SAG Nominations – TV

By Abe Friedtanzer

While there are surely more impactful surprises to discuss on the film side of things today, it’s great to see an interesting list of television options honored too. Once again, however, so few series are actually included on the slate. There are only five drama series and six comedy series honored in any category (aside from stunts), while the limited series races managed to get seven with just two categories. That’s pretty much on par with last year. There are a number of snubs and a few unexpected inclusions, but more of the former. Let’s dive in…

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The Link Boat

• The Guardian goes on a long stroll with Tilda Swinton and her dogs. She remains a fascinating conundrum
• AV Club Rooney Mara to play Audrey Hepburn in a biopic
• Vogue a profile of Squid Game's key actress Hoyeon Jung
• Cartoon Brew interesting stats piece about the very active European animation industry but the small audiences for the films. Did you know that Russia is second only France in the number of animated films produced (outside of the US/Japan obviously) 

More after the jump including Oscar's crowdpleasing trouble, Jonathan Majors, the alliterations of The Lost Daughter, Gal Gadot's Cleopatra, and Zendaya in Valentina...

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Beauty Break: Celebrity Halloween

Look it's Madonna as Harley Quinn.

Halloween is past (*sniffle*) but now we get to relive it vicariously since celebrities have been posting the pics from their spooky holiday night out on Instagram. Lupita Nyong'o, Naomi Watts, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elliot Page, and more after the jump...

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Are you watching "Squid Game" or "Midnight Mass"?

by Nathaniel R

I received an email from a reader yesterday earlier this week suggesting that we discuss "Squid Game" which has become very popular, quite rapidly, all over the world. We've had lots of internal discussion here at The Film Experience about how much television to cover since TV and Film have been merging into a two-headed amorphous beast for at least a decade now. The movies the general public likes best now are inarguably, the "continuing series" movies which makes them much more like television than their blockbuster ancestors. Today I screened Dune and it is literally just half a movie!  Meanwhile the TV series that win the most acclaim, if not always the biggest audiences, are inarguably the ones that feel the most "cinematic", a simmering change that reached a boil with Mad Men (if you ask us) since it looked and sounded as delicious and expensive as the very best the cinema itself had to offer. For the past ten years movies are getting longer (the new James Bond is almost three hours. WTF) and television seasons keep getting shorter! I suspect younger audiences don't fully get how much different the landscapes are now than they were even 15 years ago... but I digress. This is all a long way of saying we never know which series to cover and we obviously need a bigger team!

Speaking of longwindedness. If every showrunner on earth is now allowed to just make people wait for something to happen until episode two or even three (that would have got you immediately cancelled pre-2010s when shows would shove every possible hook they could into a pilot episode) I can begin this discussion of Squid Game with a detour to Midnight Mass... 

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