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Top of the Line, IndieWire’s Craft newsletter, welcomes you to what has been quite a mellow week for craft coverage, specifically — if not, uh, for the world at large. Please come in and chill out with us for however long it takes you to read a newsletter. The staff here all took a beat to recover from Sundance this week, I think. Because of something I’m sure I have not yet been diagnosed with, my way of decompressing was making a list of which films would have won an Oscar for Best Casting, had the award started being given out in 2000, as opposed to being given out for the first time at this upcoming Oscars ceremony.
The results ended up being pretty fun. We have some repeat winners, but not too many, and no single casting director would have taken home an Oscar more than twice in the last 25 years of our fake Best Casting Award. Current nominees Francine Maisler (for “Sinners”) and Nina Gold (for “Hamnet”) would be going for a third award to break the tie they both theoretically hold with Ellen Chenoweth, Sarah Finn, and Gail Stevens. We ended up highlighting both large ensembles and more intimate stories, where finding the right person for a demanding or niche role was crucial. Some of the Best Picture winners won, but there were very few sweeps.
As has been pointed out to me since its publication, I should maybe have been less afraid of “chalky” picks that favored the Best Picture winners — for instance, not only is the “Parasite” cast really extraordinary, but they make jokes about Song Kang-ho needing acting lessons! The casting, like the rest of that film, is elite and I’m not as excited about the “Dunkirk” joke I made in choosing “1917” instead. However, as I pointed out in the piece, this is for fun, and if I’m disagreeing with Past Me, you certainly can, too.
‘The Boy and the Heron’GKIDSElsewhere around the site, Jim Hemphill is writing about “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” (it is a day that ends in ‘y’) — this time, he has a great interview with the Oscar-nominated costume designer Deborah L. Scott, all about the costumes she created that have been a decade (!) in the making. The costumes workflow included the creation of physical pieces for animators to work with in order to get movement and texture right. And look, not everybody has James Cameron submarine money, but if one does have the means and the time, it certainly seems like a really fruitful way to approximate ‘realism’ while still creating a CG world that’s expressive and designed to tell the story. Which is, you know, kind of the point.
That’s the other thing — this week I have been haunted by this one image from the wholly Gen AI revolutionary war shorts, “On This Day… 1776,” that Primordial Soup/Darren Aronofsky is doing. It is an image of a speech being given in a snowy town square, and just out of focus in the background, a colonial man takes off his hat in appreciation of a speaker… and yet he is still wearing an even larger hat. This is the opposite of Absolute Cinema.
I mean, for one, has anyone told Aronofsky that the plagiarism machines are, to use more filmic jargon instead of scientific terms, drinking up our milkshake? The milkshake is all the potable water on Planet Earth, so the environmental bent of his previous films would suggest that he might have concerns. Second, releasing something that gets so many costuming and production design details wrong, so routinely, betrays such a seething contempt for audiences and for art that “seething contempt” doesn’t do it justice.
Film is an information-porous medium. Every frame contains information — in the clothes, environments, light, camera angle, props, and backgrounds — that is a core part of how we create meaning. To attempt to carelessly speedrun that work, making it anonymous and unintentional… Hayao Miyazaki was right when they showed him early AI tests, and Hayao Miyazaki is right now.
Anyway, we should have more pieces about some very well-crafted films and shows coming your way next week. Take it easy until then.
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