I am honored to be a member of the Critics Choice Association and very proud of this year’s nominations. Be sure to tune in for our awards broadcast, hosted by Taye Diggs, March 7 on the CW!

BEST PICTURE
Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Mank (Netflix)
Minari (A24)
News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

BEST ACTOR
Ben Affleck – The Way Back (Warner Bros.)
Riz Ahmed – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)
Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Tom Hanks – News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Anthony Hopkins – The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
Delroy Lindo – Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Gary Oldman – Mank (Netflix)
Steven Yeun – Minari (A24)

BEST ACTRESS
Viola Davis – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Andra Day – The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Hulu)
Sidney Flanigan – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features)
Vanessa Kirby – Pieces of a Woman (Netflix)
Frances McDormand – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
Carey Mulligan – Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
Zendaya – Malcolm & Marie (Netflix)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Chadwick Boseman – Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Sacha Baron Cohen – The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)
Daniel Kaluuya – Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros.)
Bill Murray – On the Rocks (A24/Apple TV+)
Leslie Odom, Jr. – One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Paul Raci – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Maria Bakalova – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Amazon Studios)
Ellen Burstyn – Pieces of a Woman (Netflix)
Glenn Close – Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix)
Olivia Colman – The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
Amanda Seyfried – Mank (Netflix)
Yuh-Jung Youn – Minari (A24)

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS
Ryder Allen – Palmer (Apple TV+)
Ibrahima Gueye – The Life Ahead (Netflix)
Alan Kim – Minari (A24)
Talia Ryder – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features)
Caoilinn Springall – The Midnight Sky (Netflix)
Helena Zengel – News of the World (Universal Pictures)

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE
Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros.)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Minari (A24)
One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

BEST DIRECTOR
Lee Isaac Chung – Minari (A24)
Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
David Fincher – Mank (Netflix)
Spike Lee – Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Regina King – One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Aaron Sorkin – The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)
Chloé Zhao – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Lee Isaac Chung – Minari (A24)
Emerald Fennell – Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
Jack Fincher – Mank (Netflix)
Eliza Hittman – Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Focus Features)
Darius Marder & Abraham Marder – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)
Aaron Sorkin – The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Paul Greengrass & Luke Davies – News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Christopher Hampton and Florian Zeller – The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
Kemp Powers – One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt – First Cow (A24)
Ruben Santiago-Hudson – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Chloé Zhao – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Christopher Blauvelt – First Cow (A24)
Erik Messerschmidt – Mank (Netflix)
Lachlan Milne – Minari (A24)
Joshua James Richards – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)
Newton Thomas Sigel – Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Hoyte Van Hoytema – Tenet (Warner Bros.)
Dariusz Wolski – News of the World (Universal Pictures)

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Cristina Casali, Charlotte Dirickx – The Personal History of David Copperfield (Searchlight Pictures)
David Crank, Elizabeth Keenan – News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Nathan Crowley, Kathy Lucas – Tenet (Warner Bros.)
Donald Graham Burt, Jan Pascale – Mank (Netflix)
Kave Quinn, Stella Fox – Emma (Focus Features)
Mark Ricker, Karen O’Hara & Diana Stoughton – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)

BEST EDITING
Alan Baumgarten – The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)
Kirk Baxter – Mank (Netflix)
Jennifer Lame – Tenet (Warner Bros.)
Yorgos Lamprinos – The Father (Sony Pictures Classics)
Mikkel E. G. Nielsen – Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)
Chloé Zhao – Nomadland (Searchlight Pictures)

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Alexandra Byrne – Emma (Focus Features)
Bina Daigeler – Mulan (Disney)
Suzie Harman & Robert Worley – The Personal History of David Copperfield (Searchlight Pictures)
Ann Roth – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Nancy Steiner – Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
Trish Summerville – Mank (Netflix)

BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP
Emma (Focus Features)
Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Mank (Netflix)
Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)
The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Hulu)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Greyhound (Apple TV+)
The Invisible Man (Universal Pictures)
Mank (Netflix)
The Midnight Sky (Netflix)
Mulan (Disney)
Tenet (Warner Bros.)
Wonder Woman 1984 (Warner Bros.)

