Image: Warner Bros.
Chris Luckett
Amongst my critic friends, a consensus emerged a month or two ago declaring 2017 to have been a great year for movies. I didn’t agree. I tend to judge (modern) years’ film quality by how many movies make the cut for my end-of-year article — that it, how many 4½- and 5-star movies there are. And based on that, I’d been feeling like it had been a rather weak year.
Image: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Chris Luckett
No analysis (yet). No rambling pretence. Here they are, in all their glory: the 90th Academy Award nominations.
Image: EPA
Chris Luckett
This morning at the crack of dawn, a half-dozen of Hollywood’s elite will announce to the world the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards. What movies can you expect to be up for the treasured trophies this year? It’s a more contentious year than most, but while the winners are likely to hold some unpredictable surprises this year, it’ll be the same batch of movies showing up in category after category.
Image: Focus Features
Chris Luckett
Gary Oldman is one of the great chameleons of our time. Over the last three decades, he’s played Sid Vicious and Lee Harvey Oswald, Beethoven and Dracula, Commissioner Gordon and Sirius Black. Unfathomably, he somehow even convincingly played a dwarf in the otherwise terrible Tiptoes. He disappears into every role he plays, whether it’s a literary titan in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or whatever the hell he was in The Fifth Element.
Despite it all, he’s never earned that coveted Oscar. (He received his first and only nomination just five years ago, for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.) Barring any unforeseen circumstances, he’ll get his second when the Academy Award nominations are read in three weeks. Based on his stunning portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, he may very well win.
The Apple Box 