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18 things to look forward to in 2018

18 things to look forward to in 2018

(CNN)Whether you’ve arrived at the finish line fresh and invigorated for another trip around the sun, or are so exhausted you may wheeze out your actual soul, 2017 is almost OVER.

Luckily, there are all kinds of cool and important things to look forward to in 2018 to mitigate all of the things you’ll inevitably come to loathe and dread as the year progresses.

So next time someone says, “Do we really have to go on living for another whole YEAR?” comfort them by mentioning these existence-friendly events, innovations and observances.

1. The Winter Olympics

Once every four years, the global powers of the world band together in an ongoing diplomatic effort to decide what, exactly, curling is and how it ever became a thing people did. 2018’s festivities will take over the city of PyeongChang, South Korea, for two weeks in February. One extremely chill story to look out for: The women’s Nigerian (!) bobsled (!!) team will compete, marking the first-ever time (!!!) the African nation is represented at the Winter Games. GET THEM A MOVIE NOW.

2. A royal wedding

Prince Harry and literal American dream Meghan Markle will get hitched in May. Reports are, it will be an intimate, casual ceremony at a rustic little chapel in Windsor Castle. Just your typical pastoral burlap-and-mason jar fête, you know. For Americans, it’s a fantastic excuse to wear a funny hat and drink alcohol before noon. As is tradition, the Brits will pretend not to care, but the sudden boom in royal wedding-themed collectible plates and caganers will prove otherwise.

3. Really, really good movies

If you want to make the most of 2018, you should probably just glue yourself to a movie theater seat. “Black Panther” comes for your soul in February, and anything it leaves behind will surely be snatched up by “Avengers: Infinity War” in May. Elsewhere, “A Wrinkle in Time” drops in March, “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” comes out in June and — this is the one you’ve all been waiting for — the awkward conclusion of the deeply unsexy “Fifty Shades” oeuvre will grace theaters in February, just months before it’s scheduled to show up in one of our 3 a.m. self-loathing Netflix binges.

4. The “Frozen” musical

“Frozen” hype is an infinitely renewable resource, and next year the feature-length earworm will come TO BROADWAYYY! While this is very exciting and cool, please remember to be safe. Seek immediate medical help for a “Let It Go” singalong lasting more than four hours.

5. The World Cup

Just because we’re not GOING doesn’t mean we can’t have a GOOD TIME, okay? This is like the royal wedding of soccer. We are not invited, it has nothing to do with us, but we’ll still wear silly hats and cheer like the loud, spectacle-loving people we are. Mark your calendars and choose your teams, America. June and July belong to the World (minus us) Cup.

6. Regular people going to the moon

In 2018, Silicon Valley startup Moon Express (slogan: “The Moon is Me”) says it’ll “definitely” land a craft on the moon, paving the way for a generation of rich space casuals to populate it like it’s the latest trendy New York City borough. If Moon Mission is successful, it would be the first private company to land a craft on the moon. The company’s final goal? To get folks on the moon and mine it for natural resources.

If this sounds like literal reach-for-the-moon talk, take this quote from Moon Express’ Chairman, Naveen Jain, as a chaser:

“We are really looking good and we are still hoping to launch the lander next year,” Jain told CNBC in November. “And when we launch and land on the moon, not only (do) we become the first company to do so, we actually symbolically become the fourth superpower.”

Haha, weird!

7. Must-see TV

It’ll be a good year to vegetate in front of your television or chosen device if and when reality gets unbearable. Steel yourself for more “Black Mirror” and “A Handmaid’s Tale,” as well as the last season of “Veep,” the return of “Westworld” and [checks giant Mayan calendar] Season 16 of “American Idol.”

Some noteworthy new shows to look out for: ” Black Lightning,” a “Dynasty” reboot and “The Alienist.”

As if the British monarchy hasn’t entertained us enough lately, Prince William and Duchess Catherine are expecting their third child in April. They’ve already done this twice, so royal baby fever is well past its half life. Here are some baby name odds for your amusement. We’ve got $100 on Henrietta or Boris.