BEST COMEDY
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Amazon Studios)
The Forty-Year-Old Version (Netflix)
The King of Staten Island (Universal Pictures)
On the Rocks (A24/Apple TV+)
Palm Springs (Hulu and NEON)
The Prom (Netflix)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Another Round (Samuel Goldwyn Films)
Collective (Magnolia Pictures)
La Llorona (Shudder)
The Life Ahead (Netflix)
Minari (A24)
Two of Us (Magnolia Pictures)

BEST SONG
Everybody Cries – The Outpost (Screen Media Films)
Fight for You – Judas and the Black Messiah (Warner Bros.)
Husavik (My Home Town) – Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (Netflix)
Io sì (Seen) – The Life Ahead (Netflix)
Speak Now – One Night in Miami (Amazon Studios)
Tigress & Tweed – The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Hulu)

BEST SCORE
Alexandre Desplat – The Midnight Sky (Netflix)
Ludwig Göransson – Tenet (Warner Bros.)
James Newton Howard – News of the World (Universal Pictures)
Emile Mosseri – Minari (A24)
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross – Mank (Netflix)
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste – Soul (Disney)

Best Film:
Nomadland

Best Director:
Chloé Zhao (Nomadland)

Best Actor:
Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom)

Best Actress:
Frances McDormand (Nomadland)

Best Supporting Actor:
Leslie Odom, Jr. (One Night in Miami…)

Best Supporting Actress:
Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari)

Best Acting Ensemble:
One Night in Miami…

Best Youth Performance:
Alan Kim (Minari)

Best Voice Performance:
Jamie Foxx (Soul)

Best Original Screenplay:
Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman)

Best Adapted Screenplay:
Chloé Zhao (Nomadland)

Best Animated Feature:
Soul

Best Documentary:
Boys State

Best International/Foreign Language Film:
Another Round

Best Production Design:
Production Designer: Donald Graham Burt; Set Decorator: Jan Pascale (Mank)

Best Cinematography:
Joshua James Richards, Director of Photography (Nomadland)

Best Editing:
Jennifer Lame, ACE (Tenet)

Best Original Score:
Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Jon Batiste (Soul)

The Joe Barber Award for Best Portrayal of Washington, DC:
Wonder Woman 1984

Get ready for the Super Bowl with some of my favorite football movies:

Burt Reynolds, who played college football, stars in The Longest Yard as former pro player who puts together a team in prison. (Ignore the Adam Sandler remake, please.)

North Dallas Forty is a darkly comic look at the game with Nick Nolte as an aging player who clashes with the coach.

Remember the Titans is inspired by the true story of the first integrated team at a Virginia high school, with Denzel Washington as Coach Boone. You will cry, I promise.

(Did you catch Ryan Gosling and Hayden Panitierre?). Here Washington and the real Coach Boone talk about the role.

There’s more Ryan Gosling in this little-seen football movie gem, The Slaughter Rule:

Chicago is my home town, so I have a soft spot for Brian’s Song, one of the cryingist movies of all time, the true story of Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, with Billy Dee Williams and James Caan.

Or you could try The Game Plan, featuring real-life former college football player Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson in a more family-friendly story about a selfish quarterback who discovers he has a ballet-loving daughter:

I’m a big fan of the silly but fun Keanu Reeves movie, The Replacements, with Gene Hackman as the coach, a kind of Dirty Dozen of football. Catch “Iron Man” director Jon Favreau on the team.

You can see Favreau in another crying football movie based on a true story, Rudy.

The Express is the true story of the first Black winner of the Heisman trophy, Ernie Davis.

Or watch them all at once!

If you could, if it was possible, would you smooth all of life’s rough spots? Would you remove all worry, all fear, all sadness, all pain? Would you want to live in a world of perpetual bliss?

That is the question raised provocatively but very imperfectly in “Bliss,” with Owen Wilson as greg, a gray-spirited low-level worker failing in a soul-killing dead-end job apologizing to customers who call tech support. Our own anxiety levels rise as we see him seemingly not aware of the pressure he is under. The boss wants to see him immediately. But instead of leaving his office, he talks on the phone — to a daughter reminding him of the details of her graduation and to a pharmacy that refuses refill his pain-killer prescription. We learn from this that his marriage is over due to failures on his part, that his promises are not reliable, that he has a drug problem, and that he is in trouble at work. And we see him obsessively drawing pictures of place and a woman he has never seen, like Richard Dreyfuss sculpting mashed potatoes in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

But then it turns out our assumptions and his may be wrong. We find ourselves in a blue-or-red-pill situation, “The Matrix” without the bullet time, or the bullets. After things go even more terribly wrong, Greg finds himself in a bar, where a mysterious woman named Isabel (Salma Hayek) tells him he is “real” in a way the others in the room are not. There may be another reality or, perhaps, just one real reality, which is not the one with the office and the phone calls.

