Queen Latifah's "Bessie"

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, when watching a particularly starry TV production, whether it's a movie or a miniseries, one wonders how it might have impacted the Oscar race if had been released on the big screen. Would Mike Nichols' epic Angels in America have made Jeffrey Wright an Oscar nominee back in 2003? Could Drew Barrymore have snagged Sandra Bullock's Oscar if Grey Gardens had gone to movie theaters? With the 2002 Supporting Actress Smackdown nearly upon us, I began to wonder how Academy Award nominee Queen Latifah might have figured in the 2015 Oscar race with her Bessie. After all, that HBO film is one of AMPAS's favorite types of buzzy titles, a famous musician's biopic with a cast full of prestigious names…

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Curio: The Art of Kadir Nelson

Curated by Nathaniel R

Since we rebooted Alexa's old series Curio we've been focusing on specific movies or themes but this week we want to spotlight a famous artist who is getting another well-earned round of attention at the moment, with big magazine covers celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement for both The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. His name is Kadir Nelson. The 46 year old painter, who's won numerous awards in his career has done album covers, stamps, book covers, magazine illustration, and children's books. He sells limited edition lithographs, prints, and autographed books at his shop but you can also purchase his books at Amazon and other retailers at regular prices if you don't have a big budget for art.

His art focuses on African-American history but he doesn't do much movie-related art. That said he did work on two movies, Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) and the animated feature Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) early in his career. We scoured his Instagram for a few movie/tv related pieces after the jump...

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The New Classics: Oslo, August 31

Michael Cusumano here for the 30th episode of The New Classics.

It was hard. Absolutely.

Scene: The Bucket List 
Halfway through Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31 we get an extended scene of the protagonist, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), sitting in a cafe and simply listening to the other patrons talk. He appears perfectly ordinary sitting there. Just a guy in a cafe. What we in the audience know, which everyone who meets him on this fateful day does not, is that Anders started the day by filling his pockets with rocks and wading into a lake, attempting suicide a la Virginia Woolf. He couldn't go through with it and spends the rest of the film teetering quietly on the brink...

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Almost There: Idris Elba in "Beasts of No Nation"

by Cláudio Alves

Spike Lee's latest joint, Da 5 Bloods, was released on Netflix last week and people are already talking about the possibility of Oscar glory. Delroy Lindo, in particular, is getting plenty of attention for what many call the best performance of his career. He's an early contender for the Academy Award. To observe such a reaction is to see how far Netflix has come in the past few years, effectively carving a place for itself in the Oscar race. It wasn't always like this and we need only look back at 2015 to find proof of it. Then, rewarding the cinematic excellence of films produced by streaming companies was still a relative taboo, a bridge too far for many awards bodies. 

If it weren't for the early resistance of AMPAS towards Netflix, Idris Elba would probably already be an Oscar-nominated actor…

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Oscars Delayed Until April 2021

Note: This article was written on a very crappy personal day and readers have complained that it is too petulant and that we have larger fish to fry right now (which is very much true). But this is a film/Oscars site so we couldn't not to discuss it. Nevertheless, we will try to keep a wider perspective next time we're upset with AMPAS. That chance will surely come again since to know the Oscars is a perpetual rollercoaster of elation and disappointment. -Nathaniel R

Swift on the heels of great Academy news, we get terrible news. The Oscars will not take place in February 28th as previously announced but will be pushed back two months to April 25th, 2021. (The nominations will be announced on March 15th, 2021 which means our April Foolish predictions now have an excuse for how long they're taking to finish) This also means they're pushing back the opening of the Academy Museum again. Now that will open in late April 2021 to coincide with the presumed Oscar afterglow...

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