; writers Kogonada and Erica Tremblay; and artists representatives Linda Lichter and Douglas Urbanski.

According to the Academy, 44% of the invitations went to individuals who identify as women and 41% went to people from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities. More than half went to people living outside the United States.

Each branch of the Academy has its own requirements for membership, though those requirements can be waived for Oscar nominees or winners. Committees from each branch review potential members and make their recommendations to the Board of Governors, which has the final say on which candidates are invited to join.

By inviting nearly 500 new members this year, the board broke a three-year streak of keeping the list of invitees to just below 400. The last three years had seen 395 invites in 2021, 397 in 2022 and 398 in 2023.

For years, the Academy kept the total number of members below 6,000 and limited the ability of branches to admit more new members than they lost through death or retirement. Those limits were removed in the mid-2010s, leading to three years of around 300 invitations between 2013 and ’15. After the #OscarsSoWhite protests of 2016 and the revelation that AMPAS members were 75% male and 90% white, the Academy embarked on a five-year drive to double the number of women and members of color.

That led to 683 invitations in 2016, followed by 774 in 2017, 928 in 2018, 842 in 2019 and 819 in 2020, with a particular emphasis on new members who lived and worked outside the United States.

The Academy is now about 80% larger than it was in 2010, and almost 60% bigger than it was before the 2016 membership drive began.

Notably, the Academy doesn’t reveal how many people decline their invitations to join, though anecdotal evidence suggests that a vast majority of them accept. AMPAS had 9,797 voting members for the last Oscars season, which means that a strong acceptance rate in this year’s class should bring the number of voters very close to 10,000.

This year’s invitees are listed below:

Actors
Jessica Alba – “Machete,” “Frank Miller’s Sin City”
Erika Alexander – “American Fiction,” “30 Years to Life”
Swann Arlaud – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Bloody Milk”
Shabana Azmi – “Godmother,” “Arth”
Obba Babatunde – “City of Lies,” “The Manchurian Candidate”
Saleh Bakri – “The Blue Caftan,” “The Band’s Visit”
Stephanie Beatriz – “Encanto,” “In the Heights”
Danielle Brooks – “The Color Purple,” Clemency”
Tia Carrere – “True Lies,” “Wayne’s World”
Sergio Castellitto – “Don’t Move,” “My Mother’s Smile”
Alfredo Castro – “El Conde,” “Tony Manero”
Jason Clarke – “Oppenheimer,” “Zero Dark Thirty”
Kate Del Castillo – “Under the Same Moon,” “American Visa”
Gang Dong-won – “Broker,” “Peninsula”
Lily Gladstone – “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “The Unknown Country”
Rachel House – “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” “Boy”
Sandra Hüller – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “The Zone of Interest”
Maeve Jinkings – “Toll,” “Neon Bull”
Greta Lee – “Past Lives,” “Gemini”
Kate Mara – “Megan Leavey,” “The Martian”
Dash Mihok – “Silver Linings Playbook,” “The Thin Red Line”
Catherine O’Hara – “For Your Consideration,” “Best in Show”
Da’Vine Joy Randolph – “The Holdovers,” “Dolemite Is My Name”
Fiona Shaw – “The Last September,” “The Butcher Boy”
Qi Shu – “The Assassin,” “Three Times”
D.B. Sweeney – “Dinosaur,” “Eight Men Out”
Jasmine Trinca – “Fortunata,” “Honey”
Koji Yakusho – “Perfect Days,” “The Blood of Wolves”
Teo Yoo – “Past Lives,” “Vertigo”

Casting Directors
Dixie Chassay – “Dune: Part Two,” “Poor Things”
Kharmel Cochrane – “Saltburn,” “The Northman”
Angela Demo – “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”
Jennifer Euston – “American Fiction,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”
Rene Haynes – “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “The Revenant”
Gayle Keller – “Bros,” “The King of Staten Island”
Moira Miller – “A Fantastic Woman,” “The Green Inferno”
Masunobu Motokawa – “Perfect Days,” “The Wandering Moon”
Ulrike Müller – “Ghost Trail,” “Scorched Earth”
Elsa Pharaon – “A Silence,” “Holy Motors”
Alejandro Reza – “Noche de Bodas,” “Gringo”
Luis Rosales – “Cassandro,” “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”
Limor Shmila – “The Vanishing Soldier,” “The Stronghold”
Rebecca van Unen – “Sweet Dreams,” “Quo Vadis, Aida?”
Chamutal Zerem – “Karaoke,” “Foxtrot”

Cinematographers
Eric Branco – “Story Ave,” “The Forty-Year-Old Version”
Chananun Chotrungroj – “Birth/Rebirth,” “The Trapped 13: How We Survived the Thai Cave”
Matthew Chuang – “You Won’t Be Alone,” “Blue Bayou”
Andrew Commis – “Blueback,” “Babyteeth”
Ashley Connor – “Polite Society,” “The Miseducation of Cameron Post”
Josée Deshaies – “The Beast,” “Passages”
Alex Disenhof – “Alice,” “Captive State”
Jomo Fray – “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” “Port Authority”
Damián García – “Jungleland,” “I’m No Longer Here”
Magdalena Górka – “Die in a Gunfight,” “An Ordinary Man”
Ryuto Kondo – “Monster,” “A Man”
Dariela Ludlow Deloya – “A Million Miles Away,” “Prayers for the Stolen”
Catherine Lutes – “Close to You,” “Mouthpiece”
Aurélien Marra – “L’Homme Debout,” “Two of Us”
Igor Meglic – “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” “Fast X”
Crescenzo Giacomo Notarile – “Bullet,” “Moonwalker”
Sophia Olsson – “Charter,” “Echo”
Yerkinbek Ptyraliyev – “Yellow Cat,” “Karinca”
Jamie Ramsay – “All of Us Strangers,” “Living”
Nanu Segal – “Emily,” “Donkey Punch”
Hidetoshi Shinomiya – “Drive My Car,” “The Town of Headcounts”
Jigme Tenzing – “The Monk and the Gun,” “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom”
Ravi Varman – “Japan,” “Ponniyin Selvan: Part Two”
Maria von Hausswolff – “Godland,” “A White, White Day”
Sophie Winqvist – “Clara Sola,” “Pleasure”

Costume Designers
Dave Crossman – “Napoleon,” “1917”
Mario D’Avignon – “Midway,” “Hochelaga, Land of Souls”
Anne Dixon – “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” “The Song of Names”
Jürgen Doering – “Personal Shopper,” “Clouds of Sils Maria” 
Leesa Evans – “Always Be My Maybe,” “Bridesmaids”
Gabriela Fernández – “I’m No Longer Here,” “Cantinflas”
Małgorzata Karpiuk – “The Zone of Interest,” “Quo Vadis, Aida?”
Kazuko Kurosawa – “Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai,” “Silk”
Ann Maskrey – “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
Mona May – “Enchanted,” “Clueless”
Rama Rajamouli – “RRR,” “Baahubali: The Beginning”
Sheetal Sharma – “Gangubai Kathiawadi,” “Kesari”
Preeyanan “Lin” Suwannathada – “The Creator,” “Buffalo Boys”
Jill Taylor – “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” “My Week with Marilyn”
Mónica Toschi – “A Ravaging Wind,” “Argentina, 1985”
Holly Waddington – “Poor Things,” “Lady Macbeth”
Khadija Zeggaï – “Passages,” “Love Crime”

Directors
Fede Álvarez – “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” “Don’t Breathe”
Kyle Patrick Alvarez – “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” “C.O.G.”
Lila Avilés – “Totem,” “The Chambermaid”
Jamie Babbit – “The Stand-In,” “But I’m a Cheerleader”
Minhal Baig – “We Grown Now,” “Hala”
Bahrām Beyzāêi* – “When We Are All Asleep,” “Killing Mad Dogs”
Jayro Bustamente – “La Llorona,” “Tremors”
Steven Caple Jr. – “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” “Creed II”
İlker Çatak* – “The Teachers’ Lounge,” “I Was, I Am, I Will Be”
Ayoka Chenzira – “Alma’s Rainbow”
Justin Chon – “Blue Bayou,” “Ms. Purple”
Rima Das – “Tora’s Husband,” “Village Rockstars”
JD Dillard – “Devotion,” “Sweetheart”
Alice Diop – “Saint Omer,” “We”
Sally El Hosaini – “Unicorns,” “The Swimmers”
Leslie Harris – “Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.”
Cord Jefferson* – “American Fiction”
S.S. Rajamouli – “RRR,” “Eega”
Boots Riley – “Sorry to Bother You”
Alex Rivera – “The Infiltrators,” “Sleep Dealer”
A.V. Rockwell – “A Thousand and One”
Juliana Rojas – “Good Manners,” “Necropolis Symphony”
Emma Seligman – “Bottoms,” “Shiva Baby”
Celine Song* – “Past Lives”
Angel Manuel Soto – “Blue Beetle,” “Charm City Kings”
Justine Triet* – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Sibyl”
Anand Kumar Tucker – “The Critic,” “Leap Year”
David Yates – “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”
Susan Youssef – “Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf,” “Habibi Rasak Kharban”

