The 91st Academy Award Nominations

BEST PICTURE
BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice

BEST DIRECTOR
Alfonso Cuaron (Roma)
Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite)
Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman)
Adam McKay (Vice)
Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War)

BEST ACTRESS
Yalitza Aparicio (Roma)
Glenn Close (The Wife)
Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Lady Gaga (A Star Is Born)
Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)

BEST ACTOR
Christian Bale (Vice)
Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born)
Willem Dafoe (At Eternity's Gate)
Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Amy Adams (Vice)
Marina de Tavira (Roma)
Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Emma Stone (The Favourite)
Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman)
Sam Elliott (A Star Is Born)
Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Sam Rockwell (Vice)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Favourite (Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
Green Book (Brian Hayes Currie, Peter Farrelly and Nick Vallelonga)
Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
Vice (Adam McKay)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters and Eric Roth)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, David Rabinowitz, Charlie Wachtel and Kevin Willmott)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty)

BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING
Border
Mary Queen of Scots
Vice

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Mary Zophres)
Black Panther (Ruth E. Carter)
The Favourite (Sandy Powell)
Mary Poppins Returns (Sandy Powell)
Mary Queen of Scots (Alexandra Byrne)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Favourite (Robbie Ryan)
Never Look Away (Caleb Deschanel)
Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
A Star Is Born (Matty Libatique)
Cold War (Lukasz Zal)

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
"All the Stars" (Black Panther, written by Kendrick Lamar, Al Shux, Sounwave, SZA and Anthony Tiffith)
Performed by Kendrick Lamar and SZA

"I'll Fight" (RBG, written by Diane Warren)
Performed by Jennifer Hudson

"The Place Where Lost Things Go" (Mary Poppins Returns, written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman)
Performed by Emily Blunt

"Shallow" (A Star Is Born, written by Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt)
Performed by Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga

"When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings" (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written by Dave Rawlings and Gillian Welch)
Performed by Tim Blake Nelson and Willie Watson

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Black Panther (Ludwig Goransson)
BlacKkKlansman (Terence Blanchard)
If Beale Street Could Talk (Nicholas Britell)
Isle of Dogs (Alexandre Desplat)
Mary Poppins Returns (Marc Shaiman)

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Free Solo
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Minding the Gap
Of Fathers and Sons
RBG

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Mirai
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
Capernaum (Lebanon)
Cold War (Poland)
Never Look Away (Germany)
Roma (Mexico)
Shoplifters (Japan)

BEST SOUND MIXING
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
First Man
Roma
A Star Is Born

BEST SOUND EDITING
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
First Man
A Quiet Place
Roma

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Black Panther (Hannah Beachler and Jay Hart)
The Favourite (Fiona Crombie and Alice Felton)
First Man (Nathan Crowley and Kathy Lucas)
Mary Poppins Returns (John Myhre and Gordon Sim)
Roma (Eugenio Caballero and Barbara Enriquez)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avengers: Infinity War
Christopher Robin
First Man
Ready Player One
Solo: A Star Wars Story

BEST FILM EDITING
BlacKkKlansman (Barry Alexander Brown)
Bohemian Rhapsody (John Ottman)
The Favourite (Yorgos Mavropsaridis)
Green Book (Patrick J. Don Vito)
Vice (Hank Corwin)

BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Animal Behaviour
Bao
Late Afternoon
One Small Step
Weekends

BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT
Detainment
Fauve
Marguerite
Mother
Skin

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence.

I'm cool with Vice getting nominated for Actor, Supporting Actress, and Make-Up, but all of the other nominations are a joke. I think the one that is most upsetting is giving Adam McKay a nomination for Director over Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born) and Peter Farrelly (Green Book).

I can't believe Won't You Be My Neighbor? wasn't nominated for Best Documentary Feature. That's the worst snub of all.

I love that Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs got nominations. Netflix's plan to release their titles in a theater or two right before it hits the platform is paying off.

Nomination totals
10 - The Favourite, Roma
8 - A Star is Born, Vice
7 - Black Panther
6 - BlacKkKlansman
5 - Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book
4 - First Man, Mary Poppins Returns
3 - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Cold War, If Beale Street Could Talk
2 - Isle of Dogs, Mary Queen of Scots, Never Look Away, RBG

Glass - Movie Review

Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark and Charlayne Woodard.
Written & Directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

★★½

I loved Unbreakable. I liked Split. After the hit of Split and the buzz afterwards, the studio would have happily financed Glass, but Shyamalan wanted to do it himself so he could have 100% control. This is a movie that really could have used a producer to reign him in and give script notes. The last time Shyamalan got too full of himself and refused to accept what the studio was telling him was when he ended his Disney deal and took his next film elsewhere under condition he could make it the way he wanted. That movie was Lady in the Water.

