Happy Saturday From the Loop

Good morning, Saturday Matinee friends! As you’re reading this, Chris and I are somewhere in the middle of running something called the PV Loop. There’s one long road that goes around the periphery of the peninsula where we live, and we’ve always pondered running it. Some of it is flat. Some of it is hilly. Much of it features spectacular ocean views. And all of it comes out to a total of 21 miles. Wish us luck! And in case you’re wondering, last weekend’s Rose Bowl Half Marathon was a lot of fun: Not my fastest, not my slowest, but we had cool weather and a great crowd.

Also this past week, Oscar nominations came out. In case you missed the livestream we did at our Breakfast All Day YouTube channel, you can catch up with it here. “Oppenheimer” led with 13 nominations, followed by “Poor Things” with 11, “Killers of the Flower Moon” with 10 and “Barbie” with eight. But! Missing among those “Barbie” nominations were Greta Gerwig in the best director category and Margot Robbie in best actress, which is truly mind-boggling. To borrow a line from another Gerwig movie, it’s the titular role.

These aren’t snubs. I’m not a fan of the word snub, because it suggests that a bunch of people get into a room and decide to exclude someone, and that’s just not how voting works. It’s math. It’s the way it shook out, and in a year full of rich performances, who knows whether a handful of votes separated Robbie from Annette Bening in “Nyad.” But Robbie will be at the Academy Awards on March 10 as a producer on “Barbie,” which is among the 10 nominees for best picture, as will Gerwig, who received a best adapted screenplay nomination alongside her husband and longtime collaborator, Noah Baumbach.

Some of the nominations I’m really happy about, though, include “Past Lives” in best picture, Sterling K. Brown in the supporting actor category for “American Fiction,” Germany’s “The Teachers’ Lounge” in the international feature category, and the Japanese monster movie “Godzilla Minus One” for visual effects. I literally let out a pre-dawn whoop when I saw that one. We’ll have another livestream closer to the Oscars where we’ll go through every category and make our predictions. More details and a link for that coming soon.

And speaking of “Godzilla Minus One,” you have a really cool opportunity to see it in black and white for one week only. They’re calling it “Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color,” and it’ll be in theaters until Feb. 1. We loved this movie for its mixture of astounding actions sequences and legitimate emotional stakes — Alonso even put it on his top-10 list — so I can’t wait to see it projected this way this weekend with Chris, Nic and one of Nic’s friends. You can find out more details and get ticket information here on the film’s official website.

As for this week’s movie reviews, here’s what we discussed on our YouTube channel. If you’re already a subscriber, thank you! If not, we’d be honored to have you join our community, especially as we get closer to the Oscars.

• MILLER’S GIRL. Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman play a high school student and creative writing teacher who fall into an ill-advised flirtation. This movie is dripping with Southern Gothic style and some truly clunky dialogue. In theaters.

• THE SWEET EAST. Talia Ryder also plays a precocious high school girl in this rambling indie road trip movie. It’s got a great supporting cast, including Ayo Edebiri, Jacob Elordi and Simon Rex, but the episodic structure is hit-and-miss. In theaters.

• Also, we did our MOVIE NEWS segment live for the first time ever. Media influencer and disruptor that I am, I have invented something entirely fresh and exciting: the live newscast. We had so much fun doing our Oscar livestream this week, we wanted to find other opportunities to interact with our viewers. And this live news chat went so well, we’ll probably keep in doing it this way. Keep an eye out for days and times.

Plus! Alonso and I appeared together on “Press Play With Madeleine Brand” on KCRW, one of the two NPR stations here in LA. It’s always a pleasure to share the air with him in various places, and Madeleine is the coolest. We review these movies and more, if you’d like to listen here.

One of my favorite things we do at Breakfast All Day is a service called Table for One, where we give our viewers and listeners a chance to review a movie with us. Here’s how it works: You choose the movie, we meet up online to review it, then we send you the video to keep. We’ve done dozens of them and they’re so fun — a great way to get to know our folks, and often see movies for the first time or discover ones we’d never heard of before. (If you’d like more information, visit ChristyLemire.com.)

One of our repeat Table for One guests who we’re always happy to see, Jesse Inman, recently picked 2023’s “No One Will Save You,” which is streaming on Hulu. And I’m so glad he did. It’s a lean, high-concept sci-fi movie executed with great energy and ingenuity. Kaitlyn Dever stars as a young woman living alone in quaint isolation in small-town Louisiana. When aliens invade, she must use all her resources to figure out how to survive. The brilliant conceit in writer-director Brian Duffield’s film is that it’s almost entirely wordless. Dever is excellent, expressing so much through her face, breath and physicality. And the creature effects are spectacular. Check it out if you haven’t, and let me know what you think.

We lost a legend this week with the death of Norman Jewison, the veteran Canadian director and seven-time Oscar nominee. It’s mind-blowing to consider his range over the past several decades, from "Fiddler on the Roof” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “In the Heat of the Night” and the original “Rollerball.” He’s probably best known for “Moonstruck,” the classic romantic comedy charmer that made major movie stars of Cher and Nicolas Cage. But no matter the genre, a strong sense of social justice drove his work. Jewison was 97.

My longtime friend, fellow SMU Mustang and RogerEbert.com colleague, Matt Zoller Seitz, had a lovely discussion with “Moonstruck” writer John Patrick Shanley about working with Jewison and the filmmaker’s legacy. You can read their conversation here.

One last thing! Monday is our latest Lunch Date live chat for our Patreon friends. This is another one of my favorite things we do: an intimate monthly discussion over Zoom about whatever’s going on in our lives, the movies we’re seeing, recent travels, etc. It’ll be at Noon PST on Jan. 29. If you’d like to find out more and join or upgrade to the Lunch Date level, details are here on our membership page. It’s a really good group and we’d love for you to be a part of it.

Thank you so much for coming back again and reading my newsletter! I hope these have been entertaining, helpful, or some combination of the two. Have a great rest of the weekend, and I’ll see you again next Saturday.