Oscar Nominees Talk to TheWrap

A roundup of interviews and video with two dozen of this year’s nominees

Over the past several months, TheWrap has spoken to many of this year's Oscar nominees, or hosted them at our Wrap Screening Series. Here's a roundup of interviews, videos and screening reports on Oscar's Class of 2010 … and stay tuned, because there's more to come.

Oscar Nomination AnnouncementBest Actor
Javier Bardem
, "Biutiful": "Pain is present every time you have to be creative, but that's different than being taken over by the pain."
Jesse Eisenberg, "The Social Network": "It's impossible for me to think about how the real person would feel, and to gauge the accuracy of what we were doing."
James Franco, "127 Hours": "I looked at the role and thought, there are hardly any movies that really ask an actor to do something like this."

Best Actress
Jennifer Lawrence
, "Winter's Bone": "I remember getting tired and sick and calling my mom one night crying, telling her to come."
Natalie Portman, "Black Swan": "She’s someone who is just trying to please everyone and it takes learning how to pleasure herself to become an artist.”
Michelle Williams, "Blue Valentine": "When they would call wrap it was like that set caught fire, and I ran as fast as I could to get out of it."

Best Supporting Actor
Mark Ruffalo
, "The Kids Are All Right": "Although that character is kind of iconic in American cinema, that kind of fun-loving bachelor, I didn’t think we’d ever seen him fall apart the way he does in this movie."

Best Director
Darren Aronofsky
, "Black Swan": "Any time you're doing something rock and roll and pushing the edges and trying to scare the bejeezus out of people, there's going to be people who don’t want to go along on that trip."
Tom Hooper, "The King's Speech": "I think my priority was to kind of subvert it being a traditional royal film, if such a thing exists."

Best Picture
"Black Swan
" (Darren Aronofsky, Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey): "I've always liked the structure of a slow start that builds and build and builds and then takes off."
"The Kids Are All Right" (Lisa Cholodenko): "I realized if I wanted to up the comedy and put it in more human relief with the drama, I might be able to make a film that had more commercial appeal.”
"The King's Speech" (Tom Hooper): “It gives you a wonderful sense of being an insider and an outsider in your own culture.”
"127 Hours" (Danny Boyle, James Franco): "It's best when you don't know what you're doing."
"The Social Network" (Aaron Sorkin, Armie Hammer): "This script was vetted to within an inch of its life by a team of lawyers that couldn’t fit into this theater.”
"Toy Story 3" (Lee Unkrich and Darla K Anderson): "The moment you try to make a movie for kids, you make garbage."

Best Adapted Screenplay
Aaron Sorkin
, "The Social Network" (with Armie Hammer): "I was writing about a very specific world, where woman are either prizes or enemies. It is a misogynistic world."

Best Original Screenplay
Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, "The Kids Are All Right": "We were in playland most of the time, just sort of imagining these characters."

Best Cinematography
Wally Pfister
, "Inception": "You'll have to pry that film camera out of my dead hands."

Best Documentary Feature
Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, "Restrepo": "The military has a very prickly relationship with the press, and when we turned up the guys were very suspicious of us."
Charles Ferguson, "Inside Job": "I was quite shocked when I discovered how incompetent the administration's response to the acute crisis was. I thought they would at least be competent, and I was wrong."

Best Foreign-Language Film
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
(with Guillermo del Toro), "Biutiful": "Many atrocities have been committed in the name of entertainment."

Best Original Score
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
, "The Social Network": "We just sat there without the script or the picture, and blindly created music."

Best Original Song
Alan Menken
, "I See the Light" from "Tangled": "I did six animated musicals in eight years. I don’t think I'd ever want to go back to a period like that."

(Photo by Todd Wawrychuk/AMPAS)

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