Behind the scenes with one of the best image Oscar nominees on the 2025 Academy Awards | USAEMALL.com

Watch scenes from the films nominated in the category of best picture at the 97th annual Academy Awards, as well as interviews with the filmmakers below. The 2025 Oscars will be presented on Sunday, March 2.

“Anora”

Sean Baker’s Cinderella story “Anora” was a surprise winner of the top prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — a sly and at times uproarious comic-drama of a Brooklyn sex worker who marries the young, naïve son of Russian oligarchs who decide the marriage must be broken up at all costs.

The film brings a humanity to the strivings of Anora (who favors the name Ani), a young woman who realizes too late that virtually no one around her has her best interests at heart — not even her newly-hitched husband.

In this scene, Ani takes a stand about the working conditions at her club — she will not countenance rudeness from the DJ! (Note: Graphic language):

A former NYU film student, Sean Baker had not slipped into the Hollywood industry like some of his classmates, including Todd Phillips (“Joker”), instead making small independent features (“The Florida Project,” “Tangerine,” “Red Rocket”) that focused on people living on the margins of mainstream society, cast with both professional actors and non-actors.

After contemplating “a bro movie with Russian gangsters,” he switched to a story of a sex worker in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. He and his wife, producer Samantha Quan, moved there to absorb the atmosphere. “We don’t like to go to a place and say we’re just going to get a surface view,” Baker told the Associated Press. “We really embed ourselves in that place. We talk to people. We get to know everyone. The research is us being there and soaking things up.”

Baker, who won the Directors Guild of America Award for “Anora,” based the film on research he did into the lives of sex workers. “I don’t want to say in any way that I ever faced the hardships of an undocumented immigrant or a marginalized sex worker,” he said. “But being an independent filmmaker for 30 years, there was a hustle. Up until fairly recently, I was struggling to pay rent.”

Madison told “CBS Mornings” that she “absolutely fell in love” with Ani when she read the character. “She’s such a complicated woman. There’s so much nuance to who she is. She’s so vulnerable on the inside, but she presents herself as this very fierce, tough person. And she has such a fighting spirit, and I was excited to explore all the different parts of what that would be.”

Heavily influenced by 1970s New York films like “The French Connection” and “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” Baker shot “Anora” on 35mm. “We’re living in a day and age where the technology, analog meeting digital right now, actually opens up so many doors to the artists,” Baker told Forbes. “I mean, you can shoot on film and capture your images on this gorgeous medium, but then you have the digital tools to help clean up and perfect. We’re living in a great time. I wish more filmmakers would appreciate the fact that using tools from both sides of years of technology is a wonderful thing.”

“Anora,” a Neon release, won best film at the Producers Guild of America Awards and at the Spirit Awards. It is now playing in theaters and is available via VOD.

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“The Brutalist” 

In director Brady Corbet’s period drama “The Brutalist,” Hungarian architect László Tóth (best actor nominee Adrien Brody) emigrates from post-war Europe to the United States to revive his career, and finds both opportunity and friction as he tries to pursue his artistic inclinations.

In the film’s stirring opening scene, Tóth arrives in New York Harbor, with a skewed view of the Statue of Liberty that portends an unequal assimilation into the promise of America. (Cinematography by Lol Crawley. Music by Daniel Blumberg.)

Brody, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of a musician struggling to survive during the Nazi occupation of Poland in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” is nominated for his performance as Tóth, who is hired by a wealthy Pennsylvania industrialist to build a massive community center in his “brutalist” style — a form of architecture that’s light on decoration and heavy on concrete. But Toth’s ambitions clash with his patron, who seeks in Tóth a talent he wishes to dominate.

