Oscars 2021 H.E.R. Oscar Triumph & Leslie Odom Jr’s Contender Okay, let’s have it. How did we feel about the musical performances being in the pre-show? Pros & Cons? Cons – it’s still kind of a weird enterprise, isn’t it? The live performance that isn’t a competition – that is, the songs are in competition, but the performances By Duana • Apr 26, 2021 10:37 am
Oscars 2021 Amanda Seyfried Comes To Play This woman is underappreciated. Full stop. I don’t mean as an actress, although possibly that too. But consider this – when you google Mank (after you say “MANK!” to yourself, as is obligatory) do you know what’s listed first under ‘People Also Ask’? “Is Mank Boring?” Imagine that’s By Duana • Apr 26, 2021 09:16 am
Oscars 2021 Carey Mulligan’s Oscar Playbook I have no idea what Carey Mulligan’s feelings are about her awards show season back in 2010 when she was nominated for An Education. She was 100% the new kid, and I don’t know if she was happy to be along for the ride, or thought it was By Duana • Apr 26, 2021 08:27 am
Oscars 2021 Andra Day’s Initial Oscar Outing I think it’s probably for the best that this year went the weird, semi-corporate way that it did. If it had been one of the ‘regular’ Oscar seasons, one of the narratives that would have been pushed loud and long (even more than it was) would have been the By Duana • Apr 26, 2021 07:06 am
Show Your Work Podcast Show Your Work: Amanda Gorman & The Pressures of Perfection The Amanda Gorman spread in the May issue of Vogue, complete with two different covers, is, of course, stunning – not surprising, maybe, based on Gorman’s style (and the fact that she signed with IMG not long after her performance at the Presidential Inauguration launched her into the celebrity stratosphere) By Duana • Apr 15, 2021 02:24 pm
Name Nerd Her Name Is Thandiwe The May issue of British Vogue features an interview with cover star Thandiwe Newton – and the entire piece is framed by that once-omitted ‘w’, and the correct pronunciation, ‘Tan-DI-we’. The explanation in the piece is that it was ‘carelessly missed out’ from her first credit, which seems both overly generous By Duana • Apr 06, 2021 01:18 pm
Style The Golden Globe Triumphs of Regina King It is very late and lazy to be using “what can’t Regina King do?!” as a framework for a piece – I mean, late in the night, but especially late in her recent run of media domination, even if One Night in Miami didn’t get any recognition last night. By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 11:13 am
Golden Globes 2021 Maya & Kenan & Barb & Star & The Hoodie Once we all dispensed with the pretense that the Globes was going to be fun or glamorous or in any way functional, the unintentional joys appeared, mostly in wardrobe form (and yes, it was mostly men who felt entitled to not GAF) but neither Bill Murray’s cabana shirt nor By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 09:09 am
Golden Globes 2021 Amy & Tina: Separate Coasts, Same Rhythm Did you notice that the Globes kept calling them “Amy & Tina”? No last names, because at this point, they don’t need them. Not in showbiz generally, but not at the Golden Globes specifically, where they’ve had essentially a casual residency, shared with Ricky Gervais, over the past By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 07:18 am
Golden Globes 2021 The Golden Globes Didn’t Bother To Make a Television Production What’s the most common critique of the Golden Globes? I mean, the overarching one (not the one that occurred this weekend when it became clear they have zero Black members to the point where they all remember the last person who applied, and was rejected, somewhere in the 2010s. By Duana • Mar 01, 2021 06:47 am
Name Nerd Duana Names: Man vs. Infant – You Win! Dear Duana, My childhood best friend alerted me to your column and we mutually decided I should write in. I was joking that I HAD to find a name by the time her new baby is born in September. Not for the purpose of being arbitrarily competitive with a baby By Duana • Feb 24, 2021 03:51 pm
Maple Leaf Are You There, Judy? Thanks! I’ve made a point of reading Judy Blume books to my kid. That wouldn’t have even been worthy of writing down 20 years ago, but now that there’s been an explosion of kid and YA- lit, these books are somehow not seen as essential extracurricular texts, never By Duana • Feb 19, 2021 03:26 pm
TV Updates Why Claudia Conway is on American Idol Obviously the TikTok generation, and those who become stars there, know the unwritten rules and customs better than any of us ‘olds’; in ten years time, they’ll have created an entirely new media landscape to befuddle us, based on self-generating everything, especially your image. Self-generation is why Claudia Conway By Duana • Feb 17, 2021 03:15 pm
Top Reads Charisma Carpenter Outlines On-Set Abuse By Joss Whedon Charisma Carpenter is a great name. In the late 1990s, in what was then called stuff akin to ‘the teen TV boom’, there were many sudden household names, generally the stars of the show or movie (with a subset of three named stars like Chad Michael Murray, Rachael Leigh Cook, By Duana • Feb 11, 2021 03:38 pm
TV Updates SAG Awards TV Noms – Discuss Once again we’re splitting discussion of these nominations into TV and Film, and so the actual nominations process, which used to be “televised”, deserves a mention – solely inasmuch as Daveed Diggs’ panic at not being able to add Lily Collins to the IG Live was so real it gave By Duana • Feb 04, 2021 01:08 pm
TV Updates The Golden Globes TV Nominations Are Embarrassing Look, the most generous-to-neutral observation that I can make about these nominations is that there are an awful lot of nominees whose names start with C. The category for Best Actress in a Drama includes Colman, Comer, and Corrin. You know who it doesn’t have? Coel. Yeah, I know By Duana • Feb 03, 2021 11:09 am
