AFOS Blog Rewind: Selma

After directing Selma, the 2014 movie that won a Best Original Song Oscar for the Common/John Legend track "Glory," Ava DuVernay has, in addition to being the first filmmaker to ever inspire a Barbie doll based on her likeness, racked up an intriguing bunch of directorial credits. She directed the 2016 Netflix documentary film The 13th and the first two episodes of the OWN drama Queen Sugar (a show she also wrote for during its first season), and she signed up to direct the forthcoming Disney adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic sci-fi novel I remember reading as homework in grade school (here's how long ago it was when I read Wrinkle: the cover artwork on my copy was the version that had the disembodied head of a Darkseid lookalike encased in a crystal ball). The following is a repost of a February 5, 2015 discussion of DuVernay's breakout film in the mainstream. Selma, a historical film about civil rights activism, will continue being timely, especially in a year that will inevitably see an increase in activism against both America's next president (God, those last three words sound like the title of the world's shittiest reality show, which is fitting because reality TV-loving idiots are among the ones who put him and the likes of Omarosa in office) and his inflammatory rhetoric.

The Selma Oscar snubs have disappointed all of us moviegoers who were mesmerized by director Ava DuVernay's third feature film, a historical drama about the civil rights movement's push to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, via civil disobedience and legal strategizing. But Larry Wilmore, currently the only African American host on late-night TV and hardly a stranger to the struggles of bringing more diversity to Hollywood (he was the creator and original showrunner of The Bernie Mac Show and he helped showrun the first few episodes of Black-ish this season), said something enlightening about the Selma snubs, and it's helped me feel a little less disappointed about those oversights. The host of Comedy Central's solidly funny Nightly Show said to the Hollywood Reporter that awards at the end of the day don't really mean as much as making sure a black female director like DuVernay gets a shot at making a movie ("That, to me, is more important; the other stuff is gravy," said Wilmore).

Laura Benanti's Melania Trump impression on Colbert is the funniest satirical encapsulation of the surreal, so-white-it-makes-Lawrence-Welk-look-like-106-&-Park shitshow that is the 2016 RNC

Like I've said before, whenever there's a news story that involves race, I've lately found myself saying, "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say." The controversy over Melania Trump's 2016 Republican National Convention speech sounding exactly like Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic National Convention speech may not be tied to a thornier current subject like racially motivated bullying or police reform, but her act of plagiarism is yet another example of a white woman stealing from a black woman, so I was wondering when The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore would distinguish itself from other late-night comedy shows and point out how the former supermodel's RNC speech reeks of cultural appropriation. The Nightly Show did not disappoint.

Larry Wilmore perfectly rips apart the idiotic "All Lives Matter" crowd

For a couple of years, whenever moments of appalling racism would dominate the news cycle for an entire week, I'd think to myself either "I can't wait to hear what Totally Biased has to say" or "What would be Jon Stewart's exasperated but largely funny response to all this, and could he please not sing again like he tried to do at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear?"

Well, Totally Biased doesn't exist anymore (although a couple of weeks ago, Totally Biased alums W. Kamau Bell and Hari Kondabolu started joining forces again for a new podcast, Politically Re-Active, so Kamau has now hosted so many different 30-to-120-minute shows in the podcastosphere that he makes Guy Smiley look like a lazy douche), and Stewart left The Daily Show in the hands of Trevor Noah. So these days, it's "I can't wait to hear what Larry Wilmore has to say" or sometimes "How will Noah's non-American and more global perspective handle this one?"

Samantha Bee and Larry Wilmore delivered the most satisfying late-night responses to the Orlando massacre, and, whoa, you can say "fuck" unbleeped on TBS after 9pm now?

Last Saturday's terrible massacre at an Orlando gay nightclub, the worst mass shooting on American soil, led to a range of mournful responses from late-night TV hosts the following Sunday and Monday nights. But two of those segments stood out because of one host's genuine anger over lax gun laws and the other host's emphasis on the troubling fact that this massacre was a hate crime targeted at the LGBT community in the middle of Pride month (and at a time when the community has won several legal battles against anti-gay conservatives over civil rights), a fact that homophobic conservatives try to ignore in various ways, like the way one of those right-wing morons said to the press that the massacre isn't a hate crime. Wait, what? It isn't a hate crime? Of course it's a hate crime, fucknuts. Saying it's not would be like saying, "You know that Texas chainsaw massacre? Pfft. I saw the aftermath. It was nothing. It was just a Texas paper cut."

Samantha Bee was often a terrific Daily Show correspondent (like in the remote where she mischievously tricked pro-lifers at the Republican National Convention into saying the word "choice"), but it wasn't until she performed a hilarious one-woman version of the Fox News bloviation fest The Five that I realized she could carry an entire show on her own. And that show has turned out to be a doozy: the weekly Full Frontal with Samantha Bee on TBS. Right now, Bee is, out of all the ex-Daily Show correspondents who are anchoring either their own half-hour current-events shows or the actual Daily Show itself, the one who's most deftly enacting her former Daily Show boss' memorable final-show message to everyone who's wary of bullshit, whether that steaming pile comes from the news media or from either the right or even (on occasion) the left: "The best defense against bullshit is vigilance, so if you smell something, say something." She doesn't care how angry she gets in her scathing takedowns of either misogynists, the anti-feminism crowd or the right, and it's a beautiful thing ("I don't fucking care if you like it," Amy Poehler's famous reply to Jimmy Fallon's mock-squeamish objection over some abrasive thing she ad-libbed in the SNL writer's room, comes to mind).