Documentary
Trish Adlesic – “The ABCs of Book Banning,” “Gasland”
Daniela Alatorre – “A Cop Movie,” “Midnight Family”
Waad Al-Kateab – “We Dare to Dream,” “For Sama”
Anne Alvergue – “The Martha Mitchell Effect,” “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn”
Raed Andoni – “Ghost Hunting,” “Fix Me”
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril – “Twice Colonized,” “Angry Inuk”
Mila Aung-Thwin – “Let There Be Light,” “Last Train Home”
Tina Baz – “Adolescents,” “Fix Me”
Jorge Bodanzky – “The Amazon, a New Minamata?,” “Third Millennium”
Moses Bwayo – “Bobi Wine: The People’s President”
Caryn Capotosto – “Little Richard: I Am Everything,” “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”
Nadim Cheikhrouha* – “Four Daughters,” “Benda Bilili!”
Mstyslav Chernov – “20 Days in Mariupol”
Michael Collins – “Almost Sunrise,” “Give Up Tomorrow”
Flávia de Souza – “Aftershock,” “Open Heart”
Jeanie Finlay – “Your Fat Friend,” “Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth”
Beadie Finzi – “Only When I Dance,” “Unknown White Male”
Ellen Goosenberg Kent – “Torn Apart: Separated at the Border,” “Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1”
Sky Hopinka – “Kicking the Clouds,” “Malni: Towards the Ocean, towards the Shore”
José Joffily – “A Symphony for a Common Man,” “Foreign Soldier”
Rachel Lears – “To the End,” “Knock Down the House”
Rebecca Lichtenfeld – “The Eternal Memory,” “The Nightcrawlers”
Sergei Loznitsa – “Babi Yar. Context,” “Mr. Landsbergis”
Aïcha Macky – “Zinder,” “The Fruitless Tree”
Kara Magsanoc-Alikpala – “Delikado,” “Call Her Ganda”
Elaine McMillion Sheldon – “King Coal,” “Heroin(e)”
Mark Mitten – “A Compassionate Spy,” “Abacus: Small Enough to Jail”
Vincent Moloi – “Skulls of My People,” “Men of Gold”
Nisha Pahuja – “To Kill a Tiger,” “The World before Her”
Pola Rapaport – “Addicted to Life,” “Broken Meat”
RaMell Ross – “Easter Snap,” “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”
Ousmane Samassekou – “The Last Shelter,” “The Heirs of the Hill”
Frédéric Tcheng – “Invisible Beauty,” “Halston”
Jennifer Tiexiera – “Subject,” “P.S. Burn This Letter Please”
Hemal Trivedi – “Among the Believers,” “Saving Face”
Christine Turner* – “The Barber of Little Rock,” “Lynching Postcards: “Token of a Great Day””
Keith Wilson – “Joonam,” “I Didn’t See You There”

Executives
Salma Abdalla
Cate Adams
Maya Amsellem
Lenora del Pilar Ferrero Blanco
Sasha Bühler
Michelle Byrd
Elaine Chin
Duncan Crabtree-Ireland
Paolo Del Brocco
Gina Duncan
Dan Friedkin
Poppy Hanks
Kate Hurwitz
Iris Knobloch
Tim League
Sasha Lloyd
Harvey Mason Jr.
Daniela Michel
Brittany Morrissey
Brianna Oh
Lejo Pet
Areli Quirarte
Matthew Reilly
Chris Rice
Ben Roberts
Peter Safran
Couper Samuelson
Ellen Stutzman
Fumiko Takagi
Graham Taylor
Emily Woodburne
Kim Yutani

Film Editors
Timothy Alverson – “Halloween,” “Orphan”
Michael Andrews* – “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Shrek 2”
Qutaiba Barhamji – “Four Daughters,” “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood”
Joseph Charles Bond – “Wildflower,” “The Man Who Knew Infinity”
Victoria Boydell – “Saltburn,” “Rye Lane”
Paul Carlin – “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” “The Mystery of D.B. Cooper”
Carlotta Cristiani – “The Inner Cage,” “Daughter of Mine”
Cătălin Cristuțiu – “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” “Poppy Field”
Annette Davey – “Dreamin’ Wild,” “Together, Together”
Amy Foote – “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” “The Work”
Keith Fraase – “Past Lives,” “To the Wonder”
Jo Francis – “Memory,” “Charming the Hearts of Men”
Toni Froschhammer – “Perfect Days,” “Pina”
Nassim Gordji-Tehrani – “Rosalie,” “The Wolf’s Call”
Kaya Inan – “My Wonderful Wanda,” “In the Aisles”
Lisa Lassek – “Leave the World Behind,” “Marvel’s The Avengers”
Jaume Martí – “Society of the Snow,” “God’s Crooked Lines”
Rie Matsubara – “The Boy and the Heron,” “When Marnie Was There”
Mike Munn – “To Kill a Tiger,” “This Is Not a Movie”
Darrin Navarro – “Summering,” “Tallulah”
Mdhamiri Nkemi – “Blue Story,” “The Last Tree”
Hilda Rasula – “American Fiction,” “Vengeance”
Josh Schaeffer – “Godzilla vs. Kong,” “Molly’s Game”
Laurent Sénéchal – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle”
Takeshi Seyama – “The Boy and the Heron,” “Spirited Away”
Michelle Tesoro – “Maestro,” “On the Basis of Sex”

Makeup Artists and Hairstylists
Ana Bulajić Črček – “Illyricvm,” “Number 55”
Hildegard Haide – “Run to Ground,” “Extinction”
Karen Hartley Thomas – “Golda,” “The Personal History of David Copperfield”
Frédéric Lainé – “The Animal Kingdom,” “Benedetta”

Marketing and Public Relations
Michele Abitbol-Lasry
Matt Johnson Apice
Austin Barker
Neil Bhatt
Darnell Brisco
Nasim Cambron
Holly Connors
Mauricio Azael Duran Ortega
Stephen Garrett
Christopher Gonzalez
Andrea Grau
Blair Green
Carlos Alberto Gutiérrez
Lisa Zaks Markowitz
David Ninh
Julien Noble
Gitesh Pandya
Michelle Paris
Elaine Patterson
Lonnie Snell
Ray Subers
Caren Quinn Thompson
Jessica Thurber Hemingway
Vilija Vitartas
Stephanie Wenborn

Music
Michael K. Bauer – “Cassandro,” “The Equalizer 3”
Stephen Bray – “The Color Purple,” “Psycho III”
Anthony Chue – “Man on the Edge,” “G Storm”
Gary M. Clark – “Flora and Son,” “Sing Street”
Marius de Vries – “Navalny,” “CODA”
Jerskin Fendrix – “Poor Things”
Simon Franglen – “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “The Magnificent Seven”
Jo Yeong-wook – “Decision to Leave,” “Hunt”
Shari Johanson – “Maybe I Do,” “All Together Now”
Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch – “All of Us Strangers,” “Living”
Fabrizio Mancinelli – “Il Viaggio Leggendario,” “The Boat”
Diego Navarro – “The Cuckoo’s Curse,” “The Wasteland”
Martin Phipps – “Napoleon,” “The Princess”
Plínio Profeta – “Desapega!,” “Nosso Sonho”
Philippe Rombi – “Driving Madeleine,” “Joyeux Noël”
David Sardy – “The Beekeeper,” “Zombieland”
Katrina Marie Schiller – “Wonka,” “Black Mass”
Carl Sealove – “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down,” “The Human Trial”
Ryan Shore – “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World,” “Zombie Town”
Kubilay Uner – “American Traitor: The Trail of Axis Sally,” “Force of Nature”
Dan Wilson – “American Symphony,” “Love Again”

