“Roma” Wins Best Picture from the Broadcast Film Critics! Close ties with Gaga, no REALLY!Christian Bale wins TWICE!

“Roma” makes history at the Broadcast Film Critics tonight. It becomes the first foreign language film to ever win Best Picture. It also won Best Director for its genius helmer Alfonso Cuaron, and he also won for Best Cinematography. Altogether “Roma” won the most awards tonight as it also won Best Foreign Film.

History was also made when Glenn Glose for “The Wife” tied with Lady Gaga for “A Star is Born.” That is a combo I thought I would never in this life see onstage together ! Both WINNING!

For those who care about these things, Lady Gaga’s leading man/director/co-screenwriter/co-producer Bradley Cooper once again got  SQUAT! Nada. Nothing Zilch! Just like he also got completely shafted by the Golden Globes.

Gaga’s win here least keeps her in the race, to some degree. But the Academy, who hands out the Oscars is going to give it to 70-something veteran Glenn Close, who has six previous nominations and no wins.

Mahershala Ali nailed Best Supporting Actor once again for “The Green Book,” and he will probably go on to repeat his Golden Globe triumph at the Oscars. This category is now officially closed.

Regina King also won, AGAIN, for “If Beale Street Could Talk” but she won’t win at the SAGS because she wasn’t nominated there. Watch Amy Adams for “Vice” take that.

Christian Bale was TWICE tonight for his evil vice president in “Vice.” This makes him almost a lock now for Best Actor at the Oscars,

“Downtown Abbey” Movie Coming Next Sept.

Focus Features will release the DOWNTON ABBEY movie on Friday, September 20, 2019 in North America and Universal Pictures International will release it on Friday, September 13, 2019 internationally. 

 

“Since the series ended, fans of Downton have long been waiting for the Crawley family’s next chapter,” commented Focus chairman Peter Kujawski.  “We’re thrilled to join this incredible group of filmmakers, actors and craftspeople, led by Julian Fellowes and Gareth Neame, in bringing back the world of Downton to the big screen next September.”  

 

 

About the DOWNTON ABBEY movie

 

The television series Downton Abbey followed the lives of the Crawley family and the servants who worked for them at the turn of the 20^th century in an Edwardian English country house.  Over its 6 seasons, the series garnered 3 Golden Globe Awards, 15 Primetime Emmy Awards, 69 Emmy nominations in total, making Downton Abbey the most nominated non-US television show in the history of the Emmys – even earning a Special BAFTA award and a Guinness World Record for the highest critically rated TV show along the way. 

 

The Downton Abbey movie will star the original principal cast, including Hugh Bonneville, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Brendan Coyle, Michelle Dockery, Kevin Doyle, Joanne Froggatt, Matthew Goode, Harry Hadden-Paton, Robert James-Collier, Allen Leech, Phyllis Logan, Elizabeth McGovern, Sophie McShera, Lesley Nicol, Penelope Wilton, and Academy-Award® winner Maggie Smith, as well as new cast members Academy-Award® nominee Imelda Staunton, Geraldine James, Simon Jones, David Haig, Tuppence Middleton, Kate Phillips and Stephen Campbell Moore. 

 

Academy-Award® winner Julian Fellowes who created Downton Abbey and wrote the film’s screenplay will produce alongside Gareth Neame and Liz Trubridge. Michael Engler returns to direct. Brian Percival, who directed the series’ pilot, will executive produce the movie alongside Nigel Marchant.

 

The Downton Abbey movie is produced by Carnival Films, and will be released by Focus Features and Universal Pictures International.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Oscars Major Changes, 3 Hr. Running Time, New Category

AMPAS has just announced major changes. The ratings were abysmally low (to the people who make these decisions) “The Shape of Water” winning, a beautiful film that not a lot of people saw with the love interest a monster/fish may be what sunk all this. 

It will be cut down to three hours, which can only help. All those technical awards, Best Short, Best Short Feature, Best Animated Short, Best Doc Short, all will be relegated like the Sound, Hair and Make-Up, Best Cinematography and Best Costumes to a pre-show, like with the Tonys, or during commercial breaks.

