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https://blackgirlnerds.com/congrats-to-these-nominees-of-the-2024-critics-choice-awards/

Today the Critics Choice Association announced the nominees for the 2024 Critics Choice Awards which will air Sunday, Jan. 14 on the CW. The ceremony will be hosted by Chelsea Handler. These nominations are specific to film categories. Below is a highlighted list of Black nominees as well as a full list of all nominees.

BLACK NOMINEES

Best Picture

The Color Purple

American Fiction

Best Actor

Colman Domingo, Rustin

Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction

Best Supporting Actress

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple

Best Young Actor/Actress

Calah Lane, Wonka

Best Acting Ensemble

The Color Purple

Best Adapted Screenplay

Cord Jefferson, American Fiction

Best Costume Design

Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, The Color Purple

Best Hair and Makeup

The Color Purple

Best Visual Effects

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Comedy

American Fiction

Best Animated Film

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Song

“Road to Freedom,” Rustin

———————————–

ALL NOMINEES

Best Picture

American Fiction
Barbie
The Color Purple
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Past Lives
Poor Things
Saltburn

Best Actor

Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon
Colman Domingo, Rustin
Paul Giamatti, The Holdovers
Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer
Jeffrey Wright, American Fiction

Best Actress

Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall
Greta Lee, Past Lives
Carey Mulligan, Maestro
Margot Robbie, Barbie
Emma Stone, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actor

Sterling K. Brown, American Fiction
Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon
Robert Downey Jr., Oppenheimer
Ryan Gosling, Barbie
Charles Melton, May December
Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things

Best Supporting Actress

Emily Blunt, Oppenheimer
Danielle Brooks, The Color Purple
America Ferrera, Barbie
Jodie Foster, Nyad
Julianne Moore, May December
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Young Actor/Actress

Abby Ryder Fortson, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Ariana Greenblatt, Barbie
Calah Lane, Wonka
Milo Machado Graner, Anatomy of a Fall
Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers
Madeleine Yuna Voyles, The Creator

Best Acting Ensemble

Air
Barbie
The Color Purple
The Holdovers
Killers of the Flower Moon
Oppenheimer

Best Director

Bradley Cooper, Maestro
Greta Gerwig, Barbie
Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Alexander Payne, The Holdovers
Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Adapted Screenplay

Kelly Fremon Craig, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Andrew Haigh, All of Us Strangers
Cord Jefferson, American Fiction
Tony McNamara, Poor Things
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer
Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Original Screenplay

Samy Burch, May December
Alex Convery, Air
Bradley Cooper & Josh Singer, Maestro
Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach, Barbie
David Hemingson, The Holdovers
Celine Song, Past Lives

Best Cinematography

Matthew Libatique, Maestro
Rodrigo Prieto, Barbie
Rodrigo Prieto, Killers of the Flower Moon
Robbie Ryan, Poor Things
Linus Sandgren, Saltburn
Hoyte van Hoytema, Oppenheimer

Best Production Design

Suzie Davies, Charlotte Dirickx, Saltburn
Ruth De Jong, Claire Kaufman, Oppenheimer
Jack Fisk, Adam Willis, Killers of the Flower Moon
Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer, Barbie
James Price, Shona Heath, Szusza Mihalek, Poor Things
Adam Stockhausen, Kris Moran, Asteroid City

Best Editing

William Goldenberg – Air
Nick Houy – Barbie
Jennifer Lame – Oppenheimer
Yorgos Mavropsaridis – Poor Things
Thelma Schoonmaker – Killers of the Flower Moon
Michelle Tesoro – Maestro

Best Costume Design

Jacqueline Durran, Barbie
Lindy Hemming, Wonka
Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, The Color Purple
Holly Waddington, Poor Things
Jacqueline West, Killers of the Flower Moon
Janty Yates, David Crossman, Napoleon

Best Hair and Makeup

Barbie
The Color Purple
Maestro
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Priscilla

Best Visual Effects

The Creator
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Oppenheimer
Poor Things
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Comedy

American Fiction
Barbie
Bottoms
The Holdovers
No Hard Feelings
Poor Things

Best Animated Film

The Boy and the Heron
Elemental
Nimona
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
Wish

Best Foreign Language Film

Anatomy of a Fall
Godzilla Minus One
Perfect Days
Society of the Snow
The Taste of Things
The Zone of Interest

Best Song

“Dance the Night,” Barbie
“I’m Just Ken,” Barbie
“Peaches,” The Super Mario Bros. Movie
“Road to Freedom,” Rustin
“This Wish,” Wish
“What Was I Made For,” Barbie

Best Score

Jerskin Fendrix, Poor Things
Michael Giacchino, Society of the Snow
Ludwig Göransson, Oppenheimer
Daniel Pemberton, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Robbie Robertson, Killers of the Flower Moon
Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt, Barbie

https://blackgirlnerds.com/giancarlo-esposito-cynthia-erivo-and-xolo-mariduena-join-the-cast-of-marvels-moon-girl-and-devil-dinosaur/

Season two of Disney Branded Television’s Emmy^® Award-nominated Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is set to debut Friday, Feb 2 (8:00 p.m. EST), on Disney Channel and Disney XD with two episodes. The first batch of season two episodes will be available on Saturday, Feb 3rd on Disney+, and the first season is now streaming.