Producers
Tom Ackerley – “Barbie,” “I, Tonya”
Nadim Cheikhrouha* – “Four Daughters,” “The Man Who Sold His Skin”
Jay Choi – “The Good the Bad the Weird,” “A Tale of Two Sisters”
Jennifer Davisson – “Robin Hood,” “Live by Night”
Fernanda De la Peza – “The Hole in the Fence,” “Robe of Gems”
Simón de Santiago – “Regression,” “Agora”
Diana Elbaum – “Hounds,” “Isn’t She Lovely?”
Saïd Hamich Benlarbi – “Deserts,” “Return to Bollene”
Alex Heineman – “Gunpowder Milkshake,” “The Commuter”
Sandra Hermida – “Society of the Snow,” “Un Amor”
John M. Jacobsen – “Trollhunter,” “Max Manus”
David Koplan – “Spirited,” “Papillon”
Ben LeClair – “American Fiction,” “Fair Play”
Tatiana Leite – “Rule 34,” “Loveling”
Agustina Llambí Campbell – “Argentina, 1985,” “The Wild Ones”
Andrew Lowe – “Poor Things,” “Chevalier”
Renata de Almeida Magalhães – “The Great Mystical Circus,” “The Greatest Love of All”
Kaoru Matsuzaki – “Shoplifters,” “Like Father, Like Son”
Kelly McCormick – “Bullet Train,” “Violent Night”
Sarah Schechter – “My Policeman,” “Free Guy”
Ritesh Sidhwani – “Gully Boy,” “Dil Chahta Hai”
Leslie Urdang – “Rabbit Hole,” “Adam”
Edward Vaisman – “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” “A Thousand and One”
James Wilson – “The Zone of Interest,” “Under the Skin”
María Zamora – “The Rye Horn,” “Alcarràs”

Production and Technology
Deva Anderson
Keir Beck
Nicholas Bergh
Geoff Burdick
Larry Chernoff
Man-Nang Chong
George Cottle
Eddie Drake
Shauna Duggins
Jonathan Eusebio
Clay Donahue Fontenot
Kyle Gardiner
Barrie Hemsley
Joel C. High
Susan Jacobs
Renard T. Jenkins
Joshua Levinson
Larry McConkey
David James McKimmie
Samantha Jo “Mandy” Moore
Kenny Ortega
Prem Rakshith
Chad Stahelski
David Webb
Woo-Ping Yuen

Production Design
Alain Bainée – “Society of the Snow,” “Official Competition”
Annie Beauchamp – “Swan Song,” “Penguin Bloom”
Ruth De Jong – “Oppenheimer,” “Nope”
Douglas Dresser – “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Finch”
Emmanuelle Duplay – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Red Island”
Warren Flanagan – “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” “Godzilla: King of the Monsters”
Lorin Flemming – “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”
Henry Fong – “Army of the Dead,” “A Wrinkle in Time”
Jennifer Gentile – “Blue Beetle,” “Malignant”
Shona Heath – “Poor Things”
Sam Hutchins – “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” “Joker”
Steven Jones-Evans – “Anyone but You,” “Carmen”
Claire Kaufman – “Oppenheimer,” “White Noise”
Carol Kupisz – “Napoleon,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”
Zsuzsa Mihalek – “Poor Things,” “Atomic Blonde”
Edwin L. Natividad – “Blue Beetle,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”
Till Benjamin Nowak – “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Black Panther”
Chris Oddy – “The Zone of Interest,” “King of Thieves”
Jenny Oman – “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” “The Green Knight”
Adam O’Neill – “Chevalier,” “Empire of Light”
James Price – “Poor Things,” “The Iron Claw”
Peggy Pridemore – “Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House,” “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back”
Scott Purcell – “Ambulance,” “A Quiet Place”
Steve Saklad – “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.,” “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar”
Rick Schuler – “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Once upon a Time…in Hollywood”
Don Shank – “Elemental,” “Luca”
Andrew M. Siegel – “The Fabelmans,” “Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn”
Tom Targownik Taylor – “Stand Up Guys,” “Little Fockers”
Adam Willis – “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Marriage Story”
Katia Wyszkop – “Peter von Kant,” “Une Jeune Fille Qui Va Bien”
Milena Zdravkovic – “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” “Ghostbusters: Afterlife”

Short Films and Feature Animation
Dan Abraham – “Once upon a Studio,” “Planes”
Abigail Addison – “The Debutante,” “I’m OK”
Michael Andrews* – “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Megamind”
Brad Booker – “WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko,” “The Book of Life”
Samuel Caron – “Invincible,” “As Happy as Can Be”
Nazrin Choudhury – “Red, White and Blue”
Sarah Helen Cox – “Heavy Pockets,” “Plain Pleasures”
Louie Del Carmen – “Luck,” “The Star”
Kayla Galang – “When You Left Me on That Boulevard,” “Joan on the Phone”
Amit R. Gicelter – “Letter to a Pig,” “Black Slide”
Alan Hawkins – “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “The Mitchells vs. the Machines”
Atsuko Ishizuka – “Goodbye, Don Glees!,” “No Game No Life: Zero”
Tal Kantor – “Letter to a Pig,” “In Other Words”
Àlex Lora – “The Fourth Kingdom,” “Us”
James Mansfield – “Zootopia,” “Hercules”
Patrick Mate – “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” “Puss in Boots”
Boris Mendza – “Bazigaga,” “Rise of a Star”
Yegane Moghaddam – “Our Uniform,” “On the Cover”
Maral Mohammadian – “Impossible Figures and Other Stories I,” “Shannon Amen”
Mari Okada – “Maboroshi,” “Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms”
Ryo Orikasa – “Miserable Miracle,” “Datum Point”
Frank Passingham – “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” “Kubo and the Two Strings”
Ülo Pikkov – “’Til We Meet Again,” “Empty Space”
Rebecca Pruzan – “Lovesick,” “Ivalu”
Troy Quane – “Nimona,” “Spies in Disguise”
Vincent René-Lortie – “Invincible,” “The Man Who Traveled Nowhere in Time”
Carlos Segundo – “Big Bang,” “Sideral”
Pauline Seigland – “One and Thousand Nights,” “Little Hands”
Shuzo Shiota – “Blame!,” “Muybridge’s String”
Justin K. Thompson – “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”
Christine Turner* – “The Barber of Little Rock,” “Lynching Postcards: “Token of a Great Day””
Theodore Ty – “Nimona,” “Lilo & Stitch”
Chie Uratani – “In This Corner of the World,” “Summer Wars”
Viviane Vanfleteren – “Titina,” “The Secret of Kells”
Atsushi Wada – “Bird in the Peninsula,” “The Great Rabbit”
Virgil Widrich – “Fast Film,” “Copy Shop”
Masaaki Yuasa – “Inu-Oh,” “Mind Game”
Rayka Zehtabchi – “Are You Still There?,” “Period. End of Sentence.”

Sound
Gina R. Alfano – “Baby Ruby,” “You Hurt My Feelings”
Manfred Banach – “Home Sweet Home – Where Evil Lives,” “John Wick: Chapter 4”
Stephanie Brown – “Haunted Mansion,” “The Marvels”
Johnnie Burn – “The Zone of Interest,” “Poor Things”
Alexandra Fehrman – “American Fiction,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Linda Forsén – “Love Lies Bleeding,” “A House Made of Splinters”
Lee Gilmore – “Dune: Part Two,” “The Batman”
Glynna Grimala – “End of the Road,” “Father Stu”
Loveday Harding – “Heart of Stone,” “The Batman”
Brent Kiser – “The Lionheart,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”
Frédéric Le Louêt – “Only 3 Days Left,” “Alibi.com 2”
Steven A. Levy – “Oppenheimer,” “Tenet”
Kate Morath – “The Boys in the Boat,” “Belfast”
Mark Purcell – “Maestro,” “Dune”
Alejandro Quevedo – “Murder City,” “Radical”
David M. Roberts – “The Killer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Shelley Roden     – “Elemental,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”
Jay Rubin – “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” “Master Gardener”
Ian Voigt – “The Creator,” “The Hustle”
Laura Wiest – “The Boogeyman,” “Sanctuary”
Tarn Willers – “The Zone of Interest,” “Starve Acre”
Linda Yeaney – “The Beekeeper,” “Interstellar”

Visual Effects
Gerardo Aguilera – “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Avengers: Endgame”
Stephen Hugh Richard Clee – “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp”
Simone Coco – “Napoleon,” “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One”
Ian Comley – “The Creator,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”
Tim Dobbert – “The Creator,” “Kong: Skull Island”
Emile Ghorayeb – “Nope,” “Alita: Battle Angel”
Michael Grobe – “Dune: Part Two,” “Fast X”
Trevor Hazel – “The Creator,” “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor among Thieves”
Tamara Kent – “Rebel Moon: Part One – A Child of Fire,” “The Flash”
Julius Lechner – “The Batman,” “Spider-Man: Far from Home”
Allan Magled – “Bad Boys for Life,” “Geostorm”
Luc-Ewen Martin-Fenouillet – “Napoleon,” “Cruella”
Raymond McMillan – “Little Children,” “Dracula 2000”
Lori C. Miller – “Nyad,” “Avatar: The Way of Water”
Johnathan Nixon – “Nyad,” “Avatar: The Way of Water”
Tatsuji Nojima – “Godzilla Minus One,” “Ghost Book Obake Zukan”
Rick Walter O’Connor – “Bumblebee,” “A Quiet Place”
Stephane Paris – “The Commuter,” “Guardians of the Galaxy”
Laura Pedro – “Society of the Snow,” “A Monster Calls”
Pietro Ponti – “The Marvels,” “Terminator Genisys”
Kyle Robinson – “The Flash,” “Black Panther”
Kiyoko Shibuya – “Godzilla Minus One,” “Ghost Book Obake Zukan”
Kathy Siegel – “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Ford v Ferrari”
Orde Stevanoski – “Smurfs: The Lost Village,” “Alice through the Looking Glass”
Masaki Takahashi – “Godzilla Minus One,” “Parasyte”
Alexis Wajsbrot – “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”
Alex Wuttke – “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”
Takashi Yamazaki – “Godzilla Minus One,” “Parasyte”
Dennis Yoo – “The Batman,” “War for the Planet of the Apes”