Haven’t we ALLLL longed for a shorter show? Four hours plus was always excessive…But adding a new category “Most Popular Film” makes room for action movies, etc. the likes of which I really cringe about seeing these days. That’s an unfortunate dumb-ing down…And moving the date up TOO? To Feb.8???

Well, I guess we can say Oscar season is upon us now that it’s AUGUST. It’s not too early to start prognosticating anymore, Oscar fans, now is it? And what I would like to know is what happened to the two films that are probably going to dominate the awards this year ANY way? Well, in my book…

“Boy Erased” starring Lucas Hedges as a young gay teen forced into conversion therapy by his parents Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe. It hasn’t even been announced yet as being in a major festival. Although, yes, it is opening in November. From Focus Features.

And it will be competing with, and being confused with the other “Boy” movie, “Beautiful Boy” starring Timothy Chalamet about a drug addicted teen. 

Both Hedges and Chalamet previous Oscar nominees are bound to be heading back to the Dolby Pavilion again this year. Both films are opening within weeks of each other in the now more-vital-than-ever-month of November. Now that the Awards date has been moved up to early February. Confused?

Imagine how the Academy Members are feeling right now….

The NEW Oscars is not going to be like any Oscars we’ve known before…

And “Black Panther” with its billion dollar box-office is going to be going up against “Mama Mia 2” I am making this prediction already.

ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT for my GOFUND ME!!!PLEASE HELP!!!

There’s only three days left to donate to my GoFundMe page! We have not reached our goal. We are only at $535. We need to be at $1500. Thanks to all who have donated and helped. It is deeply appreciated!

https://www.gofundme.com/save-my-early-plays-amp-tv-shows

GoFundMe!Please help save my early writing & TV shows!

https://www.gofundme.com/save-my-early-plays-amp-tv-showsPlease help me! I’ve had to start this GoFundMe page because my storage room in Manhattan where I’ve stored the first half of my  life basically, up to 1996, is about to be destroyed and lost forever if I don’t pay the storage place $1500. The deadline is sometime mid-July. Go Fund Me is great! They put up my plea IMMEDIATELY, but so far I’ve only gotten $230 in donations. I need $1200 more. Anything will help.The Storage facility knows I am doing this. They’re being nice about it. I’ve been paying them right along since 1996. EVERY month. And now I’ve amassed late fees that they add on every month. They’ve locked everything up. I can’t get in to take things out.

CLICK ON : https://www.gofundme.com/save-my-early-plays-amp-tv-shows

My credibility as a writer would be cut in two. My diaries which I’ve kept since I was a teenager, letters…Personal effects, furniture, clothes all could go and I’d only keep the originals of the plays themselves and the important TV shows with my interviews with people like Frances McDormand or the late Brian Bedford, etc. etc. Time is running out. They won’t wait forever.

“Gianni Versace” American Crime Story ~ 3 Spellbinding Episodes,# 4 Stumbles

FX’a American Crime Story “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” is Must-See TV, whether you like it or not. I veer between awe that something this gay is on TV at all, and then sometimes I’m totally revolted by the horror of all those gruesome murders committed in the ’90s by one Andrew Cunanan. Who was Andrew Cunanan?

He was a hunky male hustler of very rich, usually very old gay men, culminating in his shooting Gianni Versace on the steps of his palatial mansion in South Beach. The violence is graphic beyond belief, for television, and the subject so horrible that it is amazing that it is so well done, that it glamorizes and turns everyone in it into some kind of stars.

Judith Light particularly shines as the wife of murder victim #4, Marilyn Miglin, the Home Shopping Network’s “Queen of Perfume.” She is in complete denial that her real estate mogul husband Lee, was gay. In fact, nearly all the victim’s families refuse to admit their murdered son or husband or father was in any way connected to Andrew Cunanan and the irony is their silence = death, and totally impedes the cross-country police investigation. Andrew Cunanan is the one whose life story is told here, and he is glamorized to the max, just like the life he always wanted to live, like his gay idol fashion designer Gianni Versace, whom he ultimately shot dead at point blank range. He’s like the Talented Mr. Ripley but without the talent.

