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Deadline on Monday launched the streaming site for Contenders Film: The Nominees, the annual showcase where the cast and creatives of some of this year’s Oscar-nominated films gather to take deeper dives into the making of their movies and the paths that got them to this point.

A total of nine movies participated in the virtual event that took place Saturday, spanning several categories from Best Picture to Animated Feature and Documentary Feature to Live Action Short Films.

Click here to launch the streaming site.

This year’s lineup included in-front-of and behind-the-scenes talent from Best Picture nominees Anora from Neon, Wicked from Universal Pictures and Nickel Boys from Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM Studios. They were joined by a trio of Animated Features in Inside Out 2 from Disney/Pixar, Memoir of a Snail from IFC Films and The Wild Robot from DreamWorks Animation.

Also featured Saturday were the...

The systematic abuse of Indigenous children at Indian Residential Schools barely received attention in North America despite going on for generations. That has finally changed in the past year in large part through the profound impact of Sugarcane, the Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie.

“These were institutions that were actually founded in the U.S. with the idea to ‘kill the Indian and save the man,’ in the words of one of their original architects,” NoiseCat explained during an appearance with Kassie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees. “For over 150 years, about six generations, native children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to these schools to be assimilated into white and Christian society. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has described this as a cultural genocide. It’s one of the most significant, foundational chapters in North American history. And yet people...

Nickel Boys, which had its world premiere over Labor Day weekend in Telluride, has since gone on to critical acclaim and many awards, all leading to the Oscars, where in addition to its Best Picture recognition it is also up for Adapted Screenplay for director/co-writer RaMell Ross and producer/co-writer Joslyn Barnes.

The pair joined Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees virtual livestream event to talk about the Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios film, and their inspiration for adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which was inspired by true events. It tells the story of two Black teenagers who become wards of a juvenile reform school in Florida, where tragedy unfolds.

The film is partly told using a singular Pov style of cinematography in order to get the viewer even closer into the experience of these two young men thrust into circumstances beyond their control.

Ross related...

Kelsey Mann is the director behind the year’s top-grossing movie, Inside Out 2. At $1.7 billion worldwide, his sequel to the Oscar-winning 2015 Pixar toon not only outgrossed that one to become the biggest Pixar hit of all time but won wide critical acclaim for taking to new heights of imagination and invention the concept of all these various emotions operating inside a young girl’s head, anxiety being chief among them.

Mann took the reins of this one from the original’s director and now-Pixar chief Pete Docter and made the most successful feature directorial debut of all time. During our interview, I asked what the Animated Feature nomination meant to him. “I was the guy [at Pixar] that was once printing out the Oscar ballots, you know, for everybody to kind of do their whole thing. And the fact that I’ve got a film on that ballot that I directed is incredible,...

The awards season is winding down, the nominations are out and the final stretch of the race that concludes at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood with the 97th annual Oscars is on. That means it’s time for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees, our annual virtual nominees showcase that kicks off this morning at 9 a.m. Pt.

Click here to sign up for and launch the livestream.

In a season in which the Los Angeles wildfires tragedy have also affected the race — postponing some precursor ceremonies, delaying Oscar voting and the nominations announcement and putting into question whether the large number of voters in the area have had time to even see the movies, much less vote — Contenders offers one-stop shopping for a cross-section of nominated movies and designed to get voters more engaged and excited, and maybe even to catch up in this troubled season.

Although Emilia Pérez...

December on The Young and the Restless featured movement in the case against Sharon, and Phyllis wasn’t happy about that. She made sure the entire town knew it. Meanwhile, two supervillains were responsible for much mayhem. Their machinations escalated at the end of the month.

December 2024 Performer of the Month The Nominees

Audra Charles has started to show growth, and Zuleyka Silver is handling her character’s development nicely. In December, Audra supported Nate’s search for his brother instead of focusing on getting another job. But Audra’s dinner with the Winters is where the actress really shined. As she listened to the Winters talk about family and legacy, she couldn’t stop the tears. We loved seeing this new side of Audra.

Ray Wise is brilliant in everything he does, and it’s no different on this return trip to Genoa City. As Ian soaked up all...

More drag is on the way at MTV and Paramount+ as RuPaul’s Drag Race and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars have been renewed for new seasons.

RuPaul’s Drag Race has been picked up for Season 17 on MTV alongside its companion series, RuPaul’s Drag Race: Untucked.

Paramount+ has greenlit a 10th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars alongside its companion series RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars: Untucked.

