The Furniture: The Salesman Crafts His Own Stage

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail. Here's Daniel Walber...

Asghar Farhadi's Oscar winning The Salesman begins with a set. The opening credits appear over the quiet stage of a small Tehran theater, nearly ready to debut a new production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. We see the bed before the actors who will lie in it, neon lights illuminated for an empty house. It is a quite literal setting of the stage before the drama begins.

It’s not a play adaptation, but it often feels like one. There are few locations and the cast is small. And, as in many play adaptations, the production design does a lot of heavy lifting...

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Three Fittings: Fantastic Beasts' Odd Costume Win

New Series! Three Fittings celebrates costume design in the movies. The number is necessary self-restraint for we love the art of costuming too much.

By Nathaniel R

Dear reader, I didn't think I'd ever need to see Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them (2016). I thought, solid reasoning given the golden trajectory of most franchises, that Oscar would want to move on after a year of regular craft nominations for the series. I thought, surely they'd never hand one of them an actual Oscar if they hadn't done so by now. But in the interest of completism, after Colleen Atwood's generous fourth statue for costuming this particular movie and its bluray release, I caught up. 

I was both impressed and utterly perplexed by what I found.

While Atwood does unusually understated work (for her), there are far fewer costumes than you might expect (approximately one per man, two per woman). Sussing out why they voted for this confident minimalism within a fantasy over more traditional costume perfection in Jackie, the primary color bliss of then-frontrunner La La Land, the erotic glamour of Allied, and the flouncy Most-ness of Florence, proves nearly impossible.

Nevertheless, here are three key looks to discuss:

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Doc Corner: Is 'Five Came Back' Netflix's Oscar Moment?

by Glenn Dunks

It can sometimes feel like we’ve seen WWII from so many perspectives that there can’t possibly be new ways to convey the weight of its tragedy. That Five Came Back, a new three-part mini-docu-series on Netflix, manages to succeed at doing this is just one of its many virtues. Adapted from Mark Harris’ book of the same name by Harris himself and directed by Laurent Bouzereau, this is a three-hour documentary about the work of five of Hollywood’s biggest directorial names of the 1930s who enlisted to support the American war effort the only way that they knew how: through film, and the personal battles they fought in order to do so.

They were Frank Capra, John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler and John Ford – the latter of whom gets the biggest laugh labelling documentaries in the 1930s as “silly things that rich kooks made” – each of whom left behind successful careers without the promise of anything when they came back.

If they came back at all. The series charts their early efforts before America’s entering the war after Pearl Harbour in 1941 before digging more deeply in the works that they produced from the front lines on the ground and in the skies....

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89th Academy Awards. That's a Wrap

Another Oscar season wraps up. It's all over but the memories and the future debates. Here is a complete guide to our coverage in case you missed any of these pieces...

• New Facts & Trivia Interesting developments
• Twist Ending & The Winners List Surreal but fascinating
• Jimmy Kimmel  How'd he do as host?
• Emma Stone ♥︎s Moonlight In the press room
• Pic / Director Split Is this the new normal? 

• Moonlight's Missing Speech What we lost in the snafu
• Oscar Packages they really biffed the craft presentations this year!
• Viola's Speech Great or too much?
• Best Oscar Tweets Fun 140 character reactions
• Oscar Stage Design They're obsessed with art deco

• Warren vs Faye Reader poll - VOTE
• Only one "Woke" at a time - Oscar = always problematic
• Faces in the Crowd  So much variety in the surprise looks
• 5 Most Handsome Men Chris, Riz, Mahershala, Ryan, Dev
• Kevin O'Connell Wins! It only took 21 nominations

• 13 Fav Photos Celebrity beauty & randomness
• Random Leftovers Screengrab thoughts
• 10 Best Gowns from our fashion guru Jose 
• Podcast The Season Finale 
• The Oscar Charts in all categories 

and yet another set to add to our imaginary doll collection

AND OSCAR WINNER INTERVIEWS

• Asghar Farhadi merging theater and film for The Salesman
• Krystof Deak preps for a big career with the little Sing
• Robert Legato putting exotic animals out of business with The Jungle Book
• Rich Moore on the global resonance of Zootopia 

UP NEXT
Don't go away! We're more creative off season when we don't have so many golden statue deadlines. Pleaes like us on Facebook, sign up for a newsletter (it'll start going out weekly in March), and consider being a patron saint so that we can keep doing this.

Coming in March, the 1963 Supporting Actress Smackdown, Michelle Pfeiffer and the costumes of Scarface, Logan and King Kong and Belle and Gaston all return to the movies (so much nostalgia at the multiplex), thoughts on Big Little Lies, Jake Gyllenhaal in Life, and the 50th anniversary of Thoroughly Modern Millie... "Rasberries!". And on April 1st, new predictions for the 2017 Oscars (yes, the 2017 Oscars. Don't get it twisted like the rest of the internet)

Random Leftover Thoughts from Oscar Night...

by Nathaniel R

Yes, I'm trying to stave off the annual Post Oscar Depression. It's a real thing even if the medical community doesn't yet recognize it. So herewith some random final screengrabs from Oscar night and accompanying thoughts on topics we haven't totally covered yet over the past 3 days of Oscar reactions, recapping, post-mortem. (I promise we'll quit with Oscar 2016 by tonight and move on to other topics for those of you who've already moved on)

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