Ali, Mahershala (1974- )

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    BAFTA Nominations List: ‘Dune' and ‘The Power of the Dog’ Lead Awards

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    Dennis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic and Jane Campion’s western secured the most nominations in a lineup notable for its diversity.Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Power of the Dog,” which was nominated for eight BAFTA awards on Thursday.Kirsty Griffin/Netflix, via Associated PressLONDON — The unpredictability of this year’s award season continued on Thursday when the nominees were announced for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic “Dune” was nominated for best film at the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, as was “Don’t Look Up,” the climate change satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jane Campion’s tense western “The Power of the Dog.”Those films will compete against “Belfast,” Kenneth Branagh’s black and white movie based on his childhood in Northern Ireland, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’70s coming-of-age romance “Licorice Pizza.” But of those movies’ directors, only Campion and Anderson were also nominated for the best director prize. They will compete in that category against several directors lesser known in the United States: Aleem Khan, the director of the British movie “After Love”; the French director Julia Ducournau for her Cannes-winning horror movie “Titane”; Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese director of “Drive My Car”; and Audrey Diwan, the French director of the abortion drama “Happening,” which was the unexpected winner of the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, are often seen as a bellwether for the Oscars, because of an overlap between the voting constituencies for both awards.Learn More About ‘Don’t Look Up’In Netflix’s doomsday flick, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth.Review: It’s the end of the world, and you should not feel fine, writes the film critic Manohla Dargis.A Metaphor for Climate Change: With his apocalyptic satire, the director Adam McKay hopes to prompt the audience to action. Meryl Streep’s Presidential Turn: How the actor prepared to play a self-centered scoundrel at the helm of the United States.A Real-Life ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment: The film revives memories of a nail-biting night in the Times newsroom two decades ago.“Dune” secured 11 BAFTA nominations, the most overall, although many are in technical categories like costume and production design. “The Power of the Dog” secured eight nominations, the second highest, with three of those in the acting categories.This year’s list also includes some acting nominees that may not be to be on the Oscars’ radar. The nominees for best actor, for instance, include Stephen Graham for “Boiling Point,” a British movie set behind the scenes in a restaurant, and Adeel Akhtar for the British romance “Ali & Ava,” as well as big names like Will Smith (“King Richard”), Benedict Cumberbatch (“The Power of the Dog”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Don’t Look Up”) and Mahershala Ali (“Swan Song”).The nominees for best actress similarly include the British actress Joanna Scanlan for her role in “After Love,” about a white Muslim convert who uncovers her husband’s secret past, as well as Lady Gaga (“House of Gucci”), Alana Haim (“Licorice Pizza”), Renate Reinsve (“The Worst Person in the World”) and Tessa Thompson (“Passing”).Amanda Berry, the chief executive of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, which gives out the awards, said in an interview that the diversity of this year’s nominees was partly down to changes introduced in 2020 to encourage voters to watch more widely among the nominated movies. Before they cast their ballots, voters must now watch a random selection of 15 films via an online portal, to ensure they don’t just focus on the most-hyped movies, Berry explained. How much overlap there is between the BAFTAs and Oscars nominees will soon become clear. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science is scheduled to reveal the nominees for this year’s Oscars on Tuesday.The winners of the BAFTAs are set to be announced on March 13 at a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and Berry said she expected the event would return to its usual, pre-pandemic format. Last year, nominees attended via video link, but Berry said she expected the awards to be given out in person in March, and that the glamour of the red carpet would be back. More

