Dee Rees And Mary J. Blige Dug Into Their Roots To Make 'Mudbound'
Black History Month is a time when a lot of people remember firsts, such as Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice. Now, the film awards season has given us two new names to join those ranks.
Mudbound director Dee Rees is the first black woman nominated for an Oscar in Best Adapted Screenplay. Singer and actor Mary J. Blige is the first anyone — ever — to be nominated for both an acting performance and an original song in the same film.
That would be noteworthy enough, but is much more than that. Critics have raved about the film, the story of two sharecropper families, one white and one black, trying to scratch out an existence in post-World War II called it"a work of historical imagination that lands in the present with disquieting, illuminating force."And they've raved about how Mary J. Blige disappears into the role of Florence Jackson, the matriarch of the black family, whose oldest son has gone off to fight in the war and finds more dignity overseas than he does at home.
