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      Hollywood Crosses the Pond

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      Hollywood Crosses the PondEshe Nelson�� Reporting from Liverpool, EnglandMr. Lunt recalls watching a Batman stunt double launch himself off the top of one of the Liver Building’s towers. “It was very, very exciting,” he said. Liverpool is used to being a stand-in for American cities. It is 1920s New York in “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and the Brooklyn docks in “Captain America: The First Avenger.”More than 80 percent of the record amount spent in 2021 on film and high-end TV productions in Britain is from American and other overseas production companies. More

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      Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s Turbulent Relationship, Retold With Compassion

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      In “Truly, Madly,” Stephen Galloway writes about one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples, training an eye on Leigh’s mental health struggles.TRULY, MADLYVivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the CenturyBy Stephen Galloway406 pages. Grand Central Publishing. $30.God help anyone who flew the friendly skies with Vivien Leigh, her second husband, Laurence Olivier, or both.1936: A struggling seaplane on which Leigh was a passenger went “thudding like a skimmed stone over the waves” en route to Capri, writes Stephen Galloway in “Truly, Madly,” a new book about the couple’s relationship, causing Leigh, a Catholic, to repeatedly invoke Saint Thérèse.1940: The newlyweds were en route from Lisbon to Bristol. The cockpit of their plane burst into flames, eerily echoing a dream of Olivier’s.World War II: The debonair Olivier, enlisted in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy but a pilot “of notorious incompetence,” according to the writer and editor Michael Korda, crashed his own plane twice and was demoted to target-towing, parachute-packing and recruitment demonstrations.1946: On a trans-Atlantic flight from New York, the lovebirds glanced out the window and saw an engine on fire. The Pan Am Clipper turned back and hit the ground with a long, hard bounce in Connecticut.1948: Leigh got breathless at 11,000 feet over the Tasman Sea; the plane had to descend several thousand feet, and the actress was given an oxygen mask. Traveling by air in the ensuing years, she suffered flashbacks that required her to be restrained and sedated.Best remembered for her role as Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind” (1939), Leigh had bipolar disorder, known in her lifetime as manic depression (she later contracted tuberculosis as well). She was brittle, winsome and sociable: “The only person in the world who could be charming while she was throwing up,” Korda’s uncle, the director and producer Alexander Korda, told him. But then she would toggle rapidly, and at first confoundingly, to fits of temper and nervous breakdowns. The medications and therapies that might have stabilized her weren’t common at the time.And thus her three-decade entanglement with Olivier, considered one of the greatest talents of his generation, was its own sort of doomed flight: It soared sharply into the heavens, then was rocked with turbulence before its inevitable tumble down to earth and straight through to hell.There have been many, many previous biographies of Leigh and several of Olivier (including one by his oldest son, Tarquin, from a first marriage to Jill Esmond); a memoir by Olivier, “Confessions of an Actor”; and a memoir by his third wife, Dame Joan Plowright. There has even been at least one book, “Love Scene” (1978), devoted specifically to the Olivier-Leigh romance.But Galloway, the former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter, is perhaps the first author to interpolate this oft-told story with commentary from contemporary mental-health experts, like Kay Redfield Jamison, the psychologist who herself suffers from bipolar disorder and wrote “An Unquiet Mind.” He accomplishes this smoothly, in a contribution to the LarViv literature that is — if not strictly essential — coherent, well-rounded and entertaining. To the couple’s tale of passion he adds compassion, along with the requisite lashings of gossip.Stephen Galloway, the author of “Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and the Romance of the Century.”Austin HargraveSome couples “meet cute.” Olivier espied Leigh playing a prostitute in “The Mask of Virtue” and was left “drunk with desire.” (They went on to get drunk on many other substances as well.) Unfortunately, they had both already married other people.The startlingly beautiful Leigh was born Vivian Hartley, an only child raised first in India and then shipped off to convent school in England. She took her stage surname from the middle name of her first husband, Herbert Holman. They had a daughter, Suzanne, but Leigh found the marriage “just another role in an interminable play,” Galloway writes, and “motherhood a repeat performance without the benefit of good writing.” The youngest of three siblings, Olivier lost his beloved mother when he was 12, and though less attached to his father — a clergyman of some oratorical gifts who “meted out affection in tranches, just like the Sunday roast he would cut into wafer-thin slices” — he was influenced by him to settle down early with Esmond. “That’s a noble idea,” Esmond responded when Olivier proposed for the second time. Trying to spice up their home life, he bought her a lemur from Harrods. The Brits are different.Leigh, Olivier and their spouses all became friends at garden parties, lunches and holidays. Reading how it all went down, quite civilized and drawing-room (Leigh asked Esmond how Larry liked his eggs cooked) but with plenty of jealousy, despair and child neglect, I was reminded of John Updike’s lesser-known infidelity novel, “Marry Me,” and Harold Pinter’s play “Betrayal.” (Leigh, who excelled onstage as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire” before bringing her to the silver screen, and Olivier, a Shakespearean virtuoso, both preferred the theater to mercenary moviedom.)That the scandal of their relationship had to be initially covered up for the morality clauses of Hollywood just as they were having their big breakthroughs there — Leigh in “Gone With the Wind”; Olivier as Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights” — surely only added to the excitement.Galloway clearly spent significant time in the archives (though frustratingly, a chunk of Leigh’s side of her correspondence with Olivier remains on the loose). Galloway splices this material seamlessly with old interviews and enough new ones with those Of That Era, such as Korda and Hayley Mills, to inject some pep and freshness. Re-encountering Leigh and Olivier’s highly literate fans, like Noël Coward and J.D. Salinger, and their foils, like the flamboyant critic Kenneth Tynan, is a treat. As are the old-fashioned words — like “martinet,” “popinjay” and “annealed” — that Galloway sprinkles through the text, the way Leigh strewed the beloved posies from her various country estates.This celebrated pair, whose doomed, disease-troubled love lends them a sheen denied to steadier partnerships, won between them half a dozen Oscars. It’s an enjoyable, disorienting sensation — as the Oscars now hemorrhage viewers and relevance — to find a time capsule from when movies and their stars didn’t just stream into our living rooms along with all the other space junk, but seemed the very center of the universe. More