Episodes I and 2 were kind of astounding, majorly helped by the presences of stars Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin and Edgar Ramirez as Versace himself.Cruz magnetizes as Donatella Versace, his sister, who went on to run the fashion empire, but never learned English clearly. She doesn’t show up until a stupendously photographed entrance at the Miami airport, to crowds of paparazzi. Flash bulbs exploding and shooting at her like guns. She embodies the luxe jet set world we are going to be plunged into for Ep.1 & 2.

Judith Light carries the day and will probably win an Emmy for her brittle Home Shopping Network icon in Episode 3. She carries the glamour if not the Versaces with her, as the series shifts to a completely differently local, the Gold Coast of Chicago, where we are compelled to watch the unfolding horror of her super-rich, 72-year-old husband, being bound and gagged and bludgeoned to death by Cunanan,in a scene in their large garage that is stomach churning, and disturbing in its S&M implications.

Darren Criss is unforgettable as Cunanan himself, formerly of “Glee” where he had no challenges other than to sing and be cute. The cuteness factor is still there, but he spellbinds as the handsome gay boy toy who could kill you. Criss astounds with the length and breadth and depth of his range as he grasps every one of Cunanan’s multiple personalities, most of them evil, but at the same time commonplace.

Many have said that the “Why” of these deaths is not explained, but the answer is simple homophobia and the closet. And since it’s a NINE part series, we still have five more episodes to get into the “Why” Having just read Maureen Orth’s page-turner of a book on which this is based, I know what’s coming in the five remaining scenarios. If you want to know all read the book “Vulgar Flavors.” Ricky Martin, who is openly gay himself, plays Versace’s stricken lover, and is utterly refreshing in his candor(and his nudity) as he is the only one of the major characters who is NOT denying that he is gay.

Where I felt the series stumbled a bit was last night’s Episode 4, “The House by the Lake” where the scene again shifts, this time to Minneapolis, and a time when Andrew had people of his own age to relate to, to fall in love with and kill.

David Madson, “the great love of my love” is shown as a very weak soul. An award-winning young architect from a small town in the mid-west, Cunanan kills David Trail, their mutual friend, with a ball-peen hammer right in front of Madson(Cody Fern). Who he then semi-kidnaps for the rest of the week, then kills him when he tries to escape.
The motives are so murky here, and the writing, and Fern’s performance is no match for the star-studded cavalcade that we have seen heretofore.

But there are five more hour-plus episodes to work this all out. Next week, for instance, in Episode 5, we will be focusing on Victim #1 David Trail (Finn Wintrock).

Set in the ’90’s and brilliantly going backwards in time, it depicts the closeted forbidden loves and lusts of the gay world as it was then. Before gay marriage or any of the rights that we know today.

The police keep dismissing the deaths. as they find them. as merely “gay killings” and therefore of no importance. Until he kills Versace, and that is totally accurate in its’ mundane prejudice and horror.

If all these people only admitted to the homosexuality of the victims, the body count would never have risen so high and the clumsy devil that was  Andrew Cunanan, would’ve been caught right at the beginning.

“The Assassination of Gianni Versace” has five remaining episodes that can be seen every week on Wednesdays on the FX channel.

And Still More SAG Live Blogging!Gary Oldman Wins ~Again!

Once again, the same performer wins the SAG award as has one the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice, Gary Oldman, for his incredibly distinguished Winston Churchhill in the Darkest Hour. This is all feeling a bit been there done that this year. Now, more so than ever. But Oldman’s was a truly transformative and amazingly accurate portrayal of the great British Statesman, who it is said saved the world from Hitler.

More SAG live-blogging! The Same People Keep Winning!

With Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney both winning the Supporting Actor awards tonight as they did last week at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards last week, they have now both won all three main precursor awards leading up to the Big One = the Oscar.

It’s coming up in March, the Academy Awards night itself, but the nominations will be announced on Tuesday. Which ends the official Phase Two of the run-up to the main awards themselves and begins Phase One, which is what happens AFTER the actual nomination are announced. But the fact that these two marvelous performances, have now both won every award they possibly could win, before the Oscars themselves. 

Means that they are marching in lock-step to the Dolby pavilion.

