Courtesy of A24(LOS ANGELES) — The film Minari is getting a lot of buzz this awards season — some saying it has a very good chance of winning some gold at the Oscars. Star Steven Yeun was nominated for best actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and he tells ABC Audio the script went far deeper than most roles he sees for Asian men in Hollywood.
“Usually I read stories from that point of view and they’re oftentimes still trying to explain itself or justify itself through something outside,” he explains. “But this one was just a story of this family and it really mirrored something that I connected to deeply so.”
Minari, which is about a Korean-American family moving to the south to start a farm, is based on the early life of its writer and director Lee Isaac Chung, who shares that he really wanted to flip the perspective of most stories you see about Asian families in the U.S.
“For me and my family growing up, we weren’t the foreigners. You know, we we were Coloradans moving to Arkansas and we had our contained world in our trailer home,” he says. “And any time we stepped outside, we’re dealing with the other and those are the people in our community. So there’s a shift in perspective there that I was kind of working with what it was like to be us.”
“And in the end, you find out we’re all the same. We’re all human,” he adds.
In addition to Minari‘s buzz, co-star Yuh-Jung Youn was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, a moment she described as “unreal.”
“It’s unreal to me. I’m not a Hollywood actress,” she says. “Hopefully people will just enjoy this movie.”
(GREENVILLE COUNTY, S.C.) — Since late fall, 60,000 students and teachers across Greenville County, South Carolina, have been filing into the classroom for school the old-fashioned way: in-person, five days a week.
They’ve done it, Greenville superintendent Burke Royster said, by enforcing mask wearing, hand washing and social distancing — mostly by about 3 feet with plexiglass barriers when 6 feet isn’t possible — using high-quality ventilation and launching their own contact-tracing program.
Royster said he believes his schools have lower transmission than its surrounding community — a finding that is supported by research.
“I think it simply reinforces that this is a workable, viable solution,” Royster said of his school’s mitigation methods.
Greenville County is one of many examples across the U.S. of schools that have charted their own path forward since fall in the absence of a clear federal standard on what it means to reopen a classroom safely.
That all changed Friday when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the first time issued specific steps schools could take depending upon their level of viral transmission in the community.
Still, since Friday’s release, health experts, teachers unions and political pundits have continued to debate whether the guidance is too strict or not strict enough, particularly when it comes to its suggestion of 6 feet of social distancing in “red” zones.
Districts like Greenville that have already reopened are unlikely to retrofit their plans precisely to fit the new CDC guidance, nor does the CDC have the power to enforce its recommendations. Still, other schools that haven’t reopened yet remain at a standstill, finding the guidance too stringent to meet completely.
“I know that not everybody was happy with how the school guidance read,” Rochelle Walensky, the new CDC director picked by President Joe Biden, said in a JAMA interview on Wednesday.
“I sleep at night because I know that it was science-based and it was that children and teachers who go to school based on what we recommended could and should be safe,” she added.
But in the days since it was announced, it’s become clear that the CDC’s input didn’t settle the debate.
Dr. Joe Allen, director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, took issue with the CDC connecting school reopening with coronavirus transmission, which he doesn’t believe accurately predicts how safe schools will be.
The key factors to keeping schools safe are good masking, ventilation and hand hygiene — regardless of case count in the area, Allen said.
“If we do these basics, we know we can keep kids and adults safe in schools,” he said. “What happened is that CDC layered this other level on top — these community spread metrics — and they are so strict or conservative that it’s unlikely any of these metrics will be met for the remainder of the year.”
Allen and his colleagues have also pushed back on the CDC’s guidelines to keep students 6 feet apart, which parents and schools have also argued would be impossible to do if everyone returned in-person, given the number of students and the size of the classrooms.
“We want to encourage as much distancing as possible, but we have to recognize the extreme and devastating costs and consequences of having millions of kids out of school, and that the 6-foot rule is what’s keeping a lot of them out of school,” Allen said.
The CDC insists in its guidelines that infections in schools “reflects transmission in the surrounding community.” The CDC also has maintained since the beginning of the pandemic that 6-feet of distance is what’s been proven to work. And, its guidance also suggests other ways to “layer” mitigation, such as surveillance testing of staff and students.
“I wouldn’t even say we did the best we could,” Walensky said of the plan, which pulled research from schools in the U.S. and Europe that have been open since the fall. “We did the best that science could inform.”
Walensky also said she has hope that the recent decline in cases nationwide will allow schools to be “a little bit more liberal in terms of what we’re able to do to bring the kids back to school safely.”
When the guidance was released last week, 90% of school districts were in the red zone, an area the CDC deemed unsafe for in-person learning in middle or high schools unless all other mitigation efforts were strictly maintained. That number has now fallen to 75%, Walensky said.
Other health officials and advocacy groups have praised the guidance, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which called it “right on target.”
“These public health protocols should continue to be the model schools follow as they increasingly transition to in-person learning,” Lee Savio Beers, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement after the guidance was released.
Former CDC Director Rich Besser said the CDC guidelines show a path forward.
“The science shows that if schools have what they need and are able to decompress classrooms, ensure people are wearing masks, do some screening, improve ventilation — you can have kids in classroom learning, very safely, even before you have vaccination of staff and teachers,” Besser told ABC’s “Good Morning America” after the guidelines were released. “That gives me hope.”
