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Hollywood & Mine - Boston Herald

There’s not exactly panic but Hollywood and its attendants are perhaps in a near tizzy with the rush to get their movies seen, to get voters – for the Oscars, Golden Globes, SAG, Critics Choice, critics groups – aware and excited as deadlines approach.  Most importantly I wonder, Are they committed to getting the best, the very best as nominees?  Or just the most hyped? Already, although it’s not quite December – Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 13 – there is an emerging consensus on who is and who isn’t in the race any longer.

Recently The New York Times ran a smart feature pointing out the obvious:  When in the Best Supporting Actor race you have three near ‘locks’ for the five spots and they are Willem Dafoe ‘The Lighthouse,’ Brad Pitt ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ and Anthony Hopkins for ‘The Two Popes,’ what you really have is Category Fraud where instead of having two stars compete against each other in one movie, they suddenly have one lead and deign the other supporting.  Pitt and Dafoe are in virtual two-handers and both should definitely be slotted for Best Actor competing against their co-stars, Leonardo DiCaprio for the Tarantino ‘Hollywood’ and Robert Pattinson in ‘Lighthouse.’  Hopkins in ‘The Two Popes’ is clearly the lesser Pope.

If that trio ranks as front-runners, still in contention as Best Supporting Actor are:

Alan Alda, ‘Marriage Story,’

Tom Hanks, ‘A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,’

Al Pacino, ‘The Irishman’ (yet another leading performance in this category),

Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Ray Romano in “The Irishman” Photo from STX Entertainment press materials

Sterling K. Brown, ‘Waves’

Taika Waititi, ‘Jojo Rabbit’

For Best Supporting Actress, those already considered nominated are: Annette Bening, ‘The Report’ (this would be her 5th nomination, never a win)

Laura Dern, ‘Marriage Report’ (and the favorite, both for the role and for being Laura Dern)

This image released by STXfilms shows Constance Wu, left, and Jennifer Lopez in a scene from “Hustlers,” in theaters on Sept. 13. (Barbara Nitke/STXfilms via AP)

Jennifer Lopez, ‘Hustlers’ (a triumph for a pole dance)

Margot Robbie is eligible for both ‘Bombshell’ and ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ (Could she cancel herself out by splitting the vote?)

Margot Robbie stars in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Sony Pictures

Maggie Smith, ‘Downton Abbey’

Zhao Shuzhen, ‘The Farewell’

Florence Pugh, ‘Little Women’

Really longshots:  Meryl Streep, ‘The Laundromat,’ Scarlett Johansson, ‘Jojo Rabbit’

‘MIDSOMER’ BACK & BETTER THAN EVER

The homicide rate remains sky high, the deaths are as brutal as you can imagine – which means ‘Midsomer Murders, Series 21’ is back (premieres Sunday, Dec. 1, AcornTV).  And happily with Neil Dudgeon’s cerebral Holmes-style brilliance, the killers really never have a chance of getting away with dastardly murder.  Which is partly – mostly? – why this long-running series inspired by Caroline Graham’s novels goes on and on.  Dudgeon’s DCI Barnaby is now assisted by Nick Hendrix’s Sgt. Winter, a serious sort of chap who looks young enough to be a college student.  The murderous mysteries – four feature-length ones – include a rich family under siege with an ailing, doomed patriarch (Nigel Havers), competitive children and, regrettably, a canny sociopath. They all figure in a brother-sister killing.  Then there’s a real estate developer with a horrible reputation who dies, thanks to a wooden bullet.  Shot from a miniature house at a museum dedicated to miniature houses no less.  There’s murder afoot in a bee empire as well as a riff on the sea monster in Loch Ness.  Also here, Barnaby’s cool, collected wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) and feisty medical examiner Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland).

NEW DVDs:

STARRY STARRY NIGHT   You don’t get any classier than having both Robert Redford AND Kate Winslet narrate your holiday entry. A musical fantasy ‘Buttons: A Christmas Tale’ (DVD + Digital, Paramount Home Entertainment, PG) is loaded with name talent, from Ioan Gruffudd, Roma Downey, Abigail Spencer to a pair of legendary nonagenarians Dick Van Dyke and Angela Lansbury.  The credit must go to director/co-writer Tim Janis for rounding up this ensemble in a story about a pair of orphan girls whose only wish is to find a home for Christmas.  Van Dyke and Lansbury are their guardian angels.  And as the topping on this Christmas cake, Sir Paul McCartney offers a song.  Also: a bonus music video and additional musical scenes.

CATE! CATE! CATE!   Based on a bestseller about a woman’s need to fulfill her own creative passions and not sacrifice her life for home and hearth, ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette’ (Blu-ray + Digital Code, PG-13) is an ideal vehicle for Cate Blanchett.  Richard Linklater (‘School of Rock,’ ‘Boyhood’) directed and co-scripted the adaptation and cast Billy Crudup, Judy Greer and Kristen Wiig in support.

