**Notes from Cannes: I thought we were through with movie awards shows for a while. The Oscars always manages to disappoint, but then, what can you expect from the BOOFS club? (That’s bunch of old farts). The statistics for the Oscars are clear. The Oscars have it at 94 % white, 76% male & average of 63 years old. Let’s hope they’ve made progress into the 21st Century over the pond and into France.
Cannes also premiered the new Mad Max movie, plus Woody Allen’s film, Irrational Man. The best buzz seems to be from a satire called The Lobster, a French crime thriller, The Conversation, and a same sex love story, Carol with Cate Blanchett.
**Women in Hollywood: The Empowered Strike Back! It seems to be the end of chick flicks and the new age of Fem Flicks. For instance, insiders were stunned that Pitch Perfect 2 beat out Mad Max at the box office this weekend. No one saw it coming.
I’ve been posting articles for over a year about the trends in Hollywood running towards women’s films. That means more powerful women like Meryl Streep are speaking out about sexism in Hollywood. And films like Frozen have catapulted into the top ten highest grossing films list because of girl power. Even the macho Mad Max movie was dominated by women.
The world is changing and we see it every week in the results from the box office in Hollywood. As the front office knows, numbers don’t lie.
*We are now living, as Gary Susman from Moviefone put it rather well, in the Cinematic Universe created by George Lucas. Lucas created the world of Star Wars, and all that it entails. That includes the special effects from Lucas’s company Industrial Light & Magic, the THX sound system found in theatres, the Pixar movies that dominate the animation market, and the conversion from celluloid to digital that has revolutionized special effects and moviemaking for the past quarter century.
What is the Cinematic Universe? In the past, we had always suspended disbelief in order to immerse ourselves in the film makers process. But the world has expanded and we now have several fantastic realms that are continually explored and re-imagined by different directors and storylines. The comic book genre that has exploded, and the world of Harry Potter plus the Tolkien universe all make up the Cinematic Universe we experience at the movies. But it wouldn’t be the same without the input from one man with a unique vision who created the tools we use to delve into the creative realm of the filmmaker. George Lucas is the creator behind all of our Cinematic Universes.
*From Cannes, there was a film about the making of Le Mans featuring Steve McQueen, one of my favorite actors. And a wonderful documentary revealing some of the footage from interviews of Hitchcock by another legend, Francois Truffaut. Woody Allen admitted that working to create a new Amazon series was a huge mistake. (I could have told him that…It seems we know more about Woody’s quirky personality than he does!)
*In my book, 6 Degrees of Film, I wrote at length on the phenomenal creation of George Lucas’ Cinematic Universe. He was a true pioneer when he re-invented the art of special effects in film and started Industrial Light & Magic, which was on the cutting edge of so many films from the eighties and nineties. The book is available at Amazon.com with the link here. http://www.amazon.com/Degrees-Film-Future-Global-Village/dp/1491701781/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1432158941&sr=1-1&keywords=6+degrees+of+film
Six Degrees of Film 