SPOILER ALERT: I am going to have to spoil a few things in order to be able to talk about the movie, so if you do not want any spoilers, stop reading now, watch “Bliss,” and then if you want to know more about what I think about it, you can come back. Isabel does not give Greg the whole story. She just takes him to stay with her at a makeshift shelter in an area where homeless people camp out. It turns out she and Greg are not just part of but responsible for an experiment in re-calibration for people who have found the idyllic life of the future so blissful the only thing they have to complain about is the temperature of the pool water. It just might be that even in a world supposedly free from stress there still remain concerns (about the legitimacy and success of one’s research in absolute terms and in the way it is perceived by others). It may also be that worry and fear are inextricably linked to creativity, imagination, and an innate human inclination to problem solving and some notion of progress.

These are wonderful questions to explore and there are moments of real emotion in the film along with superb design work by Kasra Farahani (“Captain Marvel”). But the script gets tangled up in its own perameters of the world or worlds it creates. The internal logic of the storyline is inconsistent enough to undermine our connection to the characters and to the issues it raises. In case you’re looking around wondering which reality you’re in, my advice is to bet on the one with Bill Nye the Science Guy in it.

Parents should know that this movie includes strong language, peril, and an apparent accidental homicide.

Family discussion: Which reality would you chose and why? What would happen if all trouble, stress, and worry was removed from our lives?

If you like this, try: “The Matrix,” “The Black Box,” “Black Mirror,” and “Passion of Mind”

A short story by Kurt Vonnegut was turned into a television film for PBS starring Christopher Walken as a shy man who only came alive when he was assigned a part in a play. Susan Sarandon played a woman who fell in love with him and they ended up happily inhabiting roles that kept their relationship exciting. I thought of that when I watched “The Right One,” about a young writer who is drawn to a man who seems to have a dozen different personalities.

Godfrey (Nick Thune) does not conform to the expectations of Bob (David Koechner), an executive sent to improve productivity at his office. But before Bob can begin to express any concerns, Godfrey completely wins him over through a shared dedication to the 90s garage band Blues Traveler. Bob is utterly disarmed. And we soon see why Godfrey is far and away the most successful salesman in his office by far, so successful that everyone overlooks his strange looks and behavior. Just as he did with Bob, he is able to connect to people, even over the phone, finding some link to make them feel comfortable, understood, and open to buying something. We might think of it as code-switching, shifting frames of reference and modes of speech to fit the audience. But this is an extreme version, so extreme that the “real” Godfrey, if there is one, is invisible.

Sara (Cleopatra Coleman) is struggling with writer’s block. Her brash and outspoken agent, Kelly (Iliza Shlesinger) is pushing her to finish a book she has not even started. At an art gallery opening, Sara sees Godfrey in two different personas, and she is intrigued enough to start writing about a character based on him.

And so, she begins to hang out with him, seeing him as an EDM DJ and dancing the tango him. He avoids her at first, but begins to invite her to join him. He thinks they are starting a friendship. She thinks he is material for her book.

Godfrey’s brother Shad (standout M.J. Kokolis) warns Sara to stay away from him, but she ignores him. Finally, Shad tells her something of Godfrey’s background. And Godfrey finds out what Sara is doing.

The script is cluttered and inconsistent in tone and in the quality of the performances. Thune and Coleman do not have a lot of chemistry. It does not have the heft to support its more emotional beats. But like its main character, it has a rakish, if amateurish charm.

Parents should know that this film has very strong language, crude sexual humor, and references to child abuse and neglect, mental illness, and a tragic death.

Family discussion: Which personality is the “real” Godfrey? If you were going to create different personas, what would they be?  Should Sara have told Godfrey what she was doing?

If you like this, try: “Benny and Joon” and Thune’s “Dave Made a Maze”