The Critics Choice Awards will be broadcast on the CW Network on Sunday, January 15th. Chelsea Handler is hosting. These nominations are excellent. What a night that will be! Around 500 very diverse journalists vote for these awards, they’re the real thing!

FILM NOMINATIONS FOR THE 28TH ANNUAL CRITICS CHOICE AWARDS

BEST PICTURE
Avatar: The Way of Water
Babylon
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
RRR
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Women Talking

BEST ACTOR
Austin Butler – Elvis
Tom Cruise – Top Gun: Maverick
Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin
Brendan Fraser – The Whale
Paul Mescal – Aftersun
Bill Nighy – Living

BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett – Tár
Viola Davis – The Woman King
Danielle Deadwyler – Till
Margot Robbie – Babylon
Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans
Michelle Yeoh – Everything Everywhere All at Once

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Paul Dano – The Fabelmans
Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin
Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans
Barry Keoghan – The Banshees of Inisherin
Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Brian Tyree Henry – Causeway

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Angela Bassett – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Jessie Buckley – Women Talking
Kerry Condon – The Banshees of Inisherin
Jamie Lee Curtis – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Stephanie Hsu – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Janelle Monáe – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS
Frankie Corio – Aftersun
Jalyn Hall – Till
Gabriel LaBelle – The Fabelmans
Bella Ramsey – Catherine Called Birdy
Banks Repeta – Armageddon Time
Sadie Sink – The Whale

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE
The Banshees of Inisherin
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
The Woman King
Women Talking

BEST DIRECTOR
James Cameron – Avatar: The Way of Water
Damien Chazelle – Babylon
Todd Field – Tár
Baz Luhrmann – Elvis
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin
Sarah Polley – Women Talking
Gina Prince-Bythewood – The Woman King
S. S. Rajamouli – RRR
Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Todd Field – Tár
Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin
Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner – The Fabelmans
Charlotte Wells – Aftersun

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Samuel D. Hunter – The Whale
Kazuo Ishiguro – Living
Rian Johnson – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Rebecca Lenkiewicz – She Said
Sarah Polley – Women Talking

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Russell Carpenter – Avatar: The Way of Water
Roger Deakins – Empire of Light
Florian Hoffmeister – Tár
Janusz Kaminski – The Fabelmans
Claudio Miranda – Top Gun: Maverick
Linus Sandgren – Babylon

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Hannah Beachler, Lisa K. Sessions – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Rick Carter, Karen O’Hara – The Fabelmans
Dylan Cole, Ben Procter, Vanessa Cole – Avatar: The Way of Water
Jason Kisvarday, Kelsi Ephraim – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy, Bev Dunn – Elvis
Florencia Martin, Anthony Carlino – Babylon

BEST EDITING
Tom Cross – Babylon
Eddie Hamilton – Top Gun: Maverick
Stephen Rivkin, David Brenner, John Refoua, James Cameron – Avatar: The Way of Water
Paul Rogers – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond – Elvis
Monika Willi – Tár

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Ruth E. Carter – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Jenny Eagan – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Shirley Kurata – Everything Everywhere All at Once
Catherine Martin – Elvis
Gersha Phillips – The Woman King
Mary Zophres – Babylon

BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP
Babylon
The Batman
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Whale

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Batman
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Everything Everywhere All at Once
RRR
Top Gun: Maverick

BEST COMEDY
The Banshees of Inisherin
Bros
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Triangle of Sadness
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Turning Red
Wendell & Wild

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
All Quiet on the Western Front
Argentina, 1985
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Close
Decision to Leave
RRR

BEST SONG
Carolina – Where the Crawdads Sing
Ciao Papa – Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Hold My Hand – Top Gun: Maverick
Lift Me Up – Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Naatu Naatu – RRR
New Body Rhumba – White Noise

BEST SCORE
Alexandre Desplat – Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Michael Giacchino – The Batman
Hildur Guðnadóttir – Tár
Hildur Guðnadóttir – Women Talking
Justin Hurwitz – Babylon
John Williams – The Fabelmans

Martin Scorsese interviewed Steven Spielberg about his new film, “The Fabelmans,” a semi-biographical story about his journey to become a director, Sunday afternoon at the DGA Theater on West 57th Street. As the two greatest living directors sat down to talk, this became less an interview than a wide-ranging conversation about family, art, and, of course, directing. For movie lovers it doesn’t get any better than this.

