The Malibu Times has been awarding a prize to the person who correctly chooses the most Oscar winners every year since 2000. This year, for the 90th Academy Awards, the local winner is Courtney Philbrook Chapman, who guessed the winners in 19 out of 20 Oscar categories correctly. The only one she missed was best documentary film.
Chapman is thus declared Malibu’s newest “Movie Guru” and wins a one-year membership to the Malibu Film Society and dinner at Saddle Peak Lodge.
“I can’t believe I won!” she said. “I got lucky.”
“I’ve always been a big movie buff,” she explained in an interview. And, even though she gets screeners from being a member of the DGA (Directors’ Guild of America), she said, “I see a lot of the movies in theaters anyway. I prefer the big screen.”
As far as this year’s movies, she wasn’t really certain if “Shape of Water” would win Best Picture, even though she marked it on her ballot.
“It wasn’t my favorite. I thought ‘Get Out’ might win, because he won the DGA award and a Spirit Award. I don’t usually like horror-slash-scary movies, but it drew you in with the direction and the music. It was really well done for what it was.”
She’s still disappointed that “La La Land” lost out to “Moonlight” for best picture last year. “I was really upset last year. I love musicals; I grew up with ‘Gigi’ and ‘The Sound of Music.’”
“I loved ‘I, Tonya,’” she said, which didn’t make the list of best picture nominees. I enjoyed it much more than ‘The Florida Project.’”
The film Chapman most enjoyed watching with her 13-year old son, who loves history, was “Darkest Hour.” “Gary Oldman was a shoe-in for Best Actor,” she said.
She was also impressed with the performance Frances McDormand gave to win her best actress award in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
“I thought her performance was amazing and her speech at the awards was inspiring,” Chapman said. “It’s good for women now. This year, they nominated the first-ever female cinematographer (Rachel Morrison for “Mudbound.” Her most recent film, “Black Panther,” is now the No. 1 movie in the world). And there was also the fifth woman ever to be nominated for best director (‘Lady Bird’s’ Greta Gerwig).”
Chapman has spent much of the last 20 years working behind the scenes in television in a highly specialized job—”dialogue coordinator”—also known as the cue card person. She’s also been a stage manager for several shows, including “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and the “Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards.”
She worked cue cards on “Saturday Night Live” for several years in the ‘90s, and worked for “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for almost 10 years after that, as well as “The Young and the Restless,” “The Man Show,” “Late Show With David Letterman” and “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”
“One of my jobs was to do Jimmy Kimmel’s cue cards,” Chapman said. “It was a really fun job for a really long time. At times, you have to be an acrobat. You have to work very closely with the talent, because as they rewrite the jokes and the dialogue, you have to rewrite the cue cards.”
As Chapman once told the LA Times in an interview: “The job is part artistic because you have to have good, neat penmanship, and then I guess the last part of it, you are part mind reader because you’re always one step ahead of the performer. That is the whole point of the cueing. I am actually facing the cue cards and I listened [to Kimmel] so I could tell when he skipped something. I have to be quick enough to be right with him. I turned back and looked at him [at times]. Sometimes, he would give me a signal like ‘Skip that.’”
Chapman, a native of Woodland Hills, attended Viewpoint School while growing up, and has been in Malibu for three years.