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      ‘Bisping: The Michael Bisping Story’ Review: An M.M.A. Fighter Speaks Out

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      A documentary takes a look at Bisping’s tough and tender sides.This slick documentary about the mixed martial arts fighter Michael Bisping spends a lot of its first half putting up a kind of cinematic “Tough Guys Only” sign. Bisping’s a crudely voluble bruiser from the North of England! His father was a sniper in the British Army! “Fighting is something that I liked, to be honest,” Bisping says, when not swearing at his critics.OK, then. The movie is executive produced by Bisping himself, which signals a certain subjectivity. The director, Michael Hamilton, assembles a “Raging Bull”-style montage in the middle of the movie, alternating cage footage with home movies to underscore Bisping’s more tender side. This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.In 2013, after getting a detached retina in a fight, Bisping became blind in one eye. Despite the vision loss — which he did not reveal, as it would have kept him out of the sport — he went on to become U.F.C. champion in 2016. For reasons that become obvious, Bisping and the movie do not detail how he got cleared to fight, but fight he did. And even the milquetoasts who have hung in there until this point will feel compelled to hand it to him.The movie star Vin Diesel, with whom Bisping appeared in an action-packed movie, here waxes poetic about being an alpha male. And Joe Rogan shows up without the benefit of a trigger warning, but hey, Rogan was a U.F.C. commenter back in the day. He contributes the movie’s most amusing anecdote, in which Bisping, at a weigh-in, baits Vitor Belfort, a fighter who is known for being a devoted Christian, with the taunt “Jesus isn’t real.” As it happens, Belfort’s the guy who went on to deliver the blows that detached Bisping’s retina.Bisping: The Michael Bisping StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Up Next for Jessie Buckley of ‘The Lost Daughter’: More Movies, and Music