This movie isn't as bad as that one, but I really wanted to like this movie and it had too many issues to ignore. I am glad I saw the reviews were bad so I went in with low expectations.

I really liked this movie for a good while. Past the hour-mark, it was still a solid thumbs-up for me. We get reintroduced to the unbreakable David Dunn (Bruce Willis), still fighting bad guys in his poncho. We see what he and his grown son (Spencer Treat Clark) are up to. We also see that split-personalitied Kevin (James McAvoy) is free, and that the more malevolent ones in the Horde (what all the personalities who aren't Kevin are called) are running the show, as he's holding four teenage girls hostage in some abandoned brick factory. (I love abandoned brick factories as a movie setting. Almost as much as catwalk-and-steam factories for Act 3 action showdowns.)

David brushes up against Kevin and sees where the girls are. They have a showdown, but both wind up getting arrested and tranquilized and taken to a mental health facility. Enter Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychiatrist who specializes in patients with delusions of being superheroes. It's a very narrow field of research. Oh, and also at this facility? Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson).

Now if you haven't seen Split, like my wife, this movie is very confusing and terrible. I have, so I understood everything about the lights switching personalities in Kevin, or why former kidnap victim Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) has sympathy for a couple of the personalities inside there. But there are other ways the movie goes wrong.

First of all, Shyamalan is very fond of characters looking right in the camera to give their dialogue, giving the audience the POV of the character he/she is talking to. This is done quite a bit with Paulson, and we are unable to look away when her dialogue starts getting really clunky and repetitive. "Stop making Paulson look at us and explain everything!" The more she's forced to give over-expository dialogue, the worse it gets. Which is exactly how I felt when watching Lady in the Water. This makes the middle of the movie lose a lot of its pacing, but I was still okay with that.

Act 3 comes, and Shyamalan builds up to this twist that isn't really that great, or at least if he hadn't hung SUCH a lantern on it. But even as we get there, the climax is start-stop-start-stop, like a car that starts but dies as soon as you hit the gas. We also lose track of what everyone's doing during the final showdown. The last half-hour could have been done in fifteen minutes just as effectively, and it wouldn't have felt so clumsy. It also would have been nice if he'd had a couple more million in the budget to make the special effects look better.

Now I really enjoyed the three main guys in their roles. McAvoy bounces around all of the personalities with precision. One line and I have no doubt which of the dozen or so from the Horde is currently in charge. Willis looks more engaged here that he has in at least a decade, and Jackson really buries himself nicely into the role of Mr. Glass. It's one of my favorite characters of his.

Glass is a movie easy to pick apart. I could really rip on a lot more elements in this movie, but after I've slept on it, I'm still glad I saw it, as it mostly lived up to my low expectations. It's an entertainingly bad movie. But man, the potential it had... It could have been so much better.

Vice - Movie Review

Starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Jesse Plemons, LisaGay Hamilton, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, Shea Whigham, and Bill Camp.
Written & Directed by Adam McKay.

★★½

There's a certain flavor of political movie Hollywood likes to churn out. There's the HBO model, that likes to retell recent history under the prism of "Democrats are the good guys; Republicans are the bad guys." This one escalates it to "Democrats are righteous but naive; Republicans are pure evil."

The angry fervor Adam McKay brought to The Big Short worked well. He wanted to inform and enrage but also entertain. I would argue it worked on a bipartisan level. But that movie was based on a book and he had a co-writer. Here he's doing writing duties by himself with no book blueprint, and he can't help himself. It's an angry, sloppy diatribe that blames everything that's wrong with this world on Dick Cheney (Christian Bale), whom he will have you know is the most evil human being on the planet today. At one point, he puts the creation of ISIS fully on Cheney's shoulders.

Bale thanked Satan for inspiration in how to play Cheney, and he wasn't kidding.

It jumps around on the timeline, but we see how influential Lynne (Amy Adams) is in getting Dick to have some ambition and be a better husband and father than her own father was. We at least see that Dick loves his daughters, but that would be a human thing, so naturally they have to sabotage that by the end.

All the characters in this movie are evil or stupid or Democrats. It's like watching House of Cards where Frank Underwood doesn't say anything to the camera or other people, but we get this narrator (Jesse Plemons) who assures us that Dick is evil and here's what he was probably plotting. (The ultimate reveal as to who the narrator is another cheapening trick.)

Even the most minor of characters like pollster Frank Luntz are blasted as evil. When Luntz figures out that "death tax" works better in focus groups than "estate tax" he practically twirls his mustache and cackles "Mwa ha ha!"