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      in Television

      Mahershala Ali Finally Gets the Leading Role He Deserves

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      In a more just world, Mahershala Ali, one of America’s most gifted actors, would have played the lead in at least a dozen films by now.He’s certainly paid his dues and then some. Over the past two decades, the 47-year-old actor has starred or played key roles in prestige series (HBO’s “True Detective”), sci-fi franchises (“The Hunger Games”) and network-defining political thrillers (Netflix’s “House of Cards”). In 2017, he won his first Academy Award for his performance in “Moonlight,” a master class in what you can do with just 20 minutes or so of screen time, and a second Oscar two years later, for his performance in “Green Book.”So it may come as a shock to learn that Ali has never played the lead role in a feature film before, not until his star turn in the sci-fi drama “Swan Song,” now streaming on Apple TV+.“I always felt like a bit of a late bloomer,” Ali said.On a recent morning, in a wide-ranging video interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ali, dressed in a black jacket over a crisp white Team Ikuzawa T-shirt, talked about “Swan Song,” the debut feature from the Irish director Benjamin Cleary.In “Swan Song,” Ali plays both a dying man and his clone.Apple TV+As if to make up for lost time, Ali plays not just one main character in the sci-fi drama, but two: Cameron, a terminally ill husband and father of a 5-year-old son; and Jack, the perfect clone of himself — complete with every one of his memories — who, unbeknown to Cameron’s wife and child, will soon replace him in order to spare them the grief and pain of having to watch him die. In several scenes, Ali shares the stage with Ali, with only himself to play against. “It was fun after it was hard,” he said with a laugh. “Fun after you move through the hard.”It was a winding life journey that took him to “Swan Song,” with stops and starts and moments of doubt along the way. Like the time he was in his second year of New York University’s prestigious graduate acting program and considered ditching it all to go back to working as a deckhand in San Francisco. “I was still in the union,” he said, “and it’s good money.”Or another time, in the middle of his acting career, when he took off a year and a half to care for his ailing grandfather. “He had a stroke in 2010, and I kind of dropped everything,” he said. “I was living in Las Vegas and taking care of him, just me and my grandma.”And there were other reasons that the actor is only now playing his first film lead. The industry was a lot different back when he was coming up, he explained — more stratified between movies and series, which made feature film roles, let alone feature film leads, tougher for TV actors like himself to come by. Those who started in TV were seen as TV actors only, and so his aim was just to be the best TV actor he could be. He was well into the third season of his third series, “The 4400,” before he was finally called on to “step on Brad Pitt’s character” (a monstrous child whom Ali’s character literally stumbles upon at a nursing home) in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”Ali is “a really powerful actor, but he also has a really calming energy as a scene partner,” said Awkwafina, his “Swan Song” co-star. “It was probably one of the best experiences I’ve had on a set.”Chanell Stone for The New York TimesOther film roles followed — in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “The Hunger Games” and, in 2016, “Moonlight” — but no leads.Around the time “Moonlight” was released, a writer for The New York Times conceded that Ali’s rise, unlike those of some of his peers, “has not been meteoric.”“When I look at my trajectory, my start was a little slow, if you think about where I am at the moment,” Ali said.Even so, many of the supporting roles he was getting were ones any actor would kill for, like Juan in “Moonlight,” a hard-on-the-surface dope dealer bursting with love for his young charge. “I hadn’t seen that character,” he said. Or Don Shirley, the African American pianist in the biopic “Green Book” who hired an Italian American bouncer, played by Viggo Mortensen, to serve as his valet in the Deep South. “He was the most gracious type of rebellious you could be,” Ali said of the musician. “Somebody who was so smart and cunning and found a way to buck the system by hiring a white guy to carry his bags in and out of a hotel, and be his bodyguard, in 1962? I thought that was genius.”Ali won his first Oscar for his supporting turn in “Moonlight” (2016),  opposite Alex Hibbert.David Bornfriend/A24Two years later, he won best supporting actor again, this time for “Green Book,” alongside Viggo Mortensen.Patti Perret/Universal Pictures“Swan Song” came to Ali in 2019, after he read the script and asked to meet with Cleary, its writer. Cleary had won an Oscar for his 2015 short film, “Stutterer,” but had never directed a feature film before. After a single “really great conversation” between the two, Ali said yes to the project. “It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Cleary recalled.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      in Movies

      ‘Swan Song’ Review: Second Life

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      In this future-set drama, Mahershala Ali plays an ailing father who decides whether or not to clone himself for the sake of his family.Cloning is such an unsettling and outlandish prospect that it naturally lends itself to sinister adventures (and sometimes farce). But “Swan Song,” a science-fiction drama written and directed by Benjamin Cleary, posits a scenario of doubling that’s just as much about acquiring emotional intelligence as it is about reckoning with existential and practical ramifications.Cameron (Mahershala Ali) is an ailing graphic designer who doesn’t have long to live. Loathe to abandon his wife, Poppy (Naomie Harris), and their young son, he secretly undertakes a procedure that will create a replica of himself — physically identical, possessing his memories, yet healthy. But will the double really be Cameron in any meaningful sense, or will he simply be fulfilling Cameron’s role in life? Will his family even notice? And is Cameron OK with that?After an especially scary fainting episode, the switch is set to happen in a secluded compound on a lake, where the caring-but-firm scientist (Glenn Close) assures Cameron that this sort of thing will soon be common. We get a sense of the time period’s science-fiction parameters through a mix of banal and mildly “Black Mirror” details: driverless cars are a rule, talking droids serve snacks on trains, and contact lenses can record and transmit what you see.Cleary’s story walks us through the steps of Cameron’s transition. He meets his new doppelgänger in the flesh — temporarily named Jack — and uploads his memories. Mild comic relief comes from Cameron’s hangouts with a recently transitioned person (Awkwafina) at the compound. We get glimpses of Cameron’s family life and its strains, as well as a flashback to his meet-cute with Poppy, all of it suggesting how grief, belief and love might take on unfamiliar forms with new technological possibilities.But any mind-bending conceit or special effect pales before Ali’s incredibly fine-tuned talents. Playing opposite a digital replica of oneself almost doesn’t merit comment anymore, but Cameron and Jack are an entrancing study in the subtlest shifts in energy and feeling. When Cameron first meets his clone, the welter of apprehension, curiosity and concern is apparent on Cameron’s face, but Ali’s crowning touch is Jack’s faint expression of sympathy toward the man he will replace.Ali’s focus and presence makes us believe that both of these men are equally alive and feeling the brunt of this deeply uncanny predicament. This is less a conceptual thumbsucker than a tightly focused, almost miniaturist drama about moving on. Whenever something goes awry, we worry less about Pandora’s box dystopia than about the psychological toll of Cameron’s limbo. Perhaps more so than any film that’s received the tagline, it’s effectively about being true to yourself.Swan SongRated R for heated language. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More