Hollywood

If you were standing somewhere around Hollywood today, you would hear a long, deep exhalation. The new Bad Boys film, snappily subtitled Ride or Die, has indeed ridden, rather than expired, at the US box office. It grossed $56 million in its opening weekend — and not only is this the highest opening for an R-rated film since Oppenheimer nearly a year ago, but it indicates that in a summer where blockbusters have been routinely un-performing (Furiosa and The Fall Guy may have been critically acclaimed, but it looks unlikely either will cover their considerable production costs), there is still hope for a crowd-pleasing action film that appeals to a wide audience. Yet the film’s success was also a quasi-referendum on the pulling power of its leading man.

Alec Baldwin is a family man through and through. The poster for Baldwin’s eponymous new TLC show — featuring the actor surrounded by his wife and gaggle of kids — is proof. The heartwarming scene almost made Cockburn forget that Baldwin accidentally shot and killed a crew member for the film Rust back in 2021.   On Tuesday, Baldwin and his faux-Spanish wife Hilaria announced their upcoming show via Instagram, inviting viewers into their home to see the “ups and downs, the good, the bad, the wild and the crazy.” The fifty-second promo features the couple's seven kids, all under ten, screaming in their sterile, white New York City apartment — music to Cockburn’s ears.  https://twitter.

It must be nice to be Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. Not only is he paid a truly eye-watering amount of money to be in his job (roughly $50 million a year, according to reports), but because of his company’s pre-eminent position in the streaming market, he is interviewed, largely uncritically, by major news titles, even when he says things that are obviously either wrong or deeply stupid. Thus it has proved in a recent conversation with the New York Times, in which he announced, of last year’s hits Barbie and Oppenheimer, “Both of those movies would be great for Netflix. They definitely would have enjoyed just as big an audience on Netflix.” To add insult to injury, he declared that the size of a screen was all but irrelevant, saying, “My son’s an editor.

In my pre-Oscar predictions, I wrote “we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, and by the time people read this on Monday 11 March, that will no longer be the case.” And so it has proved. Oppenheimer won seven awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. The only accolade that it might reasonably have expected to take that it was disappointed in was Sound, but The Zone of Interest deservedly nabbed that one.

The Academy Awards are a strange affair. Last year, they ignored Tár, a brilliant film that will be remembered as long as cinema exists, in favor of Everything Everywhere All At Once, an over-excitable picture that barely deserves to linger in the memory as long as you can recite its unmemorable name. But the nature of awards is that its directors — the Daniels! — are now Oscar-winning filmmakers, and so score above Hitchcock, Kubrick, Fincher and the rest. Anyway, we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, yet soon, that will no longer be the case.

There is a strange rule in contemporary Hollywood that filmmakers ignore at their peril: biopics might be a popular dramatic form for directors, but they tend to be of little interest to audiences. In the past year alone, the likes of Napoleon, Ferrari, Maestro and Golda have all under-performed commercially, demonstrating that however accomplished the filmmaker (including the Oscar-nominated likes of Michael Mann, Ridley Scott and Bradley Cooper), it is nearly always a non-starter to attempt to persuade viewers to spend their $15 on watching someone’s life story for two hours at the cinema. Oppenheimer proved to be a rare exception — though that’s far from the only way in which Christopher Nolan is exceptional.

2023 was a great year for movies. After several disappointing and low-grade years post-pandemic, there was a plethora of brilliant films, all of which have combined to make awards season perhaps the most intriguing there’s been in more than a decade — even if it’s a virtual given that Christopher Nolan and Oppenheimer will storm to victory. But any year that contains the likes of Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest and — oh yes — Barbie can only be taken seriously as one of the very best times for high-grade, intelligent film in memory. It was not a great year for blockbusters, however. The Marvel flops included The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the likes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Flash and Shazam!

After the debacle of Jo Koy’s appalling, worst-ever hosting of this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, the organizers of the Academy Awards are probably patting themselves on the back in the knowledge that they’ve successfully hired safe-pair-of-hands Jimmy Kimmel for this year’s ceremony. Yes, alas, because his joke-nemesis Matt Damon features in this year’s dead-cert winner Oppenheimer, there will be the public continuation of the smuggest and least amusing fake feud in contemporary life, but at least Kimmel won’t offend anyone, knows how to deliver a carefully scripted punchline and can be relied upon to keep things moving at a lick.

If there is one thing that the rescheduled Emmy awards from this year will be remembered for, it is comforting predictability. Succession swept the board in the dramatic stakes, as The Bear did a similarly imperial job in the comedy categories. There is, of course, something of an arbitrary nature about the way that both shows have been designated; Succession contained more laugh-out-loud scenes, characters and storylines than most comedies — and The Bear alternates between humor and serious dramatic heft with aplomb. Yet the powers that be decided to designate them thus, and I doubt that Jesse Armstrong or Christopher Storer, the creators of the two shows, will be complaining too vociferously today.

After a year in entertainment dominated by the Barbenheimer phenomenon, it wasn’t hugely surprising to find that Barbie and Oppenheimer were similarly garlanded when it came to today’s Golden Globe nominations. The adventures of Mattel’s finest and most lucrative product-turned-icon are up for nine awards — in large part because it has no fewer than three nominations for Best Song, including my own favorite “I’m Just Ken” — whereas Christopher Nolan’s atomic bomb epic is just trailing behind slightly with eight, including recognition for Best Picture, Best Director and, as expected, actors Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt.

Most men approaching the age of eighty-six would be forgiven for taking it easy. Not so Sir Ridley Scott: legendary filmmaker, director of the eagerly anticipated epic Napoleon and, it appears from the recent interviews he has given, someone who does not give a single solitary cuss about how he, or his film, are received. He is fresh from telling historians who have criticized his film’s factual accuracy that they should “get a life” and that “when I have issues with [them], I ask: ‘Excuse me, mate were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then.