There Will Be Link

Storify okay, this woman Nancy Wake needs a biopic. Amazing WW II story
Coming Soon production has started on Can You Ever Forgive Me, which sounds like an interesting vehicle for Melissa McCarthy to show her range. She'll play a celebrity biographer who made her name in the 70s and 80s but resorts to deception when her career tanks. It's directed by Marielle Heller who was behind Diary of a Teenage Girl
Vulture Which Sundance debuts will be Oscar contenders this time next year? 
Comics Alliance Aubrey Joseph and Olivia Holt have been cast in the TV adaptation of the superhero comic Cloak & Dagger

 

Cigarettes & Red Vines photos from the set of Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie which stars Daniel Day Lewis but has no title as of yet
Variety Remember when Viola Davis played best friend to Julia Roberts in a thankless part in Eat Pray Love? They'll co-star again in Small Great Things, a racially charged drama about a nurse who is sued by a white supremacist couple.
/Film James Cameron gets the rights to Terminator back soon and the franchise will be revived. AGAIN.
EW The Schuyler Sisters from Hamilton will perform at the Superbowl! 
Slate A tribute to Mary Tyler Moore's feminist influence
Vice So as it turns out the Kevin Costner character in Hidden Figures was made into more of a 'white savior' in the narrative then he was in the real life story. 
Playbill Clive Owen will return to Broadway in a revival of M. Butterfly - no word yet on who'll play the Chinese opera singer he doesn't realize is a man despite a long affair. B.D. Wong who works frequently on television these days instead of the stage won the Tony as the opera singer in the original production with John Lithgow originating the lead role that Clive Owen will now play
Jezebel on Ryan Gosling's cooking in La La Land
Interview has a gallery of the rising stars from Sundance 2017 
Towleroad new clip from Call Me By Your Name in which Armie Hammer tries to massage the tension out of Timothee Chalamet  

10 Takeaways from the SAG Awards

Two handfuls of moments from last night's SAG Awards have stuck with me. How about you?

All Politics Are Personal
Julia Louis-Dreyfus early win and a speech that got political, her father being an immigrant, set the tone and politics never went away. It was there in every speech, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes poignantly. People who scream "no more politics" are always forgetting that all politics are personal. The laws that are made, the character of the country we live in, the rights we enjoy or can't, the laws that goven our workplaces, the type of healthcare we get, the size of the paycheck. All of these things affect every single person personally whether they see that it connects to D.C. or not. If there was any doubt that Mahershala Ali was going to win the Oscar next month for his terrific work in Moonlight (and also, yes, as a symbolic win for the film itself which often happens in the supporting categories) it surely vanished last night. Ali was deeply touched at the prize, humble, but also upset given T***'s unconstitutional Muslim ban. He brought up his own conversion to Islam and the initial conflict it raised with his mother. Touchingly he revealed that they're both long since over the conflict since. A bonus of Ali winning is we got to see shots of the Moonlight table and they unfortunately didn't get another chance to shine. 

Lily Tomlin, Denzel Washington, Winona Ryder and more after the jump...

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SAG Winners List

Movies
Lead Actress Emma Stone, La La Land
Lead Actor Denzel Washington, Fences
Supporting Actress Viola Davis, Fences
Supporting Actor Mahershala Ali, Moonlight
Ensemble Hidden Figures

Lifetime Achievement
Lily Tomlin 

TV
Leading Actress, Comedy Julia-Louis Dreyfus, Veep
Leading Actor, Comedy William H Macy,  Shameless
Ensemble, Comedy Orange is the New Black 
Actress, Limited Series/Movie Sarah Paulson, People vs OJ Simpson 
Actor, Limited Series/Movie  Bryan Cranston, All the Way 
Leading Actor, Drama John Lithgow, The Crown 
Leading Actress, Drama Claire Foy, The Crown 
Ensemble, Drama Stranger Things 

For commentary on the awards, check out "10 takeaways from SAG night" and "I am an actor" 

The Oscar Week: post-nominations, the campaigns rev back up.

In this weekly feature from Murtada we follow Oscar contender appearances and interviews. After taking a week off, contenders are back to the grind for Phase 2.

Supporting Actress
The warmest presence on the Oscar campaign trail is undoubtedly Octavia Spencer. She’s as delightful in interviews and appearance as her Hidden Figures character is on screen, except of course when she’s dealing with Kirsten Dunst’s racist boss. No wonder she’s so popular. On Twitter she acknowledged her nomination by mentioning not only her director and producers, but also her friends from The Help (and fellow nominees this season) Viola Davis and Emma Stone. Then she went further in by congratulating Barry Jenkins, Ava DuVernay, Dev Patel and Denzel washington. How lovely is she?

This week she was honored as Woman of the Year by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Theatricals group. She looked delighted throughout the parade through the streets of Cambridge, to the roast and the presentation of the traditional prize, the pudding pot. That pot, she quipped, was harder to get than an Oscar...

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The Final Predictions Begin!

I've updated the Picture, Director, Screenplays, Actor and Supporting Actress charts with final predictions. Though many questions remain we must make the hard calls with nominations only a week away!

Best Picture & Best Director
The Best Picture race will literally never be "locked up" again so long as Oscar sticks with its "5 to 10" balloting math. That shifting number of Best Pictures means that you just never know. I want to say 8 again this year but what if its 5,6,7,9, or gulp 10. The big question mark, at least for this pundit, is Nocturnal Animals. Given that it's the movie that won't go away in precursor season with great showings at the Globes and BAFTA and significant buzz in Los Angeles despite its polarizing nature and its relatively low box office take (lower than ALL the other still buzzing pictures with the exception of Loving). The thing is you can't vote AGAINST something. You can only vote for it, so we're predicting Tom Ford in Best Director. 

Leading Actor
Arguable the most settled of the Oscar acting races with Casey Affleck, Denzel Washington, Andrew Garfield, Viggo Mortensen, and Ryan Gosling all steady players for months. At this point it would be a minor surprise to see one of the ousted. Support for their rivals seems to be far too diffuse.

Supporting Actress
The other "settled" acting race though you can definitely make arguments about one of two women spoiling the party:  Greta Gerwig who is brilliant in 20th Century Women and who has definitely earned her place at Hollywood's most prestigious tables after years of fine work, or Janelle Monae, who proves herself a total natural in Hidden Figures with a bright film career ahead of her. Supporting Actress is a friendly category to double nominees which means if there's a major shake-up it could be both Octavia and Janelle in the mix.

With Captain Fantastic holding strong for Viggo and with its SAG nomination, we're betting the Screenplay shows up, too.

Original Screenplay & Adapted Screenplay
The big question in Adapted might be whether Fences has enough goodwill to earn August Wilson a posthumous nomination, or if naysayers who believe its too "stagey" have made it a Viola & Denzel only party. My guess is that if Tom Ford doesn't show up in Director he shows up here instead and steals that slot away from the late theatrical giant.

In Original Screenplay with three films looking unstoppable for nominations (Manchester, Hell or, La La), one looking like a very typical "of course it nabbed #1 votes!" critical darling style nominee (The Lobster), there's presumably only one spot left and SO many strong screenplays fighting for it: Captain Fantastic, 20th Century Women, Zootopia, Toni Erdmann, Jackie.