MTV Movie & TV Award Nominees

by Nathaniel R

We lost interest in the MTV Movie Awards during the looooong stretch of them turning into the (which year is this?) blur of franchise awards with Harry's Twilight Hunger Games. But let's check back in since nominees were announced a few days ago and voting is now open.

And Oops! spoke to soon in the previous post on the GLAAD Awards. The GLAAD honor wasn't the last hurrah for Call Me By Your Name. Timothée Chalamet, the internet's current boyfriend, is up for an MTV Movie Award for his performance. That he's up against Rey in Star Wars and T'Challa in Black Panther indicates that he'll lose given that the public votes on these awards and that movie earned basically a ha'penny when compared to its competition. But hey, we're part of the public. We can vote now! Because the MTV Awards have a school year schedule, Avengers Infinity War (April 2018) is competing with Wonder Woman (June 2017) for best movie though we all know Black Panther will win. More after the jump...

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'just link a prayer, your click can take me there... 🎵

• Guardian has a really fascinating interview with Sean Penn about his novel (yes he wrote one), his ex-wives, his humanitarian work, the Me Too movement and more
• AV Club Netflix suggests it's going to back away a bit from its war against the movies... or at least from competing on the awards battlefield. Does this mean they're abandoning their Oscar campaigns? This statement is quite vague.
• Boy Culture connects two of my favorite things of all time: Madonna's "Like a Prayer" phase and... Natalie Wood?
• Time Can Oceans 8 bring back the glamourous caper?

• EW Uma Thurman willing to work with Quentin Tarantino again
• W interviews Grace Jone about her fierceness "I pack a good wallop"
• Variety YES! A24 is planting the seeds for an Oscar campaign for Toni Collette in the horror film Hereditary
• Coming Soon For some reason Monty Python's Spamalot is going to become a movie
• Variety Olivia de Havilland talks about being Cannes very first female jury president decades ago
• Electric Literature "storytelling" in WestWorld and how literary it actually is
• Awards Daily Academy votes to expel Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby
• AV Club Steve Martin and Martin Short are actual best friends
• i09 beautiful posters for King Kong's Broadway musical debut
• Playboy "Hollywood's pansexual moment" - interesting points in this article but I'm really quite annoyed that we've jumped from gay rights to "let not define ourselves and let's explore fluidity" and are acting like homophobia is solved / gays are accepted. There are literally still laws being pushed in the US to discriminate against queer people - even this very week! 

Click to enlargeAvengers Mania
<-- This Captain Marvel poster going around looked so official I thought it was. Apparently it's actually fan art by a Brazilian illustrator Fabio Rodrigues

• Vulture Infinity War facial hair rankings
• Monkey See Glen Weldon coins a genius term for the ending of Avengers: Infinity War. Well worth a close read.
• Crooked Marquee Eric D Snider wins the award for "best headline to an Avengers Infinity War review"
• /Film Black Widow's solo film actively looking for a director (even though no screenplay is written yet. Hmmm)
• AV Film how are we supposed to care about Ant-Man and the Wasp post the brutal ending of Infinity War
• Coming Soon Infinity War has been out just one week and it's already nearly at a billion dollars globally. Jesus.
• Express a very elaborate theory on how Captain Marvel and Ant Man could save the day in Infinity Wars Part 2

Avengers: Infinity War Part One

This article was originally published in Nathaniel's intermittent column at Towleroad

NOTE: THE FOLLOWING THOUGHTS ARE FREE OF SPOILERS (THE MOVIE HAVING JUST OPENED) EXCEPT FOR THE MOVIE’S OPENING BATTLE AND A VAGUE SPOILER ABOUT THE GENERAL NATURE / IMPERMANENCE OF SUPERHERO DEATHS WITHIN THIS GENRE. IF YOU'D LIKE WE CAN DISCUSS IN MORE SPOILERY DETAIL A WEEK OR TWO FROM NOW. LET US KNOW.

If gloves make a big fashion comeback, blame Thanos. The alien destroyer has been haunting the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (aka The Avengers) from the sidelines (aka the post credits sequences) for a full decade of moviegoing. He's been on the hunt for the six “Infinity Stones,” (aka the Tesseract, The Aether, etc...) to decorate and power his universe-controlling glove (aka the “Infinity Gauntlet”). Sorry for all those ‘also known as’ asides but there are so many names to keep track of!

Consider, though it’s much less difficult if you don’t, that most of the six Infinity Stones have gone by at least two different names within the last decade’s worth of Marvel movies. We'll cite just one example since it’s crucial to the story.

The most familiar gem from the previous movies is “The Mind Stone”.  When last we checked in with our heroes it was sitting all lovely and golden on the broadly handsome expanse of The Vision’s Paul-Bettany shaped forehead… but it didn’t start there...

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Box Office: "Infinity Wars" tops "The Force Awakens" for Most Opening Weekend Loot

by Nathaniel R

Weekend Box Office (April 27th-29th)
W I D E 800+ screens	L I M I T E D excluding prev. wide
Infinity War	Disobedience
1. 🔺 Avengers: Infinity War $250 NEW	1. Beirut $257k on 237 screens (cum. $4.5)
2. A Quiet Place $10.6 (cum. $148.1) REVIEW, SECOND OPINION, SCREENPLAY	2.  🔺 Disobedience $241k on 5 screens NEW REVIEW
3. I Feel Pretty  $8.1 (cum. $29.5)	3.  🔺 Lean on Pete  $240k on 167 screens (cum. $665k) REVIEW
4. Rampage  $7.1 (cum. $77.9)	4.  Death of Stalin $210k on 150 screens (cum. $347k) REVIEW
5. Black Panther $4.3 (cum. $688) PODCAST	5. 🔺 The Rider $188k on 37 screens (cum. $357k) REVIEW

Avengers Infinity War  is gigantic in just about every way and the audience responded in kind gifting it the biggest opening weekend of all time. Yes, even the super long awaited return of the Star Wars franchise The Force Awakens fell to Marvel Studio's magical gloved might... The studio is currently saying that Avengers beat the record by about $2 million dollars but Marvel tends to underestimate their opening weekends in a bit of a humble brag way so expect the margin to increase a bit. 

Elsewhere at the multiplex...

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Infinity Tweet

LOL 

A timely reminder for all print-publishing folk errywhere: Beware the Gutter™ pic.twitter.com/ANVMmGKFb3

— Adolfo Aranjuez (@adolfo_ae) April 26, 2018

That's definitely a print lesson lost in the age of online media. After the jump warrior unicorns, a Clouds of Sils Maria / superhero fantasy that made me laugh out loud, Janelle Monae and Tessa Thompson, and various bon mots from twitter in general and film fanaticism in particular... 

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