The pickups follow the premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars and the franchise’s Emmy nominations.

Related: ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ USA Season Winners: Photo Gallery Including ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars’ and The Snatch Game Champions

RuPaul received his ninth consecutive nomination for Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality Competition Program this year, tying the record for most nominations in the category.

RuPaul’s Drag Race is nominated in eight categories, including Outstanding Host For A Reality Or Reality Competition Program,...

At the end of “Hacks” Season 3, co-creator, co-showrunner, executive producer and writer Jen Statsky said Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and Ava Daniels’ (Hannah Einbinder) relationship has hit a point it’s never seen before – and the writers have had to find a way to mind the comedy and emotional stakes following it.

“You always want to be funny first and think of the comedy and think of the jokes, but their relationship is very real, very fraught, very difficult,” Statsky said. “And that also gives us a lot to play with.”

Statsky, writer and producers Jake Bender and Zach Dunn of “What We Do in the Shadows,” director and executive producer of “Abbott Elementary” Randall Einhorn and writer, director and executive producer of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Jeff Schaffer joined the Variety TV FYC Fest: The Nominees to discuss their respective shows.

Einhorn, who previously worked on shows like “The Office,...

Peacock’s The Traitors is up for four Emmy Awards for its second season, and host Alan Cumming opened up about what he loves about the reality competition.

“I really just love this show. I love being at the castle. I love everybody there. It’s such a fun thing to do,” Cumming said on the virtual panel for Deadline’s Contenders TV: The Nominees. “What was great the second time around is we’re back all in the swing of it a bit more. And everyone was a bit more confident because we’d done one already, and the show had been a success. And now we really kind of hit our stride.”

Cumming — who is nominated as Outstanding Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program, his fifth career Emmy nom — said “it felt really good to come back,” adding: “It’s great when you do something new, but...

Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV may have exposed the ugly underbelly of ’90s kids TV, but good things have come from the documentary series that’s up for Best Documentary at this year’s Emmy Awards.

In Deadline’s conversation with the executive producers and participants of the Investigation Discovery project during Contenders Television: The Nominees, former All That cast member Bryan Hearne says he feels like there is a “100 percent chance” that positive change will follow now that executive producers Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz have shined a light on this dark period.

The docuseries, which is also vying for an Emmy in Picture Editing for a Nonfiction Program, set out to uncover the toxic and dangerous culture on the sets of Dan Schneider’s Nickelodeon children’s shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Related: Deadline’s Contenders TV: The Nominees – Full Coverage...

The first time Seth Meyers’ Late Night was nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Talk Series category he decided to go for a run in New York without his phone. Last year, the writers strike had shut down production of his NBC late-night show.

“What was wonderful about this year is it’s the first time — there’s only been three — but it was the first time our show got nominated when we were in the office, because we had a show that night,” Meyers said. “I will admit, I was not particularly bullish on our chances, and I found out the best possible way, which is I heard our staff cheer through my shut office door. And you know me, I don’t ever want to hear my staff nor do I ever want to open my door and engage with them.”

Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event,...

Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building took a big leap into Season 3, centering the crime-solving podcasting trio Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) and the season’s crime around a massive theater production led by newcomer Loretta, played by Meryl Streep.

The risks paid off. The series created by Martin and John Hoffman received a whopping 21 Emmy nominations in multiple major categories including Best Comedy Series, Best Lead Actor nods for Martin and Short, Best Actress for Gomez and Best Supporting Actress for Streep.

Outside of the acting categories, the Television Academy recognized composer Siddhartha Khosla, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, as well as choreographer John Carrafa. All four joined Deadline as part of Contenders Television: The Nominees to discuss working together to create sweeping musical dramedy at the heart of Season 3.

“Justin and I have described this as being like going to theater,...

Nikki Glaser was nominated for her first Emmy in July for her HBO special Someday You’ll Die. That day, she told Deadline that she wanted to parlay that show’s success, as well as her breakout appearance at The Greatest Roast of All Time: Tom Brady, into three things: working with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, sitting in a VIP box for a Taylor Swift show and hosting SNL.

Less than a month on, it seems that the latter is happening.

Glaser, speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event, said there’s “interest” from the NBC late-night show. “I think I would kill it,” she said.

Glaser, who has been working in comedy for more than 20 years, knows that she needs to take advantage of this moment, where she was one of the stars of Netflix’s biggest-ever live event and her stand-up special broke records for HBO and Max....

