Oscar nomination snubs: Jodie Foster, Jared Leto, Tom Hanks, Spike Lee, Da 5 Bloods Bryan Alexander, USA TODAY
Regina King s One Night in Miami, Spike Lee s Da 5 Bloods headline Oscar nom snubs
The Oscar field has been officially set for the pandemic-delayed April 25 Academy Awards.
But in an awards season turned upside down with movie delays, theater closures and even a lack of awareness about films in contention, many strong performances and major stars were left off the final Oscar ballot.
On several key nominations, the Academy voters ignored precursor shows and went their own way, overlooking roles ranging from Jodie Foster in The Mauritanian to 8-year-old Alan Kim in Minari and filmmakers such as Regina King and Spike Lee.
Twenty-eight years.
If that refers to the length of a human life, it is a short time. If, however, it refers to the life of a Hollywood script from page to screen, it’s impossibly long. I wrote “The Little Things” toward the end of 1992, I believe.
I say
believe, because I have no emails referencing it and no phone history to pull up on my cell, as this technology wasn’t yet available. What I do have is a hard copy of the screenplay with a WGA registration date in the spring of 1993.
Decades later I forced myself to dig it out, open it and begin to read. I’d been putting it off for a long, long time, as I was afraid the script wouldn’t be good, would be too proudly clever or that it would read like it was written by a young, not completely untalented writer, which it was.
The Little Things: Need to Talk About That Ending? OK, Us Too
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If you recently watched the neo-noir crime thriller
The Little Things, you might have questions about its symbolic open ending (and that red barrette). Following two law-enforcement officers, deputy sheriff Joe Deke Deacon (Denzel Washington) and lead detective Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), the film centers on a Los Angeles serial-killer case in 1990. After various unsolved murders are committed throughout the city, all following the pattern of women being stabbed to death, the police officers become suspicious of Albert Sparma, a man who works at a repair store near the crimes.
For most of its duration, the just-released crime thriller
The Little Things plays like a traditional whodunnit? as two cops, played by Denzel Washington and Rami Malek, hunt for a serial killer, ultimately zeroing in on Jared Leto s sinister appliance repairman.
Then, things take a turn. After Leto s Albert Sparma lures Malek s Jim Baxter to the desert, the cop kills the suspect, a murder which Baxter and Washington s Joe Deacon cover-up. The two policemen get away with the crime, while the viewer is left in the dark as to the identity of the killer. I always felt there would be a section of the audience that would prefer a very formulaic ending and there s nothing wrong with that, says writer-director John Lee Hancock (