In this extended interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Brody described his performance as Tóth and the influence of his mother, the acclaimed photographer Sylvia Plachy: “I’ve had a lifetime of influences and preparation so to speak to portray László in this movie. It’s a character that I relate to many things, and I see a lot of parallels in my own yearnings as an artist and in the yearnings of the people that I collaborate with. I can relate to how the struggles my mother has had to overcome in fleeing Hungary with her parents, my grandparents, in 1956 during the revolution and her journey coming to America and the sense of loss as a young girl and starting again. It’s really shaped — I think she’s an empathetic person by nature, but she has certain sensitivity and eye for others and those who are vulnerable, or outsiders, and captures that quite beautifully.”

Brody believes that empathy helped shape his own choices as an actor, “trying to find films that have social relevance, or to represent people who don’t have a voice and to give them that through me in some respect.”

Corbet’s monumental post-war drama (which he co-wrote with his wife Mona Fastvold) is a challenging and invigorating epic, a three-and-a-half hour tale of an artist striving to create in the face of terrible external pressures — commercial, societal, marital. Though set for the most part in Pennsylvania, much of the picture was shot in Hungary, on a tiny budget (approximately $10 million), employing the rarely-used VistaVision process to blow up to 70mm. “We cut every corner we could to make sure that every single cent was on screen,” Corbet told Variety. “It was a Herculean effort, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because it was just years and years of essentially working for free.” 

“It helped that the film was set in an earlier period, because there were places in Hungary that looked sort of lost in the past,” Oscar-nominated production designer Judy Becker told Variety. “For example, the industrial area in Budapest looked very similar to the industrial area of Philadelphia in the 1950s.”

But despite the tight budget, Corbet was not sorry he didn’t have more money: “I never thought, ‘I wish I had $30 million more,'” he told Variety. “There’s a lot of strings that come with that kind of money. It invites lots of opinions. You have all these executives who don’t trust the director and bury them in notes. What you get is something antiseptic that lacks a signature. It’s the difference between a bowl from Crate & Barrel and a wabi-sabi ceramic.”

At a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, where the film was hailed as a “masterpiece,” Corbet remarked on questions about its length: “This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do. I think it’s quite silly, actually, to have a conversation about run time, because that’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages versus 100 pages.”

At the end of “The Brutalist,” Tóth is quoted as saying, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” “I don’t think that that sentiment applies to my journey at all,” Brody told “Sunday Morning,” “but I do find it very beautiful and telling to the storytelling of the film. You have to be very present and embrace the journey, because that is all you’ve got while you’re here. I mean, a part of me would love to be proud of the body of work that I leave behind, but I won’t be around to look back at it, so hopefully I bring more good than bad and negativity into this world, and that’s what I strive for.”

Brody won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA awards for his performance, while “The Brutalist” won the Golden Globe for best motion picture drama and best director. The film received 10 Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best director.

“The Brutalist,” released by A24, is playing in theaters and is available via VOD.

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“A Complete Unknown” 

James Mangold’s biopic expertly dramatizes the rise of Bob Dylan as a mythic figure in the folk music scene, and his transformation into a singer-songwriter who blurred genres and confounded commercial expectations. The film, nominated for 8 Academy Awards, is grounded by best actor nominee Timothée Chalamet, who won the Screen Actors Guild Award for his acutely-attuned performance as Dylan.

In this scene, Dylan visits an infirm Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a New Jersey hospital, being tended to by friend Pete Seeger (best supporting actor nominee Edward Norton):

That meeting leads to Dylan’s first appearance at New York’s Folk City, where he is introduced by Seeger. The club’s audience, including Joan Baez (played by best supporting actress nominee Monica Barbaro), is enraptured by Dylan’s “I Was Young When I Left Home”:

Jay Cocks, the screenwriter of “The Age of Innocence” and “Gangs of New York,” had penned a screenplay based on the 2015 Elijah Wald book “Dylan Goes Electric.” Mangold (whose films include “Walk the Line,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “Logan”) worked on revising the script, which expanded the characters of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Sylvie Russo (a fictionalization of Dylan’s then-girlfriend, Suze Rotolo).

