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www.postmagazine.com 20 POST JANUARY 2018 OSCAR CONTENDERS With a goal of putting the audience directly onto the beach, onboard the boat traversing the Channel, and in the cockpit of the Spitfires, Nolan again turned to IMAX. He was the first to use IMAX cameras in a major motion pic- ture, for The Dark Knight, and has employed IMAX cameras on all of his sub- sequent films. But for Dunkirk, he expanded the use of large format and shot the entire film with a combination of IMAX and 65mm film, something he'd "never done before, but Dunkirk is a huge story and it demanded an enormous canvas," he notes. "The reason we were shooting on IMAX film is that the im- mersive quality of the image is second to none." Nolan is also well-known for capturing the action in-camera and eschewing digital effects and CGI as much as possible. Even so, the spectacular work by visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson and Double Negative looks likely to get some Oscar love. Another WW11 drama, Darkest Hour from British director/producer Joe Wright, looks to be another strong contender. The Oscar fave first grabbed Hollywood's attention with his debut film, 2005's Pride & Prejudice, which won a raft of awards and four Oscar nominations, and he followed that up with the Oscar-winning war drama Atonement. Now the master of period pieces has crafted a nail-biting, behind-the-scenes look at Winston Churchill's fight to save the troops at Dunkirk — and save Britain from sliding down the slippery slope of appeasement in the face of Hitler's reign of terror in Europe. With Gary Oldman's performance as Churchill looking like a Best Actor nomination lock, the film is both intimate and epic. "A main challenge was how to deliver a movie that feels truly epic with very limited resources," says Wright. "And it's a very dialogue-heavy film, and with a lot of scenes — includ- ing a 10-minute one with people sitting around a table talking, so we had to find a way to make all that very dramatic and as suspenseful as possible." The answer? Wright's visual approach marries a lot of cutting-edge camera moves to a very classical style, to great effect. Playwright Martin McDonagh won an Oscar for his very first film, 2004's Six Shooter, and his mob drama In Bruges earned an Oscar nomination for his screenplay. Now there's lots of Oscar buzz around his acclaimed new film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which stars Oscar-winner Frances McDormand (looking like a Best Actress nomination lock) as a bereaved moth- er trying to force the local police department into re-opening the investigation into her daughter's murder. It won the top prize at the Toronto Film Festival, which is a reliable barometer when it comes to Oscar — previous TIFF win- ners include Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech and 12 Years a Slave, all of which went on to win Best Film at the Oscars, and last year's Toronto winner La La Land won a ton of awards including Best Film at the BAFTAs, although it famously lost to Moonlight at last year's Oscars. So will Three Billboards, another small budget indie festival fave duplicate Moonlight's success? Or, will Oscar embrace Luca Guadagnino, the award-winning Italian director, screenwriter, producer and artist, who first arrived on the international scene in 2010 with his critically-acclaimed film, I Am Love, which garnered Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. His new film, Call Me by Your Name, a sensual and transcendent tale of first love, stars Armie Hammer and red-hot Timothée Chalamet (who also stars in Lady Bird), and has quickly been gaining Oscar momentum. I, Tonya, the latest dark comedy from Aussie director Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl), is another festival fave, which deserves some Oscar attention. Based on the unbelievable but true events surrounding infamous American figure skater Tonya Harding, it stars Margot Robbie as the fi- ery Harding and an Oscar-worthy tour-de-force performance from Allison Janney as her acid-tongued mother. "Post's the most fun and creative part of the whole filmmaking process for me and I love editing and finding the film, and then the pace and tone and rhythm," reports Gillespie who did post at Harbor Post in New York. Oscar fave Stephen Frears may also be in the running with Victoria & Abdul, which follows last year's Oscar-nominated Florence Foster Jenkins, and his Blade Runner 2049 Runner 2049 Runner Call Me Call Me Call By Your By Your By Name Your Name Your Dunkirk I, Tonya