Rita Moreno gave a funny introduction to her friend Morgan Freeman’s Lifetime Achievement Award. On a night supposedly honoring women, it should have been a woman they honored. I think Freeman knew that. He gave a VERY short speech and both got off the stage.

Live Blogging the SAG Awards 2018!!!

And now it’s finally here! It’s SAG time!The 24th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards will be handed out tonight in Hollywood and I’ll be here with you, dear readers, dear cineastes trying to capture as many moments as I can. For you to enjoy.

Most of the evening’s time will be spent honoring TV shows…There are only five main awards for film, which is what The Stephen Holt Show and its blog is all about movies, movies, movies. So we’ll skip the TV awards, shall we? And there are no male presenters tonight. No black dresses, as at the Golden Globe Awards. In a show of solidarity for the #Me,too and # Times Up movements.

Sam Rockwell, Frances McDorman and Woody Harrelson did introduce the first film clip of those five films nominated for Best Ensemble, “Three Billboards Outside, Ebbing, Missouri.” They are a trio who get along very well. Very comedic. Though the film is deadly serious. But with a deadly sense of humor. Frances, notoriously, fashion-adverse was wearing a sky- blue floor-length gown with kind of a shoulder-covering short cape.

Allison Janney, in a silver lame gown, with padded shoulders. Very elegant, and she thanked  co-star Margot Robbie who plays her ice-skating daughter.

Sam Rockwell wins Best Supporting Actor! Moving speech! “Those of you out there you are trying to be actors, hang in there! Woody Harrelson, I love you very much! Frances McDormand, you are a powerhouse!” He was so happy! He was just projecting happiness all over the room, and that there was so much of it, he would burst at any minute, he couldn’t contain all the joy he was feeling. A beautiful moment.

Sam and Allison also both won the Golden Globe and the Critic’s Choice Award in their categories. Looks like it’s going to be a “Three BillBoards” kind of night. This bodes very well for Frances McDormand in her category.

 

 

My SAG 2018 Predictions

After much consideration, and I’m trying to be as simple as I can be, I think the key to this year’s SAG Awards predictions is as plain as the nose on my face. Or as plain as the nose on anyone’s face in Ebbing,Missouri. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” is going to sweep and win all four of the categories it’s nominated for. The overwhelming performance of an angry, but not tear-stained, grieving mother Mildred will win Frances McDormand her second SAG award. The fierceness of her unforgiving fury will translate into universal acclaim  as she has already received., at 60, the Golden Globe for Best Actress Drama and the same at the Critics’ Choice Awards.And her co-star Sam Rockwell, as the confused small-town policeman, Deputy Dixon, who tries to help her solve the  seemingly unsolvable mystery of her daughter’s violent rape and death, will precede McDormand to the podium and win Best Supporting Actor. Both of them bumping into each other on their way to the Oscars.

And two of the a-fore-seen winners of the other two awards,  Gary Oldman as the definitive Winston Churchill in “The Darkest Hour” (Best Actor) and Allison Janney as Tonya Harding’s frightening mother in the surging “I, Tonya.” (Best Supporting Actress), both will win again.

The SAGS only give out few awards to film. Mostly, it’s television that is being awarded. And usually at the start of the show BANG! They announce one of the two  Supporting Awards. So tune in on time at 8pm tomorrow night at TNT and TBS (Check your local listings.) Or you might miss Sam winning! Hopefully, I’ll survive the suspense until Sunday night when once again, I will be live-blogging.

Their fourth nomination being the supposedly predictive Best Ensemble award. That’s the only one of “Three Billboards” four nominations that I’m a little bit shaky about. But I think it’s their night. They might not win the Oscar, but they’ll win this. It’s an actor’s actor movie. And the SAGs, lest me forget, are actors voting on actors. “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing” is co–starring some of the greatest actors of our time. Woody Harrleson, Peter Dinklage, John Hawkes, Lucas Hedges are among the long list of its’ sterling ensemble.

“The Shape of Water” can’t win because it wasn’t nominated.

It could easily go to one of the other films. I would automatically say “Lady Bird,” but that got shut out surprisingly at the Critics last week! What? What? But I’ll put my pen down for the night, and just wish all of them good luck on Sunday!