Mangold described to the Hollywood Reporter his initial meeting with Dylan to discuss the film: “He said: ‘So what’s this movie about?’ And I thought very carefully, because I knew he didn’t want a 20-minute answer. I said: ‘It’s about a young guy in Minnesota who’s suffocating and feeling desperate and who leaves everything — friends, family — behind and, with just a few dollars in his pocket, makes his way across the country and creates a new identity and makes new friends, finds a new family and blossoms, becomes successful, then starts to suffocate again and runs away.’ And he smiled and that was all. Like, he didn’t have anything more to say, but I knew that meant, to me, that he didn’t take issue.”

The film gets a lot right in terms of the period, the feel of Greenwich Village at its height in the folk music world, and the sense of shifting sands in commercial music. Production designer François Audouy transformed downtown Jersey City into early 1960s MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. He also recreated Dylan’s apartment based on hundreds of previously-unpublished photographs — from the exact chair Dylan had, to his Decca record player, his 1954 Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter, art on the walls, books and records. “It was like stepping into a time machine,” Audouy told Indiewire of the apartment set.

Arianne Phillips, nominated for best costume design (she’d previously been nominated for “Walk the Line,” “W.E.,” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”), told The Art of Costume, “Unlike typical biopics that span decades, this film focuses on just four years. That precision was both a challenge and an opportunity for the costumes. … The film moves through a variety of locations and scenarios, but the time period remains consistent. There’s no dramatic shift in technology, architecture, or cars. Instead, the focus is on Bob’s evolution — his character arc.”

The film’s wardrobe was broken down into three styles: his arrival in New York in 1961, the time around the release of his 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and the more mod figure he cut in 1965. “Chalamet had about 67 costume changes,” Phillips said, “and we had over 120 speaking roles with principal characters averaging anywhere from 8 to 30 changes each.”

Though much dramatized in the film did happen — including a fistfight that broke out when Dylan plugged in an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival — there were some liberties taken. “Dylan Goes Electric” author Elijah Wald told the Guardian, “The movie is full of things that didn’t happen, but the way they happen in those scenes feels right to me. If Pete Seeger had been at Woody Guthrie’s bedside when Dylan arrived and sung him a song, then said he didn’t have a place to sleep, Pete would have brought him home for the night. None of that happened, but it’s all true to the characters.”

Because of COVID, Hollywood strikes, and other commitments, Chalamet ended up waiting five years before “A Complete Unknown” could go before the cameras. He used that time to further study Dylan (whom he had never met) and his music. In addition to learning how to play the guitar and the harmonica, Chalamet mastered about 40 Bob Dylan songs — far more than were originally called for in the script — determined, like the young Dylan, to make it great.

“I give 170% in everything I’m doing,” the actor told “60 Minutes.” “I’m giving it my all. Something like the Dylan project, these aren’t watered-down experiences. I’m going Daniel Day-Lewis on all of them. I’m not saying in process, but I’m saying a level of commitment.”

He says he wasn’t merely trying to imitate Dylan: “No, totally that was the tension, for me, in doing a biopic on somebody so beloved and so well-known was … where does my heart and where does my soul fit into this? Can it fit into this, particularly with someone who was so masked?”

“A Complete Unknown,” released by Searchlight Pictures, is playing in theaters and is available via VOD.

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“Conclave”

Edward Berger’s filming of the Robert Harris thriller, about the political machinations within the Vatican as the College of Cardinals meets to elect a new pope, is an engrossing tale of intrigue in which Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (best actor nominee Ralph Fiennes) tries to get to the bottom of various mysteries, all while corralling the disparate cardinals, each with their own political and ideological predilections, towards naming a successor and guiding the Church into the future.

In this scene, Lawrence and Cardinal Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci) discuss the discovery of a secret report about a papal candidate’s activities:

Berger last directed the 2022 remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front” (which itself was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, and won four). In “Conclave,” he blends the dynamics of a drawing room mystery with an examination of the purpose of faith.