Writers
Bahrām Beyzaie* – “When We Are All Asleep,” “Killing Mad Dogs”
Elegance Bratton – “The Inspection,” “Pier Kids”
Samy Burch – “May December”
Dave Callaham – “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”
Alessandro Camon – “The Listener,” “The Messenger”
Nicolás Casariego – “Society of the Snow,” “Intruders”
İlker Çatak* – “The Teachers’ Lounge,” “I Was, I Am, I Will Be”
Massimo Ceccherini – “Io Capitano,” “Pinocchio”
Linda Yvette Chávez – “Flamin’ Hot”
Akela Cooper – “M3gan,” “The Nun II”
Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer – “Blue Beetle,” “Miss Bala”
Zeina Durra – “Luxor,” “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!”
Lee Eisenberg – “Good Boys,” “Bad Teacher”
Massimo Gaudioso – “Io Capitano,” “Tale of Tales”
Arthur Harari – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle”
David Hemingson – “The Holdovers”
Cord Jefferson* – “American Fiction”
Erik Jendresen – “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” “Ithaca”
Maryam Keshavarz – “The Persian Version,” “Circumstance”
Marc Klein – “Mirror Mirror,” “Serendipity”
Kogonada – “After Yang,” “Columbus”
Tony McNamara – “Poor Things,” “The Favourite”
Rhett Reese – “Ghosted,” “Deadpool”
Tony Rettenmaier – “They Cloned Tyrone,” “Young. Wild. Free.”
Bernard Rose – “Traveling Light,” “Candyman”
Sarah Adina Smith – “The Drop,” “Birds of Paradise”
Celine Song* – “Past Lives”
Gene Stupnitsky – “No Hard Feelings,” “Good Boys”
Takuma Takasaki – “Perfect Days,” “Honokaa Boy”
Juel Taylor – “They Cloned Tyrone,” “Creed II”
Erica Tremblay – “Fancy Dance,” “Heartland: A Portrait of Survival”
Justine Triet* – “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Sibyl”
Eva Vives – “All about Nina,” “Raising Victor Vargas”
Paul Wernick – “Ghosted,” “Deadpool”

Artist Representatives
Laura Berwick
Eryn Brown
John Carrabino
Hillary Cook
Tim Curtis
Brian Dobbins
Frank Frattaroli
Jay Gassner
Roger Green
Laurent Gregoire
Jermaine Johnson
Theresa Kang
Becca Kovacik
Linda Lichter
Douglas Lucterhand
Devin Mann
Gregory McKnight
Evelyn O’Neill
David Park
Cynthia Lee Pett
Valarie Phillips
Maggie Pisacane
Lindsay Porter
Gretchen Rush
Jodi Shields
Chris Silbermann
Carolyn Sivitz
Gary Ungar
Douglas Urbanski
Steve Warren
Alex Yarosh

The post Lily Gladstone, Sandra Hüller, Da’Vine Joy Randolph Among 487 Invited to Join the Academy appeared first on TheWrap.

Kramer took over the position in June 2022 after the departure of Dawn Hudson. His three-year contract with the Academy was originally not up for renewal until 2025, but the board renewed it a year early to secure his services for an additional three years.

“Bill is a dynamic and transformational leader, and the Board of Governors agrees he is the ideal person to continue to broaden the Academy’s reach and impact on our international film community and successfully guide the organization into our next 100 years,” Academy president Janet Yang said in a Monday statement.

Kramer first joined the Academy in 2012 and oversaw fundraising for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. He became director of the Academy Museum in 2020, during a time when the museum was under construction and its exhibition plans were transitioning from a survey of film history to one more focused on diversity and the contributions of underrepresented voices.

The executive recently oversaw the Academy100 revenue diversification and outreach program, which is designed to expand AMPAS’ worldwide scope and raise money in advance of the 100th Academy Awards ceremony in 2028.

According to the new press release, he will “continue to oversee all aspects of the Academy and its more than 700 employees in Los Angeles, New York and London.” Kramer will also “continue to lead the expansion and engagement of the Academy’s global membership, all awards programs including the Oscars, the institution’s education and emerging talent initiatives, the Academy’s extensive collection and preservation initiatives and its ongoing calendar of screenings and public programs.” 

Over the next four years of Kramer’s time as CEO, the Academy will face questions about the role of its museum, the slump in theatrical moviegoing and the state of the Oscars’ TV deal with ABC, which expires in 2028 and may well be replaced by a less lucrative deal.

The post Oscars Academy Renews Bill Kramer’s Contract as CEO appeared first on TheWrap.

The Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series category, for instance, dropped from 23 submissions last year to 11 this year, which puts it in line to drop from five to three nominees; Outstanding Directing for a Variety Series dropped from 21 to 14, which should cut its nominees from five to four.

As for the Outstanding Scripted Variety Show category – well, that’s a real mess, and it’ll be the first of our burning questions about this year’s variety categories.  

What’s the deal with the scripted variety category? How many nominees will it have? And how long can the category last?
According to Emmy rules, the Outstanding Scripted Variety Series category – and its predecessor, Outstanding Variety Sketch Series – has been facing the chopping block for years. If a category has fewer than 25 eligible entries for two consecutive years, as scripted variety and variety sketch have for more than a decade, it can be eliminated and folded into a related category. The Academy briefly merged sketch and talk shows a couple of years ago, but the outcry was so big that it reversed the decision almost immediately.

Since then, it has changed some category names and reclassified “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” from a talk show to a scripted variety show, giving “Saturday Night Live” a formidable rival in the category it had won for six years in a row.

Still, the category is now skimpier than ever. The Television Academy’s rules specify that for categories with between eight and 20 entries, the number of nominees is determined by dividing the number submissions by four and rounding to the nearest whole number – which basically means that 18 or 19 entries get you five nominees, 14 through 17 get you four, 10 through 13 get you three and eight or nine get you two …

For the last four years, the scripted variety and variety sketch categories have had between eight and 14 submissions and either two or three nominees, with “Saturday Night Live” the only common denominator.

But if there are fewer than eight nominees, the category is taken off the ballot and voting is put in the hands of a panel made up of volunteers who promise to watch all of the submissions. This year, that has happened to the scripted variety category. After regular Emmy nomination voting has closed, a panel of volunteers will watch all the submissions – “SNL,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “After Midnight,” “Painting With John” and probably not much else – and vote whether or not each one deserves to be nominated.

No more than two shows can be nominated, and a program is eliminated from contention if it doesn’t receive at least 70% approval from the panel. (Perhaps to stave off disaster, that threshold was changed from 90% to 70% only days before voting began.) If only one show makes the cut, it’ll be declared the winner on the spot.  

As for how long the category can last, who the hell knows? It could have been killed or merged a few years ago, and things are now getting worse both for scripted variety programs and for talk shows. But the Emmys couldn’t do away with them in the past, so the category will probably just keep morphing and changing its name as long as they keep giving out Emmys.

Since the category’s not going anywhere this year, can John Oliver keep winning?
The variety and talk categories are known for long winning streaks, but “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” is on an awfully impressive run. It won in the Outstanding Variety Talk Series category for seven straight years between 2016 and 2022 — and then, when the Television Academy moved it into the newly created Outstanding Scripted Variety Series category last year and put it up against the winningest show in Emmy history, “Saturday Night Live,” it won again. It’s now two wins shy of the longest streak ever, which belongs to “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” with its 10 consecutive wins in Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Series (nine wins) and Outstanding Variety Series (one win). 

Given the paucity of contenders in this category, it’ll probably come down to Oliver vs. “Saturday Night Live” once more. Oliver’s streak has to end at some point, but it’s hard to pick against him without strong evidence that voters are getting tired of “Last Week Tonight.” In fact, it probably makes more sense to think that maybe the streak will get to nine this year and then end next year, just before it ties the record, at the hands of the 50th anniversary season of “SNL.”

