The Envelope: Oscars preview/Documentaries
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In “Nightcrawler,” Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man whose drive for success leads him to do despicable things.
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It’s notoriously hard to predict which feature documentaries will end up as the film academy’s final five nominees, but surveying the field, one thing is clear: It’s been an extraordinary year for nonfiction on-screen.
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There is a long-running misconception that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences love only underdog biopics, literary adaptations and anything in which Meryl Streep speaks with an accent.
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Award consultants have finished their scouting reports. The movies have been set and ranked.
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Chadwick Boseman hit it out of the park last year with his quietly riveting performance as Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier in “42.”
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Some hotels inspire travel postcards, but it was actual hand-tinted travel postcards called Photochroms that were part of the inspiration for “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
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When director David Fincher cast Rosamund Pike in “Gone Girl,” he asked that she model her performance as the movie’s mysterious missing wife, Amy Elliott-Dunne, not on another actress or well-known icon but on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the willowy blond bride of John F.
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In 1988, along with 10 million others, I spent several days trying to decipher, decode and demystify “A Brief History of Time” by professor Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist.
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It was 2006, and documentarians Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren had just seen their main character succumb to cancer.
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Bucking the trend, several genre movies have won the best picture Oscar.
- 12
Getting rabid Chicago Bulls fan Gene Siskel to see “Hoop Dreams” was easy enough, but talking fellow film critic Roger Ebert into slotting a three-hour sports-focused documentary into his Sundance schedule was no mean feat.