In this scene, Lawrence gives a sermon to the cardinals about the value of uncertainty, little knowing that, for much of the film, he will be on a quest for understanding — questioning his own doubt — to attain a kind of certainty that, for Lawrence, may represent truth.

“I like characters that have contradictions inside them,” Fiennes told “Sunday Morning.” His reaction to reading the part of Lawrence was, “Oh, I love this. This is a human. He’s not a saint. He’s a good man trying to find his way.

“I was brought up a Catholic and then rebelled when I was 13,” Fiennes said. “My mother was a committed Catholic. So, ‘God questions’ have been in my family since I was a child.”

And did he come away with any answers to his own questions? “No, I came away with more questions,” he said.

Berger talked with the Hollywood Reporter about the film’s themes: “It is a wonderful topic for a political thriller, not [just] for a religious thriller,” he said. “This could take place anywhere. It could take place in Washington, D.C., or Downing Street, or a big corporation where the CEO job is vacant. So, I think that’s interesting on the surface, but on a much deeper level, I really connected with what [Lawrence] is going through. He says, ‘I have difficulty with prayer.’ … To overcome that and go through this crisis and refine the belief in what you do, [to believe] it has some purpose, I think a lot of us go through it at some point or another in our life. To refine the purity of your job, and refine the purity of your purpose, is a constant struggle. It’s an interesting path to keep recalibrating. And it’s actually a very healthy path to keep recalibrating. …

“What the film really deals with is doubt and certainty … It doesn’t mean that every cardinal, every character in the movie, acts to the best of their conscience. But they are certain in their beliefs, or they believe that what they think is right. Bellini has a certainty that this guy is wrong and that is a certainty as well. And I always think that, in a way, certainty creates antagonism and that’s just going to make the other side stronger.”

“Conclave,” which received the Screen Actors Guild Award for best ensemble, the Golden Globe for best screenplay, and the BAFTA for best film, is nominated for 8 Academy Awards, including best picture.

“Conclave” is playing in theaters and is available via VOD.

“Dune: Part Two”

Part One of “Dune,” released in 2021, was a masterful evocation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novels, in which the desert world of Arrakis becomes the focal point of a galactic war over a unique, invaluable commodity: spice, a psychoactive chemical necessary for interplanetary travel (and domination). Directed by Denis Villeneuve, the movie was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and won six.

The sequel follows the ascension of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) as a leader of the Indigenous Fremen tribes in combatting the forces of the ruling House Harkonnen.

In this scene, Paul and Chani (Zendaya) engage in a Fremen attack on a Harkonnen spice harvester. The fast-moving action showcases how Villeneuve’s staging, photography and pacing expertly define cinematic geography, as well as the limitations of technology — and the power of daredevil heroics:

In this technical featurette from Variety, Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Greig Fraser (who won the Oscar for “Part One”) discusses how camera movement, lenses, and shooting in natural light (as well as the combination of digital and film emulsions) mirror the emotions and journey of the characters, such as when Paul Atreides rides the giant sandworm.

Fraser noted, “The biggest challenge is, worms don’t exist.” Well, yeah, that is a problem! Thankfully, the film’s visual effects team (also nominated) provided the solution. You can watch the sandworm sequence below — a scene of remarkable anticipation, drama, and visual and sonic splendor for which Imax was created, as Paul’s feat appears to satisfy a Fremen prophecy of a messianic figure. It’s not for nothing that director Steven Spielberg, in a Directors Guild of America podcast, told Villeneuve that this sequence was “one of the greatest things I have ever seen. Ever!”

“Dune: Part Two” received five nominations in all, for best picture, cinematography, visual effects, production design and sound. (It was not nominated in the categories of direction, costumes, editing or makeup/hair styling; Hollywood can be weird.)

“Dune: Part Two” is streaming on Max and is available via VOD.

“Emilia Pérez” 

A hard-hitting true crime story that is also a poignant love story and a journey of self-discovery, “Emilia Pérez” is also a musical. Written and directed by Jacques Audiard, the story involves a powerful Mexican drug lord who secretly transitions to a woman.  