10. Tesla’s truck stuff

WHERE ARE YOUR STEREOTYPES NOW, AMERICA? A pickup truck and other larger vehicle concepts from the eccentric duke of electric cars have been a long-rumored, oft-ridiculed concept. Even if trucks aren’t produced in 2018, we’ll get some solid details.

13. Maybe a new Game of Thrones book?

We predicted “Winds of Winter,” the next book in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” saga, would be released in 2017. It wasn’t. And with no new “Game of Thrones” set to bless our HBO logins in 2018, it’s going to be a long, content-free winter if George R.R. Martin doesn’t get on it and PUBLISH THE DARNED BOOK. George, you cruel master!

If that doesn’t happen, we can at least soothe our wounded hearts by re-reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which turns 200 next year.

15. A time capsule opening

The Helium Time Columns Monument in Amarillo, Texas, is a neat structure that not only commemorates the discovery of helium, it also serves as an extremely fancy version of a time-honored middle school tradition: The time capsule. When the monument was erected in 1968, a few time capsules were placed inside to be opened at 25, 50, 100 and 1,000 years. So, obviously, in 2018, the 50-year capsule will be opened, and we can all ponder the last half-century of progress with an equal mix of awe and regret.

16. A Titanic diving trip

Most people find the Titanic disaster at least marginally interesting, but if you’re one of the special few who’re really, REALLY into its history and lore (and you’re super rich), this news is for you. Starting in May 2018, super fans will get an opportunity to take diving trips to the wreck site. Sure, the underwater postmortem will set you back more than $100,000, but travel company Blue Marble Private says the price tag is actually equivalent, after inflation, to what first class Titanic passengers paid for their tickets way back in 1912. Cool! A little morbid, but cool!

18. Historical anniversaries

Lastly, let us mark our tenuous, yet immortal hope for the future by looking back at the past. 2018 will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. It will also mark the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

So that’s your goal for next year — do something in 2018 that our ancestors will observe fondly every decade or century for ages to come.

Hawking wasn’t just an animated character. He appeared several times in The Big Bang Theory, the idea he spent much of his life working on.

“You made an arithmetic mistake on page two. It was quite a boner,” Hawking tells Sheldon after reviewing a paper on the Higgs boson in a 2012 episode.

Hawking also played himself in a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, playing a poker game with the greatest minds in physics, including Einstein, Isaac Newton and Data.

“The uncertainty principle will not help you now Stephen,” Einstein tells Hawking. “All the quantum fluctuations in the world will not change the cards in your hand.”

There were also appearances on late night talk shows, like the time he kept making phone calls to Jim Carrey on the set of Late Night with Conan O’Brien back in 2007, and his recent bit with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight‘s “People Who Think Good” series.

“You’ve stated there could be an infinite number of parallel universes. Does that mean that there is a universe out there where I am smarter than you?” Oliver asked.

“Yes,” Hawking replied. “And also a universe where you’re funny.”

While Hawking kept busy making cameos on a host of television shows, he was played by other actors including Benedict Cumberbatch in 2004’s Hawking, and by Eddie Redmayne in 2014’s Theory of Everything.

Redmayne, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance, dedicated the win to people with ALS, and the Hawking family. Hawking allowed the use of his speech synthesiser in the film.

Hawking’s influence also extended to music, where he voiced part of Pink Floyd’s 1994 track “Keep Talking” and 2014’s “Talkin’ Hawkin’,” both sampled from a BT commercial.

Although theories on relativity and black holes established him as a genius, his prevalence in pop culture made him a modern star, the likes science hadn’t seen before.

