While we had him, we also asked Baker about how he came across his trademark typeface, which has beautifully presented the title of his films since Tangerine—Aguafina Script Pro, designed by Alejandro Paul and Angel Koziupa for the Argentina-based Sudtipos type foundry and available for anyone to use courtesy of Google.
“I haven’t spoken with [the designers], and I should,” he told us. “I want to send them a nice, big, thank-you package. I fell in love with it with […] Tangerine, and was like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to take it from now’.”
To our soft disappointment, Baker does not write his scripts in Aguafina Script Pro. “That would be weird,” he says. “And be hard to read. But I know I’m going to be using it no matter what. We don’t know what we’re doing next, but it will be on the next one, guaranteed. And when we think about it, we actually envision the font in the beginning. We put it with whatever title we choose.” (We loves it too: see Anora’s page on our website for proof.)
Carpet Check
The Oscars are on Sunday, voting is long closed, and the 2024–2025 awards season is nearly at its end. (If you can call it closed; with Berlinale now behind us and Cannes in two months, it’s perhaps more of a changing of the guard. Speaking of Berlinale, Andrew Scott just won the festival’s supporting performance prize for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon.) If you’re still needing to check off some last-minute viewing ahead of Sunday, The Academy’s HQ has you sorted, with separate lists for each category and another list collecting all feature-film nominees. And don’t forget: Oscars voting closes 12 noon GMT on March 1.
Between now and the Oscars, the last major ceremony is the César Awards, France’s major film celebration, held on Friday. In its fiftieth year, Julia Roberts will receive an honorary award, and The Count of Monte Cristo, Beating Hearts and Emilia Pérez lead the nominations. On the same day in the States, the ICG announces the 2025 Publicist Awards on Friday, honoring some of the most overworked and overlooked people in showbiz during awards season: publicists, of course ( loves you!). The awards also recognize stills photographers and entertainment press, and the publicity rollouts for the likes of Gladiator II and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice are up for campaign of the year.
For an Indie Spirits refresh, all nominees are on our Best in Show HQ. Kelsey has listed all films that have won the Robert Altman award, including Margin Call and Mudbound, while Padraig has gathered all winners and nominees of the John Cassavetes Award, starting with The Blair Witch Project. Shawn’s listed the Screen Actors Guild Award nominees, updated with winners, and Paolo’s done the same for the NAACP Image Awards.
For the kicker this week, I went looking for vape-related lists and got lost in a cloud of smoke. The smell of cherry pomegranate led me to Shoop2dadoop’s Vaping list, and Hannah’s slightly more curated Vaping Cinematography, for which she says “a dramatic shot where someone vapes on screen” is a mark of our generation’s filmmaking. Lizard’s got an ode to Tired Women Vaping (Mare of Easttown, how I miss you so), but ReviloDeep has a counter: perhaps the more accurate collection is movies where characters vaping seems to represent the unsavory nature of the modern world.
