Tag: Marty Supreme

The 2026 Oscars

I saw no more tthan 3 out of 5; 5 out of 10 films

My viewing of the 2026 Oscar-nominated movies has been rather pathetic. On Washington’s Birthday weekend in 1998, I saw five films, four of which were nominated for Academy Awards (Afterglow, The Apostle, LA Confidential, Mrs. Brown). But in all of February 2026, other than some shorts, I’ve seen exactly one, and it was at home on the 27th.

Part of it was the busyness, but also, many of the films I really wanted to view in the cinema were gone by the time my wife and I had time to see them. A couple are currently on Netflix, which I don’t have, and a few others are on other platforms. I may join Netflix for a month if I can figure out how to expand time.

Moreover, we haven’t watched much television of late. We STILL have Ken Burns’ American Revolution, a half-dozen Great Performances, and about a dozen Henry Louis Gates programs on the DVR. 

The * means I saw it. 

Best picture

Bugonia – I stalled at the chance to see this collaboration of director Yorgos Lanthimos and actor Emma Stone after the mediocre reviews of the 2024 film, Kinds of Kindness 
F1 – this one I saw, and I liked it better than I expected to
Frankenstein – missed it
Hamnet – I saw it and wished I could understand the dialogue better; For Your Consideration 
Marty Supreme  – I saw it, admired what it was trying to do, but didn’t particularly  like it
One Battle After Another – I missed it. My baby sister saw it and liked it a lot. 
The Secret Agent – missed it
Sentimental Value – ditto
Sinners – my favorite movie of the year; a record 16 nominations 
Train Dreams – I was looking forward to seeing this

A brief word about the movie Blue Moon

I’m mildly obsessed with the composers Rodgers and Hart. I know (and I bet you do too) many of their songs, although not necessarily the shows they came from. The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart is still in my record collection. And the Mamas and the Papas had three of the duo’s songs on their albums. 

So I needed to see the movie Blue Moon and the relatively tall Ethan Hawke’s transformation into the diminutive Lorenz Hart. Hawke was excellent as the talented, wordy, and alcoholically deludedlyricist on the night of the opening of Oklahoma! after Richard Rodgers had partnered with Oscar Hammerstein II.

In some ways, it was very much a play, with one set, the bar. Hart interacts with the bartender (Bobby Carnavale), writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), the pianist, and eventually Rodgers (Andrew Scott), as well as the young woman of his dreams, the 20-year-old college student (Margaret Qualley).

ACTING

Performance by an actor in a leading role

Timothée Chalamet, Marty Supreme
Leonardo DiCaprio, One Battle After Another
Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon (+)
*Michael B. Jordan, Sinners – playing TWO characters must be challenging
Wagner Moura, The Secret Agent

Performance by an actor in a supporting role

Benicio del Toro, One Battle After Another
Jacob Elordi, Frankenstein
*Delroy Lindo, Sinners
Sean Penn, One Battle After Another
Stellan Skarsgård, Sentimental Value

Performance by an actress in a leading role

Jessie Buckley, Hamnet
Rose Byrne, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Kate Hudson, Song Sung Blue – the last full-length movie I saw in a cinema was on January 19
Renate Reinsve, Sentimental Value
Emma Stone, Bugonia

Performance by an actress in a supporting role

Elle Fanning, Sentimental Value
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Sentimental Value
Amy Madigan, Weapons
*Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

Best animated feature film

Arco
Elio
KPop Demon Hunters
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
* Zootopia 2 – here’s the script

The rest of the categories

Achievement in visual effects

Avatar: Fire and Ash
F1 – I felt as though I was in the races
Jurassic World Rebirth
The Lost Bus – we saw this at home in the fall, which may have been to the film’s disadvantage. Still, we felt as though we were in the fire, especially in that antepenultimate scene.  
*Sinners – impressive throughout

Achievement in casting (a new and long-overdue category)

Hamnet, Nina Gold
Marty Supreme, Jennifer Venditti – the use of the non-actors was quite creative
One Battle after Another, Cassandra Kulukundis
The Secret Agent, Gabriel Domingues
*Sinners, Francine Maisler – my favorite, especially picking newcomer Miles Caton as Sammie Moore

I’m inclined to root for Sinners for most categories, including cinematography, costume design, directing (Ryan Coogler), original song (I Lied To You), and original screenplay. Its film editing was great, though F1 worked very well. I think the F1 sound effects were grand. 

I’m hoping to get a post out about the shorts I saw on February 28 before the Oscars on March 15. If I see One Battle After Another and/or Bugonia soon – they are both streaming – I’ll mention them as well.

Movie review: Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

My wife and I went to see the new movie Marty Supreme at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. It’s on many Best Picture lists. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film a 94% positive rating, says the director/co-writer Josh Safdie had “the uncanny gift of crafting extraordinary stories from life’s most mundane moments.”

This is a movie about “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” His greatness lies in his skill at ping-pong or table tennis. His “hell and back” is almost entirely of his own making.

It is very loosely based on a guy named Marty Reisman. Reisman acknowledged that some elements in the movie were accurate, including the scenes with the Harlem Globetrotters.

You want to root for the underdog in a sports movie, and ultimately, this is one. Rudy should make it on the Notre Dame team. Ray should have people come to his Field of Dreams. 

Or maybe it’s not. Critic Alan Zilberman wrote: “Safdie’s film is less of a sports drama and more of an anxiety-fueled nightmare, a sustained effort to put the audience into the mental and physical space of a fast-talking operator who only tells the truth when it is convenient.” True enough. 

Unfortunately, I found I didn’t care if Marty “made it” or not because Marty is an ass who uses his friends, his family, women, and total strangers to achieve his goal.  The fact that he hates his job as a shoe salesman, which he’s pretty good at, might have made him more likable. But no. 

Shark Tank!

The character I liked the most is rich guy Milton Rockwell, played by the Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who serves a demeaning yet oddly justified punishment. There’s a New York Times article, How Kevin O’Leary Made His ‘Marty Supreme’ Character More Cutthroat, which is an interesting read.

Director Josh Safdie likes to use non-actors in his films. He’d watched a TED Talk Pico Iyer  delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and “came away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952.” 

I will say that the table tennis play was reasonably entertaining. 

But at the end, with the seeming payoff, I didn’t care. I didn’t believe that the final event transformed Marty. Partly, the 2.5 hours were too long. The late, great Roger Ebert  noted that “no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.”

My blogging buddy J. Eric Smith wrote that he hadn’t seen Marty Supreme and won’t “Oscar voters (and the marketing shills who serve them) fall in love with certain performances/actors/musicians in ways that are absolutely inexplicable to me, often creating eye-rolling results in their awards. Currently/recently, among my film peeves, I’d say that the deeply, smugly, annoying Timothée Chalamet appearing as an Oscar contender/fave multiple years in a row is madness.” Sure, even though he spent an hour a day to get his acne-scarred face.

As someone who liked Chalamet in the Dylan film A Complete Unknown, I nevertheless get Eric’s point. The Rotten Tomatoes audience was only 83% positive about Marty Supreme. If you see it and like it, please let me know why.

Ramblin' with Roger
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