This year, either because ABC really wanted to
streeeetch out its viewership numbers by an extra two hours or because the actual event will be so tightly packed with good stuff that there will be no time for anything else, the Academy Awards bumped the usual performances from the Best Song nominees to a pre-show event with slightly lower-key red carpet interviews and reasonably charming vamping from Ariana DeBose and Lil Rel Howery (who had to be prompted by Chloé Zhao when they came back from a commercial break, which was fun). But we’re not here for reasonably charming vamping, we’re here for the musical performances, which you can see below without having to sit through an hour and a half of interviews.
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Sound is an essential element of any film that chooses to use it, but it’s especially important to
Sound Of Metal. Starring Riz Ahmed as Ruben, the drummer for a heavy-metal band whose world is turned inside out by sudden and dramatic hearing loss, the film puts you inside the character’s head so you experience his new reality along with him. From the scene where Ruben loses his hearing onstage to sequences set at a sober living house for deaf people that unfold in total silence to the cochlear implant that gives the film’s title a new meaning, French sound designer and composer Nicolas Becker, Danish editor Mikkel Nielsen, and American writer-director Darius Marder use immersive sound design to create a unique, empathetic viewing experience.
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Clockwise from top left: Nomadland director Chloe Zhao (Charly Triballeau/AFP for Getty Images); Delroy Lino in Da 5 Bloods (Netflix); LaKeith Stanfield in Judas And The Black Messiah (Warner Media)
The nominations for the 2021 Academy Awards were announced a few hours ago, at the ass crack of dawn, as per tradition. There were, as always, winners and losers, frontrunners confirmed and surprises to celebrate. There was not a fundamental change in the kind of movies or, at the very least, the kind of distribution players that tend to come out on top at Hollywood’s annual ode to itself. Halfway through 2020, we here at
For a while, the biggest film story of 2020 was what movies
weren’t coming out, as the pandemic closed theaters and bumped release dates for some of the year’s biggest would-be blockbusters (see you later,
Black Widow and
No Time to Die, hopefully) and buzziest awards-bait (or is there another reason Spielberg directed a remake of
West Side Story?). But no more, because it turns out a lot of good movies were still released last year and lots of them have just been nominated for Oscars.
But the biggest difference between this Oscar year and any other is that you can easily (if not necessarily
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Steven Yeun (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images), Riz Ahmed (Andrew Toth/Getty Images for The Hollywood Reporter), Viola Davis (Jesse Grant/Getty Images for GBK Productions)
Image: The A.V. Club
The announcement of the 2021 Academy Awards nominations this morning wasn’t without its share of surprises and disappointing snubs, but there are still some exciting firsts worth making special note of (though, as is often the case with awards show firsts, the “why did this take so long?” sense is predictably hard to shake). For starters, Steven Yeun is now the first Asian-American person to ever receive a Best Actor nomination (for his work in