Steve Pond

Steve Pond
Steve Pond’s inside look at the artistry and insanity of the awards race, drawn from more than three decades of obsessively chronicling the Oscars and the entertainment industry.
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How ‘Three Minutes – A Lengthening’ Turns 1 Family’s Vacation Movies Into a Startling Look at the Holocaust
TheWrap magazine: “As soon as I saw these images, I realized that these are almost certainly the only moving images of this community,” says Glenn Kurtz of his grandparents’ 1938 film
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‘The Blue Caftan’ Faces Morocco’s Ultimate Taboo in Portraying a Queer, Closeted Craftsman
TheWrap magazine: Director Maryam Touzani says that shooting a film that talks about homosexuality was “a big, big risk”
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How ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Composer Created Those ‘Disturbing’ Sounds of War
TheWrap magazine: Volker Bertelmann says he used drums and harmoniums to make military sounds like shooting bullets
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‘Hallelujah’ Directors Explain How They Turned Leonard Cohen’s Song Into a Whole Movie
TheWrap magazine: Dayna Goldfine said they wanted to answer one question: “What is it about Leonard Cohen that made him the only person in the universe that could written a song like Hallelujah’?”
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How ‘Memory Box’ Turns a Stack of Teenage Notebooks Into a Movie
TheWrap magazine: “I had this strange personal archive, and we thought it would be interesting to do something with it,” says co-director Joana Hadjithomas
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Irish Oscar Entry ‘The Quiet Girl’ Has a Secret Weapon: Silence
TheWrap magazine: “The different types of silence in the film are reflective of Irish society and certain aspects of our past,” says director Colm Bairéad
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How Ukraine Oscar Entry ‘Klondike’ Tells a Timely Story Set in the Past
TheWrap magazine: “We made this film to very carefully ask the international audience: ‘What do you think about the situation on the border of Russia and Ukraine?’” says director Maryna Er Gorbach
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How Son Lux Made ‘Mountains of Music’ for ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
TheWrap magazine: “The challenge was to keep it from being a total mess,” says Ryan Lott, whose group Son Lux wrote the song “This Is a Life,” featuring Mitski and David Byrne
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How ‘Descendant’ Searched for a Slave Ship and a Community’s History
TheWrap magazine: “My mom talked about it like a ghost story or myth — it wasn’t something you talked about out loud,” says director Margaret Brown
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‘Abbott Elementary’ Leads Critics Choice Awards TV Nominations
FX, HBO and Netflix tie with 15 nominations each
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‘EO’ Director Had a Secret Weapon to Coax a Great Performance From a Donkey – Carrots
TheWrap magazine: “In difficult moments, carrots work miracles,” 84-year-old Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski says
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Why Brett Morgen Refused to Define David Bowie With ‘Moonage Daydream’
TheWrap magazine: “Bowie defies facts, defies definition and is beautifully mysterious,” the famed documentarian says
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‘Argentina, 1985’ Asks a Timely Question: How Fragile Is Democracy?
TheWrap magazine: “There was a lot of mistrust, a lot of misinformation, a lot of skepticism in the air,” says actor Ricardo Darín of the case study behind Argentina’s Oscar entry
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Why the New ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Needed a German Perspective on World War I
TheWrap magazine: Director Edward Berger says he wanted to infuse the classic anti-war story with “a sense of guilt, shame, terror, horror”
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‘Hunt’ Review: ‘Squid Game’ Actor Lee Jung-jae Brings a Dense Spy Thriller to Cannes
Lee’s directorial debut fictionalizes Korean history and throws in double agents, buried secrets and lots of broken arms