The Shape of Water’s Oscars win is the triumph of a real artist and immersive cinema | Peter Bradshaw

Guillermo del Toro has created a richly sensual and dreamlike film that, in the end, seduced the Academy without being too threatening

At the end of a somewhat predictable evening, we were all longing for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway to work their anarchic magic, and start handing out the awards to the films that werent in the envelope. Perhaps for the sheer devilment, they could have given something to, say, Kathryn Bigelows powerful race drama Detroit, a highly plausible Oscar-worthy film, which the Academy hive mind mysteriously decided was worth precisely zilch and became utterly forgotten about. In the end, many deserving films got what they deserved, others didnt, the internal economy of awards season dictating, as it so often does, that the rich become richer. And it was hardly obvious that this was the year of radical change in Hollywoods sexual politics. As my colleague Benjamin Lee notes in his blog this years Academy Awards in fact garnered the fewest female winners for six years.

Guillermo del Toros escapist fantasy-romance The Shape of Water was the biggest winner, the story of a young womans love for a captured sea creature with best picture and best director, setting the official seal of approval on what is, by any measure, a beautifully made movie to which audiences have responded with distinctively sensual delight. It is a lovely piece of work, with a terrific performance from Sally Hawkins: you can get to the end of it, not quite believing that she doesnt say a word in the entire film, so commanding and eloquent is her presence. And yet in the end I couldnt quite swoon as much as everyone else and though this is a film which pays tribute to people who are different, it does so in the reassuring rhetoric of fabular unreality. There is something a little bit frictionless and unscary about The Shape of Water; though in progress, it has the eerie force of a dream. The Academy has gratefully submitted to its current and swirl.

From the acting awards, for me, easily the most satisfying is Allison Janneys barnstorming turn as LaVona Golden in I, Tonya: the dragon matriarch or icerink showbiz mom in I, Tonya, whose daughter Tonya Harding became an skating star and was then disgraced because of her ex-husbands assault on her rival Nancy Kerrigan. Like Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Janney plays an angry and unrepentant mother, and maybe the prevalence of mothers has been an under-recognised part of this years awards seasons, especially as Sam Rockwells racist cop in Three Billboards actually lives with his mother. (There is also Darren Aronofskys brilliant black comic provocation, Mother! overlooked, I am sorry to say, by the middlebrows and the sensible-shoe wearers of awards season, except of course to be mocked.) Janneys LaVona is a brilliantly nasty, funny creation, who is spared any spurious redemptive journey.

Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell got the best actress and best supporting actor Oscars for Martin McDonaghs jagged, angular, tonally unpredictable and for some objectionable black comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The success of this film and the specific successes of these two stars in these two roles perhaps raises the thorny issue of intersectionality. McDormand radiated star quality in the part of the woman looking for justice for her raped and murdered daughter. What also radiated was her characters radioactive loathing of the police and of the men who didnt and dont care about women. She is a resoundingly satisfying and powerful winner in the era of #TimesUp. But Sam Rockwells racist cop is permitted a disputed moral comeback, and it sometimes looked as if his racism was allowed into the film as set-dressing, to offset a drama of forgiveness to which race was essentially irrelevant.

The movies admirers have been in a kind of Mexican standoff with this objection ever since it has been aired on social media, although I accept the good faith in which McDonagh created this character. Perhaps the least successful part of the film is that which is most easily forgotten: the sad, slightly whimsically uxorious tale of Woody Harrelson and his wife, played by Abbie Cornish. I personally would have preferred the best actress award to go to Saoirse Ronan for that excellent film Lady Bird, which came away from Oscar night empty-handed. And best supporting actor should really have gone to Willem Dafoe for his outstanding performance in The Florida Project: a performance which had a subtlety, resonance and genuine depth.

Of these three aforegoing adjectives, I think I can only really assign resonance to Gary Oldmans impersonation of Winston Churchill in Joe Wrights watchable wartime drama Darkest Hour, which won him his widely predicted best actor Oscar. He was roisteringly entertaining and charismatic, and the latex mask within which he was working interestingly different from the real, lived-in faces of other Churchill performances over the years gave his face precisely that babyish, cherubic expression that reportedly made him a seductive figure in real life. It was a highly watchable entertainment: comfort-food wartime entertainment, perhaps, but with a terrific storytelling zing. What actually made it different was not Oldman, in fact, but the emphasis on Halifax, an excellent performance from Stephen Dillane.

