When he couldn't get to his home in Italy after the March lockdown, George Clooney wound up hunkered down with his family in his three-acre Laurel Canyon compound and with no domestic help. When he wasn't doing dishes or laundry, or playing with his three-year-old twins, he was remotely finishing his seventh feature film as a director. `I had to take a six-month crash course in visual effects,` said Clooney, who is now calling from a beach house in Hawaii. `But it's not jam-packed with exploding things.

`The Midnight Sky` (December 23, Netflix) could return Clooney to Oscar contention for the first time since 2013 Best Picture-winner `Argo` (produced with his partner and frequent co-writer Grant Heslov and director Ben Affleck). That came one year after Clooney scored not only an acting nomination for `The Descendants` but also an Adapted Screenplay nomination for `The Ides of March` (with Heslov and Beau Willimon).

In a time when movie stars are scarce, Clooney is the rarest of breeds: He can get movies financed and greenlit (and TV series, like Hulu's `Catch-22`), even when they are not overtly commercial (`Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,` `Leatherheads,` `The Monuments Men,` and `Suburbicon`).

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Netflix approached Clooney to take on his most ambitious directing assignment to date with a dystopian sci-fi outer-space thriller, `The Midnight Sky,` with a budget heading toward $100 million. It meant tackling serious VFX for the first time as well as starring. `It's a real drag directing yourself,` he said at his London Film Festival career tribute in October - one of many this awards season, including MoMa December 7. (`The Midnight Sky` premieres via AFI on December 8.)