David Lee/Netflix(LOS ANGELES) — Viola Davis made history Monday morning when the 2021 Oscar nominations were announced: The actress received a best actress nomination for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which marked her fourth Oscar nod. With her 2021 nod for playing Ma Rainey in the George C. Wolfe-directed drama, Davis is now the most-nominated Black actress in Academy Award history.
Davis was previously tied with Octavia Spencer, who has three Academy Award nominations to her name.
Davis’ other Oscar nominations include best supporting actress for Doubt, best actress for The Help, and best supporting actress, for Fences, the latter of which she won in 2017.
The actress celebrated her Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom nod and the film’s total five nominations with an Instagram post. “Absolutely thrilled!!” she wrote. “Congratulations to the whole @MaRaineyFilm team! Deserved!”
Davis will compete in the best actress category at the 2021 Academy Awards alongside Andra Day in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Vanessa Kirby’s Pieces of a Woman, Frances McDormand’s potrayal in Nomadland, and Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman.
The actress spoke to Variety last month about the idea of becoming the most-nominated Black actress in Oscars history, saying the accomplishment signifies how much more progress needs to be made.
“For me, it’s a reflection of the lack of opportunities and access to opportunities people of color have had in this business,” she told the outlet. “If me, going back to the Oscars four times in 2021, makes me the most nominated Black actress in history, that’s a testament to the sheer lack of material there has been out there for artists of color.”
Sweet Talk Publicity Tik Tok star Lathan Warlick is teaming up with Florida Georgia Line‘s Tyler Hubbard on a new song.
The rapper from West Tennessee will release “My Way” on Friday, which is described in a statement as a cross between “acoustic samples” and “surging beats” that is centered around the theme of “coming together to live every day like a weekend.” Lathan and Tyler co-wrote the song with RaeLynn, Blake Hubbard and Jarrod Ingram.
The singers have been teasing the track on social media, including a TikTok video that shows them singing along to the song in the car. “If I had it my way/Every day would be a Friday/We’d be riding with the windows down,” Tyler can be heard singing over a hip-hop beat.
“With this single, we really had it our way. It was so great working with Tyler! This song is how we’d both spend our Friday, living free and having fun,” Lathan says.
“I’m team Lathan all day — I was a huge fan before, and I feel like I have a new brother after this,” Tyler adds. “We wanted to write a fun one that had a good, positive feel. It’s a summer jam. I just envision everybody riding around with the windows down, blasting this song, and forgetting all their worries for a little bit.”
Lathan was discovered through Tik Tok by Granger Smith last year, the country star featuring him on a remix of “That’s Why I Love Dirt Roads.” Lathan also sang with Matt Stell on “Over Yonder.”
Lathan’s debut EP featuring a variety of country collaborations is expected to be released this spring.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” – Warner Bros. Pictures(LOS ANGELES) — Streaming has unarguably changed the game of home entertainment, and when it comes to this year’s Oscar contenders, that’s no exception.
In years past, many movies that go on to earn nominations played in limited release in major markets only, like New York and Los Angeles. Add the pandemic shutting theaters down nationwide, and streaming became key for studios.
It’s no surprise then that a recent Fandango survey of more than 2,000 movie fans revealed roughly 70% have seen more awards contenders this year, because of streaming, than they ever had.
In fact, even before the nominations were announced, nominated movies like News of the World and Promising Young Woman topped last week’s on demand titles from Fandango’s streaming service, Vudu. On-demand viewing has made virtually the entire slate of nominees ready for watching at home, including Minari, which was nominated in six categories, and Promising Young Woman, which earned five.
Streamers definitely leveled the viewing playing field this year. Netflix produced 10-time nominee Mank, as well as The Trial of the Chicago 7, which earned six nominations, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which netted five noms, and Hillbilly Elegy, which was twice nominated Monday.
Similarly, Amazon Studios’ Sound of Metal boasted six Academy Award nominations: its One Night in Miami, three; and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, two.
Warner Bros.’ Judas and the Black Messiah earned six nominations. Like Tenet, which earned two, Judas came to streaming on HBO Max on the same day as its theatrical release because of the pandemic’s stranglehold on theaters.
Disney+ saw its streaming releases Soul and Mulan earn three and two nominations, respectively.
Days before Mickey and her husband Grant Savoy welcomed son Grayson in February, a video surfaced online of Wallen using the racial slur, prompting his label, Big Loud Records, to suspended his contract indefinitely while several radio stations across the country removed him from their playlists.
In a series of tweets, Mickey condemned Morgan’s use of the word and shared that she receives “vile comments” daily on social media.
“The hate that I got after I called it out, it was really bad. It caused me to go into early labor,” Mickey told Entertainment Tonighton the red carpet at the 2021 Grammy Awards Sunday, where she was the first Black solo female artist nominated for Best Country Solo Performance for her striking single, “Black Like Me.” “The day before I gave birth, I was literally in bed clinging to my mom and my husband because of how horrible it was.”
She adds that being a mother “changes everything” and that she is working to make the world a safer and more accepting place for her son by using her voice to call out racism, in addition to lifting up other artists.
“I just want the world to be better for him so that he doesn’t have to go through what I went through and what many of us go through,” she explains. “The pain that we’ve gone through, I don’t want him to have to go through that. So I’m going to fight for that.”