Here are some highlights from their 30-minute conversation:

Scorsese: Do you think now our, your age, but in a sense we tend to maybe wait to the closest, closest to us are gone before we could really tackle the subject matter for yourself?

Spielberg:  When you lose your parents, (his father died last year and his mother 4 1/2 years before) “You realize for the first time, which you never realized before, that you’re an orphan… And it’s something that, as anybody here has already experienced, it goes to the marrow of all of us. It is something that you don’t think about, you don’t anticipate it. And when it happens, it is a real feeling of loss and abandonment. Not just loss, but  abandonment. And yet my mom was very inspirational for me because she had always wanted me to tell the story. She knew all the stories we had the secret my mom and I had for a long time. And my mom would always say to me, ‘Geez Steve, this would make a really terrific movie. Why didn’t you make that a movie someday?’

But I, so I think I needed to wait yes until I felt then feeling of loss and loneliness before I could really get serious about this.”

On how his mother inspired him: “But my mom understood. She identified with me, I identified with her because I wanted to be a movie director, even as a kid with eight millimeter. And my mom wanted to be a concert pianist and my mom knew that wasn’t going to happen.

And she was also madly in love with my dad’s best friend and business partner. And she didn’t know if that would ever happen. So she had a kind of, she sort of vicariously lived through my dream fulfillment, wanting to be a director, when she knew she probably would never be able to be with my father’s best friend and her best friend.” 

Spielberg cracked, that over the 50 or so years they’ve known each other: “ Marty has only talked faster as you’ve gotten older.”

“I tried to slow it down. I tried,” lamented Scorsese.

Spielberg: “He’s not slowing down, that’s the point.”

“No, no, no,” laughed Scorsese. “ That’s why there’s sometimes, like stuff in front of a camera, I try and calm down, try to get it across. But it gets (too) exciting. Sometimes I talk so fast, (someone tells me) you already said it, doesn’t matter.”

Although Spielberg’s mother encouraged his art, his father, as in the movie, wanted him to have a back up plan. He couldn’t envision making a living as a director.

Spielberg: “I think the payoff to all this was when my dad came to the premiere of ‘Jaw’s in 1975 in Los Angeles, and he walked out of the screening, he came over to me and he just said couple words I’ll never forget. He said, “Gee, Steve, this is really neat….He wasn’t even talking about the movie. He was talking about-…”

Scorsese: “…The whole thing.”

Spielberg: “The whole gig, the gig.”

The highly charged divorce scene in the film and the different styles of the directors:

Spielberg: “A lot of the films I’ve directed, there’s a lot of highly charged tension, action, cinema obviously. But the kind of, what I would call, trauma, trauma between characters, I don’t do a lot of that. I don’t do a lot of that kind of head to head … I mean, you are a master of that.”

 Scorsese: “Thank you.”

Spielberg: “When you look at ‘Raging Bull’ and you look at ‘Goodfellas,’ I’m sure sometimes if they get out hand, you want a duck behind a table based on what’s happening in front of the camera.”

Scorsese: “I have…There are a couple of times I didn’t even see what was going on. I just heard through the earphones. No, I’m not kidding.”

Spielberg: “So I can relate to that. It’s happened a couple of times with me. But that divorce scene was the equivalent of that. Yes.”

Why Spielberg decided to tell this story now: “(Up to now) I’ve been very private about my private life.… And I think that in a sense, COVID gave me the chance to really think about it. And I think when I lost my mom, I started really taking the story seriously… And then after dad left us and COVID gave me so much time to think about… And I didn’t know. I go, “If I had to make one more movie, if I had to make one more story, what would that story be?” And that’s why I decided to put this into production.”

The interview ended with Spielberg asking Scorsese: “Did you like David Lynch?” (In his cameo as John Ford)

Scorsese: “ So tell the joke quickly, how did you do it with David? How did you direct that?”

Spielberg: “Tony Kushner’s husband, Mark Harris, when he heard I was about to make a phone call with this actor friend of mine, he said, ‘Have you ever thought of David Lynch to play?’ And a light bulb went off. It was an incredible masterstroke of an idea from Mark Harris.

So I called David immediately, who I know just a little bit, and David was really flattered to be offered, but said, “No.” He wasn’t an actor and he had other projects he wanted to pursue. He didn’t want to play John Ford because John Ford’s such a great man and what if he didn’t come up to those standards? And he just was kind of shy about that. But the one thing that we could relate to, which I think opened the door a little wider, was the fact that through David Lynch’s foundation, my wife and I got very involved in TM as a way of relaxing. And so we had been three years into the whole TM world and David found out on that phone call that I was involved in that. Bob Ross was our tutor.

