Damien Chazelle

You have to see what happens when you put the music (and some of the characters) from ‘La La Land’ into ‘Blade Runner 2049.’

If you thought La La Land director Damien Chazelle was obsessed with Paris before, wait until Netflix pays him to make a show there. Months after we first learned Chazelle was developing contemporary musical drama The Eddy, Netflix has officially added the Oscar-winner to its growing stable.

Settle in, Jon Bernthal fans, we’ve got a double-header of news for you. Bernthal, who will be starring as the Punisher in his upcoming Netflix spinoff series, has just wrapped a role for Steve McQueen’s heist thriller Widows. Not only that, he’s officially joined up with Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, alongside Ryan Gosling and Kyle Chandler.

Damien Chazelle’s work as a director has been pretty consistent — musicals, romance — but his work as just a screenwriter is a bit more ... let’s say eclectic. He wrote the Speed in a concert hall movie Grand Piano, and shares writing credits on 10 Cloverfield Lane (Awesome!) and The Last Exorcism Part II (How can the last something have a second movie?). Now another Chazelle screenplay, The Claim, is in development.

Unsurprisingly, La La Land director Damien Chazelle is lining up quite a cast of actors who want to work with the latest Oscar-nominee, and his next film, First Man, which will star Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong, is quite a hot ticket. Today brings news that three great actors, Kyle Chandler, Corey Stoll, and Jason Clarke, have all joined the movie about NASA’s project to put humans on the Moon.

Love or hate Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, it seems the young musical director is more than bouncing back from the Oscars mix-up. Reports indicate Chazelle might move to TV for contemporary musical drama The Eddy, picking up some of those Paris threads from the Oscar-winning film.

One small step for man, one giant leap towards a second Oscar. That’s likely what’s on Damien Chazelle and Ryan Gosling’s minds for their new Neil Armstrong biopic, which now has an awards season release date.

Perhaps even more incredible than Envelopegate is how quickly the whole thing escalated, and our collective fascination with what instantly (and maybe inarguably) became the most memorable Oscar moment of all time. (To be fair, America was in desperate need of a distraction.) Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty’s Best Picture envelope mixup is the best-worst thing to happen to the Oscars in years, but it’s not a mistake they’re eager to repeat; according to a new report, they’re considering a possible solution, which they’ll get around to as soon as they finish exhaustively scrutinizing this tweet.

Whether you love it, hate it, or are maintaining a neutral stance on the La La Land culture war, you’ve got to admit Damien Chazelle pulled off something pretty fantastic with his modern day ode to classic musicals. From the choreography to the film’s stunning color palette, it’s hard to deny that the filmmaker crafted one beautiful movie. With that in mind, plus the Academy’s penchant for honoring movies about Hollywood, it makes sense that Chazelle won the Oscar for Best Director on Sunday night.

Humor me for a moment — is Damien Chazelle‘s old-school romantic musical La La Land really all that far removed from the cinema of David Lynch? Like the avant-melodrama triumph Mulholland Dr., Chazelle’s film is obsessed with the artifice that defines both Los Angeles and the entertainment industry around which it was built. Both films revolve around a pair of people inexorably drawn to one another, linked even as they drift apart due to the vicissitudes of circumstance. Both Lynch and Chazelle are fond of stylistic breaks from reality, exploring a dreamlike or otherwise surreal plane beyond this dimension. Hell, “here’s to the ones who dream” might as well be the mission statement of Lynch’s entire filmography.