#philip-hoffman

#philip-hoffman

"[Bias] is that thing that stops you being regarded as a person and makes you something smaller. With my accent, I've had that experience where I'm suddenly no longer a person with infinite possibilities and potential - I am 'that Scottish person'. I'm reduced to a noise that comes out of my mouth."

DraftKings Sportsbook director Johnny Avello said last year that his trading team relies on trade publications like GoldDerby, which specializes in tracking and predicting entertainment awards shows, to make the odds for the Oscars. He told ESPN ahead of this year's ceremony that one added factor is the continued emergence of prediction markets, which are perhaps more in tune with non-sports-related wagering and rely more closely on the movement of markets.

I feel incredibly grateful for this kind attention, but to be clear, I also am quite humbled. I'm in a room of actors, many of whom are here because they've been nominated to receive a prize for their amazing work, while I'm here to receive a prize for being alive.

In a big studio-backed awards season, it's rare to see much overlap between the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars. A west coast cousin of sorts to the Gotham Awards, the Indie Spirits often celebrate the movies that the Academy skipped over with its nominations. The ceremony itself is also more fun (there's some day-drinking involved) than the more staid guild awards that dot the homestretch ahead of the similarly serious Academy Awards.

I love this movie. I love these people. I love the man who made this movie. I love everyone who I haven't met and is. And I love Tom Lizard. - Piper Curda, voice of Mabel, expressing her enthusiasm for the film and its cast and crew at the world premiere.

Casting as an artistic discipline has been around in its current form for decades, despite the proliferation of Zoom and self-tapes. Meticulous research, intuition, collaboration, and creative ability to expand on the filmmakers' vision all go into the casting process. We see no reason IndieWire can't retroactively reward that effort - albeit with no statues or acceptance speeches, unfortunately - to build a sense of what could have been a list of the Best Casting Award Winners for the first quarter of the 21st Century.

The Welsh-born actor had spent much of the decade living in the United States, where he split his time between the stage and the screen, building an utterly respectable career. He had played a compassionate doctor in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, a murderous ventriloquist in the cult thriller Magic, and the real-life convicted child murderer Bruno Hauptmann in the TV movie The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, for which he had won his first Emmy.

I was so disgusted. Like, no, you can't have a murder in this sea of people already dying - that's not right, not fair. We can't let this go.

The lone awards ceremony of the week was the Directors Guild Awards, where prizes were handed out in the categories of Feature Film, Documentary Film, and First-Time Feature Film. The First-Time Feature award didn't exist back in 1996 when Paul Thomas Anderson's Hard Eight debuted, so his win on Saturday night marked his first DGA prize in his storied career.