"Moonlight" director Barry Jenkins has gone from virtual unknown to eight Academy Award nominations; "Saturday Night Live" finds comedy gold in the Trump presidency; veteran R&B singer William Bell has two Grammy nods for his comeback album.
Barry Jenkins: from relative unknown to 8 Oscar nominations for 'Moonlight'
At the Telluride Film Festival last September, Barry Jenkins' film, “Moonlight,” seemingly came out of nowhere.
only had one other feature-length film under his belt. But “Moonlight” was the breakout hit at the very festival where Jenkins volunteered for years. It’s a coming-of-age movie that focuses on a young black man in three stages of his life. He’s struggling to understand his sexuality while growing up in a tough Miami neighborhood.
“Moonlight” received almost universal acclaim from critics when it opened in theaters. And now it has eight Academy Award nominations, including for Best Picture. Jenkins is also nominated for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. (The film is based on an unproduced play by Tarrell Alvin McCraney.)
Jenkins recently sat down with The Frame host John Horn and his co-host of The Awards Show Show podcast, Kyle Buchanan. They talked about how Jenkins is handling the hectic pace of his first Academy Awards experience.
Interview Highlights:
On being an artist in a time of social and political turmoil:
My priorities haven't changed and I was reminded of that ... I have this tweet pinned at the top of my Twitter page and it's my first short film that I made 12 years ago. I look at that film and I see everything that I want to keep doing going into the future. What it reminds me of is, as I'm contextualizing the pieces that are in front of me now, I do view them differently because I don't want to waste anybody's time [who's] going to walk into the cinema or sit down before a television and watch the images that I'm creating. I want to create those images in a way that I think will be productive and I think will speak to the truth of what life is like now in America.
My first student film, written/directed shortly after 9/11. A reminder to myself to channel this energy, to create.
— Barry Jenkins (@BandryBarry)
My first student film, written/directed shortly after 9/11. A reminder to myself to channel this energy, to create. https://t.co/88LQDaOdPz
— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) November 10, 2016
In a nutshell. This short is about an Arab-American couple washing American flags on the night shift. It was written by me, a young black dude from the projects, and it was meant to show empathy for Muslim-Americans in a post 9/11 America. I'm trying to be objective about my own work, but I do think it's a beautiful example of someone trying to identify with someone else's experience.
On shooting "Moonlight" where he grew up near Miami:
We were filming in one of the most notorious housing projects in Miami, which also is one of the most tight-knit communities in Miami. Getting in there was a process. We were shooting at night [where] the drug dealers shoot out the street lights. But we had all these movie lights so the parents were like, This is great! We can let our kids come out at night because you guys are here. Then, over the course of making the film, because I'm not at video village a lot — I like to be beside the [cinematographer], beside the actors — I look back and Adele Romanski, our producer, had given video village over to the kids in the neighborhood. They're watching me direct. I saw in their faces something I didn't see when I was their age: they saw a guy from the neighborhood making this movie and creating this art. It was one of the few moments where I realized not the importance of the film, but the importance of the act in a certain way.
On showing the film to his mother, who in part inspired a drug-addicted character in the film:
When [the Academy Awards are] all done, I go back to Miami and I'll pop in a DVD and we'll sit down and watch this movie. I think that's how it's going to play out because she's read everything about it. She probably could read, scene-for-scene — based on all the reviews — all that happens in this film. But maybe she's waiting for me to be there with her to watch it. I'm nervous about it, but only because I remember what it was like on set to watch Naomie [Harris] perform these scenes. I can't imagine what it'll be like for [my mother] to watch.
SNL enlists Melissa McCarthy to turn up heat on Trump White House
We're just two weeks into the Trump administration and Saturday Night Live isn't pulling any punches.
On Saturday's show, Alec Baldwin was back with his Donald Trump impersonation, playing opposite a cast member in a Grim Reaper costume who was identified as President Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
But it was Melissa McCarthy who stole the show with her portrayal of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer:
Dave Itzkoff, culture reporter for The New York Times, joined The Frame to discuss how SNL is finding new relevance in its confrontation with the administration.
Interview highlights:
On what's different about the approach the show is taking with political satire this season
The person that they are commenting on, who happens to be the President of the United States, is noticing what they're doing and has, up until a couple of weeks ago, been firing back at them on his Twitter account. Which is kind of unprecedented for, really, any President of the United States to seem to take umbrage at what any comedy show is doing. But this one in particular, for them to have gotten under his skin in the way they have, is really uncharted territory.
On the show's past history with Donald Trump
It's a pretty complicated dynamic that of course SNL, or any comedy show, wants to be able to satirize public figures and political figures, in the way that we all enjoy the right to. But they also have a lot of history with Donald Trump, both in terms of having parodied him as a character on the show, [and] he has hosted a couple of times, as recently as when he was vying for the Republican nomination. That was controversial when it happened. Certainly on some level it seems to be important to [Trump] that they give him the respect that he feels he is due, and so the fact that they are mocking him at all, but doing so in a fairly cutting way, that's really clearly gotten to him.
On how what SNL is doing compares with other late-night shows
SNL has this huge advantage in the sense that they are a sketch-based show. With the exception obviously of the "Weekend Update" segments, you're not looking at a person sitting behind a desk and riffing off of the news. They're sort of pretending to recreate events or act them out in front of you, so the satire just takes on a different dimension. They can comment on people in ways that the other daily late-night talk shows can't.
'This Is Where I Live': Soul singer William Bell returns to his roots
Back in the 1960s, there were two major producers of soul music: Berry Gordy’s Motown assembly line in Detroit; and the grittier sounds that came out of Stax Records in Memphis. Stax built its sound around its house band, Booker T & the MGs, and a stable of songwriters that included Isaac Hayes.
And then, there was singer/songwriter William Bell:
The original Stax Records, we were like a family there. For teenage kids, it was like going to university for us because we learned our craft and how to interpret songs. It was like a family.
Bell never reached the fame of label mate Otis Redding, but he wrote and recorded some classic songs, including “You Don’t Miss Your Water.”
Now 77-years-old, Bell recently released a new album on the revived Stax label. It’s called “This Is Where I Live,” and it re-captures that classic Memphis soul sound.