What Oscar forgot: Finding Teyonah Parris' formation in Chi-raq

If anything, himself. 

First, Spike Lee’s Chi-raq (2015) is, especially upon one’s first viewing, an uneven, or at least unwieldly movie, and reactions to the film reveal it as such. After all, while the film garners only a 5.7 rating on IMDB, the film also topped Paste Magazine and The NewYorker’s best films of the year lists. The metamorphic girth of this satire makes it typical of Spike Lee’s artistic wheelhouse, which has less to do with George Lucas pastiche and Stephen Spielberg perfection than Woody Allen’s strolling rants. Even more, Spike Lee’s New York sensibility—his ranting away from traditional plot structures and streamlined coherence—places him in constellation with African-American satirists doubling as novelists.

What Oscar Forgot: All is Lost

A series of posts on films that may have underwhelmed during Awards season:

What Oscar Forgot: The Economics behind Greengrass' Captain Phillips

A series of posts on films that possibly deserved more consideration than they received:

I don't know what people wrote about the film when it first came out in the early fall, and I don't know what people are writing about it now. I know a fall issue of The New Yorker sits in my bathroom opened to a review of the film, but I have yet to read it. On top of that opened New Yorker is about a year's worth of unopened New Yorkers--I don't know how anyone really "reads" The New Yorker. I also did not see this film in theaters. I saw it last night, at home, and I woke up this morning thinking about it.

What Oscar Forgot: Fruitvale Station

A series of posts on films that could have been nominated or perhaps never even stood a chance:

After watching Fruitvale Station, my wife and I hugged, exhaled, whispered, and took a walk in the cold air and crystallized snow. This film resonates, its power resounding from a world of real tragedy and regretable fact. The film opens with real footage of Oscar Grant III's death at the BART system's Fruitvale Station, and from there, it follows a day in the life of Oscar, each scene's daunting, yet subtle, importance magnified by knowing this man was real and did die unnecessarily. The film is understated on many levels. Race is obviously an issue, but the film does not force it, rather the indictment of racism is the lack of an explicit statement. The film need not state that such an environment exists, but reveals it gradually and persistently as a subtext that exists a posteriori.

Actions of regret are taken in an hour and a half introspection of a life that could have been lived for the better or for the worse, and, for the most part, the film does not partake in any melodrama and does not attempt to answer any of the hard questions that Oscar Grant's unseemly death surely raises. And that is the film's strength: its ability to ask without so much as a whisper. It does not speak, but exhales and you take that feeling of warmth escaping forever as the credits begin to roll in what feels all too soon and yet not soon enough.