Prime Video’s freshman spy series Mr. & Mrs. Smith is coming out of the gate with 16 Emmy nominations including Best Drama Actor and Actress for leads Donald Glover and Maya Erskine and the main event, Best Drama Series.

In a reimagination of the 2005 film that starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, co-creators Glover and showrunner Francesca Sloane — who are Emmy-nominated for Best Writing for a Drama Series — wanted the show to be its own thing and not a copy of anything else.

Sloane was joined by director and executive producer Hiro Murai, casting director Carmen Cuba and composer David Fleming for Deadline’s Contenders TV: The Nominees on Saturday.

“People keep saying that I coined this — this should go on record that Hiro coined this,” Sloane said. “Our season of Smiths are these C-minus students in an AP course. I think that sort of travels through the entire season as opposed to the film,...

“I’ve always felt throughout my career that you can always get the audience to a slightly darker place if you tell them a couple of jokes along the way,” says Fallout executive producer/director Jonathan Nolan about the approach and tone the multi-Emmy-nominated Prime Video drama has taken in its debut season.

Joined by fellow EP and co-showrunner Graham Wagner and star Walton Goggins, Nolan was speaking at Deadline’s virtual Contenders Television: The Nominees event.

Portlandia alum Wagner agrees with Nolan’s Pov on mixed-genre storytelling.

“I think that good drama has humor, and it always has,” the showrunner says. “As we’ve sort of seen in the last 20 years, great calamities can happen, and humans are still going to be idiosyncratic, weird and a little, I don’t love the word quirky, but little quirky.”

Related: Deadline’s Contenders TV: The Nominees – Full Coverage

Created by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Wagner,...

The 76th Primetime Emmy Awards, not to be mistaken for the 75th Emmys handed out earlier this year, are taking place in September, with nominations unveiled last month. Many of those big names are aboard today to participate in Deadline’s annual Contenders Television: The Nominees event, which kicks off at 9 a.m. Pt.

Sign up for here for the livestream.

Follow along for panel coverage all day Saturday on Deadline and on social using the hashtag #DeadlineContenders.

Fallout star Walton Goggins, comedian Nikki Glaser, who broke out during The Roast of Tom Brady, Alan Cumming of The Traitors and Late Night’s Seth Meyers are among those confirmed for panel discussions, along with producers and directors including Jonathan Nolan, Francesca Sloane, Hiro Murai and Sarah Schechter.

The virtual event will give viewers and voters insight into how these stars and behind-the-scenes talent found out about their Emmy nomination, how...

Five international-themed films are competing for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards this year, stories set in Uganda, Chile, Tunisia, Ukraine, and India. To Kill a Tiger, which has brought director Nisha Pahuja the first Oscar nomination of her career, centers on a poor couple in the Indian state Jharkhand who bravely fought for justice after their teenage daughter became the victim of a brutal sexual assault.

“It literally is this David and Goliath story,” Pahuja said as she appeared at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees. “We were surprised, I think, by their courage and their resilience, and we kept thinking at some point maybe they were going to cave.”

Ranjit, father of 13-year-old Kiran, faced intense pressure to drop charges against the three young men accused of attacking his daughter.

Related: Contenders Film: The Nominees — Deadline’s Complete Coverage

“It came from all angles,” Pahuja said. “Obviously,...

“Bobi has inspired our generation and the nation at large,” Bobi Wine: The People’s President co-director Moses Bwayo said of the famed Uganda performer now politician seeking to preserve his country’s waning democracy.

“When he got into Parliament and said he wanted to dislodge the dictatorship … we trusted him,” Bwayo, who did double duty as director of photography on the Oscar-nominated documentary added at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event Saturday. “The revolution that he leads today, that’s what really got him all this support around the country, and of course his messenging and the music. It really communicates with the nation.”

Back in cinemas in major markets across the U.S. this long Presidents Day weekend, National Geographic’s very timely Bobi Wine is up against The Eternal Memory, Four Daughters, To Kill a Tiger and 20 Days in Mariupol for Best Documentary at the 96th Academy Awards next month.

Filmmaker Sean Wang’s endearing live-action short Năi Nai & Wài Pó might seem to be perhaps the lightest of all the Oscar nominees in the category, but he had more on his mind in chronicling the lives of his inseparable grandmothers, the 94-year-old Năi Nai (Yi Yan Fuei) and 83-year-old Wài Pó (Zhang Li Hua) as they go about their daily lives, even sleeping in the same bed in their Bay Area home.

