AARP "Movies for Grownups" Nominations & Winners

by Nathaniel R

George Clooney is the Career Achievement Honoree this year at the Movies for Grownups Awards

The AARP's "Movie for Grown-Ups" dont get much press. That's probably because the media in general is populated with younger people or in competition to snag as many young eyeballs as possible. But the groups nominations are interesting primarily because their very raison d'etre forces them to be different from the norm. They advocate for the 50+ crowd and fight ageism in the film industry so their nominations naturally can't be copied and pasted from other prizes. This directive frees them from the restraints that shackle a lot of critics and industry groups (who all want to predict or influence the Oscars on some level, even if they vehemently claim to be above that).

Unfortunately it doesn't free them from all the other standard awards show problems like recency bias, prizing dramas and message movies above other genres, and questionable taste. You'll see the recency bias in raging force this time, in that most of the movies they're honoring either aren't released yet or are just starting to let non-festivalgoers see them. In fact, the only pre-awards season title that receives multiple nominations is Da 5 Bloods though there are a few single nominations in specialty categories for other early birds (Emma, Bacurau, A Secret Love, Bad Boys for Life)

UPDATD 3/8 Their awards will be broadcast on March 28th on PBS but they've already announced their winners which you can see below...

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Review: The Midnight Sky

by Tony Ruggio

The Midnight Sky is a mild return to form for director George Cloonney. It’s simultaneously a greatest-hits album of science fiction filmmaking of the last ten years and a beautiful, melancholic story about regret. In the midst of a global pandemic, with more proof arriving every year of what danger might await us in our planet’s future (or even right now), we’re all more aware than ever of what terrible things are possible in this world. Somehow, decades of apocalyptic cinema did not prepare us.

Clooney is Augustine Lofthouse, a scientist who has spent his life finding habitable planets at the expense of his personal life, pushing away those closest to him to devote his life to saving our future...

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The Astronaut Dramas of the 2010s

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Two-time Oscar winner Goerge Clooney directs and stars in Netflix’s final awards contender to drop to streaming during this calendar year, the science fiction drama The Midnight Sky. Based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, the film follows a lone scientist (Clooney) in the Arctic who must contact a group of astronauts to stop them from returning to earth. This is Clooney’s first film as an actor since 2016’s Money Monster and his first as a director since 2017’s Suburbicon. The film will join a curiously large cinematic trend of 2010s Hollywood: the astronaut drama...

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Emmy FYC Doc Corner: 'Country Music' and 'The Last Dance'

By Glenn Dunks

As a lover of non-fiction, you would probably assume that I naturally gravitate towards documentary series. That’s not always the case, though. In fact, as they gain more popularity, I often find myself struggling with them. Expanded running times make big omissions more frustrating, and just as elsewhere, some shows don't know when to stop. On top of that, Netflix has narrowed its house style to such a degree that it has become something of a private joke when the streaming service sends one of those “we’ve added a series we think you may like” emails.

In terms of 2020 Emmy contenders for the Nonfiction Series Emmy, we have already looked at several: I hated Netflix’s Tiger King, wavered on Hulu’s Hillary, and while I liked PBS’ Asian Americans a lot, I don’t think it made the eligibility deadline. Hopefully next year! Elsewhere, I gave up on the likes of The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez and How to Fix a Drug Scandal pretty early. However, there are bright spots among some of the other contenders: Ken Burns' Country Music and Jason Hehir's The Last Dance...

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Sunday in the Park with George(s)

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