Contenders Film: The Nominees Kicks Off This Morning Spotlighting 24 Oscar Hopefuls

EXCLUSIVE: Mathew Knowles, father of Beyoncé and former manager of Destiny’s Child, is gearing up for his own King Richard-style origin story as part of a wide-ranging deal with investment fund APX Capital Group.

Naomi Watts is a woman of many talents.

Directors Guild Awards in Beverly Hills on Saturday, with the Annie Awards (for animation) taking place in a virtual format at the same time. The EE British Academy Film Awards (i.e., BAFTA) will take place on Sunday in London, followed almost immediately by the Critics Choice Awards in Los Angeles (with a satellite ceremony in London.) And immediately after Critics Choice, the Golden Reel Awards for sound editing will take place in a worldwide stream.Given the state of the Academy, and the difference between its voters and the ones who’ve cast ballots for this weekend’s shows, we can’t exactly trust anything we’ll learn this weekend.

Deadline has launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: The Nominees, this past weekend’s showcase of 24 Oscar-nominated films and their stars, creatives and craftspeople talking about their roads to the Academy Awards.

An Oscar nominee for Best International Feature, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom marks a first for the country of Bhutan, which has only ever submitted two films for consideration (and actually entered Lunana two years in a row following its earlier disqualification on a technicality). Filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji and star Sherab Dorji joined us for Contenders Film: The Nominees to discuss the making of the movie, a charming story of a teacher who is reluctantly transferred to a remote village and ends up learning quite a bit throughout his journey.

From the Warsaw Film School, Tadeusz Łysiak’s The Dress is nominated in the Live Action Short category at the Oscars. A poignant story about the desire for love and intimacy, it stars Anna Dzieduszycka as Julka, a short-statured woman who struggles with social rejection because of her appearance.

In the Oscar-nominated animated short film Boxballet, a gargantuan boxer and a willowy ballerina cross path unexpectedly. They develop feelings for each other, but given the enormous gulf between their backgrounds, the question becomes whether love can truly bring them together.

The U.S. is not the only country with growing income inequality. The same is true of China, a phenomenon explored in the Oscar-nominated feature documentary Ascension, from MTV Documentary Films.

After sweeping the awards at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, capped by a fest-record $25 million sale to Apple, CODA has proven to be the little engine that could.

Thirty-four years after the original Coming to America was released starring Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall, a sequel, Coming 2 America, finally arrived — and like the first film has been Oscar-nominated for its makeup and hairstyling. Tasked with bringing it all up to date and making the various guises and multiple roles Murphy and Hall take on really work for a new audience are Mike Marino, who did Special Effects Makeup, as well as Hair Department heads Stacey Morris and Carla Farmer. They all joined me on Amazon Studios’ panel for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.

Joining Deadline as part of the Amazon Studios presentation at Contenders Film: The Nominees event were two of the stars of Aaron Sorkin’s funny, moving and cleverly constructed story of the relationship of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos, which all takes place in a week during the course of a taping of an episode of I Love Lucy.

At Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event, Dune‘s Oscar-nominated producer Mary Parent said that “it will be the fall” when the sequel to the feature take of the Frank Herbert novel rolls cameras, “not the summer” as previously expected.

King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green, writer Zach Baylin, star Aunjanue Ellis and film editor Pamela Martin joined Warner Bros’ panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event.

At Contenders Film: The Nominees, Deadline presented a panel with the director and star of perhaps the most historic nominated film at this year’s Oscars, Drive My Car, which represents Japan’s first-ever Best Picture nomination. It’s an astounding feat for a three-hour Japanese-language film, about a stage director’s personal crisis interweaved with his trip to Hiroshima to direct a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Kodi Smit-McPhee, an Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor, along with Film Editing nominee Peter Sciberras and Cinematography nominee Ari Wegner, joined me for Netflix’s panel on The Power of the Dog at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event.

“It didn’t have to end this way.”

Paolo Sorrentino won the Foreign Language Oscar, as it was known then, in 2014 with his film The Great Beauty. He returns to the frame this year with The Hand of God, perhaps his most personal picture, which is nominated for Best International Feature. This lightly fictionalized tale of Sorrentino’s own youth in Naples, as he grappled with family tragedy, celebrated Diego Maradona’s arrival at his local football team, and took his first steps into his love of cinema, stars newcomer Filippo Scotti as Fabi Schisa, a teenager struggling to find his place in the world.

Adam McKay is known for, among other things, his blistering satires, Vice and The Big Short among them. His latest, the four-time Oscar-nominated Don’t Look Up, takes aim at our ignorance of climate change, our politics and our obsession with tech.

Paul Tazewell, a first-time Oscar nominee for Costume Design, sat with Best Supporting Actress nominee Ariana DeBose (who won the SAG Award earlier this week) in Disney’s panel for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees. The two have worked together on other projects, notably on Hamilton, before getting a call from Steven Spielberg about West Side Story that was too good to pass up.