The recent spate of violence against innocent people in the Asian community in America was also on Wang’s mind as he joined us for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.

“I mean, the idea of it is right there, you know, my two grandmas. The movie is full of life, and joy, and humor, and farts, and all the things that it encapsulates because they are full of joy and humor and sometimes gas,” he said.

“It’s been really interesting to talk about the film in this personal way, because it really was never meant to be so personal,” Elemental director Peter Sohn said at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees panel Saturday.

“The seeds sort of started,” the Disney/Pixar vet added of his own Korean family story that birthed the Oscar-nominated toon. “And it rippled through the crew, and a lot of our crew members started bringing their own personal lives to it as well.”

With a love story of sorts between fire element Amber and water element Wade, “empathy among cultures” and a dollop or two of the immigrant experience and interracial relationships, the seven-year effort to bring Elemental to the big screen now sees the half-billion-grossing pic up for Best Animated Feature. It will face off for the Oscar against Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. Netflix’s Nimona,...

As we race to the Oscar finish line, it has certainly been a year to remember. The movie business all but shook off the last vestiges of the Covid era with the phenomenon that was Barbenheimer — collectively, Barbie and Oppenheimer earned more than $2 billion globally at the box office. Not only is cinema alive and kicking, but both of those box office behemoths are Oscar-nominated for Best Picture.

It sets the stage for Contenders Film: The Nominees, Deadline’s annual awards-season showcase. Today, we sit down with casts and creatives from eight of this year’s Oscar-nominated films, representing hopefuls spanning categories from the crafts to Best Picture. The virtual livestream begins at 9 a.m. Pt.

Click here to register and watch the livestream.

The Best Picture competition is still very much on, and Focus Features’ The Holdovers is in the running. Joining us today for a Q&a conversation are director Alexander Payne,...

Updated, 12:14 Pm: A Clark County grand jury handed down a murder indictment today against the man arrested earlier in connection with the killing of Tupac Shakur. Duane “Keefe D” Davis is accused of gunning down the storied rapper on the Las Vegas Strip in 1996. District Judge Jerry Wiese ordered Davis, 60, a reputed gang member, held without bail.

In court, Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc Digiacomo announced the charge of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. He referred to Davis as the “on-ground, on-sight commander” and “shot caller” in a revenge plot against Shakur, Death Row Records founder Suge Knight and the label.

Previously, 10:17 Am: Police in Las Vegas have arrested a man in connection with the 1996 killing of fabled rapper Tupac Shakur, according to the Associated Press.

Citing two officials with firsthand knowledge of the case, the news...

In the National Geographic documentary The Territory, illegal land grabbers in a section of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest burn down thousands of acres to clear space for cattle farming, buzzsaw giant trees left and right and build settlements in violation of Brazilian law. The destruction of their forest home has been devastating for the Indigenous Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people, who are supposed to be protected from such incursions upon their territory.

“From the 1970s onward, what my father says is that a lot of white people came, and they were splitting up, dividing up the land,” said Tangãi Uru-eu-wau-wau during an appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event. The Indigenous cinematographer earned an Emmy nomination for his work on The Territory, one of three nominations for the film. “There were people invading that were not Indigenous people — the illegal miners, the cattle ranchers. And this was happening all around where we lived.

Emmy-winning producer and director Mark Mylod has been with Succession for all four seasons, as has composer Nicholas Britell, who won an Emmy for the iconic theme of the series marking the three-time Oscar nominee’s first TV show. However, it was the stunner of a Episode 3 in the series’ final season, “Connor’s Wedding,” that was unlike anything they had tackled before on the show, and it presented unique challenges.

It also has presented them with their latest Emmy nominations as the episode each submitted (as did creator Jesse Armstrong in the writing category). Succession has received 27 nominations this season overall.

Appearing on the HBO | Max panel for the show at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event, both Mylod and Britell said that while Logan Roy’s death in the episode was a shocker for the audience, it was always the plan to have Brian Cox’s character exit in this way.

It wasn’t a quest to find new delicacies or the chance to go on road trips that inspired Padma Lakshmi to launch Taste the Nation on Hulu. Rather, it was the 2016 election and all the talk about border politics that prompted the executive producer and former co-star of Top Chef to want to launch a show that focused on the intersection of great food and our nation’s diverse population.