Is the Outstanding Talk Series category in better shape?
Yes, but only slightly. The category has had a full slate of five nominees for the last four years, but it’s going to fall short this year because it only had 14 submissions. Emmy math says that means four nominees, and history suggests those will be “The Daily Show,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and probably “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” all past nominees.

But that wouldn’t leave room for newcomers like “Hot Ones” or “John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in LA” or old timers like “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” or “Real Time With Bill Maher.”

Is a part-time host enough to keep “The Daily Show” in the winners’ circle?
The exit of “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” from the Outstanding Variety Talk Series category last year came as a huge relief to all the talk-show hosts who’d put on shows five nights a week only to lose to the guy who’d do less than two dozen a year.  But the award went to the last show besides Oliver’s to win: “The Daily Show,” which in the intervening years had changed hosts from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah.

So “The Daily Show” comes into this year’s Emmy race as the defending champion — except that it’s no longer Noah’s show, but one led by a rotating cast of guest hosts. You’d think that a shifting slate of 12 different hosts during the eligibility period would hurt the show’s Emmy chances for a repeat — but one of those guests is Jon Stewart, who has returned once a week to the show he led to its first 10 wins in the category. His 2024 return, even if it’s part time, could be the key to its Emmy hopes.

Besides awards shows and the Super Bowl halftime show, what else can break into the live variety special category?
Even more than usual, the Outstanding Variety Special (Live) category seems to be the province of awards shows: The Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys, the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, the CMA Awards, the BET Awards…  The Super Bowl halftime show is always a lock, as it will be for this year’s show starring Usher, but what else? There’s J-Lo’s live Apple Music concert, maybe. Katt Williams live standup special? Ryan Seacrest and the ghost of Dick Clark ringing in the New Year? And did enough people actually like the Tom Brady roast? We’ll see.

Will music or comedy rule in the Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) category?
In recent years, voters in this category have nominated comedy specials about twice as often as music specials — though the slate each year is generally a mixture of the two, with a tribute or two thrown in. This year the comics include Dave Chappelle (he’s controversial, but he’s got five noms in the category in the last six years), Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, Ricky Gervais, Kevin Hart, Trevor Noah, Amy Schumer and Ramy Youssef, among others. Musical entries come from Billy Joel (will he get sympathy votes for CBS cutting off the first broadcast in the middle of “Piano Man?”), Elton John, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Barry Manilow and the Grammy salute to hip-hop.

The safest bet is to pick two from column A (comics), one from column B (musical specials) and then throw in a tribute (Dick Van Dyke, “The Tonight Show” 10th anniversary or the Kennedy Center Honors) and something that mixes it all together, like “Hannah Waddingham: Home for Christmas.” But this is the most robust of the variety categories, so there’s an awful lot to choose from.

Why isn’t Taylor Swift eligible?
“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”was one of the events of the year, both the concert tour and the three-hour film of her Los Angeles concerts that played in theaters last fall and in an extended cut (“Taylor’s Version”) on Disney+ in March. In February, the Taylor Swift Museum (apparently there is such a thing) tweeted that “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” was “officially eligible for Emmy consideration.”

But sorry Swifties, Disney says it ain’t so, and the only mention of Swift anywhere on the Emmy ballot comes in the capsule description of the Grammy Awards. The bottom line is simple: You can get away with a limited theatrical release and still retain Emmy eligibility, but a 91-day release in up to 3,855 theaters? No way.

A version of this story first appeared in the Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post Burning Questions About John Oliver, Jon Stewart and the Emmys’ Messy Variety Categories appeared first on TheWrap.

The ballots covered a total of 886 pages, with a high of 239 pages for the 17 performer categories and a low of two pages for the 26 contenders in Outstanding Emerging Media Program.

We’ve looked through the ballots, and here’s some of what we learned.

Fewer contenders

Fourteen categories, most notably Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie, had more entries than they did the previous year. Three categories had the same number. And 89 categories, a staggering 84% of the included categories, had fewer entries than 2023.

A LOT of “SNL” submissions

Every one of the 20 “Saturday Night Live” hosts in Season 49 were submitted in the Outstanding Guest Actor and Actress in a Comedy Series category, making up almost 12% of the 172 contenders in those categories. For the record, the “SNL” host lineup consists of Nate Borgatze, Josh Brolin, Bad Bunny, Timothee Chalamet, Pete Davidson, Adam Driver, Ayo Edebiri, Jacob Elordi, Shane Gillis, Ryan Gosling, Jake Gyllenhaal, Dakota Johnson, Dua Lipa, Kate McKinnon, Jason Momoa, Maya Rudolph, Emma Stone, Sydney Sweeney, Kristen Wiig and Ramy Youssef. And why not? Over the last five years, 17 “SNL” hosts have received Emmy nominations.

The same strategy applied to “SNL” cast members. The performers who’ve been nominated before, Kenan Thompson and Bowen Yang, were submitted in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy category this year as well, and so were Michael Che, Mikey Day, Andrew Dismukes, Marcello Hernandez, James Austin Johnson, Colin Jost, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker – and, in the supporting actress category, Chloe Fineman, Heidi Gardner, Punkie Johnson, Molly Kearney, Ego Nwodin, Sarah Sherman and Chloe Troast. That’s every one of the season’s 12 repertory players and all five of the featured players.

Plus eight songs written for “SNL” episodes were entered in the Outstanding Music and Lyrics category.

Ken!

The variety choreography category also includes the Oscars, whose submission singles out two choreographed numbers: The dance that went with the In Memoriam film, which most people don’t remember, and the “I’m Just Ken” number by Ryan Gosling, Slash and others, which was pretty much everybody’s favorite part of the show.

Actors playing themselves

The last thing the Emmys need to do is add new categories – but if they do, how about Outstanding Performance as Yourself? This year’s performer ballots feature 17 people who have been entered in the guest acting categories for playing themselves (and that doesn’t even count John McEnroe’s truly great “Never Have I Ever” narration as himself).  The main contributor to the roster of self-performances is the final season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is responsible for entries from Ted Danson, Lori Loughlin, Sienna Miller, Conan O’Brien, Jerry Seinfeld and Bruce Springsteen, all of whom played versions of themselves on the show.

Others include Benjamin Bratt from “Loot,” Matthew Broderick and Mel Brooks from “Only Murders in the Building,” Bradley Cooper from “Abbott Elementary,” Flea from “Painting With John,” Richard Kind from “Girls5Eva,” Simu Liu from “The Other Two,” Vincent Pastore and Rachael Ray from “The Curse” (the only person entered from a drama rather than a comedy), Jason Ritter from “Gen V” and Charlie Sheen from “Bookie.”

And while it might not seem like a stretch, there is precedent for being nominated for playing yourself. Morgan Freeman was nominated in 2021 for doing it in “The Kominsky Method.” So was Mel Brooks in 2015 for “The Comedians” and Michael J. Fox in 2012 for “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”

Actors competing against themselves

Dozens of actors are competing in multiple categories for different shows, but how about ones who are competing against themselves? This year’s ballots of have lots of those.

The full list: Laura Benanti in “Elsbeth” and “The Gilded Age” (guest actress drama); Rose Byrne in “Physical” and “Platonic” (lead actress comedy); Jamie Camil in “Acapulco” and “Lopez vs. Lopez” (guest actor comedy); Cameron Cowperthwaite in “Fallout” and “Sugar” (guest actor drama); Jim Gaffigan in “Full Circle” and “Unfrosted” (supporting actor limited); Walton Goggins in “I’m a Virgo” and “The Righteous Gemstones” (supporting actor comedy); Forrest Goodluck in “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” and “Pet Sematary: Bloodlines” (supporting actor limited); John Goodman in “The Conners” and “The Righteous Gemstones” (lead actor comedy); Jackie Hoffman in “Night Court” and “Only Murders in the Building” (guest actress comedy); Jake Lacy in “Apples Never Fall” and “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” (supporting actor limited); Judith Light in “Julia” and “Shining Vale” (supporting actress comedy); Camila Mendes in “Musica” and “Upgraded” (lead actress limited); Tig Notaro in “The Morning Show” and “Star Trek: Discovery” (supporting actress drama); Wendell Pierce in “Elsbeth,” “Power Book III: Raising Kanan” and “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” (supporting actor drama); Dennis Quaid in “Full Circle” and “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” (supporting actor limited); Anna Sawai in “Shogun” and “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” (lead actress drama); Shaun Sipos in “Outer Range” and “Reacher” (supporting actor drama).

EGOT chasers

By the way, if Bruce Springsteen somehow gets a nomination for his very funny work on “Curb” as Bruce Springsteen, he’ll be on the verge of a semi-EGOT. Springsteen has won 20 Grammy Awards, an Oscar for the song “Streets of Philadelphia” and a special Tony Award for “Springsteen on Broadway” – so if you count his Tony, he’s only an Emmy shy of the showbiz-award grand slam. To get all technical about it, an Emmy win would place him on the non-competitive EGOT list alongside Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, James Earl Jones, Harry Belafonte, Quincy Jones and Frank Marshall, all of whom got one of the four awards with an honorary trophy.