What Juan “Manitas” Del Monte leaves behind when he transitions is a wife and children, who are relocated to Europe for their protection. Jessi (Selena Gomez) mourns the death of her husband, but after moving back to Mexico she meets up with a former lover — and is also introduced to a distant cousin, Emilia Pérez (best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón), not knowing Emilia is Jessi’s former husband.

In this scene Gomez performs the Oscar-nominated song “Mi Camino” (by Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais), in which Jessie evokes the vulnerability of her character. “It was actually so therapeutic for me to sing,” Gomez told “CBS Sunday Morning” in this extended interview. “It’s basically in English translated to, you know, ‘If I fall off this hill it’s my hill; if I decide to do this with my life it’s my decision,’ and embracing womanhood if you will. And I really appreciated that.”

In this profile for “CBS Sunday Morning,” Gomez said shooting “Emilia Pérez” left her “a little sore from the dance numbers.” So, why did she want to do it? “I found it incredibly compelling,” she said. “To be honest, I’ve never really seen a movie like this before. I don’t think I’ve ever been this proud of something in the acting field.”

In her extended interview, Gomez described the experience of shooting the film as transformative: “The people I was around, I couldn’t have been luckier with their support and their wisdom. It just felt so right,” she said. “The story is original, but it’s also a story that a lot of people walk through. So, the way it was told was artistic and audacious and beautiful, but it is a true element where people crave and have a desire to live their life authentically, and whatever that looks like to them should never be judged. I thought that we did a good job encompassing that.”

“Also, when I read the script, my character came across quite harsh in the beginning. Jacques was really wonderful with collaborating with me because I felt like adding a bit of softness to her would help. So, there are these moments in the movie where you can take a deep breath and enjoy the ride, and then it brings you right back up to where the stakes are high.”

Gomez, Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, and Adriana Paz shared the best actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. “Emilia Pérez” is nominated for 13 Acadeamy Awards — the most of any film this year — including for best picture, best director and best original score.

“Emilia Pérez” is streaming on Netflix. 

“I’m Still Here” 

In 1971, Brazilian politician Rubens Paiva, who opposed his country’s dictatorship, was kidnapped by the military, tortured and killed — one of thousands who suffered at the hands of the authoritarian government.

In this scene, his wife, Eunice Paiva (best actress nominee Fernanda Torres), alerted to the death of the family dog in front of their home, confronts two suspicious men staking out her home:

After Rubens’ disappearance, Eunice, a mother of five, continued her husband’s legacy by becoming a lawyer, and leading efforts to support civil rights and protect the Amazonian rain forest. Her tragic but inspiring story was recounted in her son Marcelo Rubens Palva’s 2015 book, “I’m Still Here.”

Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles’ previous films include 1998’s “Central Station” (an Oscar-winner for best foreign language film), and “The Motorcycle Diaries.” At last year’s New York Film Festival, Salles said that the story of “I’m Still Here” was very personal to him because of his own history. The son of a diplomat, Salles returned to Brazil in 1969 after living abroad for five years: “The country I came back to was very different from the country I had left, because it was now under military dictatorship, and I was personally pretty much at loss, really at loss, until I met this family of five kids, and it was Marcelo’s family. Became really good friends with his sister Nalu, and I got embraced by this family.

“I’ve been in that house, you know, for almost two years on a constant level,” Salles said. “We drifted to that house because in it you could hear the political discussions that didn’t exist anymore in the exterior of that place. You could hear the music that was forbidden. … And there were no barriers between, you know, adults, adolescents, kids. This was completely different from my house. So, I was very informed by that. The moment where this was broken up was for all of us who were in that house at some moment kind of severed a line. It stipulated a before and an after, which obviously has to do with the moment when an authoritarian state invades the heart of a family. And that stayed with me for years and years and years.”