“I’m an immigrant myself, and I was brought up in different immigrant communities,” Lakshmi said on a panel for her series at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event. “I mean, America is a country that has been built on immigrants and immigrant labor. So I wanted to do something in my next creative project that utilized everything I had learned from working with the ACLU over the course of several years on this issue. And, you know,...

Tupac Shakur has been gone for nearly three decades, but his popularity has never waned thanks to family, friends and collaborators like Jamal Joseph and Allen Hughes, who are behind FX’s Emmy-nominated docuseries Dear Mama.

It received two Emmy noms last month: for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Series and Outstanding Writing For a Non-Fiction Series for Hughes and Lasse Järvi.

The project tells the stories of the legendary rapper and actor, who was murdered in 1996 at the age of 25, and his mother Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther activist who died 20 years later at 69.

“I knew Tupac when he was in the womb. I’m one of the New York Panther 21. I joined the Black Panther Party when I was 15,” Joseph, a Dear Mama executive producer and doc subject, said during the show’s panel at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event.

“The first day I [went] into the Panther office,...

“Making a show about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll at the height of Covid was another challenge that we did not anticipate,” Daisy Jones & The Six executive producer Lauren Levy Neustadter said of the very real-world hurdles the Prime Video series about a fictional 1970s supergroup faced making it from the page to the screen.

“But, I think, the silver lining was this group of actors really became a band,” added Neustadter, Hello Sunshine’s president of Film & TV, about the script-flipping moment for the limited series led by Riley Keough and Sam Claflin. “They took advantage of that year and trained with their voices and their instruments and became a real rock band, which is pretty amazing.”

Clearly the effort paid off.

Daisy Jones & The Six has proved a hit for the Jeff Bezos-owned streamer – on the screen and on the record charts too. The cherry on...

Christopher Gattelli appeared at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event after receiving his second consecutive nomination for his work creating the numerous dances in Schmigadoon!, which takes a satirical look at the world of movie and Broadway musicals.

Last year, the Apple TV+ series, created by Cinco Paul, dealt with the 1950s. But for its second season the possibilities really opened up for Gattelli as Schmigadoon! became Schmicago, spoofing the likes of Bob Fosse, Hair, Stephen Sondheim and more. In fact Gattelli, as a performer, last appeared on Broadway in the show Fosse, so this season became second hand to him thanks to his personal experience.

“Season 1 with the ’50s had its its pluses with the kind of long shots and the long takes and the getting of the full dancers bodies and a lot of the shots and whatnot, but this this season was a lot of...

Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie heads into final Emmy Awards voting with more nominations than any other nonfiction project this year: seven in all, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special, as well as recognition for director Davis Guggenheim and picture editor Michael Harte.

The Apple TV+ documentary creates a powerful portrait of the titular star, who rose to fame in the 1980s with Family Ties and Back to the Future and at age 29 – at the height of his fame – was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“I grew up adoring Michael J. Fox as an actor, and I think by the end of the project I kind of adored him as a man, as a human being,” Harte shared during an appearance at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event. “It’s his ability to see the positive and to laugh through basically everything; his ability to find the...

In Apple TV+’s Black Bird, Dennis Lehane’s limited series about convicted criminal Jimmy Keane (Taron Egerton) trying to elicit a confession from suspected serial killer Larry Hall (Paul Walter Hauser), cinematographer Natalie Kingston knew she wanted to tackle toxic masculinity from a fresh angle.

Speaking during Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event, Kingston, who shot all six episodes, said, “Dennis’ perspective on this was really inspiring and really what got me into this. He wasn’t interested in playing up the violence, being very literal with the story, being on the nose, making these killings feel very heightened or theatrical. It wasn’t about that at all.”

Instead, Kingston noted, the work was to tell “a human story.” Lehane’s telling, based on true events, is “character-driven,” she added, “and it’s about this uncomfortable tense dialogue between these two prisoners and this unlike, false friendship and about the different,...

The Traitors has been one of the breakout unscripted hits of the year. But while many viewers of the Peacock series will have been aware of its cast of celebrity reality faces including The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Brandi Glanville, Survivor’s Cirie Fields and Below Deck’s Kate Chastain, the team behind the series also needed a group of willing civilian contestants.

Enter the casting directors — Erin Tomasello, Jazzy Collins, Moira Paris and Holly Osifat — who were tasked with finding folk from all walks of life.

“We wanted to find people that are good at lying, people that are good at manipulation and maybe some people that are really gullible that will fall for it,” Tomasello said during a panel featuring all four casting directors at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event. “Our first brainstorm was what job titles do people hold that maybe emulate that.