But two other Emmy contenders could secure a real EGOT this year. The only living people on the list of those who are only missing the E in EGOT are songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. (The people who died one E short were Henry Fonda, Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner, Frank Loesser, Stephen Sondheim and Jule Styne.)  Pasek and Paul probably have a better chance than Springsteen of landing an Emmy this year; they’re on the ballot with “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” a humorous song from the “Sitzprobe” episode of “Only Murders in the Building.” Pasek, who together with Paul won an Oscar for “La La Land,” Tonys for “Dear Evan Hansen” and “In the Loop” and a Grammy for “The Greatest Showman,” called the song “a roller coaster of insanity” in a recent conversation with TheWrap.

Potential dominators

In recent years, the acting categories have often been dominated by a small number of programs to a distressing degree.  Even after the Television Academy changed the voting process in a way designed to cut down on people casting votes for every cast member of their favorite shows, certain shows racked up the nominations: “Succession” got 14 acting nominations twice, while “Ted Lasso,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus” got nine.

This year, who’s positioned to dominate the acting categories? If you’re just going by the number of submissions, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is on top: It submitted 24 actors, 17 of them in the guest categories. But “The Bear” has 18 entries, spread out across six acting categories: one each for lead actor and actress, four for supporting actor, three for supporting actress, five for guest actor and four for guest actress. Elsewhere, “Only Murders in the Building” and “The Morning Show” have 17, “The Righteous Gemstones” and “Hacks” have 15, “The Crown” and “Abbott Elementary” have 12.

In the end, it’s unlikely that anything other than “The Bear” can hit double digits, or that a small number of shows will dominate the acting categories the way “Succession,” “Dopesick,” “The White Lotus” and “Ted Lasso” did in past years. But we’ve underestimated voters’ propensity for turning to the same programs in the past, and we might be doing it again this year.  

Shows that defied conventional wisdom

Emmy watchers typically keep a close eye on submissions in the writing and directing categories, under the longstanding consensus that it’s a mistake for a show to submit multiple entries in those categories. Juggernauts like “Succession” have gotten away with it and landed multiple nominations, but conventional wisdom says that a show risks splitting the vote and losing out on a nomination if it submits too many episodes in a category. (Complicating matters is the fact that individuals can submit themselves even if the network or production company doesn’t.)

This year, a handful of shows threw caution to the wind. “Reservation Dogs” may have figured it had nothing to lose in its final season, since Emmy voters have ignored it in the past, submitting six different episodes for directing and eight for writing. “Ahsoka” has six directing entries and “Silo” has three directing and seven writing. And “Shogun,” the series that moved from limited series to drama series categories and immediately became a frontrunner, submitted six different episodes for directing and five for writing.

Shows that stuck with conventional wisdom

Most of the big series stuck to one or two submissions in the directing and writing categories. In comedy, “Abbott Elementary” submitted the “Party” episode for directing and “Career Day” for writing; “The Bear” submitted “Fishes” and “Honeydew” for directing  and just “Fishes” for writing; and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” submitted “The Colostomy Bag” and the finale, “No Lessons Learned,” for directing, and nothing for writing, because improvised shows aren’t eligible in the screenwriting categories. In the drama categories, “The Crown” submitted “Dis Moi Oui” and “Sleep, Dearie Sleep” for directing and “Ritz” and “Sleep, Dearie Sleep” for writing, and “Slow Horses” submitted “Strange Games” for directing and “Sleeping With Tigers” for writing.

Category Hogs

In the Outstanding Choreography for Variety or Reality Programming category, there are 48 entries. Of those 48, more than half are from only two shows, “Dancing With the Stars” and “So You Think You Can Dance.” “DWTS” entered 11 different routines, and “SYTYCD” entered 14.

For the record, “So You Can Think You Can Dance” is the program with the most nominations (43) and wins (12) in this category, with “Dancing With the Stars” second with 22 noms and five wins. But it’s been two years since “DWTS” landed multiple noms in one year, and three since “SYTYCD” did it.  

One person, two names

Devery Jacobs is on Emmy ballots in the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series and Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie categories for “Reservation Dogs” and “Echo,” respectively, but that’s not the only name under which Jacobs appears. In the Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance category, she’s on the ballot as Kawennahere Devery Jacobs for “What If…?” She also uses her full name in the directing category for an episode of “Reservation Dogs” – and while writers’ names don’t appear on the Emmy ballot, it’s likely that her entry in the writing category for another episode of “Reservation Dogs” will be under that name as well. Jacobs has explained that when she’s working as a writer, producer or director, and particularly when she’s “telling stories from my culture,” she thinks it’s important to use her full Mohawk name.

The Multi-Cam Wild Card

Outstanding Director for a Comedy Series is one of the categories where entries are separated by genre, multi-camera and single camera. Where the vast majority of comedies these days are of the single camera variety, there are still old-style sitcoms that are shot on a set (typically before a studio audience) with multiple cameras running. This year, out of the 107 total submissions, 13 of them come from multi-cam shows: “Bob Hearts Abishola,” “The Conners,” “Extended Family,” “Frasier,” “How I Met Your Father,” “Lopez vs. Lopez,” “The Ms. Pat Show” and “Night Court.”

Emmy rules dictate that nominees from each of the two genres will be proportional to the number of submissions from each genre, as long as each genre has at least 5% of the entries. The 13 multi-cam submissions are enough to give it one of the six nominees in the category, so the director of one of those multi-cam shows will be nominated.

The last two years, “The Ms. Pat Show” director Mary Lou Belli was the top vote-getter among multi-cam directors, so she surprised people by showing up on the list of nominees both years. This year, though, the heavyweight in the category seems to be “Frasier,” whose two entries were directed by the show’s star, Kelsey Grammer, and by the consensus pick as the giant of sitcom directing, James Burrows. It’s hard not to think that Burrows has a very good shot at his 28th nomination for comedy directing.

The post 12 Things I Learned Perusing All 886 Pages of the Emmy Ballots appeared first on TheWrap.

The 45 entries contain films about Paul Simon, James Brown, the Beach Boys, U2, Jennifer Lopez, Lil Nas X and even the disgraced Milli Vanilli, among others. There’s a film about the recording of a single song, one about a concert at Hoover Dam and one in the aftermath of the murder of a singing star. (True crime meets music, you could say.)

Of the documentaries that qualified in the category, 12 are music related, a 27% share that is almost four times the proportion of music films in the 2023 Oscar-qualifying documentaries.

As voting goes on in the Emmys’ nomination round, here’s a guide to the music docs that are in the running.

“The Beach Boys” (Disney+)
Directors: Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny

Veteran producer Marshall has directed a string of music docs in recent years, including “Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name,” “Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story” and “The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” He joins forces with longtime music-doc director Zimny (“Springsteen on Broadway,” “Willie Nelson & Family,” “Elvis Presley: The Searcher”) for this look at the long-running Southern California band, which focuses far more on the first 15 years of the band’s career than the 50 or so years since then. The center of the film is tortured mastermind Brian Wilson, who is not in shape to talk through the career – so the film relies on archival interviews and footage of Wilson and his late brothers, and new interviews with bandmates like Al Jardine and Mike Love, who comes across as more measured and less embittered than he has sometimes seemed.

“Billy Idol: State Line” (Veeps)
Directors: Vincent Adam Paul and George Scott

This 93-minute doc is billed as showcasing “the first-ever live concert in front of the world famous Hoover Dam,” which may be a rather arcane first except for those who are big fans of “White Wedding” and “Eyes Without a Face.” The film, which received a brief theatrical release in late 2023, sets up the unusual event but focuses on footage of the show at which the veteran punk and new-wave musician was joined by his longtime guitarist Steve Stevens and by special guests Alison Mosshart, Steve Jones and Tony Kanal.

“The Greatest Love Story Never Told” (Prime Video)
Director: Jason B. Bergh

J-Lo is double dipping at the Emmys this year, with her special “Apple Music Live: Jennifer Lopez” competing against concerts by Lady Gaga, Audra McDonald, Barry Manilow, Billy Joel, Hozier and Maren Morris and others in the Outstanding Variety Special (Pre-Recorded) category. This documentary about the making of her “This Is Me … Now” album, is part of the multimedia barrage that accompanied that album and also included the Apple Music concert and a musical film on Amazon featuring Post Malone, Keke Palmer and others. Jane Fonda is part of this film, and so is Ben Affleck.