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      The actress Jessie Buckley is a natural brunette, but her hair is currently chopped into a ragged black bob and her nails are painted the same emerald green that the writer Christopher Isherwood gave Sally Bowles, the glamorously in-denial singer, in his 1937 novella of the same name. “Different hair for every job,” says Buckley, characteristically wry over a video call from London. “People think you’re very transformative.” Later, she’ll go onstage in “Cabaret,” the musical adaptation of Isherwood’s story of Weimar-era doom, at the Playhouse Theatre’s Kit Kat Club, alongside Eddie Redmayne. And in a few weeks, she’ll fly to Los Angeles for the 94th Academy Awards: Her performance in “The Lost Daughter” garnered her a nomination for best actress in a supporting role. Her brother had delivered the news to her over text the day before. “I thought he was joking,” she says. “It’s just something that doesn’t happen in life.”Buckley, photographed for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, wearing a Celine by Hedi Slimane shirt.Photograph by Andrea Urbez. Styled by Hisato TasakaBuckley with her musical collaborator Bernard Butler. Buckley wears a Miu Miu sweater, $1,430, and shoes, $875, miumiu.com; and Celine by Hedi Slimane pants, $1,250.Photograph by Andrea Urbez. Styled by Hisato TasakaExplore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage.A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.Buckley, 32, has been earning praise for her deft portrayals of maddening, messily vital characters, but her own career trajectory has been disciplined, even conventional: drama school (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) to theater (Shakespeare’s Globe), theater to indies, indies to Hollywood. She was born in Ireland’s County Kerry and seems to fulfill a kind of Yeatsian fantasy of the woman from the west who’s gifted in song. Raised in an artistic household with four younger siblings — her mother is a musician and teacher, and her father is a poet and bar manager — she moved to London as a teenager, where she finished second on a TV talent series called “I’d Do Anything.” YouTube videos show her delivering a tune from “Oliver!” with the same blend of power and vulnerability she’d bring to later roles.It’s Buckley’s voice, after all, that astonished audiences in 2018’s “Wild Rose,” a movie in which she plays an aspiring country star. This summer, she and Bernard Butler — a veteran musician, songwriter and producer — are set to release a 12-track album called “For All Our Days That Tear the Heart” on the British label EMI. “I feel a bit shy about it,” she says. “It was a really pure, beautiful, untainted thing, and a bit of a secret.” Over the past two summers, she and Butler would meet weekly to drink tea in his kitchen and discuss, among other things, lines of poetry. At the end of the day, they’d record whatever they’d made on an iPhone, just one or two takes, “and then we’d say goodbye,” says Butler. The finished album conveys the intimacy of two friends finding private meaning through creativity.Buckley, photographed for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, wearing aMiu Miu sweater; and Celine by Hedi Slimane pants.Photograph by Andrea Urbez. Styled by Hisato TasakaIn the fall, Buckley will travel to Spain to film Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s “Hot Milk.” This year will also see the release of the Sarah Polley-directed “Women Talking” — starring Buckley, Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand as members of a remote religious community disturbed by sexual violence — and Alex Garland’s “Men,” in which Buckley portrays a widow alone on holiday.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      After Criticism, Academy Museum Will Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History