Updated: Kate Winslet and Ben Whishaw scooped the top acting prizes at the BAFTA TV Awards in London this afternoon.

The pair won in the Leading Actress and Actor categories for I Am Ruth and This is Going to Hurt respectively, with I Am Ruth also winning for Single Drama.

Adam Kay’s Whishaw-starring BBC/AMC drama This is Going to Hurt was defeated in the Best Mini-Series category to BBC Three breakout Mood, in one of the night’s biggest surprises.

Meanwhile, Apple TV+ drama Bad Sisters won the streamer’s first BAFTA TV performance awards ever for Best Drama Series and Best Supporting Actress Anne-Marie Duff. Creator Sharon Horgan used her acceptance speech to express “solidarity with [her] WGA brothers and sisters” and a colleague of Horgan’s told Deadline that she had recently joined the picket line in Los Angeles.

The International BAFTA went to Netflix’s Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,...

Here’s a look at this week’s biggest premieres, parties and openings in Los Angeles and New York, including red carpets for Love Again and Angel City, plus FYCs for Wednesday, The Last of Us and Ted Lasso.

The Last of Us FYC

Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey reunited with their Last of Us team for a “For Your Consideration” event in L.A. on April 28.

Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal Neil Druckmann, Craig Mazin, Bella Ramsey, Pedro Pascal, Gabriel Luna, Carolyn Strauss and Murray Bartlett

Wednesday FYC

Netflix held a special Wednesday screening and Q&a at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday with stars Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Luis Guzmán and Gwendoline Christie.

Jen Malone, Danny Elfman, Alfred Gough, Luis Guzmán, Gwendoline Christie, Jenna Ortega, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Miles Millar and Yvette Nicole Brown Gwendoline Christie, Jenna Ortega and Catherine Zeta-Jones

Welcome to Wrexham FYC

Ryan Reynolds and...

Making eat-the-rich comedy Triangle of Sadness, with a gross-out scene that rivals Farrelly Brothers movies, was simple for Swedish director Ruben Östlund.

“I wanted to create a roller-coaster ride for adults,” he said during a panel for the Neon movie during a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees. The film follows an influencer fashion couple (played by Harris Dickinson and the late Charlbi Dean) who board the wrong the yacht of rich people. The ship’s fate is worse than that of those from Gilligan’s Island, with a drunk Marxist captain losing sway of the boat which crashes onto a deserted island. There on that isolation off at sea, the lesser of the crew becomes more senior in status in a swap between the rich and poor.

Related: Contenders Film: The Nominees – Deadline’s Full Coverage

The movie in its world premiere at Cannes last May left...

“I used to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and see snowfall and imagine the characters in the book moving. It was a dream of mine to take them further than the static book drawings,” said writer-director Charlie Mackesy during a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees to discuss The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse.

Based on his 2019 illustrated book, Mackesy’s animated short from Apple Original Films that’s nominated for the Best Animated Short Film Oscar, follows a boy searching for a home. Along the way, he meets three animals who are also looking for a place to belong and begin to develop a bond. The short is directed by Mackesy and Peter Baynton, with the voice talents of Jude Coward Nicoll, Gabriel Byrne, Idris Elba and Tom Hollander.

Related: Contenders Film: The Nominees – Deadline’s Full Coverage

The book became a hit,...

“I saw the Disney film when I was very, very young, and it made a huge impression,” Guillermo del Toro said during a panel for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio at Deadline’s Contenders: The Nominees event, where he was joined by director Mark Gustafson. “What sat wrong with me was the idea that you needed to be obedient to be a real boy, and that you needed to be transformed into something you were not to be loved.”

Related Story ‘Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio’: Read The Screenplay For Oscar Winner’s Take On Classic Tale Related Story 'Eo' Director Jerzy Skolimowski And Co-Writer Ewa Piaskowska On Challenges Of Working With Animals: "We Were Terribly Optimistic" – Contenders Film: The Nominees Related Story 'Fire Of Love' Team On Their Volcanic Love Story For The Ages – Contenders Film: The Nominees

Del Toro’s Netflix adaptation of...

Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees is underway Saturday with 12 panels featuring some of the year’s biggest crowd-pleasing movies as well as its most artistic critical hits. This final round of Contenders events this Oscar season features virtual Q&a panels with the on-screen stars, creatives and craftspeople behind 12 of the films that will be going for gold at the Dolby Theater less than a month from now.