“The Greatest Night in Pop” (Netflix)
Director: Bao Nguyen

In an all-night recording session in January 1985, almost 50 pop and rock stars recorded a single called “We Are the World,” a Lionel Richie/Michael Jackson song written to raise money for relief efforts in Africa. “Be Water” director Bao Nguyen was too young to remember when the song was released, and he wasn’t really a fan of sentimental composition (“quite corny,” he says), but he found the rush to get it written and recorded to be “like a cliffhanger. It felt like a ticking-time-bomb sort of story.” Participants including Richie, Bruce Springsteen, Huey Lewis and Sheila E. participated in the doc.  

“In Restless Dreams:  The Music of Paul Simon” (MGM+)
Director: Alex Gibney

“In Restless Dreams” is the first film about an entertainer that Oscar-winning director Gibney has made since his two-part Frank Sinatra miniseries “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All” in 2015. The two-part, three-and-a-half-hour film is an intimate look at the recording of Simon’s last album, “Seven Psalms,” using that meditative album as a jumping-off point for an examination of Simon’s entire career. TheWrap’s review said, “’In Restless Dreams’ captures an important artist at a crucial time in his life, and finds a way to do so with humor, pathos and a sense of wonder.”

“James Brown: Say It Loud” (A&E)
Director: Deborah Riley Draper

Draper’s previous work included the film “Olympic Pride, American Prejudice” and doc series “The Legacy of Black Wall Street,” both of which focused on the reverberations of specific events. This four-part documentary is about a single person, the titanic singer and performer James Brown, but his life and career also reverberated throughout popular culture and helped change society and art. She told TheWrap that she approached the film fascinated by a question she saw on the cover of a 1960s issue of Look magazine: “Is James Brown the most important Black man in America?”

“Kiss the Future”
Director: Nenad Cicin-Sain

The talking heads in this film set during the Bosnian war in the 1990s include Bill Clinton and Christiane Amanpour, but the focus is on a group of people who refused to let the siege of Sarajevo stop their defiant art and music, and on the massive rock group, U2, who shined a spotlight on that siege during the concerts on their huge ZooTV tour. TheWrap’s review of the film after its 2023 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival called it “a portrait of a city and a people who used culture to fight back; it’s also the story of a rock ‘n’ roll band exploring the limits of how its music can impact the real world. Above all else, though, it’s a rich and moving chronicle of the use of art as both a weapon and a means to salvation.”

“Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” (HBO)
Directors: Carlos Lopez Estrada and Zan Manuel

As as openly queer Black artist, rapper and singer Lil Nas X has been a trailblazer but also faced a homophobic backlash, possibly including a bomb threat that delayed the Toronto Film Festival premiere of this film. “Long Live Montero” is a chronicle of Lil Nas X’s first tour that takes the form of a diary and delves into his relationship with his audience and his family.

“Milli Vanilli” (Paramount+)
Director: Luke Korem

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the German pop group Milli Vanilli went from hitmaking artists to a pop-culture punchline with lightning speed when it was revealed that they lip-synced on stage and didn’t sing on their records. Members Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus could never recover from the humiliation, with a couple of failed comeback attempts preceding Pilatus’ suicide in 1998. But filmmaker Luke Korem, who said what really happened “is more bizarre than anyone knows,” lets Morvan tell the story in this documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2023.  

“The Secret Song” (PBS)
Director: Samantha Campbell

This film isn’t about a specific artist; instead, it’s about a teacher, Doug Goodkin, who taught music to children for 45 years in San Francisco. The documentary follows Goodkin during his final year as a teacher – a year that turned out to bring the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed schools and forced Goodkin to find new ways to create community through music.

“Selena & Yolanda: The Secrets Between Them” (Oxygen)
Director: Billie Mintz

The story of Tejano star Selena Quintanilla Pérez and her murder at the hands of her fan-club president Yolanda Saldívar has been told in the 1997 movie “Selena,” the 2018 series “Selena’s Secret” and the 2021 Netflix series “Selena: The Series,” among other places. This new two-part doc series tells the story from inside the Texas prison where Saldívar is serving a life sentence, with the convicted killer giving her first English-language interview in decades from behind bars.   

“Wham!”  (Netflix)
Director: Chris Smith

This 93-minute film is a zippy travelogue through the relatively brief career of the hit duo of George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley that doesn’t expend much time on the lives that came before (they get together and make their first record by the six-minute mark of the film) or any time on Michael’s solo career that came after. The extensive concert footage can be amusing (those short-shorts!), but the film can be surprisingly touching with the help of some archival interviews in which Michael speaks openly about his struggles as he remained in the closet for his entire Wham! career, only coming out as gay a decade into his solo career.

The post 12 Music Docs Dominating the 2024 Emmy Race, From ‘The Beach Boys’ to ‘Milli Vanilli’ appeared first on TheWrap.

A while after he gave Urbanski that wishlist, the two men were on a plane together. Urbanski was perusing a script. “What are you reading?” Oldman asked him.

“I’m reading a character who’s about to become your new best friend,” Urbanski said. “I won’t say anything more than that.”

The new best friend, it turned out, was Jackson Lamb, a rumpled and grumpy British intelligence agent who presides over a motley crew of discredited spies who’ve been reassigned to the bottom of the barrel at MI-5: Slough House. That’s where agents who’ve screwed up badly go to be verbally abused and given lousy assignments by Lamb. 

The role was delicious, funny and touching, because of course the misfits at Slough House — or “Slow Horses,” the derisive nickname that gave the show its name — turn out to be capable agents under the tutelage of a brilliant boss. The role lets Oldman wear the same clothes almost every episode, and he never has to worry about spending time in the makeup chair or getting in shape for a new season. Hell, he barely has to cut or comb his hair, and he certainly doesn’t have to wash it. 

Essentially, “Slow Horses,” based on a series of novels by Mick Herron, was that checklist he’d given Urbanski as a guide to the remainder of his career. As he began to navigate his 60s and his fifth decade as an actor, the man known for his fierce performances in “Sid and Nancy,” “Prick Up Your Ears,” “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” “True Romance” and many more was going into his final act as a slovenly grump who farts ferociously and never changes his raincoat.

And he was loving it.

“He’s got no filter, he doesn’t care about being judged and there’s really nothing to lose,” Oldman said with a grin. “There’s something very freeing and liberating about playing someone who really doesn’t give a f–k.”

*

Oldman sat on a couch in a sleekly appointed house above Beverly Hills. His suit was pale linen, casual but stylish; his striped socks added a touch of color above his cream-colored, elegantly detailed brogues. He was sharp in a not-trying-very-hard kind of way. And yet, Jackson Lamb was peeking out all around the edges. The hair was long and tangled, albeit cleaner than Lamb would have it. The T-shirt, an off shade of blue, was a little ragged around the neck. And when he leaned back on the couch, a visible potbelly protruded above his belt.

The actor, it turned out, was on a break in the middle of shooting Season 5 of the Apple TV+ series. And if we always hear about stars getting in shape for a role, this is the kind of series where you might want to get out of shape before reporting to the set, right?

“Yeah, I suppose so,” he said, laughing and patting his belly. “I gained a few pounds for ‘Mank’ and this followed shortly after, and obviously the character is unhealthy and has let himself go. So I’ve sort of been carrying it around.” He glanced at his waist and shrugged. “It, and the hair. And when I’m not on the set, it just is what it is.” A grin. “It doesn’t work with every outfit.”

But it works with Lamb’s shabby outfits, which include a wrinkled shirt, a half-hearted tie and the same ragged raincoat no matter the weather. “I’m so thankful to be able to come in and throw on these old clothes that never change,” Oldman added. “I’ve got the same shoes I’ve been wearing since Episode 1. It’s quite fun to almost be in your own clothes, you know?”

Of course, there’s more to Lamb than the clothes, which in a way are an act of deliberate camouflage. “The whole thing with the greasy hair and not bathing very often and having holes in his socks — it’s all designed to make people underestimate him,” he noted. But Herron’s books aren’t big on explaining how Lamb got that way — and when Oldman went to the writer early in pre-production to ask questions, Herron told him that if it wasn’t on the page, he didn’t really have an answer.

“So I just went away and made my own little bible,” Oldman recalled. “I said, ‘Do you think he was married, and the pressure of the job and the nature of the work was such that it sort of disintegrated?’ ‘Yeah, maybe.’” He laughed. “You just have to go away and put your own spin on it. But what’s there on the page is terrific.”

Because each new season covers one of Herron’s Slough House books, Oldman said he reads the appropriate book prior to filming and often asks showrunner Will Smith if he can incorporate favorite lines into the scripts. The idea is to find that fine line between drama and humor, which has always been a key ingredient of “Slow Horses.”

“I think we walk the knife’s edge very well,” he said. “How much of the drama do you emphasize? How much of the comedy do you play up? Do you make the drama a little more like ‘Killing Eve,’ which is ever so slightly heightened, or do you go very real with the drama and make the humor more incidental? I think that’s where we kind of came down: There’s a lot of humor in the show, but we can’t ask for a laugh.”

