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Film

Behind-the-Scenes Photos of Oscar-Winning Directors at Work

By Tom Hawking on

The Oscars are just around the corner, and we’re very much looking forward to sitting down this Sunday night and watching them unfold. (Much more excited than we were about the Grammys, anyway.) The point of interest, as ever, will be who walks away the Best Director award — even with the golden age of the auteur long behind us, the director’s chair continues to hold a certain mystique, as do the people who occupy it. It’s intriguing to watch directors at work, to see how differently they translate their ideas into reality, and in this vein, we’ve collected some fascinating behind-the-scenes photos of the most distinguished directors to receive the Best Director award over the years. And Mel Gibson. … Read More

Film

New Oscar Categories We’d Like to See — And Who We’d Nominate to Win Them

By Jason Bailey on

The Academy hasn’t added any new Oscar categories since Best Animated Film was established back in 2001; that was the first in 30 years. Every winter we discuss ways to spice up the ceremony, whether it’s new hosts or new production ideas or streamlining the handing out of the statues — but maybe it’s time to rethink the categories… Read More

Celebrity

10 of the Most Incredibly Unlikely Celebrity Feuds in History

By Alison Herman on

Yesterday saw the latest flare-up in what’s apparently a nearly two-decade war between Roseanne Barr and writer Jamaica Kincaid. As Roseanne tells it, Kincaid resigned in protest when then-editor-in-chief Tina Brown invited Barr to guest-edit an issue of the New Yorker in 1996, which is why Barr now considers Kincaid a “repugnant classist.” We didn’t know the two women had even heard of each other, let alone hated each other, but it turns out plenty of famous people have beef, and not just Kanye and Taylor Swift. Here are some of the most unexpected celebrity conflicts, from authors to actors to everything in between. … Read More

Film

12 Female Directors Who Should Have Been Nominated for Oscars

By Alexander Huls on

Since the inception of the Academy Awards over 400 Best Director nominations have been given out. Only four have gone to women. Only one woman has won. It took 80 years for that to happen. Let’s imagine we have the power to travel back in time and change Academy Awards… Read More

Film

10 Famous Directors on Movie Violence

By Emily Temple on

The Internet has been abuzz this week about Quentin Tarantino’s explosive interview with a British journalist for Channel 4, in which the director snapped after being asked why he didn’t think film violence and real violence were connected. “Don’t ask me questions like that. I’m not biting. I refuse your question,” he retorted. “I’m not your slave and you’re not my master. You can’t make me dance to your tune. I’m not your monkey.” Though he goes somewhat off the handle, Tarantino is right about one thing — he has been asked about violence quite a bit. And so have many other directors that use it in their films. After the jump, we’ve collected a few of their answers, which range from quippy to sincere, to get a better view of how violent Hollywood views itself. Any good quotes we’ve missed? Add to our list in the comments. … Read More

Film

The 2012 Oscar Nominees: Your Shocks, Surprises, and Snubs

By Jason Bailey on

If there’s one thing you hear a lot in the run-up to the Academy Award nominations, it’s that they’re predictable — that the industry’s “Oscar bait” films are clearly labeled and marketed as such. So maybe it’s just because there was such an embarrassment of cinematic riches in 2012 that there were so many genuine surprises and shocking snubs when Seth MacFarlane and Emma Stone announced the Academy Award nominees yesterday… Read More

Film

The Year in Film: The 25 Best Movies of 2012

By Jason Bailey on

2012’s finest films reflected ambition, risk, and advocacy. They boldly redrew the maps of genre, freshly examined the creative process, and dared us to contemplate our own mortality. And, in more traditional terms, they made us laugh, and cry, and feel alive. These are the best films of… Read More

Film

The Year in Film: 2012′s Biggest Movie Controversies

By Jason Bailey on

In perusing this year’s biggest movie controversies, we found ourselves discussing matters a good deal less trivial than last year. Make no mistake, there are some tempest-in-teapot situations here: ratings woes, questions of reappropriation and hagiography, and (god help us all) frame rates. But we also grappled with issues of artistic responsibility and racial representation, and with the ongoing question of the very health of the form itself. Join us after the jump for a stroll through the year’s memorable movie controversies, won’t you? … Read More

Pop Culture

Bret Easton Ellis' Worst Tweets of 2012

By Emily Temple on

It’s year’s end, which means we’re doing a lot of roundups of our cultural touchstones from 2012. But not all roundups have to be of the things we liked, right? Enter American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, whose Twitter feed, as much as we hate to admit it, definitely ranked on our cultural radar this year. To be honest, a lot of what he says is truly hilarious, he recommends good books (he’s been on about Skippy Dies recently, which we also loved), and we actually find his insistence that Magic Mike was the best movie of 2012 kind of refreshing. But at this point, he’s much more famous for the pretty awful things he says than he is for the clever ones. And he can be an enormous jerk. Remember when he said bullying victims should “man up“? Or how about the time he compared watching Glee to stepping into a puddle of HIV? Or the time he celebrated J.D. Salinger’s death? Well, he’s only stepped up his game this year. After the jump, we present BEE’s most offensive, most left-field, and flat-out worst tweets of 2012. Feel free to argue with us in the comments. … Read More

Film

Flavorwire’s Flick of the Week: ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Is the Film of the Year

By Jason Bailey on

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is a great American film: complicated, nuanced, searching, piercing, difficult — and yet thrilling and satisfying all the same. In dramatizing the nine-year manhunt for Osama bin Laden, Bigelow examines some of the most pressing and important questions of our time; she’s asking what it is to be a “post 9/11″ American, but it’s a question she asks without actually, y’know, asking it. As with her Hurt Locker, a film that grows only more powerful and prescient, she’s patently uninterested in the pedantic. It is a film full of talk: in meetings, in interrogations, in negotiations. But she’ll do nothing so gauche as telling us what to think. The fully engaged audience gleans characterization through action, message through montage, and draws its own conclusions. … Read More