Kristen Stewart & Daniel Radcliffe + Adele & Aaron Tveit: The Oscars

Kristen Stewart and Daniel Radcliffe with Oscar-winning production designer Rick Carter.

Kristen Stewart & Daniel Radcliffe: Bella Swan & Harry Potter together at last

Kristen Stewart and Daniel Radcliffe – Bella Swan and Harry Potter together at last – presented veteran production designer Rick Carter with the 2013 Academy Award for Best Art Direction for his work on Lincoln. (Jim Erickson was the film’s set decorator.) Directed by Steven Spielberg, Lincoln was in the running for 12 Academy Awards, winning only two: one for Carter and another for Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Among the evening’s Lincoln losers were director Spielberg, veteran producer Kathleen Kennedy, supporting actress Sally Field, supporting actor Tommy Lee Jones, and screenwriter Tony Kushner.

Rick Carter had previously won an Academy Award for James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), shared with production designer Robert Stromberg and set decorator Kim Sinclair. Carter received two other Oscar nominations: for Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011) and Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994).

Among the other Rick Carter / Steven Spielberg collaborations are Munich, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, War of the Worlds, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Amistad, and Jurassic Park. Carter’s collaborations with Robert Zemeckis include What Lies Beneath, Cast Away, The Polar Express, and Death Becomes Her.

Kristen Stewart

Kristen Stewart is the female lead in the Twilight Saga franchise, co-starring Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. Stewart’s stardom soared in 2008, with the release of Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight; it was later solidified via four sequels: Chris Weitz’s New Moon, David Slade’s Eclipse, and Bill Condon’s Breaking Dawn – Part 1 and Breaking Dawn – Part 2. Generally derided by critics, the Twilight movies have been immensely popular worldwide.

Besides Bella Swan, Kristen Stewart recently played another iconic character, Snow White, in what may turn out to be the first movie in a mini-franchise, Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, and co-starring Chris Hemsworth and Charlize Theron. Other Kristen Stewart movies include Walter Salles’ On the Road, with Garrett Hedlund and Sam Riley; Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, with Dakota Fanning; Greg Mottola’s Adventureland, with Jesse Eisenberg and Ryan Reynolds; and David Fincher’s Panic Room, with Jodie Foster and Forest Whitaker.

Kristen Stewart currently has three films reportedly in pre-production: Snow White and the Huntsman 2, with Chris Hemsworth, and not to be directed by Rupert Sanders for obvious reasons (no director has been announced so far); Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s Focus, which was to have co-starred Ben Affleck, who has since dropped out of the project (no new leading man has been announced so far); and Steven Shainberg’s The Big Shoe, featuring Elizabeth Banks and Jim Sturgess.

Daniel Radcliffe

Daniel Radcliffe became one of the highest-paid actors in the world following the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter movie franchise, which ended with David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, co-starring Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Ralph Fiennes, in summer 2011. Since then, Radcliffe has been seen in James Watkins’ mystery / horror thriller The Woman in Black, which became a surprising international box office hit.

Next in line for Daniel Radcliffe are John Krokidas’ Kill Your Darlings, in which he plays gay poet Allen Ginsberg opposite Ben Foster, Elizabeth Olsen, Dane DeHaan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kyra Sedgwick, and Michael C. Hall; Michael Dowse’s The F Word, with Amanda Crew, Adam Driver, and Rafe Spall; and Alexandre Aja’s Horns, with BAFTA Orange Rising Star winner Juno Temple, Kelli Garner, and James Remar.

Kristen Stewart, Oscar winner Rick Carter, and Daniel Radcliffe

Kristen Stewart on the Oscar red carpet

Kristen Stewart on the Oscar red carpet

Top photo, featuring Kristen Stewart, Daniel Radcliffe, and Oscar winner Rick Carter: Matt Petit / © A.M.P.A.S. Kristen Stewart, Oscar winner Rick Carter, and Daniel Radcliffe, with giant Oscar statue behind them: Heather Ikei / © A.M.P.A.S. Kristen Stewart on the Oscar 2013 red carpet photos: Sara Wood / © A.M.P.A.S.

