Gossip Central

Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 80 for Brady: Ageless Football Fans

It is a truth widely acknowledged, don’t mess with gray haired ladies, (and others in Barbarella wigs). Based on a true story of four fans in love with Tom Brady, the new movie, 80 for Brady, features the Frankie & Gracie team, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, plus Sally Field and Rita Moreno; these women look good at any age. One way or another, they are determined to make it to the Superbowl. Winning a contest, they now have tickets, and this being a road movie with some action-packed scenes in the field, albeit geriatric style, the comedy comes in how they get to Houston and make the big football scene.

Mishaps abound: lost and counterfeit tickets, slow movement as desire demands speed, life’s thornier issues of health, death, --and then there’s the question of how do you kidnap someone napping from a nursing home? Only Sally Field, an academic, has a partner, a fellow academic played by Bob Balaban, who insists that she advise him on a speech, oblivious to where she has fled, and so needy, he forgets to put on his pants. Forgetting is a good part of the joke.

Oscar Nominations: The Andrea Riseborough Upset

Oscar watchers did not see Andrea Riseborough coming, even though she was on the tip of Cate Blanchett’s lips as she accepted a Critics Choice award for Best Actress for her tour de force performance in Tar. In almost a whisper, the formidable Blanchett, a frontrunner who has already won a slew of awards, noted Riseborough, not even mentioning a movie she leads, To Leslie. A hugely solid actress, Riseborough is in the back story of many films, a minor character or supporting role. A British actress, she was a factory worker in Made in Dagenham. She’s played Wallis Simpson. Reaching back to the biopic about Billie Jean King, she played a sly, deceitful love interest to the tennis star with Emma Stone in the lead. She’s in David O. Russell’s most recent film Amsterdam, and when the premiere took over Alice Tully Hall, she graced the long cast line onstage. Present for a long time, in To Leslie, an indie film celebrated by a Hollywood elite, Andrea Riseborough finally leads.

Unseated is a list of fine actresses including Danielle Deadwyler, Viola Davis, as many have noted. Many ponder how this nomination will affect the Best Actress win, but for now, whatever conversation the Oscars inspire, this nod has mixed up a predictable roster that includes Michelle Yeoh, Michelle Williams, and Ana de Armas for her heartbreaking turn as Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.

Steven Spielberg at the Golden Globes: The Awards Season Heats Up

Everyone gets a kick out of Jennifer Coolidge’s loopy discourse. As demonstrated at the Golden Globes ceremony this week, nobody does it better, but the antic Ke Huy Quan, whose award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture for his work in Everything Everywhere All at Once started the evening off, comes close. In a flash of serious reflection and gratitude, he shouted out to Steven Spielberg for casting him in his debut movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Seated closeby, with his new movie’s cast and crew, Spielberg looked genuinely pleased. While Quan went on to a few more roles—in Goonies, for example—the young actor could not get work for decades until the Daniels put him in their new movie, such a mash up of martial arts and narrative high jinks, there’s never a dull pause in the multiverse. Quan’s heartfelt speech became a bookend to the historic Globe’s night that, in the end, honored Steven Spielberg for Best Director-Motion Picture and Best Picture-Drama for his quasi-autobiographical The Fabelmans.

Picking up his statue for directing, Spielberg spoke about his movie, what it meant to finally address his own story. His words struck a chord. Having thought about it for years, he hit 74. What was he waiting for? True, not everyone has a mother who danced provocatively at family camping trips, or brought home a pet monkey, or who, so utterly free, went off with her husband’s best friend. That’s one part of his origin story. Another, the anti-Semitism Spielberg endured as a teen struck another chord. He did what he had to do, discovering that story-telling—for him with his camera—could make him popular. Or at least respected. Or at least keep him alive. The parameters are emblematic of what it took in his era for Jewish kids to survive, and speaks to the larger story of how the young come into their own next moment.

Martin Scorsese to Cate Blanchett at the New York Film Critics Circle Gala: Where Are You Going with This?

Joining the party at Tao Downtown on a screen, Martin Scorsese looked genuinely bewildered as he presented the Best Picture award to the movie Tar, noting the extraordinary performance of its star Cate Blanchett. As Lydia Tar, a genius orchestra conductor, Blanchett rages and purrs, at times in impeccable German. Scorsese has indeed worked with an actor or two but seemed awed over Blanchett: given she can do anything, and is, perhaps the actress of her generation: how far is she willing to go? Tar is on many “best” lists as it turns the cliché of the toxic male around, but the question is not how far Lydia Tar can go, but, for me, how far she has come.

The standout scene is when she returns home to Staten Island, as Linda. Here was the modest provincial place she had to flee to self-invent, to flourish in her music, and, horrifically, to nurture a monstrously warped ego. Discussing the film with its director Todd Field, I mention this resonant film moment. In writing it, he said, he was exploring, how does a talented person break into the elite cultural world of orchestras. He was thinking of Billy Strayhorn and how he fixed himself up to see Duke Ellington, into his idea of the cool Manhattan jazz society, and how everyone then looked to copy his style, his idea of how to be cool.