TV 'Critics Choice' Winners

Allison Janney wins twiceThe TV critics really rolled out the red carpet for Ryan Murphy who took the non-competitive "Genius" award while two of his shows (American Horror Story: Coven and The Normal Heart) won prizes. Alison Janney also got the deluxe treatment winning supporting actress for "Mom" and guest actress for "Masters of Sex," both first season series, at this still fairly green awards show.

The new organization, an off shoot of the BFCA, mostly stuck with their favorites from last year repeating several wins like Tatiana Maslany from Orphan Black and almost everything Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston had to step aside for Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, though. We knew that was coming and the Emmys will (probably) follow suit. Everybody in Hollywood loves a winner (a phenom we've previously discussed) so when you're winning no one wants to break your streak.

I suppose I should really watch Orphan Black. I've seen the first 4 episodes and found Maslany technically scarily gifted but the the show and supporting characters I enjoyed much much much less so. Does it improve?

The complete list of winners is after the jump....

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My Beautiful Laundrette

[With Gay Pride festivities happening in various cities in June, we'll take a look back at a few gay classics. Here's Matthew Eng (who you'll remember from a couple of American Hustle pieces) on an Oscar nominated 80s classic - Editor]

Initially envisioned as a low-budget, Channel 4 telefilm, My Beautiful Laundrette cheekily challenged the Western moviegoing market upon its U.K. and U.S. releases in, respectively, 1985 and ’86. It became an out-of-nowhere arthouse hit, all while ironically embracing and blending a distinctive, regional-specific grouping of Thatcher-era South Londoners who fall under social categorizations normally left discrete or disregarded in modern-day moviemaking, both then and now. In the film, Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young, business-minded Pakistani-Brit, sets out to renovate his uncle’s dreary laundrette into a clothes-cleaning arcade, a luxury laundrette “as big as the Ritz.” To do this, Omar recruits Johnny, his white former classmate and one-time lover, resulting in all the charged, complicated power shifts that would inevitably stem from a South Asian British man employing his former skinhead ex-boyfriend in Thatcherite England.

Arguably the film’s greatest claim to fame is that the smirking, blonde-streaked, and neck-licking Johnny is played by an effortlessly charismatic and impossibly hot Daniel Day-Lewis, the only actor in the cast since allowed to top his work here (not to mention the only one still working, period) and whose strong turn in Laundrette—coupled with his amusingly meek snob in the same year’s Merchant-Ivory export A Room with a View—prompted a prize-winning stateside breakout...

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Happy Birthday Nicole & NathanielR?

Kidman's first Vanity Fair appearance in 1990 with the "Dead Calm" look

I can still hear her saying it...

Nathaniel. It's Nicole!"

...t'was one of my all time favorite life moments, interviewing her. Today twitter informed me that it was my 7th birthday there. By their count I'm almost old enough to start obsessing on movies. And, as Graham pointed out, that means I joined Twitter on Nicole Kidman's birthday. Was this intentional? I can't recall. For our faux shared anniversary, Catarina challenged me to share my single favorite Nicole Kidman photograph. Just one? I've selected seven in keeping with my twitter age.

My top seven (at the moment) are after the jump but before we get there, I just want to say that this challenge led me to Kidman pictures I'd never seen before like this one with Ed Harris from Bruce Weber! They didn't have any scenes together in The Hours so what was going on here? I'm obviously forgetting a movie as I'm typing.

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New Banner. Not Water Proof

six... seven... all good girls go to heaven ♫We're now giving readers control of the banner themes and this one is brought to you by Jake (who won the last Say What? contest). He wanted runny mascara so he gets it.

I curse the day they invented waterproof mascara because runny eyes always make a strong visual impression. But this banner was hard to make -- internet searches provide mainly images of white trash reality stars crying and that's not what TFE is about!

What are your favorite scenes of glam beauties breaking down into hot smeary messes?

Tim's Toons: Thoughts on animation's new reboot fever

Tim here. It’s been a weird week for fans of old animation. Nathaniel already said his piece (which is indistinguishable from mine) on the news that Warner is re-rebooting Scooby-Doo a mere 12 years after the first grisly first live-action/animated reboot of the ‘70s cartoon (the recent death of Casey Kasem, mere days before the announcement, now looms as some sort of grim karmic metaphor). And in the last couple of days, we’ve been hit with the first promotional artwork for an in-development Popeye feature at Sony Animation, and the news that DreamWorks has purchased the rights to Felix the Cat from the family of the 95-year-old slapstick animal’s creator.

More...

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