The screenplay Oscars (and the foreign language Oscar) made sure that the really great movies were not overlooked. James Ivory was a thoroughly deserving winner of the best adapted screenplay Oscar for his excellent work on Luca Guadagninos masterly love story Call Me By Your Name. It is highly satisfying to see Ivory, a veteran of cinema, get an Academy award which is not a lifetime achievement gong (though he surely deserves one of those as well) but something to recognise his continuingly vivid, urgently passionate work right now.

Get Out was the film that I had been hoping against hope might actually win best picture. Well, it won Jordan Peele the Oscar for best original screenplay, which is excellent news. Get Out is a brilliant satire on race and the gruesome twist ending of post-Obama America which functions also as a scary movie, black comedy and an acting masterclass from its four leads.

Very often, the foreign language Oscar is an embarrassing misstep for the Academy. Not last night it wasnt. I was tipping Ildik Enyedis strange love story On Body and Soul for this, while saying that Andrei Zvyagintsevs searing Russian drama Loveless would have been the worthy winner. In the end, I was wrong both ways but fair enough. The Oscar went to Sebastian Lelios glorious A Fantastic Woman, the story of a trans woman whose grief at the death of her partner is compounded by the cruelty and indifference of society. It is a wonderful film.

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Elsewhere, there were other solid choices: Coco was the only possible choice as best animation, and this arguably could and should have been a best picture contender although it is hardly in the league of Pixar movies like The Incredibles or the Toy Stories. Roger Deakins rightly won best cinematographer for his superb work on Denis Villeneuves Blade Runner 2049, although this award, justified as it is, perhaps doesnt reflect quite how extraordinary a big-screen experience this film is.

Mark Bridges was also justly rewarded for his costume design on Phantom Thread but for me this is another point of niggling exasperation with this years awards. Paul Thomas Anderson created another brilliant film here: a really masterly piece of work with a performance by Daniel Day-Lewis which was a jewel of this years awards season. And yet it has been overlooked in favour of less interesting work.

Well, there we are. To return to The Shape of Water: however conflicted I feel about its triumph, it is certainly the work of a real artist, and someone who believes in immersive cinema, total cinema, cinema that enfolds you in a complete created world.

Science friction: can Netflix figure out its blockbuster problem?

Costly sci-fi films have received poor reviews but the streaming giant still has an eager audience in its vast subscriber base

The future hasnt been kind to Netflix. In the last two months, its launched three science fiction blockbusters Will Smiths orc cop adventure Bright, the shock assault The Cloverfield Paradox, and the bizarre Berlin-set Blade Runner-riff Mute each of which critics reacted to as though a cockroach crawled out of their TV (not one film managed to score over 27% on Rotten Tomatoes). A fourth attempt, Alex Garlands Annihilation, about five female explorers in a technicolor hellscape, received better reviews but Netflix still couldnt win. It scooped up theinternational distribution rights from Paramount, who lost confidence in the Natalie Portman cerebral chiller and decided to release it theatrically only in the United States, Canada and China. Netflix rescued the film for foreign audiences … who grumbled that theyd be forced to squint at Garlands giant, surrealist visuals at home on Netflix.

If Netflix could see into its own future, would it green-light each film again? Probably. Its already given the go-ahead to Bright 2, and just awarded a first look deal to the heavyweight producer of Transformers and World War Z and snatched another major studio film from the trash bin when Universal dumped the planet invasion thriller Extinction. Plus, last Friday as Mute tested wary audiences already primed to ridicule Paul Rudds handlebar mustache, Netflix announced it had won an expensive nine-way bidding war to produce another costly sci-fi flick, Life Sentence, in which convicts have their brains wiped to prevent them from repeating their crimes. Directed by War for the Planet of the Apes Matt Reeves, Life Sentence repeats the same high-concept, name-brand fantasia thats made Netflix duck tomatoes. And yet, the timing of the news feels pointed: Netflix knows exactly what its doing.

