Critics' Choice goes to 'Once Upon a Time'

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood won four awards at the Critics Choice Association's 25 annual Critics' Choice Awards, the most of any 2020 nominee. In addition to best original screenplay, best-supporting actor and best production design, director Quentin Tarantino's movie took top honors for best picture.

As a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, I vote in the movie segment of the Critics' Choice awards, which also honor outstanding work in television.

In this compressed awards season, it's notable that the Critics' Choice Awards were given out on Sunday, the night before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was slated to announce 2020's Oscar nominees. Stay tuned.

Here, though, are this year's Critics' Choice winners:

BEST PICTURE
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST ACTOR
Joaquin Phoenix – Joker

BEST ACTRESS
Renée Zellweger – Judy

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Brad Pitt – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Laura Dern – Marriage Story

BEST DIRECTOR (TIE)
Bong Joon Ho – Parasite
Sam Mendes – 1917

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Quentin Tarantino – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Greta Gerwig – Little Women

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Roger Deakins – 1917

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN
Barbara Ling, Nancy Haigh – Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood

BEST EDITING
Lee Smith – 1917

BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Ruth E. Carter – Dolemite Is My Name

BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP
Bombshell (Lionsgate)

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Avengers: Endgame

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Toy Story 4

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS
Roman Griffin Davis -- Jo Jo Rabbit

BEST ACTION MOVIE
Avengers: Endgame

BEST COMEDY
Dolemite Is My Name

BEST SCI-FI OR HORROR MOVIE
Us

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Parasite

BEST SONG (TIE)
Glasgow (No Place Like Home) – Wild Rose
I’m Gonna (Love Me Again) – Rocketman

BEST SCORE
Hildur Guðnadóttir – Joker

And, if you like numbers, here are totals for movies that won more than one award:

ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD - four
Best Picture
Best Supporting Actor – Brad Pitt
Best Original Screenplay – Quentin Tarantino
Best Production Design – Barbara Ling, Nancy Haigh

1917 – three awards
Best Director – Sam Mendes (Tie)
Best Cinematography – Roger Deakins
Best Editing – Lee Smith

AVENGERS: ENDGAME – two
Best Visual Effects
Best Action Movie

DOLEMITE IS MY NAME - two
Best Costume Design – Ruth E. Carter
Best Comedy

JOKER – two
Best Actor – Joaquin Phoenix
Best Score – Hildur Guðnadóttir

PARASITE -- two
Best Director – Bong Joon Ho (Tie)
Best Foreign Language Film

Zellweger does justice to ‘Judy’

Judy isn't great, but Zellweger's performance carries the show.

Judy, a drama about the final months of Judy Garland's all-too-brief life, turns the iconic entertainer into a kind of prisoner of her pubic image. Garland's life fell prey to studio tyrants, drugs, bad marriages, and her own need to connect with audiences. Judy already is being hailed as an Oscar showcase for a transformed Renee Zellweger. Fair enough. Judy derives most of its power from Zellweger's performance.

Based on End of the Rainbow, a musical play by Peter Quilter, Judy survives a series of sometimes wooden flashbacks and an overly familiar story arc to reach an emotional conclusion that pays tribute to Garland's enormous capacity to entertain while recognizing the deep sadness that could pervade her life.

I don't think it qualifies as a spoiler to tell you that the movie's finale involves a deeply felt rendition of Garland's signature tune, Over the Rainbow. If you don't see that coming when the movie enters its third -- and best act -- you probably need to see more movies.

Set mostly in 1968, the story places Garland in a swirl of trouble, notably a battle with former husband Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) over custody of their two children. Garland loved her kids but she couldn't give them the stability they needed.

Problems constantly threat to drag Garland down. Broke and hardly in demand, Garland takes a job in London to play the Talk of the Town nightclub. Not surprisingly, her appearance is marked by difficulties: She refuses to rehearse; she drinks too much; she can't sleep; she barely makes it to performances on time, and in the middle of all that, she decides to marry Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), her fifth and last husband.

It's obvious to us, if not to the love-starved Garland, that the marriage will be brief and bad.

In London, Rosalyn Wilder (Jessie Buckley) receives a tough assignment; she's supposed to look after Garland, who misses few opportunities to test Rosalyn's ample patience. As the impresario who brings Garland to London, Michael Gambon is given little to do aside from looking dyspeptic and skeptical. Underutilizing Gambon must always be regarded as a mistake.

