New shades of success SCREEN SCENE WITH GUY DAVIS
YOU may not know the name Victoria Mahoney but she made a little bit of history this past week.
A director best known for her work on episodes of TV shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Mahoney was this week announced as second-unit director on the currently untitled Star Wars Episode XI, the next instalment in the blockbuster science-fiction saga.
J.J. Abrams will be in the main director’s chair, but on a production of this size the second-unit director — generally responsible for supplementary footage — plays a sizeable part, often overseeing an entire shoot of their own.
And Mahoney is the first African-American woman to hold such a position in the 40plus years of the Star Wars franchise.
This announcement was one part of what shaped up as a very big week in AfricanAmerican arts and entertainment.
Rapper Kendrick Lamar also made history by being the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for music, receiving the prestigious award for his acclaimed album DAMN.
The Pulitzer board praised Lamar’s work for “its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life”.
And Beyonce once again reminded all and sundry that she’s the most innovative, electrifying and captivating artist working in popular music today with her live performance at the Coachella music festival in California.
The spectacle had fans and critics thumbing through thesauruses in search of superlatives.
Let’s face it, though, 2018 has already been a very big year in African-American arts and entertainment.
Get Out’s Jordan Peele became the first black screenwriter to win an Academy Award.
And the Marvel superhero adventure Black Panther has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide at the box office, making it one of the biggest hits of all time.
These are tremendous achievements, ones that indicate a greater and longoverdue level of inclusion, acceptance and recognition in an industry that could justifiably be seen as having paid lip-service to such notions in the past…even the fairly recent past.
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that intolerance or inequality have been wiped off the map as a result — as a society, we’ve still got so far to go in that regard.
Nor do I wish to come off as patronising in applauding the work of these artists and creators, especially given that the work of black artists and creators provides so many influential and inspirational cultural cornerstones in so many fields of expression.
But what’s so pleasing and so encouraging about this recent surge of mainstream recognition is that it’s a win- win. It results in greater exposure and additional opportunities for artists who may have been marginalised in the past.
And it broadens the horizons of punters on the lookout for something new and different to read, listen to or watch.
And that leads us to the TV series Atlanta, airing Friday nights on SBS Viceland and also available on the SBS On Demand streaming service. The brainchild of unfairly multi-talented actor-writerdirector-musician Donald Glover, Atlanta feels unique — the kind of distinctive, individual project that comes off as handcrafted rather than mass-produced.
In its first season, the series set up its story of smart but aimless underachiever Earn, played by Glover, as he tried to get his life back on track as the manager of his cousin, a rising hip-hop star (and part-time drug-dealer) with the stage name Paper Boi.
In its current second season, though, Atlanta — which wasn’t short of confidence and originality to begin with — has really hit its stride by sending the show’s core characters off on their own various storylines.
Some are heartbreakingly honest, some absurdly funny, some unsettling and strange to the point of scary.
Glover, who’s about to corner the market on suave with his performance as Lando Calrissian in the upcoming Star Wars movie Solo, has described Atlanta as “Twin Peaks with rappers”.
Now that’s a combination that may not be to everyone’s tastes. But this is a show that will reward and enrich the adventurous viewer.