Gossip Central

Cinema Eye Honors: Are These Awards Predictors of Best Documentary Oscars?

Non-fiction films take center stage at the Cinema Eye Honors, awards for the art of documentary filmmaking. At the Museum of the Moving Image this week, pioneers and newcomers to the field, gathered to recognize achievement in editing, directing, graphic design or animation, cinematography and other aspects of story-telling craft. Oscar voters have their own list; the Cinema Eye nominees, and winners, coming from theatrical, television, and streaming venues, may not be your most familiar movies, such as this year’s Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, but they are the ones most admired by industry insiders. Academy Award winner Morgan Neville said he was attending: because his documentary about Mister Rogers was nominated, and because he loves the documentary community.

Love Fest for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant

The road movie Green Book, winner of numerous awards this week, is also shadowed by controversy. Are recent discoveries of racist tweets an attempt to bring down what is for many the Oscar film of the year?

At a celebration for Green Book at Patsy’s Restaurant this week, friends and family of both jazz pianist Dr. Don Shirley and his driver Tony Lip gathered to remember the real life characters of this crowd-pleasing road story. Daniel Craig hosted, and stuck around just long enough for the movie’s star, Viggo Mortensen, to arrive. As he left, a waiter requested a selfie with him, and the Bond actor obliged.

Golden Globes to New York Film Critics Circle Awards: How to Travel Light During the Award Season

With this year’s Golden Globes in Hollywood preceding the New York Film Critics Circle’s annual award dinner by a night, the big question was how did directors like Alfonso Cuaron (Roma) or actors like Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk), winners at both events, traverse the country with such speed, looking fresh as can be? Imagining private jets, I was briskly informed by an insider, they were on a 7 A. M. flight out of L. A. this morning, arriving in New York in the afternoon. At Tao Downtown, Roma was honored: while our president looks to make a wall, Roma gives us a window. Roma won not only for Best Film and Best Director, but Best Cinematographer: that would be Alfonso Cuaron himself, so for sure, he’d make every effort. The transition West to East may have looked seamless, but the Golden Globes, so green in everyone’s memory, made a lingering impression.

Warhol at the Whitney, Epic Abstraction at the MET

Back in the day, at the height of abstract expressionism, Warhol was the enemy. When subjectivity in art was all the rage—i.e. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings-- Warhol was commodifying soup cans, world leaders, and other celebrities. Such artists as de Kooning and Kline would enjoy more than their 15 minutes of fame, and Warhol with his production line productivity, his commercial factory considered an antithesis to fine art. Now with the current exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum (Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again) and Metropolitan Museum of Art (Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera), it’s a good time to reevaluate the mid-century’s art.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie Rule in Mary Queen of Scots

Celebrating her new movie Mary Queen of Scots this week at the Monkey Bar, the actress Saoirse Ronan, now 24, said she’s has wanted to play the role of this ill-fated queen since she was 18. “Mary is a big deal where I come from, an icon,” she noted, and though many notable actresses have played her, there was enough new in the source material, a copiously researched book by Tudor scholar John Guy, to warrant another look. Director Josie Rourke was attracted to the period material through the book, which reads like a “forensic thriller”—“I’m just a nerd,” she joked. That, and Ronan’s enthusiasm: “My path to this film was through Saoirse.”

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War: Cool Women and Hot Jazz

For Oscars, the Best Foreign Language Film category is often a fierce race with some of the year’s best offerings. When The New York Film Critics Circle anointed Alfonso Cuaron’s Mexican-language Roma best film, the move acknowledged a “darling” that’s been on many critics’ “best” and “favorite” lists beating out American or English language hits such as Green Book, A Star is Born, and The Favourite, among many others hotly debated. That selection also made room for Cold War as Best Foreign Language Film. At this year’s New York Film Festival, where I first saw it, this black & white gem, the Polish Academy Award entry, resonated deeply for me, a reaction confirmed at a more recent second viewing following a Q&A at the Brasserie Ruhlmann between the actress Rachel Weisz and Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski.

John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan in Stan & Ollie: Do You Like My Hat?

Reviving the classic antics of the premiere comedy duo of the 1930’s is no joke. A new movie, Stan & Ollie, features performances by John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan, based on the final tour of the very lean Stan Laurel and the very large Oliver Hardy, as their fame declined. With a script by Jeff Pope and under the fine direction of Jon S. Baird, the comic team comes live, a testament to the talents of this cast. New audiences will be introduced to a historic moment in entertainment, the visual gags and simplicity of the time. Audiences for whom Laurel & Hardy were childhood staples will delight at the laughs, and will be moved by the underside of their hilarity, the resilience of their friendship, the challenges of maintaining celebrity.

Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody and Three Great Actresses in The Favourite: It’s Good to be Queen

“I don’t sing. I never touched a piano,” Rami Malek told filmmakers at his audition for Bohemian Rhapsody. That did not stop him from incarnating Freddie Mercury, Queen’s frontman until he died of AIDS, in a role that just earned Malek a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama and may be a prelude to an Oscar nod.

At a luncheon at the Russian Tea Room this week celebrating his achievement in Bohemian Rhapsody members of the academy praised his performance as he explained how he managed to electrify the screen. To get the right moves and music, he got Eddie Redmayne’s movement coach, and then he watched Mercury and danced around at home for a year. “When Brian May of Queen was on set, I did my best version of Freddie. I was working on him so long, I fell in love with him,” Malek gushed. “I keep blowing him kisses.”

Glenn Close Honored at the Museum of the Moving Image Gala: “With One Look”

It was the lustful look as Glenn Close’s character locked eyes with Michael Douglas at dinner in the clip from the unforgettable Fatal Attraction that was truly the show stopper at the 583 Park Avenue party space where The Museum of the Moving Image held their gala honoring Close’s extraordinary career on stage and screen this week. Everyone knows what follows, from the boiled rabbit to the bathtub in this game changer for cinema history, and if this were the only movie Close ever did, the only role she ever occupied, it would distinguish her legacy. Add to that her Cruella DeVille in 101 Dalmations, her Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard recently revived on Broadway, and her role opposite the formidable Jonathan Pryce in her current movie, The Wife. Her demeanor can morph in a moment, paced meticulously as you measure her emotion. You may even gasp, breathless.

Season Two of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Premieres: Nostalgia in Pink

Spoiler alert: At Season Two’s start of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Mrs. Maisel’s marriage is still in turmoil. Everyone glued to this thoroughly entertaining Amazon Prime series is familiar with the domestic impasse, a source of angst for the couple, and humor for everyone else. Why can’t two people deeply in love be together?

As episode 1 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel opens, our heroine, the divine Rachel Brosnahan, forced to take odd jobs, answers phones at one of those switchboards, moving about on a swivel chair. Think Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing. And then she is summoned home. Before you can say Ooh La La, our Midge is in Paris with her dad, the amazing Tony Shaloub, for some perfectly pitched father-daughter banter, and neither one knows French. Ever resourceful, Midge manages to do her act even there, finding an expat New Yorker at a drag show to translate her weepy story of failed marriage. Get ready to sob in hysteria.