By
Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted from Wilmette, USA January 24, 2018)
Lupita Nyong’o
couldn’t have picked a better time to be in Hollywood.
Since her
award-winning performance in ’12 Years a Slave,’ she’s had the chance to be in
a slew of remarkable films and made an impact in every single one of them. From
her amazing presence in the Star Trek franchise (in ‘the Last Jedi’ film and TV
series) to The Jungle Book and the Queen of Katwe, they have all been leading
up to her co-starring in the much-anticipated Marvel comic make-over movie,
Black Panther which is opening worldwide on February 16th.
Lupita was
clearly meant to be Nakia in the very first Black super-hero film, based on the
first black super-hero comic book character created by the inimitable creative
Stan Lee.
But Lupita
is by no means the only woman of color who is making waves in Hollywood.
Indeed, this would seem to be the hour not just of the Hollywood women who’ve
been spearheading the ‘Me Too’ and ‘Time’s Up’ movements that took off once
celebrity women started pointing fingers at sexual predators like the media
mogul Harvey Weinstein.
Lupita wasn’t
nominated for anything special this year, but a number of other black women
were. For instance, Octavia Spencer, (who last year won awards for ‘Hidden
Figures’ along with Ta... Henson) is up for best supporting actress for her
role in ‘The Shape of Water,’ which just received the most Oscar nominations
including Best Picture.
The R&B
singer Mary J. Blige was nominated in two Oscar categories for her role as
Florence Jackson in ‘Mudbound.’ One was for Best Supporting Actress (which
would also constitute the first time in the history of the Academy Awards that
two women of color were up for the same Oscar). The other for composing and
singing the Best Original Song.
Then too,
the screenwriter for Mudbound is Dee Rees, another African-American woman, and
she has been nominated in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay.
But even
beyond the Academy Awards, Black women in Hollywood are making their creative
capacities known. The most exciting film of this kind (apart from Black Panther
which also features Angela Bassett and a number of new faces like Florence
Kasumba, Letitia Wright and Sydelle Noel) is another upcoming film directed by
the African-American filmmaker Ava DuVernay, the award-winning sci-fi fantasy ‘A
Wrinkle in Time’ in which Oprah Winfrey will co-star as Mrs Which.
DuVernay
choice to direct this classic children’s fantasy by Madeleine L’Engle is a
far-cry from her previous films. She’s best known for her directing of ‘Selma’
about the historic civil rights march led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s.
Oprah was
also in that film and proved her full range, not just as a Talk Show icon but also
as a serious actor with broad theatrical power. The first and only African
American female billionaire also recently won the Cecil B. DeMille Life Time
Achievement Award in January at the Golden Globes in Hollywood, additionally
making her the first Black woman to receive that award.
Ava also
made the controversial documentary film ‘13th’ about race, injustice,
the 13th amendment of the US Constitution, and the mass
incarceration of men of color in the US. So for her to scoop the directorial
role of this $100 million Disney film project is rather extraordinary. But ‘A
Wrinkle in Time’ also has a number of women of color in the cast, including Storm
Reid and Gugu Mbatha-Raw among others.
Yet there
are other films starring women of color this season which haven’t done quite as
well as others. But it was exciting to see ‘Proud Mary’ starring Taraji P. Henson
(who costarred with Octavia Spencer in ‘Hidden Figures’ and also costars with
Terence Howard in the TV series ‘Empire’) break out into new territory. It
might be termed ‘terrible’ terrain since she plays a gun-happy hit woman who
develops a conscience which of course complicates her life in a big way.
Taraji is
just as ‘good’ a hit woman as Charlize Theron in ‘Atomic Blond’, if not better!
But the film had a rather sappy, to-be-expected (albeit touching) ending that
may not be attuned to the tenor of these ‘black women rising’ times. All the
same, Taraji is one of a constellation of outstanding Black women actors. Some
are African American, a few British Black and some like Lupita African. Lupita
is sometimes billed as Mexican or Mexican-African. But we Kenyans know Lupita
is pure African and proud of it
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