I could tell he was leaning forward at the bar on the call, but he still said no. And so I went to my go-to person, Laura Dern, his best friend. I said, ‘Laura, help. I need you. I need you now than I’ve ever before, ever before. You’ve got to talk David into doing this.” David’s promised he’ll give me his final answer in two weeks. We’ve made a deal on the phone. ‘David, can I call you in two weeks so you can tell me no and I won’t bother you again?” He said, ‘Yeah, call me in two weeks.

I said, “You’ve got two weeks to talk him into this.” I called him two weeks later and he answers the phone. He says, “Look, I’ve decided that I’m going to do this under one condition.” I said, “What’s that?” “I want to get the costume two weeks ahead of time to live in it for two weeks. I want to break down the costume.” And I said, “You mean you’re going to wear it?” He says, “Every day. I’m going to come every day. The patch, the hat, everything else send to me.” And he showed up that day in a pretty ratty costume. But it was the way John Ford was.

That scene happened to me and that was the first and last time in real life I met John Ford.”

The audience groaned when told time was out.

“But I will be back,” Spielberg said, pointing to Scorsese. “ I will be back here in New York City at the Directors Guild same time next year interviewing this guy for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon.’”

Photo c2022 by Rinaldo Caballero Guerra for Showbiz411

If you think scenic Sicily is having a moment in this season’s “White Lotus,” check out the southern Italy of Bruce Weber’s ravishing “The Treasure of his Youth: The Photographs of Paolo Di Paolo.” Opening with archival shots of children on the street, a girl on communion day, Anna Magnani with her dog, Marcello Mastroianni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the documentary arrives at a provocative and hilarious clip of Sophia Loren in a striptease from de Sica’s “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.” Marcello howls with desire.

Illustrating his childhood love affair with Italy through Italian cinema, Weber in voice over reveals a happy discovery: At a gallery in Rome, he and his wife, Nan Bush, were struck seeing prints from a prominent photojournalist of the late 1950’s, who, at the height of fame, after the breakup of a love affair in the ‘60’s, retired to the countryside. Signed Paolo Di Paolo, the photos became the inspiration for this film.

When Weber called, Di Paolo’s daughter, Silvia, had to explain who this American photographer was. It was she who, rummaging through the basement looking for skis one day, found a chest full of negatives and pushed her father to tell his story.

Charming and dapper, Di Paolo at 94 (he’s now 97), recounts his life, living under fascism, leaving his home to find the world, his first commission photographing a debutante ball with 2,000 guests, and a welter of celebrity artists including Tennessee Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Taylor; Weber’s film was set to wrap after covering Paolo’s first ever photography retrospective, “Mondo Perduto,” when Di Paolo was commissioned to shoot the Valentino couture fashion show in Paris. He speaks humbly of his art, “I did it as an amateur, because I loved it. My luck was to know important people.”

Bruce Weber knows some too, some of whom attended his opening at Film Forum this week, with a Q&A conducted by the great Isabella Rossellini, whose parents, Hollywood legend Ingrid Bergman and director Roberto Rossellini, are seen in the film. Alec Baldwin, Benjamin Bratt, and William Ivey Long were in the crowd cheering on the filmmakers and Silvia Di Paolo. (A post screening dinner was held at the ravishing Ciccio restaurant on Sixth Avenue just below Houston, where mouth watering Italian food underscored the authenticity of the film.)

Aside from his well-known ads for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, Bruce Weber has made non-fiction films of Robert Mitchum and Chet Baker, of his dogs surfing in Montauk. I spoke to him  after the opening. When asked how this portrait fits into his oeuvre, he said, “I did not set out to make a film of a photographer. It happened. I stumbled on it because I cared about the photographs. All my films come from my wanting to explain something to people. Today that whole reportage world is almost completely gone. I love photographs that are not trying to sell something.

“Paolo left photography as the magazines were changing. As they changed in my time, I did the opposite. I never retreated, photographing every day.” As he says in the film, “If I gave up photography, I could not breathe.”

Bruce Weber’s exquisite film is playing right now at Film Forum in NYC. Stay tuned for info about wider distribution, coming soon…