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      The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which tried to present an inclusive history of film, overlooked the role Jewish immigrants played in creating the industry.LOS ANGELES — When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a 300,000-square-foot tribute to Hollywood, opened here last fall, it was lauded for honoring, in an industry historically dominated by white men, the contributions that women, artists of color and people from many backgrounds have made to film, an essential American art form.“We want to ensure that we are taking an honest, inclusive and diverse look at our history, that we create a safe space for complicated, hard conversations,” the museum’s director, Bill Kramer, said the day after the museum opened as he welcomed guests to a panel discussion titled “Creating a More Inclusive Museum.”But one group was conspicuously absent in this initial celebration of diversity and inclusivity: the Jewish immigrants — white men all — who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system. Through dozens of exhibits and rooms, there is barely a mention of Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer, to list just a few of the best-known names from Hollywood’s history.The omission, which came at a time of increasing concern about rising antisemitism across the country, soon drew complaints from Jewish leaders, concern from supporters of the new museum and a number of critical articles, including in Rolling Stone and The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”“I was there opening night: I was shocked by the absence of an inclusion of Jews in the Hollywood story,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a group that tracks antisemitism and hate crimes.Now, museum officials say, that is going to change.The museum was criticized for overlooking the first- and second-generation Eastern European Jews who helped create Hollywood, including Louis B. Mayer.Margaret Herrick LibraryBarraged by complaints, the museum plans to open a new permanent exhibition next spring devoted to the origins of Hollywood, and specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders who were largely responsible for creating the world that is being celebrated by the sellout crowds flocking to the new museum.Kramer said in an interview that the Academy Museum had always intended to open a temporary gallery devoted to the subject. “We’ve long had this on our list to do, and we knew this was going to be in our first rotations,” he said recently over coffee at Fanny’s, the museum’s restaurant. But the criticism prompted museum officials to shift gears and decide to enshrine it as a permanent exhibition.“Representation is so important,” Kramer said “We heard that and we take that seriously. When you talk about the founding of Hollywood studios, you’re talking about the Jewish founders.”The dispute highlights the challenges museums across the nation face in an atmosphere of heightened sensitivities about issues of representation and race and gender. It is particularly complicated for the Academy Museum, as it tries to walk the uncomfortable line between being a place of scholarship and a sales tool for an industry struggling to reinvent itself as audiences abandon movie theaters for their living rooms.“It’s a colossal miss,” said Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League. “Any honest historical assessment of the motion-picture industry should include the role that Jews played in building the industry from the ground up.”Some historians said the omission appeared to be the latest example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history.“You have to understand that Hollywood in its very inception was formed out of a fear that its founders — and those who maintained the industry — would be identified as Jews,” said Neal Gabler, the author of “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” a book about the Jewish studio heads. “It’s almost fitting that a museum devoted to the history of Hollywood would incorporate in its very evolution this fear and sensitivity.”Still, Jewish leaders said they were heartened by the museum’s response to their complaints. Kramer and other museum leaders reached out to rabbis and Jewish scholars, including Gabler and Greenblatt, asking their guidance on what should be included in the new gallery to repair this breach.“I am convinced they are going to do the right thing,” Greenblatt said.What that is, though, is not yet clear. The exhibition is being planned for a relatively modest 850-square-foot gallery on the third floor of the building. Dara Jaffe, the curator, said the exhibition, which will be called “Hollywoodland,” will be a broad look at the origins of the industry. It will highlight the biographies and achievements of the founders of the major studios, as well as of some lesser-known Jewish filmmakers.Carl Laemmle, who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, became a founder of Universal Pictures and later worked to help German Jews escape from the Nazis. Margaret Herrick Library“We want to answer the question of: Why Los Angeles?” Jaffe said. “Why is this the place where the world capital of cinema blossomed? It’s not a coincidence that many of the founders are predominantly Jewish. It’s a specifically Jewish story and a specifically Jewish immigrant story.”The exhibition will not open for a year, and key details, from how it will be presented to what kind of artifacts will be included, are still in the planning stages.Haim Saban, an Israeli American philanthropist and media entrepreneur who with his wife, Cheryl, donated $50 million to the museum, becoming one of its most important benefactors, said in an email that the promise of a new gallery “not only underscores how seriously the Academy Museum has taken the feedback, but demonstrates an understanding of the critical role that Jewish founders had in the establishment and shaping of Hollywood.”Saban was among the major backers of the museum to register his concern within days after it opened. He and his wife were critical to financing what ended up to be a $487 million project; the main exhibition hall at the museum was named the “Saban Building” in their honor.Some are asking how a museum that took such care to highlight the contributions of people from a diverse array of backgrounds — it created an Inclusion Advisory Committee to offer guidance on how to deal with these issues, and made a call to “Embrace Diversity and Be Radically Inclusive” one of its guiding principles — neglected to account for the role of some of the biggest names in Hollywood history.“There is a historic tendency of Jewish people in the industry to play down the fact that they were Jewish,” said Rabbi Kurt F. Stone of Boca Raton, Fla., who grew up in Los Angeles and is one of the rabbis the museum consulted after the backlash began. “But do I have an answer as to why they screwed up so badly? I don’t.”Sid Ganis, a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a lifetime trustee of the museum, said he was surprised at the depth of the outrage that emerged after the museum opened its doors. “It was vocal and real and something we paid attention to,” he said.Ganis, a longtime proponent of the museum, said organizers were always aware of the importance of Jews in Hollywood history, adding that this was not an oversight. “We just hadn’t gotten to it yet,” he said. “Opening the museum at the end of October, the beginning of November, was an enormous undertaking. And we made choices. It was something we always knew we were going to attend to. But now, even more so.” More

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      ‘Atlantide’ Review: Restless and Reckless on the Venetian Lagoon