“You have to get the numbers down in communities and those are moving in the right direction as well,” he added.
In Greenville, the superintendent of schools has seen another benefit to bringing kids back to the classroom: widespread mask-wearing because the teacher said so.
“Every day, if you count the students that are in person and our employees, that’s over 60,000 people that for somewhere between seven and nine hours a day are doing what the CDC, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and medical experts say they should,” Royster said.
His district has continued to see cases rise dramatically over school breaks when students are free to spend that time in the community without stringent mitigation measures, Royster said, but fall within a week of students returning.
To Allen, there’s clear science to back up Royster’s anecdote.
“What we’ve seen in the data is that when kids are in school with good control measures in place, this can actually be an environment that’s where risk is controlled for both kids, as well as the teachers and other adults in the school,” Allen said.
Given the unsettled debate, even after the CDC released its long-awaited guidelines, reporters and public health experts have consistently asked the Biden administration for clarity. Conservatives have used the debate to criticize Biden for issuing restrictive guidance despite his initial pledge to open schools within his first 100 days.
But the Biden administration has struggled to navigate the debate, attempting to walk a fine line between telling reluctant teachers to return to school while also trying to jumpstart the nation’s education system.
In December — prior to Biden’s inauguration — he announced that “if Congress provides the funding we need,” he would work to see that a majority of schools would open in his first 100 days of office. After taking office, his press secretary said that could mean being in-person just one day a week, but Biden clarified at a CNN Town Hall on Tuesday night that his goal is now to get K-8 students back to school five days a week.
The goal raises questions, however, about how a majority of students can return to school in the next two months if 75% of the country currently falls under the “high-transmission” category. Under the CDC guidelines, much of the county would remain in virtual or hybrid learning until case numbers declined.
On vaccines for teachers, the White House has also confirmed that they do not believe teachers need to be vaccinated before returning to school, though they recommend teachers be prioritized for vaccine eligibility.
Ultimately, however, the White House and the CDC said it’s still up to local school boards.
“What we’re trying to do is evaluate the risk of COVID in the school, a potential outbreak … versus the counterfactual, which is all the education loss, all of the food security loss, all of the mental health,” Walensky said.
“I think a year from now, we’ll start understanding all of those losses and we’ll really need to think about what the risk we were willing to take at the time.”
ABC News’ Sophie Tatum contributed to this report.
Jay TrevinoCody Johnson will be the subject of an upcoming documentary called Dear Rodeo, chronicling his time as a bull rider on the Texas rodeo circuit and tracing how that journey led him to country music.
Ahead of the film’s release, the singer shared a sneak peek of the trailer on his Instagram.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be the Lone Ranger,” he says at the opening of the clip. “I always had those heroes…Because he’s always the good guy. He’s always the larger-than-life guy that walks in the room.”
Dear Rodeo takes its title from a song of the same name that’s included on Cody’s 2019 album, Ain’t Nothin’ to It. The singer subsequently released a duet version of the song with Reba McEntire, who shares his affinity for the rodeo life: As a kid, she was a barrel racer.
“I always thought everybody wanted to be a cowboy or a cowgirl,” Reba says in the documentary trailer. “It’s a way of life that’s very romantic. It’s honesty. It’s mother nature. It’s what God gave you.”
There’s no word yet on a release date for the Dear Rodeo documentary.
Robert Voets/ 2020 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.(LOS ANGELES) — After news broke that the CBS comedy series Mom is ending after its current eighth season, star Allison Janney took to Instagram to reflect on her time on the show.
“Getting to be part of MOM these past 8 years…showing the laughter, love and hope that can come with recovery, has been one of the great honors of my life,” she wrote.
Janney went on to thank everyone involved with the show, including executive producers Chuck Lorre, Gemma Baker and Nick Bakay, as well as the writing staff “for giving us these wonderfully flawed and lovable characters to bring to life.”
She paid tribute to the “amazingly talented actors I got to act with everyday!!!”: Mimi Kennedy, Jaime Pressly, Kristen Johnston, Beth Hall and William Fichtner. Janney also made sure to shout out her former co-star Anna Faris, who exited the show last year just days before production began on season eight.
“And last but not least all of our extraordinary fans!!!” she wrote. “Thank you for all of your support over the years.”
Mom is CBS’ longest-running comedy series currently on the air. The series finale is set to air May 6.
ABC/Sami Drasin(LOS ANGELES) — Michael Bolton knows that “Love Is a Wonderful Thing,” so maybe that’s why ABC has tapped him to host a new show that’s all about romance.
The crooner will co-host The Celebrity Dating Game alongside New Girl actress Zooey Deschanel. Like the original Dating Game from back in the day, each contestant will choose their date from a hidden panel of three bachelors or bachelorettes, based on their responses to the contestant’s questions.
However, this time around, the contestant choosing a date is a celebrity. The bachelorettes and bachelors will have the opportunity to guess the star’s secret identity based on clues, questions and “special parody performances” courtesy of Michael.
The eight-episode show is being filmed in L.A.; a premiere date will be announced at a later time.
Courtesy of A24(LOS ANGELES) — The film Minari is getting a lot of buzz this awards season — some saying it has a very good chance of winning some gold at the Oscars. Star Steven Yeun was nominated for best actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and he tells ABC Audio the script went far deeper than most roles he sees for Asian men in Hollywood.
