EDITORIAL

APPLE TV
Apple took home its first animated short Oscar for “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse,” a magical fable featuring a star-studded voice cast and luxurious hand-drawn animation. “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” is based on the book of the same name by British artist and author Charlie Mackesy. Apple Original Films acquired the film last year and it debuted on Apple TV+ on Christmas Day 2022. The film was presented in partnership with the BBC, which made it available on broadcast and streaming in the U.K. ...

The process of naming films is rarely a straightforward assignment. And with the glut of entertainment options vying for viewers’ attention, there’s heightened pressure to come up with something that sticks. Hollywood has been struggling with movie titles since the beginning. Had things gone another way, “Casablanca” would have been known as “Everybody Comes to Rick’s.” “Pretty Woman” was almost called “3,000,” and “The Breakfast Club” was originally titled “The Lunch Bunch. A good title isn’t going to save an unwatchable movie. But in the online world, a catchy name has potential to propel a film into the zeitgeist (see “M3GAN”), just as a clunky one can send a film plunging into obscurity faster than you can say “Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.” “If audiences are stumbling on a movie title,” Cassidy says, “they’ll move on to the next one that much more easily.”...

Ahead of Sunday’s Academy Awards celebrating the year’s greatest achievements in film, the 43rd annual Razzies celebrated the “worst” actors and movies. The Razzies put itself on the ballot, replacing Armstrong, and won in a landslide. In the awards video, “Razz Berry” said “Until our next mistake, cheers!,” “Blonde” received the top dishonor, taking home worst picture as well as worst screenplay. “Elvis” also took home two Razzies for Tom Hanks as worst supporting actor and “Tom Hanks and His Latex-Laden Face (and That Ludicrous Accent)” as worst screen combo. Industry leaders John J. B. Wilson and Mo Murphy founded the Golden Raspberry Foundation to recognize the year’s “worst films,” with the first in-person ceremony taking place in 1981. Voter must pay a membership fee to vote on the Razzies, though there is no requirement to watch particular films....

The job market is daunting for filmmakers, media producers, editors and other early career talent, while the arts and media sectors lack a broad enough infrastructure to support accessible pathways for in-demand jobs. Job seekers need an impressive reel of visual stories just to get their foot in the door, and in a Catch-22 scenario, one can’t build that without professional experience. Programs like Universal Pictures’ Below-the-Line Traineeship are a great road map for inclusivity. Nonprofit creative agencies in the Creative Impact Lab, like RE:IMAGINE, PhillyCAM, Spy Hop and Youth FX are connecting paid apprentices with other private sector employers to help grow their networks. This helps shift the traditional hiring mindset from a world which was traditionally rooted in “who you know” to “who do we need to know.”...

A24 has acquired worldwide rights to the classic Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense.” A 4K restoration of the movie will be released in theaters globally later this year. Jonathan Demme, the acclaimed filmmaker of “Silence of the Lambs” and “Philadelphia,” directed 1984’s “Stop Making Sense,” which is regarded as one of the greatest concert films ever. “Stop Making Sense” stars core band members David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison along with Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steve Scales, Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt. The live performance was shot roughly 40 years ago over the course of three nights at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater in December of 1983. It features Talking Heads’ most memorable songs, including “Burning Down the House,” “Once in a Lifetime” and “This Must Be the Place.”...

To celebrate its 25th anniversary, Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi” screens in IMAX auditoriums around the country, preceded by a live-streamed Q&A with Aronofsky, cinematographer Matthew Libatique, and other special guests at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. Back then, Aronofsky and Libatique chose to shoot their film on 16mm black and white reversal stock, both for economic and aesthetic reasons. “It was a relatively rare stock to shoot, but the contrast and grain it could achieve were unparalleled at the time,” Aronofsky said. “The only issue was that the same film that passed through the camera was the positive, not unlike Polaroid film. To protect the image, we treated it like a negative and never projected it. To make a release print, we had to cut this positive negative old-school style with splicers and hot glue, shoot it with 35mm negative, and print off of it 35mm prints.”...

Speaking to the press backstage after winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature for “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” the director once again called for the industry to hold animators up as serious artists. “It’s important that animation is done by people who are given license, who are given permission to be treated as artists, not just technicians,” del Toro said. “This is an artform that has been kept, commercially and artistically, in the kids table for so long.” Del Toro’s passions for elevating the art of animation and creating opportunities for minority filmmakers intersected in 2018 when he launched the Animexico scholarship fund. That program sees del Toro funding tuition and living expenses for aspiring animators who were born in his native Mexico. In the press room after his Oscar win, the filmmaker reaffirmed his commitment to continue funding the program for another decade in honor of his late mother, who passed away in October....