Sloan Science in Cinema Prize: Don’t Look Up

Academy Award winning writer, director, and producer Adam McKay’s most recent feature Vice, starring Christian Bale and Amy Adams, received many accolades including eight Academy Award nominations, six Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, and a DGA nomination for McKay. In 2015, McKay and Charles Randolph adapted Michael Lewis’s New York Times best-selling book, The Big Short. Starring Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, the film went on to receive much critical acclaim as well as Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Picture and won the 2016 PGA for Best Picture. 

Upcoming film projects include The Menu, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult and Ralph Fiennes from director Mark Mylod for Searchlight Pictures; FRESH, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan from director Mimi Cave with a screenplay from Lauryn Kahn; and Bad Blood that will tell the story of Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes with Jennifer Lawrence starring.

Leonardo DiCaprio is an Academy Award® award-winning actor, producer, and activist. DiCaprio was seen most recently in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Prior to that he starred in The Revenant, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, he received the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, and the Critics’ Choice Awards for Best Actor.

DiCaprio is well known for his dedication to the environment on a global scale, producing creative projects such as the documentary, And We Go Green, The 11th Hour, and the Academy Award®-nominated Virunga, directed by Orlando von Einsiedel. Appian Way Productions, founded by DiCaprio, is in partnership with Netflix on several additional documentaries, including the critically acclaimed Struggle, The Ivory Game and Catching the Sun.

Joseph Barranco grew up in Massachusetts, and as a child, had always wanted to be an astronaut after watching Star Wars at a drive-in theater in the mid-’70s. Joe attended Harvard University, graduating Magna cum laude in Physics, Astronomy, and Astrophysics in 1993.  He then made his way out west to attend graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a PhD in Astrophysics in 2004.  His PhD dissertation on “Theory and Numerical Simulation of Three-Dimensional Vortices in Protoplanetary Disk” won the Nicholas Metropolis Prize for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Computational Physics from the American Physical Society.  Joe won a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship which allowed him to continue his research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.  In 2007, Joe joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Francisco State University. Since 2018, he has been the Department Chair.