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www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JAN/FEB 2019 OSCAR CONTENDERS Favourite) and Peter Farrelly (Green Book) were all strong contenders going into the nominations, yet it was Lanthimos who scored the nod. While the controversial X-Men director Bryan Singer was highly unlikely to be recognized after famously being fired from Bohemian Rhapsody (another '70s period piece based around the rock group Queen and its flamboyant front man Freddie Mercury; it was finished by Dexter Fletcher, although Singer's still credited as the director), the film still snagged a Best Picture nomination. And if they handed out Oscars for patience and unwavering commitment to a project, Oscar-winning producer Graham King (Hugo, The Departed) would undoubtedly add another to his haul (his 45-plus films have grossed over $2.8 billion world- wide and have been nominated for 61 Academy Awards) for his latest production. Bohemian Rhapsody, a true labor of love and the warts-and-all biopic, took King "over 10 long years to make," he told me. But the result is a triumph (it's heading towards a global haul of $650 million on a tight $50 million budget), not only for star Rami Malek of Mr. Robot fame, who completely inhabits the role of Mercury and is well-deserving of the Best Actor nom, and the rest of the cast, but for all the talent behind the camera. The film, full of high energy and high drama, was edited by John Ottman (the X-Men franchise, Superman Returns; see our inter- view in the November issue of Post), who expertly balanced the powerful public moments of Live Aid and arena rock shows with the very different and often sub- dued private moments in the singer's life. The film also showcases effective VFX work by Double Negative, Clear Angle Studios and a few other houses. And the sound — often so lame in so many films in this genre — particularly "We Will Rock You," is thrillingly loud when it should be, subtly layered in the quieter scenes, and also deserves some Oscar love. Writer-director Damien Chazelle made Oscar history when his retro-glam- orous musical La La Land, a triumphant follow-up to his 2014 release Whiplash (which received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Chazelle), earned 14 Oscar nominations, winning six awards, including Best Director for Chazelle, the youngest director to receive the award. The film didn't win Best Picture (it was the Oscar gaffe that reverberat- ed around the world) but now he's reteamed with that film's star, Ryan Gosling, who plays famed astronaut Neil Armstrong in First Man, the riveting story behind the first manned mission to the moon. Focusing on Armstrong and the decade leading to the historic Apollo 11 flight, it's a visceral and intimate account that puts the audience squarely inside the planes and rockets, fully immersing the viewer in the exciting and terrifying test flights and space missions. Written by Academy Award winner Josh Singer (Spotlight, The Post), with Steven Spielberg as an exec producer, the epic drama also reunites Chazelle with his Oscar-winning director of photography Linus Sandgren (American Hustle), Oscar-winning editor Tom Cross (Whiplash) and Oscar-winning composer Justin Hurwitz (Whiplash). The director also teamed for the first time with production designer Nathan Crowley (Dunkirk, The Greatest Showman), and Oscar-winning visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert (Blade Runner 2049, The Huntsman: Winter's War). Chazelle reports that he did all the post on the Universal lot, including the sound mix and the DI with colorist Natasha Leonnet from Efilm. "She also did La La Land and Whiplash, he says. "I love post, especially the editing. It's my favorite part of the whole process and where it all comes together. We had some big editing chal- lenges on this, and the big one was the huge amount of film I shot — two million feet — and a short editing schedule...So figuring out how to take all that, and a lot of it was documentary style, and trying to wrangle it into a narrative space and make the movie feel visceral and kinetic and propulsive was very challenging. And then finding the balance between the big set pieces in space and then the quiet A Star is Born (above and right) Avengers: Infinity War Bohemian Rhapsody (above and right)