It's a wonderful night for an Oscar?

Some movie talk here at the TV newsletter, plus, 'Extraordinary,' 'Boarders,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as Jack Palance starts doing one-armed push-ups on stage…

Very Extraordinary?

This week’s two most interesting premieres for me are both British imports coming to American streamers. We’ll get to the other one in the next item, but let’s start with Season Two of Extraordinary, a comedy about a world where almost everyone — with exceptions like our young protagonist Jen —has super powers, even if many of them are lame. One character in the new season has the ability to tell whenever a woman is going to have her period, while Jen’s boyfriend Jizzlord (not his real name) can turn into a cat, but has no memory of what happens whenever he’s in feline form.

As unfortunately happened when the first season arrived on Hulu last year, other work got in the way of writing an actual review. Fortunately, I now have this newsletter where I can briefly recommend things I don’t have time to give the full Rolling Stone treatment. I think I probably laughed a bit more at Season One, but this remains a really clever show, and the new season does an effective job of exploring the psychological reasons why Jen’s powers have yet to appear, in a way that doesn’t clash with the silly humor. I hope this. is the first of many lead roles for Máiréad Tyers, who’s so warm and funny as Jen.

Odds and/or ends

• Because I didn’t have a window to write more about Extraordinary, and because the other thing I wrote this week is publishing late tonight, the only new Rolling Stone story I have to link to at the moment is my review of Boarders, a British high school dramedy that just began streaming on Tubi. The premise: five Black teens get scholarships to an elite private boarding school, and struggle in different ways to fit in with their wealthy, mostly white new classmates. As I say in my review, very little of it’s new, but it’s an entertaining, well-executed variation on an enduring theme.

• Also, while I managed to exercise some restraint by not filling the Boarders piece with comparisons to The O.C. — a show that debuted before any of these characters were born — allow me the indulgence here to note that there is definitely some Ryan Atwood stuff going on with the scholarship kids’ unofficial leader, as well as a rivalry with a bully whom the show clearly wants to reform, just like our old friend Luke Ward. In a completely unrelated development, Welcome to The O.C. is still available wherever books are sold.

• Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, with the Game of Thrones showrunners teaming up with the creator of The Terror to adapt Cixin Liu’s best-selling sci-fi novel trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past, doesn’t debut for another couple of weeks. But the first episode is premiering tonight at South by Southwest, so the review embargo will lift at 1 a.m. Eastern. While we mostly publish my reviews these days close to when series are available, we make exceptions for high-profile shows, and this qualifies. So I’ll send out a Substack Chat link to the review tomorrow morning, if people are curious this far in advance. Or you can check my Rolling Stone author page if you’re up in the wee small hours tonight. UPDATE: Here is the review.

• Last week, I joked about wanting to find an excuse to buy the booth from the final scene of The Sopranos, since Holsten’s is renovating and put the booth up for auction. The winning bid was juuuuuust a bit outside my price range, at $82,6000. I actually checked to see what’s happening with the other booths, and was told I could buy one of the others for only $300. While it might be a fun conversation piece to put in my basement, they’re also kind of ugly, and almost certainly gross after decades of use. So if it’s not the actual table, what’s the point? Maybe I should look into the cost of the recreation of Dr. Melfi’s office from SopranosCon?

At the movies

I’m not a professional movie reviewer, and my moviegoing has plummeted as I’ve acquired more personal and professional responsibilities. That said, this weekend’s big TV event is the telecast of the Academy Awards, and for once, I feel like a relatively informed viewer. Between trips to the theater and films available on streaming or VOD, I’ve seen eight of this year’s 10 Best Picture nominees. (I finished American Fiction last night — which is why it’s not in the narrated version of the newsletter — and haven’t gotten to Zone of Interest or Anatomy of a Fall.) In many recent years, I’m lucky if I’ve seen three or four.