Of course, any discussion of the humor in “Slow Horses” has to circle around to Lamb’s farts, which get a juicy place of honor at least once per season. Given that Oldman is a key creative participant in the show, the question was inescapable: Do they give him input into the volume and tone of his gas?

“I’m a fart consultant,” he said immediately. “It sounds ridiculous, but we do have emails going back and forth where we talk about the frequency and robustness.” He laughed. “I mean, come on: If we’re in the back of a Rolls-Royce, that is really good leather we’re talking about. We need a more robust fart and we should put a little echo on that one.”

Season 5, he promised, is particularly strong in the flatulence department. “It’s a three-fart season,” Oldman revealed. “I’ve got three crackers coming up, if you like that kind of thing.”

*

There was a time in Oldman’s career when you wouldn’t have pictured him in a long-running television program of any kind. Born in Southeast London, the son of an alcoholic welder who left the family when Oldman was just 7, he went to drama school and acted on the stage before bursting onto movie screens.

He was fearsomely talented and often ferocious on screen, moving into high-profile roles with Oliver Stone (“JFK”), Francis Ford Coppola (“Bram Stoker’s Dracula”), Tony Scott (“True Romance”) and, later, the “Harry Potter” and “Dark Knight” series. Odd roles aside, he was not the kind of actor you’d expect to find on the small screen.

“Early on, there was a sort of snobbishness, wasn’t there, about television?” he said. “You were either a movie actor or you were a television actor. And like theater people who looked down on movie actors, the movie actors looked down on TV actors. Even though there were great one-offs on television, we tended to look down on television.” He shrugged. “Now everybody wants to get in the game. They all want a show. We’re in this golden age of it now, aren’t we?”

As for Oldman’s own golden age, everybody has their own favorites: yours might include “Air Force One” or “The Contender,” mine might be “True Romance” or “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and Oldman’s own favorites… well, those would be the ones he had the most fun making. 

“You know the end result, but for me, the process of doing it is what I remember,” he said. He mentioned “JFK,” for which Stone gave him plane tickets and a per diem and asked him to go to Dallas and New Orleans and do his own research into Lee Harvey Oswald; “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” which involved months of rehearsal at Coppola’s estate in Northern California wine country; “Hannibal,” where he loved Ridley Scott’s energy and pace; David Fincher’s “Mank”; and Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope,” in which he has a small but crucial role as John Cheever in the Italian director’s rapturous film that premiered in Cannes. “Watching him work was just extraordinary,” he said, imitating how Sorrentino would pace the set looking for inspiration.

Oldman has talked recently about retiring — but when you hear him rhapsodize about Sorrentino or “Slow Horses,” it’s hard to imagine he’s at a point where he might walk away.

“Well, it’s on the horizon,” said Oldman, who turned 66 in March. “I mean, I do like what I do, but I am creative in other things, like photography. The good thing is that we shoot 12 episodes and they break it up into two seasons of six, so you have seven or eight months off. I really do enjoy the downtime, when I can take pictures.”

“What has happened is there were periods when I wished the material had been better. You know, it is a job and you have to put kids through school and put food on the table and pay the mortgage. And there were times when the work I was doing was really removed from what I wanted to do. I just started to resent it and thought, Oh, I’ll just pack it in. I’m done with it.” (Oldman didn’t say which films he was talking about, though he has said he was unsatisfied with his performance in the “Harry Potter” films in the past.) “I’d give it my best, but I just really wasn’t enjoying the material.”

“Now I have a renewed energy. But, God willing, I don’t know if I want to be doing it when I’m 80.” Another shrug. “It’s very selfish being an artist or an actor. You’ve got this vision and you sacrifice a lot of things. So now there are photographs I’d like to take, and there are books I’ve never read and films that I want to see and all sorts of things I might want to do. It’s not stopping being creative, it’s just slowing everything else down.”

He stood up and stretched, then started to leave with his wife, Gisele Schmidt. On his way across the living room, he stopped and turned. “But we’ll see,” he said with a smile. “As long as Apple keeps writing the checks, I’ll keep playing Jackson.”

This story first appeared in the Drama Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

The post How Gary Oldman Landed His Dream Role as a Farting Slob in ‘Slow Horses’ | Video appeared first on TheWrap.

Because they have shaped this season, that’s why. Their effect starts with the calendar: This year’s Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony is taking place on September 15, 2024, exactly eight months (244 days) after last year’s Emmy Awards, which actually took place this year.

It’s the shortest time between shows in Emmy history because when the strikes hit, the show that should have happened in September 2023 was delayed to January 2024 in order to ensure that writers and actors could actually show up. So the Television Academy gave out awards for the TV shows of 2022-23 in ’24, and now they’ll have a second ceremony in the same calendar year for the first time ever.

But it’s not just the timing that has changed because of the strikes — so has the field of contenders. Emmy ballots in most of the 118 categories were posted on the Television Academy website on Thursday, and the most obvious takeaway was how much smaller the field of contenders was. The drama series and comedy series categories dropped by more than 35%, and some acting categories had fewer than half the number of entries they had in 2023.

Of the 106 categories where a direct comparison was possible between the number of eligible contenders this year and last year, only 14 had more entries this year, three had the same number and 89 had fewer submissions.

Crucially, many of the shows that would have been top contenders are missing in action, particular in the Outstanding Drama Series category. For example, let’s look at last year’s nominees in that category. One of them, “The Crown,” is eligible again this year. Two, “Succession” (which won) and “Better Call Saul,” have ended their runs.

The remaining five nominees were derailed by the strikes. “Andor,” “The Last of Us,” “The White Lotus,” “House of the Dragon” and “Yellowjackets” will be competing for awards in years to come — but because of the work stoppage, all five had their upcoming seasons delayed. “HOTD” Season 2 was pushed back to after the May 31 eligibility cutoff date and the others have all been moved into 2025.

If you look at the dramas that weren’t nominated last year but did make the cut in previous years, the landscape is no better. Past nominees “The Boys” and “Squid Game” similarly did not make the May 31 cutoff date, while “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Stranger Things” are also planning to drop new seasons in 2025.

Meanwhile, the fourth season of “The Mandalorian” is in limbo after the announcement of a 2026 “Mandalorian” feature film; the third season of “Euphoria” was postponed indefinitely after a stop-and-start production schedule; and “Severance” went into production on Season 2 back in 2022, was shut down and finally wrapped earlier this year. Plus, 2019 nominee “Bodyguard” has had a second season teased every so often for years — including on April Fool’s Day 2022, so we can take that with a grain of salt.

The closest thing to a former nominee back in the running, “Bridgerton,” dropped the first four episodes of its second season during the eligibility period. But Emmy rules specify that a series must air a minimum of six episodes to qualify for awards, so it’s out of the picture, too.

The bottom line is that this year’s drama lineup won’t have more than one past nominee, a situation that hasn’t occurred for 50 years. The last time there was only one returning nominee in the category was 1974, when defending champion “The Waltons” was joined by the first seasons of “Kojak,” “Police Story” and “Upstairs, Downstairs” and the second season of “The Streets of San Francisco.” Since then, the fewest past nominees came in 2002, when only two out of a category of five had been nominated prior; and 2017, when “Better Call Saul” and “House of Cards” were joined by five first-year shows.

In the comedy category, things are a little better: Among last year’s nominees, “Wednesday” was delayed, with its next season due to premiere outside the eligibility window. But three of the other 2023 nominees — “Abbott Elementary,” “Only Murders in the Building” and the winner, “The Bear” — had finished filming their next seasons before the strikes began and are eligible. Three others — “Barry,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Ted Lasso” — have ended their runs (though “Ted” is fudging about whether the series is really over). The final 2023 nominee, “Jury Duty,” might have a second season at some point in the future.

The final tally: Out of 16 comedy and drama series nominees last year, only four are back in the running this year.

That’s what you get on the heels of a year in which premieres of new and returning television programs fell by 21%. The first half of 2024 wasn’t much better as studios, networks and streamers thought twice about restarting everything they’d been working on (the strikes only reinforced the doubts they’d been having since the pandemic hit and transformed Hollywood). Even unscripted programs and reality shows, which grabbed the available space because they weren’t affected by the strikes, took a hit: The three reality program categories had a total of 116 entries this year, more than 35% down from the 182 they had last year.  

Late last year, Simulmedia founder and executive chairman Dave Morgan told TheWrap that he expected networks to take “a full year or more to re-energize their entertainment programming.” So if this year’s (second) Emmys feel a little rushed and a little skimpier than usual, make no mistake: We’re still hearing the echoes of the strikes.

A version of this story first appeared in TheWrap’s awards magazines. Read more from the Emmy-season issues here.

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