“I’m Still Here” has tapped into the public conscience in Brazil, where the collective memory about the nation’s suffering under military rule across two decades is being revived through the story of Eunice and her family. It became the fifth highest-grossing film in Brazil last year (behind Hollywood fare like “Inside Out 2,” “Deadpool & Wolverine,” “Moana 2” and “Despicable Me 4”). The film won three awards at the Venice Film Festival, including for its director.

Torres won the Golden Globe for best motion picture actress in a drama for her performance. She is the second Brazilian actress to be nominated for an Academy Award. The first? Her mother, Fernanda Montenegro, who was nominated for “Central Station.”

“I’m Still Here,” released by Sony Pictures Classics, is nominated for three Academy Awards, including best international feature film, best actress, and best picture. It is currently screening in theaters.

“Nickel Boys”

Colson Whitehead, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for his novel “The Underground Railroad,” based his next novel, “The Nickel Boys,” on the tragedy of the Dozier School, a Florida reform school for boys in the Jim Crow South, which became notorious for its institutional abuse, torture and deaths of youth. Following an investigation, the school was closed in 2011; subsequent diggings unearthed unmarked graves, which revealed even greater evidence of the staff’s cruelties.

In this extended interview from 2019, Whitehead told “Sunday Morning” that his book’s main characters, Elwood and Turner, represented different sides of himself: “I have an optimistic part of me that thinks that things are getting better. We are making progress as a country, in terms of race and other things,” Whitehead said. “And then there’s a pessimistic, or realistic, part of me that says, no, things never change, and we make some progress and then we slide back. And so, Elwood and Turner in their initial incarnation represented different sides of me.

“Elwood is 16, he’s a straight-A student, he’s been inspired by Martin Luther King, the civil rights marches. Every week, he reads Life magazine and sees the picture of his heroes. … And he sees himself as part of the new generation that can change the old order. And then there’s Turner, who is an orphan. And he’s been sent to [Nickel] ’cause there’s nowhere else for him to go. And he lives by his wits. He’s a survivor. And he sees the system as it actually is, unchanging, casually cruel, callous. And he doesn’t believe in the same sort of enlightened goals of Elwood. [He believes in] making his way through the obstacle course, getting through a day without getting beaten, and then getting out of school where he can find some other survival tactic that works in the outside world. And so, they meet, and they have to survive but also consider each other’s philosophies — what works, what doesn’t, and how do you maybe perhaps integrate them.”

What makes the film adaptation of “Nickel Boys” unique is that director and co-writer RaMell Ross, a visual arts professor at Brown University who earned an Oscar nomination for the 2018 documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” employs a first-person perspective for most of the film; the camera serves as the eyes of Elwood, or Turner, throughout the story, so the audience directly experiences the sensations of the characters, which can be especially disturbing when they become victims of abuse.

In this trailer for the film, we experience life from the perspective of the protagonists:

In this scene, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), unable to see her grandson Elwood, approaches Turner (voice of Brandon Wilson) for help: 

In a New York Film Festival panel discussion, Ross, who had always wanted to make a POV film, said reading Whitehead’s book was profound for him: “And in the process of reading, it was the process of being allowed to imagine in a way that I think a lot of American writers aren’t focused on. 

“The way that Coulson wrote was, like, concise and spare, [he] didn’t over-describe, so it allowed me to imagine myself as Elwood and truly be visual in the world,” Ross said. “And so, that process led to the POV notion, and ideas around at what point in time did Elwood realize that he was raced, that he realized he was Black? Which is something that I would argue all people of color go through. It’s a visual thing, it’s a perceptual thing, and what a devastating thing in his life as you can see in the film juxtaposed against being a sentient-innocent child and being in awe of what it means to be embodied, and then to go out into the world and to be forced to adhere by this manufactured law. It’s devastating.”

Shot with Sony’s Venice (a full-frame digital camera not much larger than a DSLR still camera), to allow movement through tight spaces, the camera was worn on various rigs (chest mounts, helmets, SnorriCams), as well as handhelds. In many instances, the actors wore the cameras themselves.

