Critics Choice Awards Nominees Offer an Escape from Troubled Times

variety.com:

Zoe Hewitt It’s easy — and perhaps a bit lazy — to posture that 2021 was a year like no other. In fact, not only was there a global pandemic, but the angst over film, theater attendance and the future of entertainment went along in lockstep.

As the Hollywood awards season marches on with the Critics’ Choice Awards taking place on March 13 at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel, the productions up for consideration include different elements of escapism while steadfastly sidestepping an exact replication of the current pandemic, a paradigm also set by the past.Ryan Lintelman, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History entertainment curator, points out that theater owners worried about the future of their business during the 1918 flu pandemic as well, wondering if audiences would favor intimate fireside chats at home over the big screen.

And, just over 30 years later, theater owners had a new worry: television. “That’s when [movie] productions switched to color,” says Lintelman. “It was a way to compete with television.

You’re watching black and white at home [but] if you come out to the theater and pay, you can see color.”Some of that transitional period was exemplified in “WandaVision” as the show cycled through traditional sitcom conventions, including the change from black and white into color. “WandaVision” earned four Critics’ Choice Award nominations, including limited series.