Damien Chazelle

It’s no secret by now that Damien Chazelle’s La La Land featured some unbelievably ridiculous camerawork. Now that the film has been nominated for Best Picture and Best Cinematography, as well as Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Production Design, the film’s campaign is making sure the Academy voters know exactly how much it deserves to win in the technical categories.

When it comes to predicting future Oscar winners, few institutions are as prescient as the Directors Guild of America. Only once in the past decade has the DGA honored a filmmaker who did not go on to win the Academy Award for Best Director; that took place in 2012, when the DGA selected Ben Affleck for Argo while the AMPAS went with Ang Lee and Life of Pi. If the DGA selects you as the best director of the previous year, you might as well start working on that Oscar acceptance speech.

The signature image of Damien Chazelle’s La La Land — the one that adorns all of its posters and trailers, and this post as well — is of its two stars, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, dancing in the hills of Los Angeles. It’s a striking visual: Gosling in his dark wool (not polyester) suit, Stone in her canary yellow dress, each with one arm pointed skyward behind them and the other crossed and pointing to the ground. In this single pose, they’ve essentially diagrammed their characters’ entire journeys over the course of the film: They come from different worlds, meet, and send each others’ lives careening off in new directions, with the city of Los Angeles serving as the glittering backdrop to their romance.

La La Land’s backlash arrived a little later than expected this awards season, but that didn’t stop the jazzy bittersweet musical from claiming a top prize at the 2017 Golden Globe awards. In one of the least surprising moments of the evening, Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash follow-up received the award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Next stop: The Oscars, most likely.

Most of the attention in the Oscar race so far has been focused on Moonlight, and with good reason; it is an amazing film. But don’t count out La La Land just yet; the movie is a feel-good crowd-pleaser, and these awards are, after all, popularity contests. Tonight Damien Chazelle, director of La La Land took home the Golden Globe for Best Director, making this year’s Oscar race that much more interesting.

After taking some time off to make his directorial debut and tend to his growing family, Ryan Gosling is back and busier than ever with recent roles in The Nice Guys and awards season favorite La La Land. While that film is currently in theaters (and picking up a few awards nominations), Gosling is already plotting a reunion with director Damien Chazelle for his next project, a Neil Armstrong biopic that will take the actor from the “City of Stars” to the actual stars — in outer space.

The musical never completely died as a movie genre, but it did lay dormant for a good long while throughout the 1980s and ’90s, with only the occasional throwback like Pennies From Heaven, Newsies, or Everyone Says I Love You popping up, like an old memory. Back then, the movie business largely conceded its tradition of song-and-dance to Disney cartoons and MTV, assuming — wrongly — that the idea of flesh-and-blood actors breaking into big numbers in the middle of narrative feature films had become too cornball for the modern mass audience.

Music is everything to La La Land, not just its main mode of communication but its reason for being — all of director Damien Chazelle’s films have centered on the power of music to varying extents. For his most ambitious passion project yet, Chazelle figured he’d need a composer who was up to the task of capturing the swooning romance and the lingering melancholy of the film, and he found one in Justin Hurwitz. And now you can listen to the beautiful La La Land score a whole week before the film hits theaters.

Is there a more stressful month for film fans than December? Not only are most of us trying to stay on top of our normal holiday stress  —  picking up gifts for our family and friends and dreading time spent in airports and train stations  —  we are also trying to fit in as many movies as possible before the end of the year. Whether you write about film, participate in an office Academy Award pool, or just like watching good movies, there’s nothing like cramming movies into every spare second of an already packed mo

Pretty much since the first moment I saw the first teaser for La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s amazing new musical hitting theaters next month, I’ve been waiting for the soundtrack. Sometimes I’ve put on one of the film’s trailers to hear the music again. Other times I’ve caught myself humming some of the tunes while walking down the street, particularly the earworm “City of Stars,” sung by Ryan Gosling’s character. Via Variety, I now know when my suffering will end with the release date of the La La Land soundtrack (December 9) and, in the meantime, I can now listen to a duet version of “City of Stars” by Gosling and co-star Emma Stone, which is available on YouTube (and embedded above).