Alexander Larman

In 2019, the aspiring filmmaker Morgan Cooper had a clever idea. He took the cheery early Nineties Will Smith comedy The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and reimagined it as a gritty social realist drama, even making a low-budget trailer for his idea. It went viral, and the streaming service Peacock turned it into a series, now titled Bel-Air. The protagonist (still named Will Smith) is again removed to his aunt and uncle’s care after getting involved in gang tensions in West Philadelphia, but the show is largely devoid of jokes. Instead, it tries to offer a serious look at the young African-American experience in the contemporary United States, complete with Instagram influencers as supporting characters. It is not much fun. Television dramas reinvented as comedies are nothing new.

The death of filmmaker Ivan Reitman was announced early on Valentine’s Day, which seems grimly appropriate. Although Reitman was not exclusively a director of romantic comedies, his films all had a cheerfully good-natured quality that generally made them significant box office successes. From his debut proper, the Bill Murray comedy Meatballs, to his final film, the Kevin Costner sports drama Draft Day, his films tended to celebrate the warmer and happier aspects of life. You might even call them Capra-esque, although Frank Capra never made a picture in which a giant, phantasmal marshmallow terrifies New York City. One-nil, Reitman.

Lady Gaga fans, unite in grief. Their idol — who was widely expected to win the Best Actress Oscar this year for her performance as the murderous Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci — has not even been nominated for the award. In her place are Kristen Stewart, Jessica Chastain and Nicole Kidman — who are recognized for playing real people, respectively Princess Diana, Tammy Faye Messner and Lucille Ball — as well as Oscar stalwarts Olivia Colman and Penélope Cruz. Any of them stands a decent chance of winning now that the Gaga threat has been removed. But this still represents the greatest volte-face in what is otherwise a largely predictable set of Academy Award nominations.

The new and thoroughly adult-oriented miniseries Pam & Tommy tells the tale of the relationship between the musician Tommy Lee and the actress Pamela Anderson. It is interspersed with the narrative of the notorious theft and subsequent internet leak of their Nineties sex tape that has occupied a near-iconic place in popular culture ever since it occurred twenty-five years ago. Pam & Tommy was initially announced as a James Franco project in 2018, for him to both direct and star as Lee, but Franco’s current status as persona non grata saw him replaced by Sebastian Stan.

I am on record as being somewhere between weary and terrified of the threatened arrival of Downton Abbey 2 in our movie theaters imminently. But this is also tinged with sadness. When Julian Fellowes emerged with his screenplay for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park in 2001, it fizzed with wit and imagination. Now, he has seemingly become the go-to chronicler of English upper-class life, churning out increasingly nonsensical variants on the same story with greatly diminishing returns. So how does he fare when he turns his attention to American upper-class life? The new HBO series The Gilded Age attempts to answer this question. It primarily concerns two New York figures in the 1880s, who are schematically represented as "snobbish Old Money" and "arriviste New Money.

Public fallouts between major music stars are far from unheard of, but the speed and ferocity of the recent contretemps between Damon Albarn and Taylor Swift is a reminder that, in this social media age, arguments can go viral in seconds. The initial cause of the row was an interview that Albarn gave to the Los Angeles Times. The Blur and Gorillaz star, presenting himself as an elder statesman of the industry, decried Swift as one of a breed of artists who use "sound and attitude" to conceal thin songwriting. For good measure, he then alleged that these songs were not even written by Swift. After the interviewer suggested that Swift wrote or co-wrote all her songs, he said, "That doesn’t count. I know what co-writing is. Co-writing is very different to writing.

Recently, the Golden Globes were handed out in the most low-key fashion imaginable. Gone are the days of glitzy, alcohol-laden bashes, complete with Ricky Gervais making near-the-knuckle digs at Hollywood icons, who look as if they’d happily knock him down. Instead the results this year were announced in that most pandemic-friendly of ways: via the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s social media feed. It was socially distanced, devoid of any potential for gossip or scandal — two qualities forever associated with the Globes — and deeply boring. The results themselves were mainly sensible.

This summer will mark the tenth anniversary of The Avengers, the superhero mash-up film that arguably kicked off the endless rolling shenanigans that now dominate our multiplex screens year after year. Nonetheless, it remains one of the more entertaining examples of its kind, thanks to its witty script by writer-director Joss Whedon. One might expect to find Whedon and company reunited for various examples of backslapping bonhomie over the next few months, except that the filmmaker is now persona non grata to the highest extent. The stories about his downfall are well known, and include allegations of bullying, sexual exploitation and general maltreatment of colleagues and former employees alike.

The actor Sidney Poitier, who has died at the age of ninety-four — a month shy of his ninety-fifth birthday — has justifiably been celebrated as one of the last remaining actors from "Old Hollywood." Poitier continued to act until 1997, with his final role being a somewhat anti-climatic appearance as an FBI director in the indifferent remake of The Day of the Jackal. But his heyday came in the Fifties and Sixties, when he established himself as the first bona fide African-American box office draw and a performer of rare force and charisma.

I sat down to watch Adam McKay’s Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up over the Christmas break with an unusual burden of expectation. Half the people I’d known who had seen it — admittedly, mainly those on the right — had denounced it as unfunny, heavy-handed agitprop, whereas their politically opposed brethren praised it as "timely," "inspiring" and "important." Would I finish watching it and sign up for a series of Greta Thunberg podcasts, or smash my television in and take to the streets, hollering? To be honest, the film is neither offensive nor clever enough to arouse such strong opinions.