Tag: awards

Given how dramatically the group’s voting body has changed in recent years, predicting the Golden Globes winners—as we attempted to do this week—is even harder than it used to be, back when things could happen like Paul Giamatti winning for a film called Barney’s Version. The 2024 Golden Globe nominees may be a little less out there than we used to expect from the Globes, but in many categories that doesn’t make the winner any easier to predict. After all, this is the first televised awards show of the season, and the first non-critics group to weigh in. Anything, in theory, is possible!

Jo Koy was “literally sitting on 10 days’ notice.” With barely more than a week to prepare for his job hosting the Golden Globes on January 7, as opposed to the months he says hosts usually get, the comedian was under the gun for his first awards hosting gig.

“And I don’t care. I love it,” he promises. “I’m feeling overwhelmed, nervous, excited, pressure, and I’m not complaining. I’ve been granted a beautiful opportunity, I’m going to seize the moment and enjoy it.”

The comedian, best known for his four Netflix comedy specials and his many appearances on Chelsea Lately, as well as starring in last year’s studio comedy Easter Sunday, says the Globes hosting gig has presented him with several new challenges.

“I’ve never written this many jokes before in my life,” he admits. “I’ve got six specials under my belt right now, but this is the most joke-writing I’ve done, and it’s a style that I’ve never [done]. This is all new, doing a host-style monologue, yet still giving it my tone and my voice. It’s been challenging, but, man, we’re having a blast. And we’re knocking this monologue out.”

Since the news was announced December 21, Koy says, he’s received an outpouring of love and support from fans, friends, and unsolicited yet very welcome advice from fellow comedians.

“The most amazing thing is that I’m getting unsolicited help from people that I admire,” he says. “Like Seth Meyers getting on the phone with me and telling me certain things that he felt about the Golden Globes—that he had nervous energy going in, and that he didn’t go out during New Year’s Eve. I told him, ‘I’m not going out New Year’s Eve.’ He goes, ‘Neither did I.’ And to hear that from him made me feel good, like, Okay, then. This is a normal feeling. It’s not me. He had it too, and this guy’s got his own talk show.”

“And getting a call from Chris Rock, we were talking for, like, an hour,” Koy continues. Rock, who is also nominated at the Golden Globes in one of two new categories, best performance in a stand-up special, is a two-time Oscar host. “He’s telling me things like, ‘F–k the wardrobe change. Don’t worry about your outfit. Worry about the show. Watch the show. That way you’re prepared, if something happens, you’re ready. You don’t want to be in the back in the room changing your outfit, and you’re like, What happened? You want to be there.’”

Koy adds that another nominee, Ali Wong, reminded him of the importance of doing his own research.

“Ali Wong, when she talked to me on the phone, was like, ‘Be prepared. Just be prepared.’ And that’s why I’ve been hyperfocused, watching every [nominated] movie and TV show—because of Ali. This is my second time watching Beef. I already watched it, but she’s right. I’m going to be prepared, watching all these movies, writing down ideas, and writing out joke ideas. I’d rather be overprepared.”

To the Peloton instructor who criticized a Christopher Nolan movie during a recent class: You might want to check the leaderboard before weighing in next time.

Onstage at the New York Film Critics Circle dinner in Manhattan Wednesday night, where Nolan accepted the best-director prize for Oppenheimer, the filmmaker put his own spin on the adage that everyone’s a critic. “I was on my Peloton doing some high-interval gasping, some shit,” he started, vaguely but accurately describing the sensation of being mid-workout. “The instructor started talking about one of my films, saying, ‘That’s a couple of hours of my life I’ll never get back.’” After a pause for laughs, Nolan expressed his gratitude for actual movie critics: “When Rex Reed takes a shit on your film, he doesn’t ask you to work out more with him.”

Untelevised and with the winners announced a month in advance, the NYFCC dinner is a loose, lower pressure opportunity for the year’s biggest contenders to step onstage just days into the New Year. Many of Wednesday night’s winners, Nolan included, are likely to have repeat victories at the Golden Globes on Sunday. But televised awards shows have infamous countdown clocks, and a lot of pressure to give a good sound bite. At the NYFCC dinner, meanwhile, speeches ran long, introductions were heartfelt—and according to NYFCC chair Matt Singer, the whole thing wrapped up 15 minutes early anyway.

It’s traditional for each of the night’s honorees to be introduced by another high-profile figure in the film world, making room for some surprising stories that might never otherwise make it to an awards show stage. Richard Jenkins was on hand to introduce The Holdovers star Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the night’s best-supporting-actress winner, and revealed that after they’d worked together on one film, he specifically requested her for a role in his next one. (They both appear in the 2020 films Kajillionaire and The Last Shift, though nobody specified which came first.) “We actors have a way of seeking out greatness in other actors,” Jenkins said onstage. “It’s called jealousy.”

Supporting-actor winner Charles Melton was seated at the Netflix table next to the actor who introduced him, Lucas Hedges, who recalled meeting the May December star over karaoke years ago. “Like Todd Haynes [the director of May December], I had no idea what to do with how good looking he was,” Hedges said. Praising Melton’s charisma and talent—the former Riverdale star’s karaoke song was “Halo,” an incredible flex—Hedges added a warning: “Now, if anyone knows anything about stardom or being a successful actor, everything I just said about Melton is as much a red flag as it is beautiful. Melton could so easily be a monster. But this is not who he is. I can say this with certainty: Melton deserves his light.”