There’s unfortunately very little suspense regarding the Oscars these days, because the forced march of precursor awards makes clear the winners in most of the major categories. So rather than make obvious predictions, I thought it might be fun to offer quick takes on the seven Best Picture nominees I’ve watched in their entirety. (If you follow me on Letterboxd, many of these opinions will be familiar, particularly the Killers of the Flower Moon one that annoyed a lot of people.) In alphabetical order:

• Cord Jefferson co-wrote an incredible episode of Watchmen (the Hooded Justice origin story, “This Extraordinary Being”) and is a really smart guy in general. (Here’s our conversation about white supremacy, cops in pop culture, and more, from mid-2020.) So it’s no surprise at all that his feature debut as writer-director, American Fiction, was so sharp, full of big ideas but also lots of sly humor, fully-realized familial and romantic relationships, and a great star vehicle for Jeffrey Wright. (Also, O.C. alum Adam Brody is very funny in a small role. Have I mentioned before that I wrote a book about The O.C.?)

• Barbie was an absolute delight, and a seemingly impossible marriage of personal filmmaking and corporate IP. I still can’t fathom that Greta Gerwig wasn’t nominated for director, nor Margot Robbie for lead actress.

• Sideways, the first collaboration between Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti, was so wonderful, it’s shocking that it took two decades for them to make another movie together. But The Holdovers was worth the wait, the kind of cozy, funny, sad hangout movie that I imagine is the nominee from this year I’m most likely to watch multiple times over the years. Glad Da’Vine Joy Randolph seems a lock for supporting actress, and am rooting for Giamatti to pull the unlikely upset over Cillian Murphy. Murphy’s great, too. But the scene where Giamatti answers the question about his eye is one of those movie moments that’s going to stick with me for a long time. Also, if you loved Randolph in this, I highly recommend seeking out Hulu’s terrific-but-canceled High Fidelity series, where she essentially plays the Jack Black role.

• Killers of the Flower Moon was a huge disappointment for me. Lily Gladstone is incredible — and if you loved her there and haven’t yet seen either of her Reservation Dogs appearances, have I got a binge for you — but I never felt like Scorsese and company succeeded at presenting Ernest and Molly’s relationship as a love story the way they wanted to. Ernest came across to me as a one-note goon, so a three and a half hour movie focusing largely on how he keeps letting his evil uncle manipulate him into arranging the murder of women seemed a waste of the talent of everyone involved. Gorgeous to look at, tedious to sit through most of it. And yet… the final scene is among the very best things Scorsese has ever done, and a moment that powerfully acknowledged many of the overall film’s limitations.

• Maestro was another movie that never delivered on the promised depth of its central relationship. Excellent performances and some stunning bits of filmmaking, but I wanted much more exploration of when Felicia knew things, how she felt as she learned each piece, etc.

• I walked out of Oppenheimer feeling impressed by the spectacle and performances, but undecided how I felt about the storytelling. This is one I feel like I would need to watch another time or three to make up my mind. But, again, if I find a moment to visit one of these again, it’s gonna be Holdovers. And not just because I wouldn’t feel like I was getting the proper Oppenheimer experience seeing it on my TV or tablet this time.

• This was the Academy’s year of No Gretas. Even more than the Barbie/Gerwig/Robbie issue, it’s hard to accept Past Lives getting a Best Picture nomination without a matching one for Greta Lee’s spectacularly nuanced performance. Yes, I understand the math, and in an era with only five Best Picture nominees, this likely wouldn’t have been one of them. But still.

• Poor Things was funny, weird, and extremely unnerving, particularly in the ambiguity regarding how old emotionally Bella was supposed to be at various points in the story. I’m pulling for Gladstone, but Emma Stone is so good in this — better than in the movie she already won an Oscar for — and Mark Ruffalo is hilarious.

Will I make it all the way through the telecast? Based on recent history — including the year I went to bed before Will Smith slapped Chris Rock — probably not. But it was a good year for the movies. Even a TV critic can see that.

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?