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      A speed boater and his girlfriend maneuver around the coasts of Venice and its islands in this moody portrait of contemporary youth culture.Those in need of right-brain fuel may find a source in “Atlantide,” a documentary-narrative hybrid film that offers a highly stylized window into Italian youth culture. Thin on story and nearly free from dialogue, the film takes place on the turbid Venetian Lagoon where locals congregate to scroll their phones, speed on motorboats and pump their fists to trap music.Much of the film is spent trailing the solemn Daniele (Daniele Barison), a young skipper from the agricultural island of Sant’Erasmo, as he maneuvers his petite two-seater around the inlet. Like those of his peers, Daniele’s boat bears the name of his girlfriend, Maila (Maila Dabala), who plays passenger on his sea rovings and reluctantly indulges his yen for speed racing.Characters seldom speak, but when they do, the director, Yuri Ancarani, paints the interpersonal moments with admirable restraint. In one sequence, as Maila lays bare her emotions to her manicurist, Ancarani grants the women privacy by fixing his camera not on their faces but on their hands, delicately intertwining across the cosmetic table.It’s a rare moment of intuition in a film that disproportionately favors impressionism over substance. And visually, the film is brimming: Ancarani depicts bridges agape over canals, forts crumbling in ruin and ominous bricola, or wooden poles, protruding from the lagoon like broken bones. Had “Atlantide” granted deeper access to Daniele and Maila, these images might have lent a moody complement to the characters and their struggles. As is, any sense of meaning is cast adrift in a sea of pretty pictures.AtlantideNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Atlanta’ and the Academy Awards

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      Donald Glover’s series returns for a third season on FX. And the 94th Oscars ceremony airs on ABC.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, March 21-27. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE VOW (2012) 6:15 p.m. on Showtime. Channing Tatum returns to theaters this week in “The Lost City,” a big-budget comedy with Sandra Bullock and Daniel Radcliffe. It’s Tatum’s second big movie of the year, after “Dog” in February. Tatum was booked solid in 2012, too: He starred in two Steven Soderbergh movies (“Haywire” and “Magic Mike”), a remake of “21 Jump Street” and “The Vow,” a romantic drama with Rachel McAdams about a marriage derailed by amnesia. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote that the movie itself was a lackluster adaptation of the true story on which it was based, but that the chemistry between Tatum and McAdams stood out. “When they are on the screen together here,” Scott wrote, “there is enough physical charm and emotional warmth to distract from the threadbare setting and the paper-thin plot.”AMERICAN SONG CONTEST 8 p.m. on NBC. The Eurovision Song Contest, a television spectacle, has been held annually overseas since before the British Invasion. “American Song Contest” finally brings a version of it stateside. This musical competition, with Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson as hosts, gathers dozens of performers from all 50 states and has them perform original songs. There are no limitations on genre, which should making for interesting juxtapositions.TuesdayTHE 2022 IHEARTRADIO MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on Fox. LL Cool J will host this year’s edition of the iHeartRadio Music Awards, which will be broadcast live from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The lineup of performers includes Jennifer Lopez, Megan Thee Stallion, Jason Aldean and John Legend. Competing for the top prize, song of the year, will be Olivia Rodrigo, Adele, Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, Silk Sonic, Dua Lipa, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and the Kid Laroi.SHACKLETON’S ENDURANCE: THE LOST ICE SHIP FOUND 10 p.m. on History. Frigid water and a merciful lack of wood-eating marine organisms helped the explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship stay recognizable in the century that passed between when it sank, in 1915, and when its wreckage was discovered earlier this month at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula. The discovery involved a multimillion-dollar hunt and the use of undersea drones. This new special will look at the significance of the find.WednesdayJohn David Washington in “BlacKkKlansman.”David Lee/Focus FeaturesBLACKKKLANSMAN (2018) 5:20 p.m. on FXM. John David Washington and Adam Driver play a pair of police detectives who infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan during the 1970s in this Spike Lee joint. They’re a somewhat odd couple for that particular job. Washington’s character, Ron Stallworth, is the first African American officer hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department; Driver’s character is a Jewish officer named Flip Zimmerman. (Stallworth is a real person — the movie is based on his memoir of a similar name.) When the movie came out in 2018, A.O. Scott called it Lee’s “best nondocumentary feature in more than a decade and one of his greatest.”ThursdayATLANTA 10 p.m. on FX. What will “Atlanta” look like outside Atlanta? The third season of Donald Glover’s surreal comedy series is set mostly outside Georgia. Outside the United States, actually: Alfred, the fictional rapper known as Paper Boi (played by Brian Tyree Henry), goes on a European tour, bringing along Earn (his cousin and manager, played by Glover), Darius (their enigmatic friend played by Lakeith Stanfield) and Van (Earn’s it’s-complicated girlfriend, played by Zazie Beetz. The location change should make for a surprising set of episodes — not that the show has been lacking in stylistic twists. Wesley Morris, in a Times column in 2018, summed up the second season by saying, “No episode looked or felt the same as the one before it.”FridayMarin Alsop in “The Conductor.”Alessandra Fratus/Cargo Film and ReleasingGREAT PERFORMANCES: THE CONDUCTOR (2022) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Marin Alsop became the first woman to lead a major orchestra in the United States when she took over the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 2007. This documentary, directed by Bernadette Wegenstein, looks at Alsop’s career through the conductor’s own recollections and interviews with musicians who have either been pupils of Alsop’s or who have otherwise been affected by her work. While Alsop’s story is exceptional, the documentary itself takes a “fairly standard approach,” Ben Kenigsberg said in his review for The Times. “The most engaging portions,” he wrote, “involve music-making itself.”SaturdayTHE GODFATHER (1972) 6 p.m. on Paramount Network. Since its release in theaters 50 years ago this month, the original “Godfather” has been shown on TV more times than they shot Sonny on the causeway. Here’s a chance to rewatch it for its anniversary alongside its equally acclaimed sequel, THE GODFATHER PART II (1974), which airs on Paramount Network at 10 p.m. Watch them together to see Francis Ford Coppola’s growth as a director. “You have to understand, as a filmmaker, I didn’t really know how to make ‘The Godfather,’” Coppola said in a recent interview with The Times. “I learned how to make ‘The Godfather’ making it.”SundayKristen Stewart at an event for Academy Award nominees on March 7. The actual ceremony is on Sunday.Roger Kisby for The New York TimesTHE 94TH ANNUAL ACADEMY AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. You can count on seeing a handful of unpredictable things at any given Oscars ceremony. This year, we know when one of them will come: at the moment the best actress winner is announced. The race for that honor is unusually open this year, with no obvious favorite among the nominees: Jessica Chastain, Olivia Colman, Penélope Cruz, Nicole Kidman and Kristen Stewart. (As The Times’s awards-season columnist, Kyle Buchanan, recently wrote, nearly every ceremony this season has offered a different lineup of women.) The race for the top honor, best picture, is down to “Belfast,” “CODA,” “Don’t Look Up,” “Drive My Car,” “Dune,” “King Richard,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Nightmare Alley,” “The Power of the Dog” and “West Side Story.” Wanda Sykes, Regina Hall and Amy Schumer are the hosts. More

