THRs Annual Oscar Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Nominees?
1 Rise and shine, comrades. The funniest scenes in One Battle After Another find Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosives expert locked in a Kafkaesque squabble with an operator on a revolutionary hotline. He can’t remember the password, screams into the receiver then later calls back, only to be put on hold. What is the insurgent’s hold music?…
1
Rise and shine, comrades. The funniest scenes in One Battle After Another find Leonardo DiCaprio’s explosives expert locked in a Kafkaesque squabble with an operator on a revolutionary hotline. He can’t remember the password, screams into the receiver then later calls back, only to be put on hold. What is the insurgent’s hold music?
A. ”War,” by Edwin Starr
B. ”The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott-Heron
C. ”This Bitter Earth,” by Dinah Washington
D. ”Get Up, Stand Up,” by Bob Marley and The Wailers
2
Casting director Jennifer Venditti burned the candle at both ends on Marty Supreme, not only assembling stars and wild-card cameos but finding 140 non-actors to populate the table tennis underworld of 1950s New York. Which story is phony?
A. For a scene set at a London press junket, she and her team looked for journalist types at Tea & Sympathy, a West Village hangout popular with British expats.
B. The two badges in Central Park are actual cops from the 1st Precinct in Lower Manhattan.
C. For Marty’s friend Dion, she discovered Luke Manley through @newyorknico, an Instagram page dedicated to New York characters.
D. The team scouted table tennis clubs and the streets of New York City.
3
Midway through Sinners, Miles Caton’s Preacher Boy performs “I Lied to You,” the Delta-metal blues banger that sets the roof on fire and conjures ancestral spirits to the dance floor. A DJ is shown onscreen, but who was actually spinning behind the scenes to capture the music live, in-camera?
A. Raphael Saadiq
B. Kendrick Lamar
C. Ruth E. Carter
D. Ludwig Göransson
4
Like many of Jafar Panahi’s films, the Iranian revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident was shot in secret and had a minimalist screenplay. How many pages was the English-language script?
A. 63 pages
B. 52 pages
C. 29 pages
D. 15 pages
5
The Bugonia screenplay offered no phonetic road map for the alien language spoken by Emma Stone’s pharmaceutical CEO in the film’s climax. With little more than Stone’s vocal recordings of script readings and past movie lines, how did sound designer Johnnie Burn create this otherworldly dialect?
A. He recorded environmental textures and mechanical sounds on set, extracted vocal-like tones from them and built the alien speech entirely from non-human sources.
B. He deconstructed and rearranged the syllables in Stone’s speech and reverse-engineered a functional alien language.
C. He spent months studying rare speech patterns from Indigenous languages to construct the strange, subtitled dialect.
D. Working with a linguist, he first designed a written, tongue-twisting alien language then translated it phonetically for Stone to perform.
6
By chasing the Bard’s ghosts, actress Jessie Buckley, director Chloé Zhao and photographer Agata Grzybowska have emerged as authors of their own mythos. Their Hamnet companion book is filled with handwritten journals and images exploring the dreams that shaped the film. Unmask thy title.
A. Such Stuff as Dreams
B. The Weaver of Mist, The Master of Silence
C. Upon a Sea of Slumber
D. Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream
7
Much of the family trauma in Sentimental Value plays out inside the Borg home — a living thing, with a literal crack in the foundation. How were we introduced to the old Dragestil house in Oslo, Norway?
A. The autobiographical comeback film from director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgard).
B. The family album that belonged to Gustav’s ex-wife, Sissel Borg (Ida Marianne Vassbotn Klasson).
C. The school essay by stage actress Nora Borg (Renate Reinsve).
D. The archival research at the National Archives of Norway by historian Agnes Borg Pettersen (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas).
8
Old Masters paintings and statuary art, as much as orphaned souls and science, were on the minds of director Guillermo Del Toro and prosthetic makeup designer Mike Hill when designing The Creature (played by Jacob Elordi) for Frankenstein. What was the source of inspiration for the Creature’s ethereal color palette and translucent look?
A. ”The Flagellation of Christ” painting, by Caravaggio (1607)
B. “St. Bartholomew Flayed” Carrara marble statue, by Marco d’Agrate (1562)
C. ”Dying Gaul” fine-grained white marble sculpture, by Epigonus (AD 1-AD 200)
D. ”The Visible Man” anatomical education toy, by Renwal (1959)
9
The story reel used to pitch this animated feature didn’t just secure its movie deal, it eventually became the opening sequence.
A. Arco
B. Elio
C. KPop Demon Hunters
D. Zootopia 2
10
Which film’s composer viewed the score’s choral framing device as “amniotic fluid”?
