7 Costume Sights to See Before The Oscars

I sent Anne Marie to the FIDM Museum to check out this year's costume design exhibit. Here's her report. (I'm seething with jealousy right now!) -Nathaniel

Michael Wilkinson with some of his Oscar nominated costumes for American Hustle

The advantage to being a cinephile in Los Angeles is that there’s a wealth of Oscars-related activities around this time to check out. Costume lovers, rejoice! The Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Museum has launched the 22nd Annual Art Of Motion Picture Costume Design. Here are 7 things you’ll see if you get a chance to go:

1) Sydney’s physics-defying gown from American Hustle - Which is, upon closer inspection, almost see-through. Kudos to Amy Adams and Michael Wilkinson (Oscar-nominated) for pulling off Sydney’s daring looks, which seem all the more daunting to flaunt in person. (There just must have been so much boob-tape.) It's impossible to tell the period pieces from the original creations, which is more than can be said for...

2) Jay Gatsby’s surprisingly striking pink suit - Away from the noisy CGI of Baz Lurhman’s anachronistic adaptation, I was shocked to realize that this suit is dapper as hell. The color is absolutely beautiful, not the alternately washed-out-or-bubblegum pink it had seemed to be in the film. DiCaprio should ask Catherine Martin (nominated for The Great Gatsby) to design his Oscars tux, because otherwise I guarantee he won’t look nearly so good.

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Links

Psssst. Oscar voting closed 2 hours ago. Can you believe we're almost there?!

Film School Rejects good god, Warren Beatty is still going to make that Howard Hughes picture and it started shooting today (!!!) Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, The Bening and the rumors go... Jack Nicholson to co-star
IndieWire porn stars pick the Oscars
E Online Jared Leto's mom reacts to going to the Oscars

/Film Sony wants to release a Spider-Man movie every year now. As I've predicted one day film and television will totally merge since tv got way more cinematic and nearly all movies Hollywood wants to fund are basically tv series with huge budgets that franchise their way across decades with new "episodes"
Variety Oscars are always under heat about omissions and hierarchies of the In Memoriam section. A sordid thing for controversy but it's true. People are always upset by something in it
Screener interesting interview with an Academy member on what they really talk about and how they like to vote
Advocate Our friend Nick on Oscar's dotage and the shrinking window of films they consider
Variety the winners of the makeup and hairstyling guild includ The Butler, Prisoners, American Hustle and actual Oscar nominees Bad Grandpa and Dallas Buyers Club. I'm unclear on why the makeup category is the only category that is still less than 5 nominees. It's not like every single film non-animated film that exists doesn't use hair and makeup. 

Oh and it's good to see Anthony Mackie get his own poster for something even if, for all we know, this is another thankless role (albeit an expensively costumed one). Here he is as The Falcon in Captain America: Winter Soldier. Superheroes movies always start packing in the characters in their sequels. This one will be juggling the good captain, the titular villain, Black Widow, Nick Fury and The Falcon. 

small screen
Caryn James on Ronan Farrow's new show on MSNBC
Shadow and Act Viola Davis has a few TV projects in the works (sigh, but good for her) include How to Get Away With Murder for Shonda Rhimes
The Playlist suggests that a tweet from the writer of True Detective means two female detectives next season. The tweet doesn't actually suggest this. It just says that structurally there are only two POV characters and this time they happened to both be men. (My guess? opposite sex partners next year)

and finally...
A huge congratulations to Steve McQueen, John Ridley and Fox Searchlight. Solomon Northup's memoirs "12 Years a Slave" is finally making its way into American high schools. From the press release:

The National School Boards Association is honored to partner with Fox Searchlight Pictures and Penguin Books to ensure that every public high school student in America has the opportunity to stare the stark realities of slavery in the eye through books and film,” said NSBA President David A. Pickler. “We believe that providing America’s public high school students the opportunity to bear witness to such an unrelenting view of the evils of slavery is essential toward ensuring that this history is never forgotten and must never be repeated.”

When I attended the AFI Steve McQueen event late last year, the push to get the book in school was all that McQueen seemed to want to talk about, barely mentioning the acclaim or the Oscars or anything of the sort during his conversation with that evening's moderator.

Interview: Patricia Norris on 12 Years a Slave, Scarface, Twin Peaks

Patricia Norris with her lifetime achievement from the Costume Guild in 2007Patty Norris is a national treasure but I believe she'd be the last person to say so. When I spoke to the enduring costume designer over the phone about sixth Oscar nomination for 12 Years a Slave, she shocked me again and again with her modesty and her absolute lack of sentiment about what I've always thought of as a very illustrious Hollywood career. But her honestly was, shall we say, refreshing.

The 82 year old's career, as we know it at least, began over just over 40 years ago with westerns like Rio Lobo (1970) and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971) but she doesn't get misty-eyed or nostalgic about her filmography. "I think it was just luck. I started as a stock girl at MGM and I've always been comfortable with clothes," she explains. But to hear her tell it, her developing career wasn't born of and ambitious creative drive, but from practicality.  "I was married but I was left with five children and I had to support them! So you start taking almost any work. There are a few I would like not to think about!" 

I instantly worry (aloud) that I'll touch on one of those accidentally but if I do in the ensuing conversation, she doesn't let on.

I assumed her current flurry of work (Killing Them Softly, The Immigrant, 12 Years a Slave) was a sudden return from retirement but she corrects the impression. She's just picky since she's been frugal. "It's one of those things. Save your money and you don't have to do anything. I do just what I want to do. If it doesn't come along I just do housework." 

Happily for fans of costume dramas, The Immigrant and 12 Years a Slave came along. And these she definitely wanted to do. [more...]

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9 Days Til Oscar. Should 9 Times Nominated "12 Years" Worry?

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, once the Oscar frontrunner and perhaps still, has nine nominations. As we move into the final days of voting (ballots are due on Tuesday the 25th), how many of its categories can it win? I'm thinking about 12 Years again today due to Harvey Weinstein's awful potshot at it over at Deadline where he suggested that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained was better at covering slavery.

I liked 12 Years A Slave, but Quentin covered a lot of that ground first, and dealt with violence, slavery and oppression, shining a light on the American holocaust, as he called it.

Oy!

I'll flesh out some of the following thoughts in the "final predictions" article a week from now but until then, let's discuss it's upcoming Oscar battles... 

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Interview: Lupita Nyong'o on 12 Years, Non-Stop and Her Future

On Lupita Nyong'o's Instagram account she captioned this one:

Yes, a chocolate BAFTA will do quite nicely, thank you!

A golden BAFTA woulda been better but what can you do?

Recently it came to me in a flash: Lupita Nyong'o is the new Jessica Chastain!  Think about it: classically trained movie actress in her early 30s goes from complete unknown to everyone's favorite in the blink of an eye in a critically acclaimed movie (movies plural in Chastain's case) and proves herself a complete and utter natural at celebrity, red carpets, fashion, and social media. 

Of course I didn't know all this when I first sat down with Lupita in the fall in the first rush of acclaim for Twelve Years a Slave, a meeting I shamefully neglected to tell you about until now. Looking over the transcript it occurs to me that the past few months have been so eventful that pieces of our conversation barely make sense. We're conversing as if she isn't a huge celebrity. But the right role at the right time can permanently change things for an actor. [More...]

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