Cinematographer Jomo Fray, who won the American Society of Cinematographers’ Spotlight Award, told the New York Film Festival audience that he did not think “POV” was adequate as shorthand to describe its effect: “I don’t think it was about being in the point of view, but it was actually creating an image that is at one point immersive — it brings us in as an audience into the world. At a second point, it is implicative — it implicates us in the world that the image itself is seeing. And as a third point, it’s an image that has a physical danger to it, that the image itself is navigating, trying to go through spaces that are naturally hostile to it. So, we wanted to shoot these scenes not from outside but be inside of the scene. … It was fundamentally, totally different than anything I’ve ever shot before, conceptually and otherwise.”

Brandon Wilson, who plays Turner, told CBS station KCAL in Los Angeles, “I think this movie offers a beautiful invitation for people to let go of their own subjective points of view and step into the shoes of another person, and step into their eyes. I just hope they accept that invitation and allow themselves to be pulled into this world and release their own conditional point of view for a moment.”

RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes were nominated for best adapted screenplay.

“Nickel Boys” is streaming on Amazon Prime and is available via VOD.

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“The Substance”

Coralie Fargeat’s body horror film “The Substance” stars best actress nominee Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging TV star who discovers a sinister-looking potion that can give her a younger, more perfect version of herself, but at a terrible price.

In this early scene, following a devastating career downturn and a car accident, Elisabeth breaks down under the watch of an ER doctor (Tom Morton), but then finds herself the focus of a sinister male nurse (Robin Greer). Why does he refer to her as “a good candidate”? And what is that strange birthmark on his forearm?

The upshot? Elisabeth is offered access to a radical potion, a.k.a. The Substance, that promises “a better version of yourself.” What that entails, once a yellow liquid is injected into one’s veins, is the creation of a new, younger duplicate of the person, ready to take their place. [Warning: There is a regimented schedule for injections; don’t deviate!]

Fargeat, a French filmmaker whose credits include “Revenge” and the TV series “The Sandman,” told Vogue magazine that the stylized horror was purposefully made to look unreal: “From the start I knew I wasn’t interested in depicting the real Hollywood but rather what it’s about. It’s about beauty. It’s about success. Taking it out of reality was a way to make it timeless and thus universal, like the story could happen today, yesterday, or tomorrow — as well as anywhere.”

In a Hollywood Reporter roundtable, Gargeat said that she would not call “The Substance” a horror film. “I would call it more of a genre film, which is to me very wide … going from sci-fi to action to everything that is not grounded into reality. Basically that’s how I grew up loving films, everything that [would] allow me to escape real life, which I hated, which I felt totally unadapted to, and very bored [with].

“So, especially for that film and the previous one, that’s really where I found my freedom and where I felt powerful and where I felt fully capable to express myself in a way that there are no boundaries. Also, where I love to go very much into the excess and kind of touch my part of, yeah, craziness … it felt totally relevant for it to be as excessive as what I wanted to say, and make the audience feel that excess and feel that craziness.

“So, that’s it’s even not a question where that I choose; it’s just what I do,” she said.

The film has been recognized as an indictment of sexism and ageism, in a popular culture that denigrates women who have the temerity to get older. In an extended interview with “CBS Sunday Morning,” Moore referred to a line by Dennis Quaid’s character making reference to a woman’s fertility being tied to their value, and to their desirability. “There’s an aspect that [and I would say up until now] kind of put women at a certain age or time in their life as, ‘Well, you’re now relegated to this corral because you can’t be that.’ And I just don’t think it’s the truth. I don’t think that is the truth of who we are as women as we get older. And I think again, like the film, there’s a part of that that we as women have bought into, and so if we want to change this, then we have to change how we’re looking at it, how we’re holding it, and how we see ourselves. We can’t wait for it to change on the outside; we have to be that change.”