Daniel Day-Lewis with a kneeling Steven Spielberg, plus John Travolta and Kathryn Bigelow can be seen in the background.

Daniel Day-Lewis Oscar acceptance speech

You know you’ve made it to the top when Steven Spielberg kneels before you. In the above picture, Best Actor Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis is seen chatting away with his Lincoln director, Steven Spielberg. Lincoln was the evening’s most nominated film, but it ended up winning only two Academy Awards: Day-Lewis’ Best Actor and Best Production Design. Below is Day-Lewis’ Oscar acceptance speech.

Daniel Day-Lewis: “I really don’t know how any of this happened. I do know that I’ve received so much more than my fair share of good fortune in my life and I’m so grateful to the Academy for this beautiful honor. It’s a strange thing because three years ago before we decided to do a straight swap, I had actually been committed to play Margaret Thatcher. [Laughs] And Meryl was Steven’s first choice for Lincoln. And I’d like to see that version. [Presenter Meryl Streep won the Best Actress Oscar last year for her performance as Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd’s The Iron Lady.]

“And Steven didn’t have to persuade me to play Lincoln but I had to persuade him that perhaps if I was going to do it that Lincoln shouldn’t be a musical. My fellow nominees, my equals, my betters, I’m so proud to have been included as one amongst you.

“When we got married 16 years ago, or since we got married 16 years ago, my wife Rebecca has lived with some very strange men. I mean they were strange as individuals and probably even stranger if taken as a group. But luckily she’s the versatile one in the family and she’s been the perfect companion to all of them.

“I’d like to thank Kathy Kennedy, our producer, and through you, Kathy, and through you our mighty team of co-conspirators. At the apex of that human pyramid there are three men to whom I owe this and a great deal more: Tony Kushner, our beloved skipper Steven Spielberg and the mysteriously beautiful mind, body and spirit of Abraham Lincoln. For my mother, thank you so much.”

Lincoln cast

Directed by Steven Spielberg, besides Daniel Day-Lewis the Lincoln cast includes Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, John Hawkes, David Strathairn, Lee Pace, James Spader, Tim Blake Nelson, Jared Harris, Bruce McGill, Jackie Earle Haley, Joseph Cross, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Tony Kushner was credited for the screenplay based on a couple of chapters from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book.

Lincoln producer Kathleen Kennedy: 8 Oscar nominations, no wins

Lincoln producer Kathleen Kennedy, by the way, has been nominated for eight Academy Awards in the last three decades, but has never won. For the record, Kennedy’s nominations (as one of the producers of a Best Picture nominee) were for Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), with Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore; The Color Purple (1985), with Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey; Munich (2005), with Eric Bana and Geoffrey Rush; and War Horse (2011), Jeremy Irvine and Emily Watson; in addition to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), staring Bruce Willis and Joel Haley Osment; Gary Ross’ Seabiscuit (2003), with Tobey Maguire; and David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth, Oscar winners for the song “Skyfall,” with Oscar presenter and Chicago star Richard Gere.

Oscar winner Paul N.J. Ottosson: Zero Dark Thirty sound editor tied with Skyfall team.

Daniel Radcliffe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were the Oscars’ special guests/presenters/performers.

Adele Adkins, Paul Epworth, Richard Gere photo: Matt Petit / © A.M.P.A.S. Daniel Day-Lewis / Steven Spielberg, Daniel Radcliffe / Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Paul N.J. Ottosson photos: Richard Harbaugh / © A.M.P.A.S.

Amy Adams: Oscar red carpet.

Amy Adams

Amy Adams, a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nominee for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, arrives at the Oscar 2013 ceremony. Amy Adams’ competitors consisted of eventual winner Anne Hathaway for Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, Sally Field for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Jacki Weaver for David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, and Helen Hunt for Ben Lewin’s The Sessions.