Beamed Reeves, Netflix is at the forefront of a new age in how storytellers are reaching an audience. Frankly, Netflix knows more than anyone about how people watch movies. However, the industry still doesnt know much about it. Before Netflix, a films success or failure was gauged by three numbers: its budget, its opening weekend and its total global haul. But when Netflix launched its streaming service a decade ago, it began to horde more sophisticated information. Who exactly wants to watch a movie about an orc not just which broad demographic, but which specific people sitting on their couch on a Tuesday? What are the viewing patterns even subscribers dont recognize? The key words they search, the films that make them watch other films, the scenes that make them turn a movie off?

We know what people like to watch, said Netflixs chief communications officer Jonathan Friedland when the company began to produce its own original content in 2011. It wasnt an empty boast. Netflix knew that there was an audience for their first show, House of Cards, because it had studied the overlap between David Fincher fans who also liked British miniseries. Plus, it didnt have to spend a fortune blanketing the country with ads. It could directly reach specific viewers with ten different online promos tailored to whether the target was more likely to click play for a story about a powerful woman, or for Finchers camerawork.

Since that first triumph, Netflixs subscriptions have quadrupled. Today, more Americans pay for Netflix than for cable television, and after an intensive international push, over half of Netflixs users live abroad. Its rightly been called a disruptive force in entertainment, as though founder Reid Hastings legendary annoyance at being charged a $40 late rental fee for Apollo 13 had mutated into a vengeance to destroy not just video stores, but traditional Hollywood itself. Meanwhile, though we know that Apollo 13s opening weekend box office was $25.3m, Netflix rarely trumpets financial data about its releases. Doomsaying reports claim that only 5m viewers watched Cloverfield Paradox in its first week. But crunch the numbers, and thats actually about as many people who bought a ticket to Apollo 13.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw in The Cloverfield Paradox. Photograph: Netflix/AP

Of course, the difference is that Netflix isnt trying to sell individual films. It wants to sell people on renewing their subscriptions or rather, not canceling them which is behind its strategy of taking risky swings. Sure, itd be great if the finished film was fantastic, and the companys investment in talented directors like Garland, Reeves and Mutes Duncan Jones means that it has good taste. Yet, what really matters is that people are talking about its orc cop flick, even if theyre just saying its a legendary disaster.

Traditional Hollywood studios struggle to sell full-price tickets to something iffy or complex like Annihilation or Extinction, an all-or-nothing push to inspire a trip to the theater, to make people make a choice. They have to scatter the film across 2,000 screens and spend major advertising money hoping the audience for it will hear, and care, that it exists. But Netflix embraces inertia. No ones going to cancel a subscription because one movie was bad. And hey, its fine if all people want is to sample 15 minutes of Will Smith grunting, Fairy lives dont matter, so they can join in the jokes. To Netflix, who needs less cash to reach a targeted audience and needs far less motivation from them its biggest danger in acquiring major studios cast-offs is the brand-tainting odor of being a dumpster diver.

Netflix has pledged to release 80 original films in 2018, a mix of small, quality films the company scooped up for cheap at film festivals and splashy, silly events guaranteed to get people tweeting, like the comedy Eggplant Emoji, about a teenager who loses his penis. Theres big money in giving people just enough excuses to maintain a low-risk subscription. Each month, Netflix makes nearly a half-billion in dues in America alone thats more than the entire domestic box office of Wonder Woman. For that money, they could make a high-profile disaster like Bright five times over, and still have enough pocket change for Oscar-nominated movies like Mudbound.

Perhaps to understand Netflix, we need to analyze their patterns just like theyve analyzed ours. The same key words keep coming up: strange, celebrity, curiosity, conversation. Whats more likely: that Netflix cant stop placing bad bets on costly science fiction films, or that these movies help them make money in ways the company isnt explaining? Maybe Netflix has the future figured out after all.