Mickey also delivered a powerful performance of “Black Like Me” during the show.
(PHILADELPHIA) — Former NFL players Kevin Henry and Najeh Davenport are seeking to intervene in the upcoming court-ordered mediation between the NFL and the class counsel representing former players in the league’s landmark concussion settlement program, arguing that class counsel “cannot adequately represent the interests of Black former players on the issue.”
In a motion filed before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Monday, attorneys for Henry and Davenport took aim at Seeger Weiss, the prominent plaintiffs’ law firm that negotiated the terms of the original settlement, alleging that “the discriminatory status quo has emerged and persisted on Class Counsel’s watch.”
“Class Counsel Seeger Weiss cannot be solely entrusted with eradicating a discriminatory practice that it has had a role in effectuating, has allowed to continue, and does not view as discriminatory,” wrote the attorneys, led by Cy Smith of the firm Zuckerman Spaeder.
A spokesperson for attorney Christopher Seeger, one of Seeger Weiss’ leading partners, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, following an ABC News investigation into allegations of racial bias in the program, the federal judge overseeing the settlement sent the league and Seeger Weiss back to the negotiating table “to seek to address the concerns relating to the race-norming issue” that critics say has skewed compensation for some football-related head injuries along racial lines.
The NFL has consistently defended the settlement and its protocols, and in response to questions from ABC News, Seeger initially issued a statement saying that his firm had previously “investigated this issue” and “not seen any evidence of racial bias in the settlement program.” The following day, however, Seeger added that it was his view that “race-based demographic adjustments should be eliminated” from the settlement program, and he pledged to “fight for the rights of Black players to have [their] claims rescored” if improper adjustments were found to applied.
In Monday’s filing, Smith seized on the apparent discrepancy.
“It is not realistic,” Smith wrote, “to expect that concerns about race-norming will be addressed effectively by parties who do not view the current use of race-norming as a problem.”
Seeger has also been a target of the group of wives of former players who have organized their own effort to end race-norming in the concussion settlement program. The group, which launched a Change.org petition that has garnered nearly 50,000 signatures, has urged the judge overseeing the settlement to remove Seeger as class counsel.
“We demand that you choose an impartial attorney of record, one that will fight for the rights of ALL players, not just the NFL and their deep pockets,” they wrote.
Seeger’s spokesperson has not responded to ABC News’ multiple requests for Seeger to discuss his position regarding the mediation in an on-camera interview.
At the crux of the controversy: The NFL’s concussion settlement program manual recommends the use of a “full demographic correction,” in which a player’s cognitive test scores are compared to average scores, or “norms,” for supposedly similar demographic groups, and then adjusted to account for expected differences in age, gender, education — and race.
The practice of adjusting test scores for race, widely known as “race-norming,” is in use across several different medical fields as a supposed safeguard against misdiagnosis. But because these “norms,” as used in a neuropsychology context, assume that the average Black player starts at a lower level of cognitive functioning than the average white player at the outset of their careers, Black players need to show larger cognitive declines than white players to qualify for compensation.
“What the NFL is doing to us right now … when they use a different scale for African-Americans versus any other race?” former NFL running back Davenport told ABC News. “That’s literally the definition of systematic racism.”
In response to questions from ABC News, an NFL spokesperson issued a statement in February saying that the concussion settlement, which has paid out more than $800 million to retirees and their families to date, was “agreed to by all parties, with the assistance of expert neuropsychological clinicians and approved by the courts more than five years ago” and “relied on widely accepted and long-established cognitive tests and scoring methodologies.”
“The settlement seeks to provide accurate examinations to retired players,” said the spokesperson, “and thus permits, but does not require, independent clinicians to consider race in adjusting retired players’ test scores as they would in their typical practice.”
But ABC News uncovered emails between clinicians who evaluated former NFL players for compensation through the program in which they contend they were all but required to apply race-based adjustments to players’ cognitive test scores and express concerns that the league’s protocols discriminate against Black players. ABC News was also able to obtain a data analysis that suggests that the impact of the practice on payouts could be significant, making it much more difficult for Black players to qualify.
In Monday’s filing, attorneys for Henry and Davenport claim the NFL and Seeger Weiss were presented with evidence “at least as early as November 2018” of the discriminatory impact of race-norming in the settlement program, but neither of them “has lifted a finger” to address it since.
And, the attorneys argued, it was the lawsuit filed by Henry and Davenport this past August, which the judge recently dismissed as “an improper attack on the Settlement Agreement,” that alerted the court to the issue in the first place.
“If [Henry and Davenport] had not begun litigating the race-norming issue, Class Counsel and the NFL would never had brought it to the Court’s attention,” the attorneys wrote. “[Henry and Davenport] should be allowed to participate as parties to ensure that the NFL and Class Counsel address the Court’s concerns fairly and comprehensively.”
David Lee/Netflix(LOS ANGELES) — Viola Davis made history Monday morning when the 2021 Oscar nominations were announced: The actress received a best actress nomination for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which marked her fourth Oscar nod. With her 2021 nod for playing Ma Rainey in the George C. Wolfe-directed drama, Davis is now the most-nominated Black actress in Academy Award history.
