Viola Davis wins lead actress SAG award

Viola Davis accepts the Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role award for ‘The Help’ onstage during the 18th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at The Shrine Auditorium on January 29, 2012 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images) LOS ANGELES (AP) – The Deep South drama “The Help” won three prizes Sunday at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, including best actress for Viola Davis and supporting actress for Octavia Spencer. “The Help” also claimed the guild’s ensemble award, the show’s equivalent of a best-picture prize. Davis and Spencer won as black maids going public with uneasy truths about their white employers in 1960s Mississippi. Jean Dujardin won the lead-actor honor…

Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer Lead 2012 Oscar Nominations

The Help costars could continue the tradition of making Hollywood history for Black actors. (BET) This morning, the list for the best and brightest in film for Hollywood was finally announced.  Viola Daviswas nominated for Best Actress for her role as the stoic, proud maid Aibileen Clark in the 1960s period drama The Help. Davis’ stiffest competition comes from her friend, two-time Academy Award winner and now 18-time nominee Meryl Streep her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. If Davis wins the Best Actress award, she will become only the second African-American woman in history (after Halle Berry in 2002) to receive that award in the Academy’s 84-year history. The Help costar Octavia Spencer received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her turn as the…

If ‘Red Tails’ flops, are black audiences to blame?

Cuba Gooding, Jr. in ‘Red Tails’. ‘Red Tails’: If George Lucas war film flops, are black audiences to blame? (theGRIO) Red Tails, a biopic about the heroic Tuskegee Airmen fighter pilots, and arguably the most expensive film ever made with a predominately African-American cast, opens this weekend. The film has arrived with enormous hype and has renewed debates about whether ‘black films’ can succeed at the box office. Rightly or wrongly, the financial success, or lack thereof, of Red Tailsmay be seen as a barometer of black audiences’ buying power. Which begs the question: if Red Tails fails to meet expectations will African-American filmgoers be to blame? The film, which was largely financed by legendary Star Wars director and producer George Lucas, boasts…

Octavia Spencer wins actress honor at Golden Globes

Los Angeles (CNN) – Michelle Williams carried home a Golden Globe Sunday night for her portrayal of movie legend Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn.” “Thank you to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for putting in my hand the same award that Marilyn Monroe herself won over 50 years ago,” Williams said as she accepted for best actress in a film comedy or musical. Since the Globes separates dramas from comedies — unlike the Academy Awards — Williams was not competing against Meryl Streep, whose portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in “Iron Lady” may be her toughest Oscar competitor. Streep’s Globe category — best actress in a drama film — was set…

Samuel L. Jackson, Highest Grossing Actor of All Time

Samuel L. Jackson Sets Guinness World Record As Highest-Grossing Actor (NBC) And to think, he’s just begun what could be his biggest franchise yet. Even without counting the whopping nine-picture deal he struck with Marvel Studios to take the role of superspy Nick Fury from cameo (in “Iron Man,” ”Iron Man 2,” ”Thor,” and “Captain America”) to prominent featured player (in the upcoming “The Avengers” ) to, potentially, the lead in his own spin-off, Samuel L. Jackson is still the highest-grossing actor of all time, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. His impressive filmography has collectively brought in more than $7.4 billion. The 63-year-old actor has a knack for snagging roles in colossal movies and franchises, like “Jurassic Park” (which grossed…

Nick Cannon Doesn’t Want His Kids to Be Entertainers

“I just want them to strive for something greater than entertainment. I’m one of those believers in teachers, professors, heart surgeons. That’s what I’m rooting for. If I could get a scientist, that’d be amazing.” — Nick Cannon tells People that he hopes Morrocan and Monroe, his babies with wife Mariah Carey, will find their way to other careers outside the entertainment industry. Wow, Nick sounds so down-to-earth saying this. I wonder if Mariah agrees? Below, Nick almost makes me swoon with some words about his wife. “Everybody knows I’m obsessed with my wife. I’m married to Mariah Carey. It doesn’t get better than that. I’d be an idiot to do anything wrong. I worship my wife. Have you seen…

‘The Help’ Puts in Overtime at No. 1 With $19M

LOS ANGELES (AP) – “The Help” stayed on the job over Labor Day, finishing as the No. 1 film for the third-straight weekend. The acclaimed drama about Southern black maids speaking out during the civil-rights movement took in $19 million over the long holiday weekend, according to studio estimates Monday. That raised the film’s domestic total to $123.4 million. “The Help” also has begun rolling out overseas, pulling in $1.7 million in its first international market, Australia. A DreamWorks Pictures release distributed by Disney, “The Help” has been a triumph amid a rush of late-summer duds that ended Hollywood’s busiest season. Another batch of new movies this weekend packed in modest to small crowds. “‘The Help’…

‘The Help’ Author Sued by Brother’s Maid

‘The Help’ author Kathryn Stockett sued by brother’s maid for basing best-selling book on her (NYDailyNews) JACKSON, Miss. — Lawyers for Kathryn Stockett want a judge to dismiss a lawsuit that accuses the author of “The Help” of basing a character on a real-life maid who works for Stockett’s brother. The best-selling book “The Help” was made into a movie that opens Wednesday. It’s based on relationships between white families and their African-American maids in the segregated South of the 1960s. A driving character in the novel is a woman named Aibileen. A real-life woman named Ablene Cooper, who said she works as a maid for Stockett’s brother, filed a lawsuit in February that accuses Stockett of…

Jennifer Hudson’s New Title

Jennifer Hudson to author new weight loss book (ET) You can add author to Jennifer Hudson’s stable of job titles. The actress, singer, mother, and weight loss success story just inked a book deal to share the ins and outs of her reported 80 lb weight loss. Due out January 2012, the book will be published through Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group, and has not been titled. Hudson has seen her weight go up and down before her days as the big girl on “American Idol.” She reportedly lost 20 pounds prior to her audition, gained for her Oscar-winning performance in ‘Dreamgirls,’ and a few years later had her first child. The Weight Watchers spokesperson…

Jennifer Hudson Tries Something New In Her Career

Jennifer Hudson Joins ‘The Three Stooges’ As Sister Rosemary (HuffPost) An Oscar winner, “American Idol” star, and now: slapstick nun? Jennifer Hudson’s brief yet wildly successful career has taken another interesting turn, as the singer/actress has officially signed on to play a nun in the Farrelly Brothers’ big screen remake/retelling of “The Three Stooges.” According to Deadline, she’ll play Sister Rosemary, one of three nuns who run the orphanage in which the young stooges are housed. She completes the trio of sisters; previously, Jane Lynch was cast as Mother Superior, while Larry David will go in drag as Mother Mengele. Sofia Vergara will also play a role in the film, as a temptress who tricks the three goofballs….