Fargeat told the Associated Press that her film was a response to the limits of female representation. “Our society, you know, has been built on 2,000 years of being kind of one way. And to make a real sense, it’s still too tiny to me. That’s why I also wanted my movie to be so excessive, you know, because I think this is what we need. We can’t be shy with those issue because the weight of everything is huge. The weight of all that still creates so much inequality and so much violence. So, that’s why also I wanted to make the movie that way.”

Moore won both the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance, and was nominated for a BAFTA. The film is up for a total of five Academy Awards, including best picture. Coralie Fargeat received two nominations for best director and best original screenplay, and a third as producer.

“The Substance” is available on Mubi and via VOD.

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“Wicked” 

In the song “Defying Gravity,” from “Wicked,” there is a lyric: “It’s time to trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap.” That resonated with the director, Jon M. Chu. “It was the whole reason I did the movie,” Chu told “Sunday Morning.” “It’s all about striving for that dream and being able to fight through the uncomfortable things to get there.”

The director of “Crazy Rich Asians” and “In the Heights,” as well as music documentaries (“Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” “Believe”), dance projects (“Step Up 3D”), and action sequels (“G.I. Joe: Retaliation,” “Now You See Me 2”), Chu said his view of “The Wizard of Oz” — which, when he was a child, represented a dream of another, better place — has changed since he was a kid. “I think that that Yellow Brick Road is no longer the path that you just keep following, because there is no wizard there that’s gonna give you your heart’s desire,” he said. “Life is a series of walking adventures. And as you’re walking, smell the flowers and feel the air. And maybe you’ll realize you’re actually flying.”

The show “Wicked,” with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, and based on Gregory Maguire’s novel about the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West, opened on Broadway in 2003. It won three Tony Awards. For the film adaptation, the show has been split in half (Part Two opens this November). Far from the candy-colored vaudevillian Oz that the 1939 classic projected, “Wicked” has a darker subtext about tyranny and civil rights. A rebellion builds against the Wizard and the increasingly autocratic rule coming from the Emerald City, which draws Elphaba (best actress nominee Cynthia Erivo) to become a resistance figure; her empathy leads to her becoming an outcast.

At the center of the narrative is the connection between Elphaba and Glinda (best supporting actress nominee Ariana Grande). Their frenemy relationship begins at Shiz University, but evolves as they compete for the attention of the dean of sorcery (Michelle Yeoh), and of a hunk (Jonathan Bailey), and then join as friends to meet the Wizard.

In this scene, the hunk, Fiyero, a transfer student at Shiz University, makes his case for living less studiously, especially as it affords more chances to engage in a rapturous dance number in the school’s library:

This behind-the-scenes featurette shows how Erivo performed her flying stunts while singing “Defying Gravity.”  And yes, the “Wicked” cast were not performing to pre-recorded vocal tracks; for most of the film, Grande, Erivo, et al, were recorded singing on set by live sound mixer Simon Hayes (an Oscar-winner for “Les Miserables”). While it’s as impressive as Timothée Chalamet singing live on set for “A Complete Unknown,” Bob Dylan wasn’t dangling in the air from a broomstick.

Hayes told Playbill.com, “There’s something within the breath and the cadence of the way that the lips are moving, the breath that you’re hearing as someone’s walking and singing live, that just sounds real — because it is real. There’s also something within the acoustic of the voice that matches the set we see, because it’s a real acoustic. It’s not synthetic rebuilt digital acoustic.” Hayes is part of the sound recording and mixing team nominated for an Oscar.

Watch this featurette giving a more detailed look at how the sound of “Wicked” was captured:

Speaking of the film adaptation, Maguire told CBS Boston, “The fact that the story of ‘Wicked’ continues to be pertinent 30 years after it was first published shocks me, saddens me a little bit, because it’s about social ills and political stress, but also encourages me because it means we’re still looking for guidance and for comfort.”

Nominated for 10 Oscars, “Wicked” is in theaters and available via VOD.

See also:

“Wicked” director Jon M. Chu on casting, movie’s impact and part two release (“CBS Mornings”)

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