Movies

Chadwick Boseman might not have landed an Oscar this year, but the 2021 MTV Movie & TV Awards are giving him the posthumous honor he deserves. The Black Panther star, who died last August at just 43 years old after a long but private battle with cancer, won Best Performance in a Movie on Sunday (May 16) for his role in Netflix’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. In the film adaptation of the beloved August Wilson play, Boseman plays Levee Green, an overconfident musician who plots to leave Ma Rainey’s band and score his own record deal. The scene-stealing performance was also Boseman’s final film role. “Chadwick’s impact is everlasting, and we are eternally grateful for the ways his presence and his art have changed the wor...

Back to the Future, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and… To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before! The voters for the MTV Movie & TV Awards have decided the Netflix original film has earned its spot among other classic Hollywood trilogies. They proved it by crowning the third installment, To All the Boys: Always and Forever, as Best Movie during the awards ceremony on Sunday (May 16). The film’s star, Lana Condor, along with To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before author Jenny Han and producer Matt Kaplan, came out onto the stage to accept the Golden Popcorn. “Thank you for all the fans who voted. Thank you, Netflix. Jenny, thank you for trusting us with your books. Without that, we wouldn’t be here,” said Kaplan during his short speech, ...

It was three days before Christmas when the actress Jessica Barden received an Instagram DM from Kelly Oxford, the New York Times best-selling author of When You Find Out the World Is Against You. This wasn’t out of the ordinary — the two had struck up a friendship online about five years ago after Barden discovered Oxford’s writing — but the content of the message certainly was. “Hey, I’ve written a script. It’s about one of the passages in my book,” it read. “We have to film it in Los Angeles in the summer because I have kids. Let me know if you want to do it.” “I was like, this is the most iconic job offer I’ve ever gotten,” Barden says over Zoom from Sydney, Australia. The 28-year-old’s career has included standout performances in the dark comedy The End of the F***ing World and the ed...

Is your popcorn buttered? Are your fingers tired from voting for all your faves? Don’t worry — the 2021 MTV Movie & TV Awards are only a few weeks away, which means it’s almost time to settle in and watch the biggest names in film and television get honored. And there’s even more good news: Leslie Jones will be your host for the evening. By the way, did you watch the Oscars on Sunday? Jones sure did, and her running commentary on Instagram helped make sense of all its head-turning moments, like Glenn Close doing “Da Butt” dance (“I know COVID has forced us to do things, but…”) and Daniel Kaluuya shouting out his parents for having sex to make him (“Look at the mom!”). At the Movie & TV Awards, we won’t be wondering w...

Heading into the 2021 Oscars, few narratives were as seemingly clear-cut as the likelihood of Chadwick Boseman winning a posthumous trophy for Best Actor. His dynamic turn in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was made all the more potent by the fact that it was his final film role, completed before his death in August 2020. It wasn’t just fan wishing, either. Some light tweaking of the show’s typical order of awards seemed to point to a Boseman celebration — why else would producers have chosen to end the night by giving out Best Actor and bumping up usual closer Best Picture to third-to-last? Instead, the award went to Anthony Hopkins for his devastating performance in Florian Zeller’s The Father, a temporally disorienting and fragile portrait of an elderly man’s desc...

“Something’s Coming,” and that “something” is Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated big-screen remake of West Side Story — which viewers finally got a sneak peek of during this year’s Academy Awards. Never one to back down from a challenge, Spielberg has chosen to adapt one of the most beloved and popular shows of all time as his first musical in his almost 50 years of directing. While originally scheduled to be released in December 2020, Spielberg’s West Side Story will now hit screens one year later, in December 2021, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the original film’s release. The remake stars Rachel Zegler as Maria and Ansel Elgort as Tony, along with Brian d’Arcy James as Sergeant Krupke. Rita Moreno won the Oscar fo...

By Deepa Lakshmin At the insistence of Bong Joon-ho — whose Parasite swept the Oscars last year with four wins — the five visionaries nominated for this year’s Academy Award for Best Directing had one not-so-simple task ahead of the 2021 show Sunday night (April 25) at Los Angeles’s Union Station. They had to answer the question: “If you have to explain to a random kid on the street what directing is in 20 seconds, what would you say?” For Chloé Zhao, it’s about “shedding the skin of who we think we are and walking in another person’s shoes.” Her Nomadland, which landed her the Oscar for Best Director and features real-life nomads, does exactly that. It gives you a look at what it’s like to live a lifestyle on the road where you’re not homeless, exactly, but “houseless,” as the film’s...

By Deepa Lakshmin Yuh-Jung Youn, who plays the incomparably comical grandmother Soon-ja in Minari, started her Oscars winning speech by calling out presenter Brad Pitt (“Where were you when we were filming?!”) and ended it with a tribute to her kids deserving of its own standing ovation: “This is the result, because mommy works so hard.” It was a cheeky and charming way to wrap her off-the-cuff speech accepting the Academy Award for Actress in a Supporting Role, one of several historic wins that went down Sunday night (April 25) at Union Station in Los Angeles. Youn is the first Korean actress to take home an Oscar in an acting category, and though the Academy clearly sees her talent, she credits her win to a splash of good luck. “I don’t believe in competition,” she said, addressing fello...