The “Mo’Nique Was Blackballed After Winning an Oscar For Precious” narrative has been an ongoing part of popular culture for just over three years. It began when the actress told The Hollywood Reporter that the film’s director, Lee Daniels, and producers, Tyler Perry and Oprah, were responsible for an industry-wide…
This weekend, Mo’Nique began a vocal crusade against gender and race pay disparity in Hollywood. She claims to have been offered $500,000 by Netflix for a comedy special, while “Amy Schumer was offered $11 million, Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock $20 million.” Her video opened the floodgates, and Wanda Sykes quickly…
Over the weekend, Mo’Nique, an Academy Award-winning actor and comedian, took to Instagram to call out Netflix for offering to pay her $500,000 for a comedy special while her fellow comedians and colleagues got considerably more.
Since winning an Oscar in 2010 for her devastating performance as an abusive mother in Lee Daniels’s film Precious, Mo’Nique has acted in just four films. In a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actress famously claimed it was because she had been “blackballed.”
In a breathtaking—but all too expected—display of unselfconscious privilege, Kylie Jenner revealed the key to the delicious Lip Kit swatches featured on both her Snapchat and Instagram accounts: her housekeeper. And no, she does not deign to identify her by name.
Mo’Nique, a documented philanthropic sandwich-buyer and the butch Ma Rainey of my dreams, does not want to hear anymore of this Oscars nonsense. What does she want? Equal pay.
While the world rightfully celebrates Ava DuVernay’s skills with Selma, we might want to stay tuned to director Dee Rees too. The creative force behind HBO’s Bessie, Rees cut her teeth on the heart-wrenching independent film Pariah that left me in a puddle of tears by the credits and she brought the same raw, subtle…
At a party in Los Angeles on Thursday, Solange performed a new song called “Rise,” written about the heady times in Ferguson and Baltimore.
After last week’s premiere of her new film Blackbird, Mo’Nique took photos with fans outside New York City’s Schomburg Center. But while almost anyone can nab a photo with a celebrity, real fans can work their way into even better souvenirs—like sandwiches and cash.
In the recent slew of Sony emails published on WikiLeaks, it was revealed that Ben Affleck, after appearing on Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.’s Finding Your Roots, asked the PBS show to suppress newly discovered information about his ancestors owning slaves. (Gates obliged.) Yesterday, Affleck released a Facebook…
Back in 2012, Chrissy Teigen and Chris Brown were not on great terms after Teigen sarcastically tweeted that she was excited to see Brown perform at the Billboard Awards because she loves "loud and surprising background fits of rage I can hear from the audience!" Jump forward to 2015 and the relationship, you'll…
Yesterday, famed blowhard Piers Morgan—the biggest threat to U.S./British relations since the War of 1812—took to Twitter to express his discontent about pop stars of a certain age (namely Madonna) wearing revealing costumes. But what about Cher? Even Cher, hissed back Morgan. And having been summoned, the Goddess…
During an interview with Inside Edition, Mo'Nique responded to the controversy following her recent comments about being blackballed in Hollywood.
Last week in the days leading up to the Academy Awards, Mo'Nique flipped a hypothetical table when she addressed being blackballed in Hollywood after her 2010 Oscar win. Sheryl Lee Ralph, who's my TV mom from Moesha and also Tony-nominated, put in a couple cents about the matter.
In 2010, Mo'Nique famously refused to play along with Oscar politics when she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Despite winning that year for her role in Precious, the actress says she's facing the reality that a blackballing is in effect for her in Hollywood.
Kanye West is allegedly going out of control planning his big day. The singer/actor/designer/messiah was expected to have a quiet family wedding (lol, no), but recent reports from various insiders suggest that West's ideas are running to much more extravagant places.
So here's a thing! Zoe Saldana's Allure cover prints her weight like she's a slab of nova at the Zabar's fish counter. The dek under her name reads: "115 pounds of grit and heartache." (The rest of the dek: "—117.6 pounds after quinoa lunch; 114 pounds after bikram yoga, 0.00 pounds in space" — was cut for design…
We are mere hours from Oscar night, so naturally we need to be reminded that for women — and especially for black women — winning an Academy Award can actually be a bad thing. Oh, sure, it's great for an actor to have her hard work recognized. But researchers have discovered that there really is an Oscar Curse.