Click here to sign up for and launch the livestream.

Streaming Contenders events has opened up a whole new global audience, and also offers quick and convenient access to filmmakers who are either dealing with busy production schedules or, as is the case with several of the panels here, based in locations all around the world. In that respect, Contenders is here to bust open the myth that the Academy Awards are solely a vehicle for the American film industry: you...

Each of this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees has survived a journey to cross the finish line, before earning the Academy’s consideration. Here’s how they came together.

Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees Streaming Site

Belfast

Writer-director Kenneth Branagh began work on Belfast at the beginning of 2020, but the story itself has been growing for 50 years. “The desire to write something about Belfast had been with me ever since I left the place,” says Branagh, “but it was definitely enhanced by the idea of the lockdown. There was much more introspection at the beginning of this period.”

In casting his family, Branagh’s goal was to cast people who understood the culture of Belfast. “I admired Jamie Dornan very much for his work on The Fall,” he says, “he’s from just outside Belfast. Ciarán Hinds was brought up a half a mile from where I lived,...

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.

Click here to go to the site.

Saturday’s virtual panels ran the gamut from the cast of the Oscar Best Picture-nominated Coda to the star and director of Bhutan’s first Oscar-nominated film, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, and pretty much everything in between.

Panelists included Kristen Stewart and Pablo Larraín from Spencer; Kenneth Branagh and Ciarán Hinds from Belfast; Guillermo del Toro with Nightmare Alley; Jessica Chastain from The Eyes of Tammy Faye; Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson from Summer of Soul; Jonas Poher Rasmussen from Flee; Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve from The Worst Person in the World; Ariana DeBose from West Side Story; Adam McKay and Nicholas Britell from Don’t Look Up; Paolo Sorrentino...

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.

For Marino, just walking in the shadow of seven-time Oscar winner Rick Baker’s original creations was daunting.

Contenders Film: The Nominees — Full Coverage

“So Rick Baker is essentially a guru in our industry, and still is even though he is retired now. I was a huge fan of the original, and Rick...

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.

The pic’s Oscar-nominated production designer Patrice Vermette, meanwhile, said that for Part 2, most of Part 1’s sets aren’t packed up in a huge warehouse someplace. “For the sequel, we’re going to have the same approach as we did for the first one — practical sets — obviously as big as they can be in the physical space of a soundstage, and we have a pretty big sound stage here in Budapest.”

Contenders Film: The Nominees — Full Coverage

In addition to Parent and Vermette, beaming in for the 10-time Oscar-nominated film’s panel were director/producer/co-writer Denis Villeneuve (nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay), costume designer Jacqueline...

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.

Will Smith stars as Richard Williams, the father and coach of Venus and Serena Williams, in the biographical film about a driven father who, along with his wife Oracene (Ellis), raised two of the most brilliant tennis players of all time.

Contenders Film: The Nominees — Deadline’s Complete Coverage

While Richard Williams accomplished something incredible with his daughters, the film didn’t shy away from his faults. “We see Richard throughout the film, sort of getting in his own way,” said Green. “I think it’s important to see the three-dimensional character that you see in Richard Williams; we were not trying to sugarcoat any of the issues that he may have had.”

Even though Williams never shied away from the press,...

“It didn’t have to end this way.”

That’s one of the central messages of Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s Oscar-nominated documentary Attica, about the 1971 prison uprising in upstate New York that culminated in mass bloodshed. The Showtime film meticulously reconstructs what precipitated the revolt, led primarily by inmates of color, what transpired during the five days prisoners held control of Attica, and the hideous crackdown that saw authorities slaughter inmates and hostages alike.

Contenders Film: The Nominees — Full Coverage

“It was just a decision made by Nelson Rockefeller, the [then] governor of New York, to go in with guns blazing and shoot gas in first, which created smoke and fog and they couldn’t even see,” Nelson said during a panel discussion of Attica for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event. “They were shooting indiscriminately into the crowd.”

The filmmakers spoke with numerous ex-prisoners who survived the carnage,...

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.

Speaking on a panel during Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event, McKay explained how the idea for Don’t Look Up germinated for him.

Contenders Film: The Nominees — Full Coverage

“It came about from the dawning awareness that the climate crisis, which I think a lot of us always thought was 50, 80, 100 years away,” he said. “And in the last four or five years it started to hit me that it’s right now. And that a lot of the modelling that we’ve seen has been incredibly optimistic. And in fairness the scientists were telling us that all along. And so, I started to get this bad feeling in my stomach.