In the flashbacks to her MGM days and The Wizard of Oz, Garland (Darci Shaw) finds herself in painful encounters with the tyrannical Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), the mogul who controlled her with threats and humiliation. Garland eventually claimed that Mayer groped her, as well, something the movie hints at.

An effort to acknowledge Garland's importance in gay culture feels both necessary and yet forced. Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira play a gay couple who meet Garland when she's leaving Talk of the Town after a performance. They wind up taking her to their apartment. She's lonely and their company proves welcome.

The two fans also figure in the movie's appropriately sentimental ending, which suggests that the only true love Garland ever experienced (aside from that of her children) was given by audiences.

Aided by prosthetics including a false nose, Zellweger's performance gathers the necessary force. A collection of tics, outbursts, displays of sincerity and vulnerability create a character who spent a lifetime taking morning pick-me-up drugs that she would counter with late-night sleeping pills.

The mannerisms that Zellweger employs make sense; they become Garland's mannerisms; her sometimes sharp motions suggest a person buffeted by ferocious gusts of inner turbulence.

Director Rupert Goold makes the most of Zellweger's transformation and the movie also benefits from the fact that Zellweger does her own singing. She's not Garland, but Zellweger works hard to sell Garland numbers such as Get Happy and puts brassy, entertaining showmanship into the musical numbers that she performs.

Make-up and singing aside, Zellweger hits home when it counts. When Garland calls young Lorna Luft (Bella Ramsey) from a London phone booth, Zellweger joins Garland's vulnerability to a level of self-realization that's heartbreaking.

Maybe this small and sometimes limited movie was inevitable. The figure of Garland was destined to dwarf any story about her and that happens here. Judy stands as a portrait of Garland at the end of a rainbow, one in which the promised pot of gold wound up being empty. You wonder whether the woman who had played Dorothy Gale, a character who awakened the dreams of so many, had lost the capacity to wish for herself.

She's back -- and she's pregnant

Renee Zellweger reprises her role as Bridget Jones. The results are decidedly mixed.

I don't know about you, but I haven't breathlessly been awaiting another Bridget Jones movie, although I have missed Renee Zellweger's presence on the big screen. Zellweger hasn't appeared in a movie in six years.

I suppose it was inevitable that Zellweger would return to movie action by reprising her role as a British woman who first stole hearts in 2001's Bridget Jones's Diary (good) and followed with 2004's Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason (not so wonderful).

These days, Bridget works as a TV news producer. Even with an established career, she's still wondering whether her life ever totally will jell. On the night of her 43rd birthday, she ponders the question in her apartment -- alone and in PJs.

The movie quickly introduces the men in Bridget's life: two of them.

As a reluctant attendee at a music festival, Bridget meets Jack (Patrick Dempsey), a billionaire who has made his fortune in the computer-dating business. For Jack, romance can be reducible to algorithms.

Bridget also reacquaints herself with the charmingly diffident Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), one of her flames from the first two movies.

Bridget sleeps with both men, becomes pregnant and then agonizes about which of her lovers might be the father of the expected child.

Director Sharon Maguire, who also directed the first movie, isn't working in subtle mode. Laughs are derived from bits such as the one in which Bridget falls face forward into the mud that has turned the outdoor musical festival into a swamp.

Lots of ink has been spilled about Zellweger's appearance. I won't spill any more, but this edition of Bridget Jones finds everyone looking a bit long in the tooth for a supposedly rollicking rom-com.

Perhaps because he was busy acting his age in Florence Foster Jenkins, Hugh Grant is absent from this edition -- although the screenplay finds ways in which to refer to his character.

Emma Thompson, Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent turn up in generally negligible roles.

Some of the comedy involving Bridget's job is border-line smart. She feeds questions to an on-air personality played by Sarah Solemani, a woman who takes a far more pragmatic approach to romance than Bridget.

And, yes, the movie finds ways to add a culminating spasm of physical comedy, the unavoidable scene in which Bridget's water breaks. She's hurried to the hospital in the company of both men in her life: They struggle to carry her crumpling body through the hospital's revolving door.

I probably should report that a largely female preview audience found the movie a good deal funnier than I did, but I also must confess to a deep lack of concern about whether Bridget Jones's Baby bombs or booms, except to fret that a whopping success just might breed more such strained efforts.