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OSCAR PREDICTIONS www.postmagazine.com 18 POST JANUARY 2017 Or could it be a year where Oscar bypasses the old guard in favor of the young turks, including such frontrunners as Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), Jeff Nichols (Loving), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea), David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water), Tom Ford (Nocturnal Animals), J.A. Bayona (A Monster Calls) and Mike Mills (20th Century Women)? And despite last year's very public soul-searching about Oscar's lack of diversity, women and people of color are still likely to be sorely under-represented again this year, with only Denzel Washington (Fences), Andrea Arnold (American Honey), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Rebecca Miller (Maggie's Plan) and Mira Nair (Queen of Katwe) looking like possible contenders. Jeff Nichols (see November's "Director's Chair" interview) looks like- ly to get some Oscar love for his assured and empathetic direction of the interracial marriage drama Loving, which follows his well-reviewed sci-fi drama Midnight Special earlier this year. Also in the running is the other Cannes hit, Hell or High Water, directed by David Mackenzie and starring Chris Pine and Ben Foster as bank robber brothers who are chased by a Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges). His latest genre mash- up might look like a standard-issue, nail-biting, bank-heist thriller, but it's also a lyrical western, a road movie and a timely commentary on current political and economic issues in America. "It had to be a balance between the genre bank robbery ele- ments and the deeper exploration of land and space and people lost in the erosion of change," notes Mackenzie. "And they aren't really verbal and articulate; they communicate as much in their silences as their sentences, and the 'porch moments' feel to me absolute- ly essential to the film and we a l l felt instinctively drawn to them whenever the opportunity arrived. I love the contrast between the huge, empty horizons and the sanctuary of the porch." The film was shot using both digital — Arri Alexa XTs — and classic Cinemascope "to create a look that's both very contempo- rary but also timeless," and was posted in New Mexico, Glasgow and in LA. "We did some ADR at Margarita Mix, PostWorks and the final mix at Wildfire with Chris David," reports the director. "As for the VFX, the biggest was the brush fire. Vitality VFX did that and it took quite a long time to get right. And I want to give a special shout-out to Jeremy Cox, who also did a lot of very subtle VFX work — condensing shots, adding signage and so on. It's the first time I've had so many VFX like that, and it was a revelation to me." The DI was done at Light Iron with Corinne Bogdanowicz. Barry Jenkins is another up-and-comer who deserves Oscar attention. Moonlight may only be his second film — following his assured 2008 low-budget debut, the San Francisco-set Medicine for Melancholy — but he's already established himself as a filmmaker to watch, and after the implosion of Nate Parker's once red-hot Birth of a Nation, his film's chances are looking better and better. Written and directed by Jenkins, Moonlight chronicles the life of a young black man from childhood to adulthood as he struggles to find his place in the world while growing up in a rough neighborhood of Miami. At once a vital portrait of contemporary African American life and an in- tensely personal and poetic meditation on identity, family, friendship and love, Moonlight focuses on the particular, but reverberates with universal truths. The low-budget indie was shot on location in Miami, in just 25 days, and Jenkins edited the film with two editors — Nat Sanders, who cut his first film, and Joi McMillion, who works with Ryan Coogler. "We used the Atomos Samurai, as they weren't on set — we didn't have the budget to fly them out, and anyway, they were cutting Season 5 of HBO's Girls when we started," he explains. "So the way this system works is that our DIT on set was basically duplicating all the dailies Passengers Rogue One: A Star Wars Story The Jungle Book Suicide Squad