Comfort food: the Oscars nominations are not nearly as radical as they think they are
Mank is a gorgeously rendered monochrome fantasy about the genesis of Orson Welles’s classic 1941 movie Citizen Kane, and the role played by its co-writer Herman Mankiewicz, played by Gary Oldman; it is now the frontrunner, surging ahead with 10 nominations, notably in front of Chloé Zhao’s stunning docu-fictional road movie Nomadland, Sound of Metal, with Riz Ahmed as the drummer losing his hearing, Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah, about the FBI’s killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, the dementia drama The Father, with a heartwrenching performance from Anthony Hopkins, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, an exceptional tale of Korean immigrant farmers in Reagan’s America) and Aaron Sorkin’s egregious liberal-patriot drama The Trial