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      Writers Guild Awards Keep up Momentum for ‘CODA,’ ‘Don’t Look Up’

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      The victories are good news for those films’ Oscar chances: The best picture winner usually also picks up a screenplay trophy.A sudden Oscar front-runner and a dark-horse contender took top honors at the Writers Guild Awards on Sunday night, as the heartwarmer “CODA” and the satirical “Don’t Look Up” prevailed in the adapted and original screenplay categories, respectively.“This is real, legitimate excitement,” the writer-director of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay, said in a pretaped speech. Though several awards shows have returned to in-person gatherings, the WGA ceremony was virtual, and nominees were asked to send in their acceptance speeches ahead of time. Only the winner’s was played during the ceremony.Several major films were ineligible for the WGAs this year because they were not written under a bargaining agreement with the WGA or its sister guilds. So “Belfast” and “The Worst Person in the World” (in the original-screenplay category) and “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” (in the adapted category) were not in the running. And because that significantly whittled down the pool of big contenders, most pundits expected the writer-director Sian Heder’s “CODA,” based on the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” would prevail with the Writers Guild, though “Don’t Look Up” still faced stiff competition from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Licorice Pizza.”Can the WGA victors also win their Oscar races now that “Belfast” has lost its awards mojo and the surging “CODA” beat “The Power of the Dog” at this weekend’s influential Producers Guild Awards? In a recent screenplay contest at the BAFTAs, “CODA” pulled out another surprise win over “The Power of the Dog,” its biggest best-picture rival. Since the path to the top Oscar almost always winds through the screenplay categories, an adapted-screenplay win for “CODA” on Oscar night could foreshadow the film’s ultimate fate.And though “Don’t Look Up” has a tougher path to the best-picture Oscar, with no notable awards-season wins until now, the WGA victory at least suggests that the original-screenplay race will remain one to watch.Here are some of the other WGA winners:Documentary: “Exposing Muybridge”Drama series: “Succession”Comedy series: “Hacks”New series: “Hacks”Original long-form series: “Mare of Easttown”Adapted long-form series: “Maid” More