With his film Flee, which recently scored a historic trifecta of Oscar nominations in the categories of Animated Feature, Documentary Feature and International Feature, Jonas Poher Rasmussen cleverly fused two cinematic mediums to help his longtime friend tell a painful, personal story that for decades he kept to himself, while maintaining his anonymity.

The writer-director first met the friend, referred to in the film as Amin Nawabi, when he was just 15 years old. “I grew up with in very small, rural Danish village, and one day, Amin arrived all by himself from Afghanistan, and stayed in foster care with a family just around the corner from where I lived,” Rasmussen explained during Neon and Participant Media’s panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees. “I was, of course, already back then curious about how and why he came, but he didn’t want to talk about it, and I of course respected that.

“We were waiting for another script, and then suddenly before the pandemic, he said, ‘Read this’,” Oscar-nominated Licorice Pizza producer Adam Somner says about how Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest project came to fruition. “It came out of the blue. It was definitely a surprise.”

Anderson drew inspiration from working with and knowing performing artist Alana Haim, as well as Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper. The now 11-time Oscar-nominated Anderson previously shot music videos for Haim’s band, Haim.

“It’s in line with how the music videos come about, which are very off the cuff: You get the call, you’re dreading the call, ‘Let’s do a music video, and let’s do it in three days and we don’t have any money,’ ” added Sara Murphy.

Both Somner and Murphy were speaking during the film’s panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.

The duo,...

“I believe that a big reason why this ambitious idea of throwing a music festival in Harlem in which somewhere between 70,000 to 90,000 people every weekend would see performances was so that there was something joyous and hopeful for people at that point were kind of at the end of their rope,” Summer of Soul (Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson says about the importance the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival had to a Black America ravaged by violence and assassination.

“It was a healing moment, if you will,” Thompson added during the film’s panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event. The Roots drummer, bestselling author, musicologist and now Oscar nominee made his feature directorial debut with the feature documentary.

Having premiered at the virtual Sundance Film Festival in 2021, Summer of Soul took home the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award in the documentary categories in Park City.

Belfast writer-director-producer Ken Branagh, actor Ciarán Hinds and sound supervisor Simon Chase – all Oscar nominated – spoke with us at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees event about the acclaimed film’s journey to screen.

Based on Branagh’s own experiences growing up in Northern Ireland, the Focus Features movie follows a young boy and his working-class family as they experience the tumultuous late 1960s.

“It’s not a story I had been planning for a long time, but it is one I had been feeling for a long time,” Branagh said. “The necessity to tell the story and understand about that time of change in Belfast was accelerated by the lockdown and the uncertainty it produced…What in times of turmoil can you understand.”

Music supervisor Simon Chase and Branagh discussed the film’s potent music (Van Morrison is a big part of the sound) and the scene-stealing moment Jamie Dornan...

Contenders Film: The Nominees, a one-stop-shop experience featuring a smörgåsbord of Oscar-nominated talent discussing their top-tier projects, kicks off Saturday beginning at 8 a.m. Pt as a virtual event, the latest in Deadline’s rapidly expanding Contenders series. Stars, creatives and craftspeople behind 24 films will take part in moderated panels discussing the roads that led them to the doorstep of the Academy Awards.

To sign up for and watch the livestream, click here.

If we’ve found a little silver lining to this Covid situation, it’s that it inspired us to stream our Contenders events since the earliest days of the pandemic. And we’ve not only reached a global audience in the comfort of their own homes, but we’ve also found a brave new world in which we screen chats with talent who couldn’t have made it to the stage in person anyway due to their schedules.

Disney+’s first TV series launch, the nine-episode WandaVision combined a wholly original premise that somehow felt familiar by its blatant homage to classic sitcoms that the witch Wanda conjured to mask her grief in losing her soulmate, Vision, to a brutal death we all saw in Avengers: Infinity War.

Having Wanda mask her grief by creating a world steeped in sitcoms that gave her comfort as a child was an idea hatched by Marvel chief Kevin Feige, and turned into a workable concept by the show’s creator, EP and writer Jac Schaeffer. At Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees awards-season event, Schaeffer, director/EP Matt Shakman and series stars Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany and Kathryn Hahn – all Emmy-nominated – discussed the unusual series, and how it was helped in finding its inner sitcom laugh track courtesy of Dick Van Dyke, whose self-titled show was a pioneering effort given a homage in early episodes.