Experiencing his first awards season, Melton was effusive in his enthusiasm for his fellow winners and many presenters too. He shouted out Paul Dano, in the room to present Justine Triet with the best-international-feature prize for Anatomy of a Fall, as an inspiration to him as a young actor. After Dano’s own moment onstage, he flagged down Melton, and the two shared a hug in a corner of the room, talking animatedly for a few minutes before returning to their tables.

Benesch projects a level of poise and savvy that’s to be expected of an actor who broke out early and abruptly, before needing to figure out how to make this kind of life work for her. She didn’t come from money and didn’t have anyone giving her advice. During the campaign for The White Ribbon, which was nominated for an Oscar, she felt “really unprotected,” thrown into the dizzying world of intensive press interviews and glamorous premieres.

The scrutiny came in part because Benesch, portraying the sweet-natured nanny Eva, made a vivid impression and emerged as a talent to watch. “I knew nothing about publicity, nothing about dress codes and all of that stuff—and I was too young,” she says. “If you are thrown into something as insane as the Oscars or red carpet in Cannes, you need someone to [tell you] you need to be dressed well, and that that entails you paying someone or having someone give you stuff. I had no one to tell me, ‘This is how it works. These people do this job. Those people do that job.’ I needed someone to tell me that.’”

She didn’t exactly have a typical first filming experience, either. This is Haneke we’re talking about. “Even though people tell you this is not what it’s usually like, you then arrive at the next set and you’re flabbergasted by the reality of what other films are like,” she says. Haneke hired an acting coach for Benesch, introducing her to method acting—a process she realized she did not care for, in real time. (“I found it a little off-putting because it’s just so serious.”) The director’s demanding nature also proved intimidating, even as he was “nothing but sweet” to Benesch directly. “If something didn’t work out by the time we got to set, Michael would have a fit,” she says. “I saw it twice and it was really scary.” (She and the director remain on friendly terms, and had lunch last month.)

Coming out of all that, then, Benesch needed to be decisive. She wanted to commit to acting but needed to take ownership. Her parents couldn’t pay for drama school, so Benesch worked and took out loans to get herself through a program in London—which she considers her real, official start as a professional performer, despite her auspicious debut with Haneke. “I had some people, especially in the German industry, tell me that it was stupid to go and leave and I wouldn’t then be able to get back in the industry and all that stuff,” she says. “But I learned most about the job at drama school. It’s to do with a moving body and space that walks and talks at the same time. It sounds so simple, but breaking it down to that, that’s my foundation now.” Toward the end of her studies, she booked a regular gig on Babylon Berlin, starring on the hit series for three seasons.

With a breakout like The White Ribbon, typecasting naturally follows. Benesch was most likely to get cast in “traumatic” projects after that role, and because she’d gone into debt to pursue an acting career, she couldn’t be especially choosy. She laughs at the memory of promoting projects she didn’t feel particularly proud of. “I’ve definitely done jobs that I wouldn’t have chosen because I needed to pay stuff back,” she says. Babylon Berlin kept her in the ingénue category, too, but the depth and success of that project stretched Benesch’s talents, allowed her to make good on her training and put her back in the spotlight.

There’s one way in which White Ribbon brought Benesch directly to The Teachers’ Lounge, though. About a decade ago, the director of the latter film, Çatak, met Benesch as a student filmmaker. Benesch was part of a panel giving out awards to a handful of people, including him. “As I was leaving, he came up to me and asked me, ‘What was it like to work with Haneke?’ and I apparently said something that Haneke always said, which is, ‘You need to know your lines and be in the moment, or the rest doesn’t matter,’” Benesch recalls. “Ilker took that, and it’s been one of his mantras when he started filmmaking.”

The cars that race, roar, and crash so memorably in Michael Mann’s Ferrari are not just gorgeous—they are also, more than 60 years after the movie is set, extremely rare, and valuable, with some selling in the eight-figure range for those devoted enough to pay.

That meant it was an in-depth process to find cars that could look and sound like these exemplars of automotive art and engineering. And it was made no less challenging by the famed automotive, and detail, obsession of its director. “Michael is a massive car lover. He knows absolutely everything about cars,” says Danny Triphook, the picture supervisor on Ferrari, responsible for sourcing the movie’s automobiles. “In some other films, I would have had the ability to say, ‘Oh, let’s do this or let’s do that because this car is better because of this.’ There was no chance I could do that because Michael knows everything.”

Triphook’s first assignment was to conduct a “massive, massive, massive research investigation,” sorting through old Italian television, documentaries, and film footage to get a sense of which cars could have been on the road, and tracks, in 1957, when the film is set. He then sat down with Mann and went through the script, “agreeing on what vehicles we needed for each character, what vehicles we needed in each location.” Then, he started looking for cars.

Triphook had the cooperation of additional experts. These included Gabriele Lalli, the operations manager at Ferrari Classiche, the brand’s in-house archive and restoration facility, who helped ascertain what factory vehicles may have been raced during the season depicted in the film. He also had assistance from major collectors, who agreed to loan him their vehicles.

Triphook soon discovered that this is a tight, gossipy, and competitive community. “One collector would speak to another one and say, ‘Oh, yeah. My car is going to be in the movie.’ So the other collector wanted to be in the movie as well, to the point where these guys were ringing me instead of me reaching out for it,” he says.

He ultimately sourced 393 vehicles for the movie, a hoard that required its own similarly sized transportation infrastructure. “We couldn’t drive these on the road to take them to set because of the insurance,” he says. “So we had to use 333 car carriers.”