Amy Adams had three previous Oscar nominations in the Best Supporting Actress category: Phil Morrison’s Junebug (2005); John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2008), with Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman; and David O. Russell’s The Fighter (2010), opposite Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale, and Melissa Leo.

Two more Best Supporting Actress nods and Amy Adams will match Thelma Ritter’s six nominations in that category. For the record, Ritter’s nods were for Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Mitchell Leisen’s The Mating Season (1951), Walter Lang’s With a Song in My Heart (1952), Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk (1959), and John Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). Ritter, by the way, never won.

Amy Adams movies

Besides her Oscar-nominated roles, Amy Adams’ other movie credits include Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Christopher Walken; Bharat Nalluri’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, with Frances McDormand; Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War, with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman; Kevin Lima’s Enchanted, with Patrick Dempsey; Anand Tucker’s Leap Year, with Matthew Goode and Adam Scott; and Robert Lorenz’s Trouble with the Curve, with Clint Eastwood and Justin Timberlake.

Amy Adams’ upcoming movies include Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, with Henry Cavill, and Andrew Levitas’ Lullaby, with Garrett Hedlund.

Aaron Tveit, Les Misérables actor/singer, on the Oscar red carpet.

Benh Zeitlin, Best Director nominee for Beasts of the Southern Wild, on the Oscar red carpet.

Aaron Tveit, Benh Zeitlin photo: Matt Petit / © A.M.P.A.S. Amy Adams photo: Todd Wawrychuk / © A.M.P.A.S.

Mychael Danna on the Oscar red carpet.

Mychael Danna: Oscar winner backstage interview

Best Original Music Oscar winner Mychael Danna talked to journalists about working with Ang Lee on Life of Pi while in the press room at the 2013 Oscar ceremony. In answer to a question as to what had inspired him to “combine a lot of different musical aspects” into the Life of Pi score, Danna explained that he had begun working on the film after reading the book a decade ago.

Ang Lee became involved in the project about five years ago. “And one thing we knew from the beginning,” Mychael Danna explained, “is that [Life of Pi] was going to be a big, rich picture, so there had to be, obviously, a big orchestra, a big choir.

“But we knew that we wanted to respect the culture that Pi came from, respect his sense of inclusiveness of all the world’s cultures and religions. His sense of not seeing any borders between different ways of looking at the world, that different cultures around the world have different points of view. So we wanted to respect that in the music and reflect that in the music, and so we knew right from the beginning that was our approach.

Mychael Danna: Working with Ang Lee

Mychael Danna also told journalists that he and Ang Lee “worked very closely for the last four months of post production” on Life of Pi, adding that both of them “would work and mold the score together.”

Mychael Danna wrapped up his q&a with reporters by saying that the Academy Award “is the biggest honor you can possibly have in this work that we do. And I’ve been working for a long time writing music for movies and to have this big group hug from my peers and from fellow filmmakers, it’s a supreme honor and it’s yeah, it’s the greatest honor of my life.”

‘Life of Pi’

Directed by Ang Lee, the 20th Century Fox-distributed Life of Pi won four Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Original Music, Best Cinematography (Claudio Miranda), and Best Visual Effects. Suraj Sharma stars; in the supporting cast: Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Gérard Depardieu, Rafe Spall. David Magee wrote the screenplay based on Yann Martel’s novel, whose basic setting was inspired by Moacyr Scliar’s Max and the Cats.

Mychael Danna movie credits

Among Mychael Danna’s movie credits are the Bennett Miller / Brad Pitt baseball drama Moneyball, the Joseph Gordon-Levitt-Zooey Deschanel sleeper hit (500) Days of Summer, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ family comedy Little Miss Sunshine, the Chris Cooper-Ryan Phillippe thriller Breach, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, and Ang Lee’s family drama The Ice Storm, starring Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver.

Mychael Danna photo: Matt Petit | © A.M.P.A.S.