Granted, Cheney did enormous damage to this country and the world with some of his misguided policies and cherry-picking of intelligence. And I was certainly never bored by what was going on. Bale and Adams deserve the nomination buzz they've been getting. Bale transforms himself, and Adams just feels like she's due. Carell's Donald Rumsfeld is an amoral clown, and Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush might as well drool and wear a propeller hat. Tyler Perry captures the indignity of Colin Powell recognizing he's in the minority of an increasingly wrong-headed Cabinet.

Even in the middle of the closing credits we get one final self-congratulatory scene from McKay that undercuts whatever points he thought he was making.

Deep down, what is Cheney's motivation? His personal ethic? His driving force? McKay doesn't know and doesn't care. Cheney's just evil. If these are why events transpired the way they did, yes, it's horrifying. But this makes Michael Moore look like Dinesh D'Souza.

Bumblebee - Movie Review

Starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, John Ortiz, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., Jason Drucker, Pamela Adlon, Stephen Schneider, Len Cariou, Glynn Turman, Edwin Hodge, the voices of Angela Bassett, Justin Theroux, Peter Cullan and Dylan O'Brien.
Written by Christina Hodson.
Directed by Travis Knight.

★★★

Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) stars in what is easily the best Transformers movie to date. It's a prequel to Michael Bay's five films, featuring Bumblebee on his initial landing on Earth in 1987. After narrowly escaping a couple Decepticons, he has no memory and no ability to speak. There he befriends a girl with her own issues.

I liked how the movie leans into 1980's cinematic cliches. The mean girls from school. The militant jock-villain. Big Government's desire to kill aliens first, ask questions later. A good song changing everything. When Bumblebee is fumbling around a house, it had a distinct Harry & the Hendersons vibe.

I can't help but think that giving screenplay duties to Christina Hodson (Shut In) as opposed to Dudebro McSplosions contributed to it being the first Transformers movie with a heart. Someone give her the He-Man live-action movie. We'll know then that Teela, Sorceress, and Evil-Lyn will be characters that actresses would want to play besides for just the paycheck. (And who knows. John Cena as He-Man? I digress.)

Golden Globes Winners

MOVIES

BEST DRAMA - Bohemian Rhapsody
BEST MUSICAL OR COMEDY - Green Book
BEST ACTOR DRAMA - Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
BEST ACTRESS DRAMA - Glenn Close, The Wife
BEST ACTOR COMEDY - Christian Bale, Vice
BEST ACTRESS COMEDY - Olivia Colman, The Favourite
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Mahershala Ali, Green Book
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
BEST DIRECTOR - Alfonso Cuaron, Roma
BEST ANIMATED FILM - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM - Roma
BEST SCREENPLAY - Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie, Peter Farrelly - Green Book
BEST SOUNDTRACK - Justin Horowitz, First Man
BEST SONG - "Shallow", A Star Is Born

TV

BEST DRAMA - The Americans
BEST COMEDY - The Kominsky Method
BEST ACTOR DRAMA - Richard Madden, Bodyguard
BEST ACTRESS DRAMA - Sandra Oh, Killing Eve
BEST ACTOR COMEDY - Michael Douglas, The Kominsky Method
BEST ACTRESS COMEDY - Rachel Brosnahan, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
BEST MINISERIES/TV-MOVIE - The Assassination of Gianni Versace
BEST ACTOR MINISERIES/TV-MOVIE - Darren Criss, The Assassination of Gianni Versace
BEST ACTRESS MINISERIES/TV-MOVIE - Patricia Clarkson, Sharp Objects
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR - Ben Whishaw, A Very English Scandal
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS - Patricia Arquette, Escape at Dannemora

Cecil B. DeMille Award - Jeff Bridges
Carol Burnett Award - Carol Burnett

Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh were hosts. In this post-comedy era, they weren't allowed to do jokes, so they did this half-ironic shtick where they showered the guests with praise. The show had some heartfelt moments and some definite wackiness.

Aquaman #1, Escape Room #2 at box office

For the weekend of January 4-6, 2019, Aquaman was #1 for the third week in a row. It's now passed $940 million worldwide and is on course to become the fifth 2018 release to cross the $1 billion mark.

The only new release was Escape Room, and for its budget, it's a hit. Don't be surprised if we get Escape Room 2 next year.

Everything else is sliding down. Some films will be able to boast Golden Globe wins after tonight, and then the Oscar nominations coming soon will help with films like Mary Poppins Returns, Vice, If Beale Street Could Talk, etc., in their advertising.

Opens January 11
A DOG'S WAY HOME with Ashley Judd, Edward James Olmos and Barry Watson.
THE UPSIDE with Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, Nicole Kidman and Julianna Marguiles.
REPLICAS with Keanu Reeves, Alice Eve, Emily Alyn Lind and Thomas Middleditch.