A. Bugonia (Jerskin Fendrix)
B. F1: The Movie (Hans Zimmer)
C. Frankenstein (Alexandre Desplat)
D. Hamnet (Max Richter)
11
The Perfect Neighbor reconstructs the escalating conflict between Florida neighbors that led to the 2023 killing of Ajike Owens and highlights the controversy surrounding Stand Your Ground laws. Which of these narrative elements was not used to assemble the documentaryfilm?
A. 911 calls and police body cam footage
B. Talking-head interviews
C. Cellphone videos
D. Ring camera clips
12
To capture the striking, dreamlike imagery of the Pacific Northwest shifting across time for Train Dreams, cinematographer Adolpho Veloso committed to an almost entirely naturalistic approach to light and the use of drone cameras.
A. True
B. False
13
In Sinners, Wunmi Mosaku’s character, Annie, is the resident priestess. Which spiritual tradition with West African roots connects her to the earth and her ancestors?
A. Yoruba
B. Mudimu
C. Hoodoo
D. Rastafari
14
Even with AI-driven sorting tools and an editorial team working around the clock, it took F1 editor Stephen Mirrione more than a year to sift through the film’s racing footage, which clocked in at 5,000 hours. To put the sheer magnitude of that data in perspective, if F1 were shot on 35mm film, the physical reels would make one of these scenarios possible.
A. The total length of the film would span about 2,180 laps around a standard Formula 1track.
B. If you aimed the footage straight up, it would blast past the International Space Station and reach Medium Earth Orbit.
C. It would take 40 hours of going nonstop at 200 mph to drivethe length of the footage.
D. In a New York City taxicab, the fare for the reels’ distance would be $10 million (before tip).
15
For the 17-minute opening sequence, Sirat director Oliver Laxe organized an epic rave in the Moroccan desert, populated by a crowd he recruited while touring Europe’s club scene. How long did this marathon party actually last?
A.18 hours
B.36 hours
C.Three days
D.It has obtained permanent residency in the desert.
16
TheJurassic World RebirthVFX team used two virtual camera systems to create Gaussian Splats of filming sites in Thailand and Malta. That360° video footageserved as the basis for detailed 3D set models that director Gareth Edwards could then walk through digitally to prep and block sequences. Proof (U.K.) created the first V-cam system. Who developed the second, a portable V-cam system?
A. Digital Domain
B. DNEG
C. Industrial Light & Magic
D. Weta FX
Answer Key
1
B “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott-Heron
Scott-Heron’s 1971 masterpiece argues that real change happens in the soul and on the streets, not TV.
2
B The two badges in Central Park are actual cops from the 1st Precinct in Lower Manhattan.
(Read with New York accent) Thems two, they weren’t cops. Joseph Cappiello (Patrolman Cap) was scouted on the streets of New York City and Joseph Jankauskas (Patrolman Joey) outside a bar in Brooklyn.
3
D Ludwig Göransson Göransson not only composed the film’s score; he and Raphael Saadiq also co-wrote “I Lied to You.”
4
A 63 pages
A win for Panahi would mark one of the shortest winning scripts in Oscar history, trailing only the nearly wordless 1956 French film The Red Balloon (15 pages) and 1955’s Marty (79 pages).
5
B He deconstructed and rearranged the syllables in her speech and reverse-engineered a functional alien language.
“I was really surprised when Emma texted me and was like, ‘Yorgos says the alien language is sound design, not script, so what am I saying?’ ” Burns tells THR via email. “I thought it would be a scriptwriter job!”
6
D Even as a Shadow, Even as a Dream
The book was published by Mack in the fall ahead of Hamnet’s nationwide theatrical release in December.
7
C The school essay by Renate Reinsve’s stage actress. The film opens with a four-minute oner of the home, as the narrator recounts Nora’s school essay.
8
B “St. Bartholomew Flayed” Carrara marble statue, by Marco d’Agrate (1562)
9
C KPop Demon Hunters
Director Maggie Kang’s preliminary storyboarded action sequence showed the idols using synchronized dance-combat moves to dispatch a group of demons posing as flight attendants just as they do in the finished film.
10
D Hamnet (Max Richter)
Richter said in an interview, “I was trying to make a kind of amniotic fluid, a sort of musical vessel, that these worlds could all float in.”
11
B Talking-head interviews
Director Geeta Gandbhir previously told THR, “I didn’t want to retraumatize [the community] through that process.”
12
B False
Veloso had a total ban on drone shots, saying in an interview he wanted to keep the film “grounded and honest.”
13
C Hoodoo
14
B If you aimed a track straight up, the footage would blast past the International Space Station and reach Medium Earth Orbit.
Five thousand hours of 35mm footage is more than 5,000 miles.
15
C More than 1,500 people registered for the desert rave inSirat. On the hottest day of filming, temperatures reached 113° Fahrenheit.
16
C. ILM
Jurassic World Rebirthhad an incredibly tight prep time of just 12 weeks.
This story appeared in the March 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
