A renegade masterpiece that will get you good.
For Your Consideration
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For Your Consideration
Best Picture
Produced By
★ ★ ★ ★
A renegade masterpiece that will get you good.
★ ★ ★ ★
A darkly comic drama expertly structured with a rousing narrative.
A towering achievement. The best yet Martin McDonagh.
A Gut-Twisting Cinder-Black Comedy.
I think there’s something quite hopeful about the film in Mildred’s single-mindedness and also in Willoughby’s decency. I hope audiences will be moved and amused and feel they were just told a rich and somewhat unexpected type of story.
It was always a given that this story would be funny, because it was already so funny on the page and we had such terrific actors. But as we made the film, Martin was so careful to protect the beautiful sadness and the love of humanity in the film, and that’s what brings it to another level.
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For Your Consideration
Best Director
★ ★ ★ ★
A renegade masterpiece. Martin McDonagh is an exhilarating gift to movies, a blunt-force artist with the soul of a poet.
A towering achievement. The best yet Martin McDonagh.
★ ★ ★ ★
This is the best movie I’ve seen this year. McDonagh has done a masterful job.
McDonagh’s styles is a form of magical realism, here mixed with a kind of Gothic Americana, based on the idea that people in small towns are not prosaic but poetic.
The careful balance Martin brings between the funny and the serious is something magnificent. I guess it gets to the reason people sometimes laugh at funerals. In real life, opposing emotions often butt up against each other like that. When you suddenly experience humor after great tragedy, it’s a great kind of relief and I think it’s human nature to seek that. Martin can’t really help but be moving then hilarious then moving again because that’s the storyteller he is.
Martin doesn’t guess as a director. He's very specific. I think because Martin comes from theater he brings a different kind of vibe, where there’s more of a kinship and a communion with the actors.
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For Your Consideration
Best Ensemble
The cast turns in the best ensemble work of any movie this year.
All the performances are first-rate.
The cast is superb, with Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell right up there with Ms. McDormand in the pantheon of unforgettable performances.
Working with the rest of the cast was almost like doing theater – we did a lot of talking about their characters and character choices. It’s really a proper ensemble piece.
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For Your Consideration
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
★ ★ ★ ★
One of those truly rare films that feels both profound and grounded. Martin McDonagh’s simply perfect script is never quite what you expect it to be.
McDonagh's writing is full of verve, flair and precision.
★ ★ ★ ★
darkly comic drama expertly structured with a rousing narrative.
As we made the film, Martin was so careful to protect the beautiful sadness and the love of humanity in the film, and that’s what brings it to another level.
I think Martin’s one of the great talents. His writing is so fresh, alive and funny but with such pathos and you just don’t find many screenwriters like this. He’s able to capture things about human relationships and the human condition yet he’s then able to get maximum humor, tension and emotion out of it, too.
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For Your Consideration
Best Actress
McDormand gives a revelatory performance — her best since her Oscar-winning turn in ‘Fargo’.
Frances McDormand is an absolute force of nature.
★ ★ ★ ★
A livewire Frances McDormand will blow you away as Mildred Hayes. She is phenomenal, a combustible force of nature.
I wrote Mildred for Frances. There wasn’t any other actress I thought had all the elements that Mildred needed. She had to be very in touch with a kind of working class sensibility as well as a rural sensibility. She also had to be someone who wouldn’t sentimentalize the character. All of Frances’s work is fundamentally truthful. I knew she could play the darkness of Mildred yet also have dexterity with the humor, while staying true to who Mildred is throughout.
Frances is such a fierce actor and her particular mix of tenacity and compassion matches Mildred. She brings that fight-or-die quality.
I could see it in her walk and her attitude. I think John Wayne did become a touchstone to a degree for Frances. But I also see Brando and Montgomery Clift in there, too.
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For Your Consideration
Best Supporting Actor
The cast is superb, with Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell right up there with Ms. McDormand in the pantheon of unforgettable performances.
I think this is the best work Sam has ever done. There’s a real synthesis between Sam and Martin as an actor and director who have worked together repeatedly and are just getting better and better at it.
We see a different side of Woody in this film. This is a more honest, sadder and realistic character. Woody brought to it not only his great humor but a strong sense of integrity and decency. The decency of Woody as a man shines through into Willoughby and I think that’s why it works so well.
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For Your Consideration
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Composer Carter Burwell further enhances the mood of ‘Three Billboards’ with his beautiful score, blending rural tunes with more classical and poetic leitmotifs.
Like the best movies often do, ‘Three Billboards’ leaves audiences with a complex set of emotions, and with a hard-to-define hint of the profound… something worthwhile and humane.
Martin and I work entirely one-on-one, which isn’t always how it is in films. We talk everything through just the two of us and no one else enters the conversation so it’s an intimate kind of thing. For both of us, the focus was honing in on Mildred’s mix of fury, warmth and loss.
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For Your Consideration
Best Cinematography
★ ★ ★ ★
A renegade masterpiece that will get you good.
★ ★ ★ ★
A darkly comic drama expertly structured with a rousing narrative.
A towering achievement. The best yet Martin McDonagh.
A Gut-Twisting Cinder-Black Comedy
There’s something between Ben and Martin which allows Martin’s words and brain to come to visual life. Ben captures the rural American landscape in a way that feels dramatic, while filming the characters in a quite minimal, yet emotionally striking, way.
Ben and I are both fans of American ‘70s films so we wanted that feel. Something beautiful but not overly modern, overly stylized or overly saturated.
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