 Cate Blanchett stars as Bernadette Fox in Richard Linklater’s WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE, an Annapurna Pictures release.Credit: Wilson Webb / Annapurna Pictures

EDDIE EDDIE EDDIE    In 1998 Eddie Murphy starred in this satire as an unlikely guru who helps a home shopping channel rise out of its doldrums. With Jeff Goldblum as the station’s anxiety ridden wreck of a programmer who gets Murphy’s G as his unexpected savior, ‘Holy Man’ (Blu-ray, KL Studio Classics, PG) initially divided moviegoers and critics.  Director Stephen Herek couldn’t know it at the time but as he was coming off a string of hits — ‘101 Dalmations’ (the live version), ‘The Mighty Ducks,’ the cult monster movie ‘Critters,’ ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ (the Keanu Reeves franchise is being rebooted with the upcoming ‘Bill and Ted Face the Music’) and the teary ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus’ – his hitmaking era was over.  In showbiz, you just never can tell when the glow fades.

MURDER SQUAD PART 2   A scenic, violent, engrossing cop show ‘London Kills: Series 2’ (Blu-ray, 5 episodes, 2 discs, AcornTV, Not Rated) has the Murder Squad led by Hugo Speer’s DI David Bradford on a series of homicides.  But what makes this series’ new season unusual is that the disappearance in the first season of Bradford’s wife leads two of his subordinates – Sharon Small and  Bailey Patrick – to begin their own secret investigation to see if their boss is responsible for his missing mate.  It’s pretty irresistible.  Bonus: A 44-minute behind the scenes.

AN ENDURING LEGEND    ‘The Eagle’ (Blu-ray, Kino Classics, Not Rated) in 1925 saw the silent era’s defining male star Rudolph Valentino attempt a makeover.  Notorious – and notoriously popular – as the movies’ great Latin Lover, Valentino starred in this film version of an Alexander Pushkin novel as a Russian lieutenant in the Imperial Guard who angers the Czarina Catherine II when he rejects her amorous advances.  A woman scorned!  Fleeing the Royals, he ends up in the country where, masked, he becomes a Robin Hood-style savior of the abused peasants. Among the costars is future Oscar winner Marie Dressler (‘Dinner at Eight,’ ‘Min and Bill’).  The Blu-ray is a 2K restoration with a new musical score performed by the Alloy Orchestra and film historian Gaylyn Studlar’s audio commentary.

This is an 1921 photo of actor Rudolph Valentino in “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” (AP Photo)

AN ENDURING LEGEND PART DEUX   Thanks to MGM, the biggest and most prestigious studio of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the name Florenz ‘Flo’ Ziegfeld was cemented in the nation’s pop culture vocabulary.  Ziegfeld was a Broadway producer whose scantily clad women in his Ziegfeld Follies, musical extravagances on 42nd Street inspired by Paris’s Folies Bergère, in the period leading up to the Roaring Twenties earned him a reputation as a hitmaker and larger than life figure.  With the arrival of sound, Paramount Pictures in 1929 – the year that initiated the Great Depression – produced a lavish movie musical: ‘Florenz Ziegfeld’s Glorifying the American Girl’ (Blu-ray, Kino Classics, Not Rated). After licensing Ziegfeld’s name, Paramount mounted Ziegfeld-style musical tableaux — in Technicolor yet (this was what is known as two-strip Technicolor, the definitive 3-strip Technicolor wouldn’t arrive until ‘Becky Sharp’ in 1935).  Paramount also hired Broadway’s biggest stars for musical numbers including tragic Helen Morgan (‘Show Boat’), comedian Eddie Cantor and crooner Rudy Vallee (he had a huge revival in the ‘60s with the Broadway musical smash ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’).

American Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, in his office in New York, USA, Nov. 8,1927. (AP Photo)

This 2K Master restoration has an audio commentary by the author of ‘A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film,’ a ‘Hollywood – City of Celluloid’ travelogue, a Hearst Metrotone News backstage clip with the actual Ziegfeld rehearsing his dancers and a 1934 Technicolor short ‘La Curacha.’  Ziegfeld went bankrupt in the Depression.  His actress wife, comedienne Billie Burke (most famous as the Good Witch Glinda in ‘The Wizard of Oz’) sold her jewels and went to work in Hollywood movies.  In 1932 Ziegfeld died at 65.  MGM would immortalize Ziegfeld in two prestige pictures: The Oscar-winning ‘The Great Ziegfeld’ (’36) and 1945’s all-star ‘Ziegfeld Follies.’  Ziegfeld figures prominently as a character (played by Walter Pidgeon) opposite Barbra Streisand in ‘Funny Girl’ (’68). Who Knew Dept:  The sensualist was baptized a Roman Catholic.

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Hollywood & Mine - Boston Herald
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