Happy Birthday, Laura Dern!

by Cláudio Alves

Laura Dern has been blessing us with her existence for 55 years. The Oscar-winning actress started young, being the daughter of two screen titans in their own right – Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. Indeed, one of her earliest big-screen roles was by her mother's side in Martin Scorsese's 1974 Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Since then, Dern has flourished into one of American cinema's most important modern performers. Often driven to auteurs with bold visions, she's a director's actress whose commitment to her roles is never in question. She's never in danger of dispassionate acting, giving it her all 100% of the time and often twisting her visage into terrifying extremes. She really is 'The Face.'

To celebrate the occasion, a list of favorite Laura Dern film performances…

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MTV Movie Awards: The Winners

Manuel here, pretending he’s still part of the demographic for the MTV Movie Awards. Amy Schumer (“Half of you don’t know me and half of you think I’m Meghan Trainor” she quipped at the start of the show) hosted the show which might just as well have been called the “Shailene Woodley” awards. After Jennifer Lawrence and her Hunger Games dominated the past couple of years, unlikely movie star Woodley emerged as the clear winner last night. On top of her MTV Trailblazer award, her film The Fault in Our Stars (the first non-franchise film to win the Movie of the Year award since Wedding Crashers in 2006!) took home 3 awards. Indeed, original and non-franchise films pretty much dominated, even as the show seemed intent on reminding us that Furious 7, Avengers Age of Ultron and plenty more of summer sequels are out or on their way.

I wish I could find that J-Lo reaction to Schumer's Gone Girl/latina joke because it was EVERYTHING. Oh wait...

In other news, Bradley Cooper may be 3-for-0 at the Oscars, but he won “Best Male Performance” over presumed favorites Chris Pratt (whose Marvel film went empty-handed), and Faults own Ansel Egort, Meryl Streep won her very first popcorn award and Zac Efron won “Best Shirtless Performance” for his beautifully psychopathic performance in Neighbors which sounds about right, don’t you think?

Check the full list of winners below

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MTV Movie Awards Nominations

Manuel here pretending not to be baffled and utterly fascinated with the just-announced MTV Movie Awards nominations. As much as I’d like to bemoan their crass youth pandering, their lineup for Movie of the Year (a "category that honors the most loved theatrical release of the season") is quite a respectable one while any awards that nominate Kristen Wiig & Bill Hader for their tour de force lipsync for their lives on The Skeleton Twins is fine by me. 

New Movie Awards Logo designed by Dabs Myla,

You’ll note that Neighbors (which netted Rose Byrne THREE nominations!), Guardians of the Galaxy and The Fault in Our Stars led the pack with seven a piece while Oscar favorites American Sniper, Selma, Boyhood, Whiplash and Birdman found some love. No such luck for Wes Anderson’s big Oscar winner The Grand Budapest Hotel nor for Oscar winners Patricia Arquette & Julianne Moore. Implausibly seeing as she's such an awards juggernaut, you may be surprised to hear that Meryl Streep garnered her second (!!) nomination ever at these awards (Best Villain for Into the Woods). She was previously recognized for her work in The Devil Wears Prada. She shares the category with J.K Simmons (Whiplash), Peter Dinklage (X-Men), Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) and Jillian Bell (22 Jump Street) making it precisely the type of hodge-podge category MTV so enjoys putting together. Don't forget to vote, and maybe we can collectively nab ScarJo a win for Lucy and pretend it's for Under the Skin.

Check the full list of nominations after the jump:

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Year in Review: Women in Hollywood Box Office

Two yummy year in review lists per day. Here's Manuel to talk money 

Last year’s Box Office Top Ten is, as we all know by now, populated with talking raccoons, fighting robots, dangerous apes and superheroes of web-slinging and shield-throwing capabilities, so for this end of year report, we’ll focus instead on female-led films and how they fared with the public. It's a celebration of a corner of Hollywood more in line with the TFE sensibility.

Note: I am using “female-led” quite strictly (though, as always, quite subjectively in some cases).

Ensemble films like Guardians of the Galaxy, The LEGO Movie, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Godzilla are missing from the list below because, while they feature female characters in key roles, they remain male-centric, at best making their female-character (or if we're lucky characters) central amid an obscenely male-skewing world (Saldana in GOTG, Lawrence in XM:DOFP). At worst they side-line their actresses totally - what are Keri Russell and Elizabeth Olsen even doing in their respective films?.

After the jump see what the top 11 female-led films of 2014 grossed last year (along with other lists)

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Interview: Is Laura Dern Still "Wild" At Heart?

Happy Thanksgiving! What better gift for you on this weekend of celebrating abundance than an interview with one of the most gifted actors in the world. Laura Dern has been shocking and stirring moviegoers with finely carved and often daringly dramatic or weirdly comic performances for the past thirty years.

Laura Dern as "Bobbi" in Wild

Born into showbiz (her parents are Oscar-nominees Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd) she grew up onscreen and around film sets. Her breakthrough came early at the age of eighteen. Her first hit as a blind girl in Mask was shortly followed by a revelatory performance as a young girl treading into dangerous sexual waters with an older stranger in Smooth Talk. The very next year she worked with David Lynch on Blue Velvet beginning a long collaborative and rather genius director/muse duet. Nearly thirty years later she's still delivering buzzy performances. On paper her new character Bobbi in Wild, an incongruously positive dying mother who we meet in wisps of memories as Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) attempts a soul searching hike on the PCT, seems far removed from the reckless spirits that made Dern such a fascinating screen presence. But that's not the way Dern sees it, describing this woman as "wild" and "a pioneer". 

When we sat down to talk in Los Angeles it had been the third time I'd seen her in the past year, since she was such a regular presence on the Oscar circuit last season for her father's nomination. "You were practically his campaign manager," I say, fondly remembering her indefatigable enthusiasm for his work as we settle in sharing memories of a Nebraska reception a year back.

"I mean... I'll always be." she says, beaming, ever the devoted daughter now promoting her own film that happens to be about a deep parent-child connection.  The back-to-back award campaigns seem like a good place to start...

NATHANIEL: Did all that time with your father last year make you hungry for an Oscar yourself?

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