In season two, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur are in their element as super heroes; however, as Moon Girl’s super hero-ing intertwines more with her personal life, she must decide if the cost of keeping her identity a secret is worth the toll it takes on her family.

New guest stars for season two include the following:

• Jonathan Banks (“Better Call Saul”)
• SungWon Cho (internet personality)
• Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked – The Motion Picture”)
• Giancarlo Esposito (“The Mandalorian”)
• Andy Garcia (“The Godfather Part III”)
• Arsenio Hall (“Coming to America”)
• Ann Harada (“Avenue Q”)
• Jackée Harry (“Sister, Sister”)
• Manny Jacinto (“The Good Place”)
• Carol Kane (“Star Trek: Strange New Worlds”)
• Xolo Maridueña (“Blue Beetle”)
• Alex Newell (“Glee”)
• Edward James Olmos (“Battlestar Galactica”)
• Parker Posey (“Best in Show”)
• Ephraim Sykes (Broadway’s “Hamilton”)
• David Tennant (“Doctor Who”)
• Robin Thede (“A Black Lady Sketch Show”)
• Peter Weller (“RoboCop”)
• GRAMMY Award^® winner Raphael Saadiq serves as the series executive music producer. “Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur: Season 2 Original Soundtrack,” from Walt Disney Records, is set for release on Feb. 2 and will feature 12 songs from the new season.

Based on Marvel’s hit comic books, the series follows the adventures of 13-year-old super-genius Lunella Lafayette and her 10-ton T-Rex, Devil Dinosaur, as they protect her Lower East Side neighborhood from danger.  

The series stars Diamond White as Lunella Lafayette (aka Moon Girl), Fred Tatasciore as Devil Dinosaur, Libe Barer as Casey, Alfre Woodard as Mimi, Sasheer Zamata as Adria, Jermaine Fowler as James Jr., Gary Anthony Williams as Pops and executive producer Laurence Fishburne as The Beyonder.

https://blacknerdproblems.com/the-end-of-an-actual-era-a-eulogy-for-the-cw-as-we-know-it/

Thank you all for taking the time out of your day to attend today’s ceremony. We are gathered to celebrate the long and storied life of one of our constant companions in the media landscape: the CW over the last two decades. 

Of course, the CW has gone by many monikers and provided a veritable treasure trove of content throughout its time. Some of the older audience members will recall a time of the WB and UPN that existed as competitors before eventually merging into the CW that we know today after several exchanges of iconic franchises such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville. And in many ways, those two franchises were emblematic of what the CW would commonly be known by. 

The Tumblr historians, the sects of post-2000 fandom, have a particular conception of the union of the two networks into the CW looked like. Said conception will likely confuse future anthropologists, and that’s the one I would like to talk about.

And so, we begin this eulogy by discussing perhaps the most iconic franchise of the CW which originally started on the WB: Supernatural.

Clocking in at 327 episodes over 15 seasons, Supernatural holds the distinction of being the longest running live-action fantasy series in the US. This is a baffling fact given that this show had a very clearly defined myth arc that ran from Season 1 to Season 5. However, due to the inexplicable success, the show continued on for 10 more seasons and locked Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki into flannel wearing brothers who traveled the US in an Impala.

A staggering simple premise, the show worked largely due to the chemistry between the leads and a moderately innovative look into urban fantasy and horror. The show would go through several evolutions including the 2007-2008 Writer Strike that caused Eric Kripke to pivot more heavily into Christian mythos and bring in Misha Collins as the now equally iconic Castiel, who would become a companion to the Winchester brothers. After one Apocalypse deferred in Season 5, the CW refused to let the show die. Thus, this opened a revolving door of life and death for the brothers as they faced new and weirder threats and an expanding family tree. This went on for fifteen seasons, 300+ episodes of contractual nonsense, PoC and women getting fridged at unfortunate intervals, all culminating in moments where Castiel gets cast to the fan-dubbed “Super Hell” after confessing his love for Dean, and Dean dying the most undignified death ever in the finale.

But there is a reason why Sam and Dean captured the imagination of the masses. It was a meditation on Americana and mythology, a small injection of magic into the mundane world and one that had a vast supporting cast (that admittedly existed solely to give the audience someone to love and threaten their impending death repeatedly). The core of the brothers also proved to be the central thesis to the show’s success as various spin-offs were attempted and none made it to full production. Even the prequel, Winchesters barely managed to survive a season. And the success also proved to be quite the stranglehold on Jensen and Jared who would attempt to star in two different horror franchise revival movies only to return to the CW to continue the sprawling epic of the Winchester legacy as Kansas’s “Carry on My Wayward Son” plays aggressively as seasons recap. 

Supernatural served as a cornerstone to CW programming and its end marked the first of many fallen pillars that would soon crumble.

Among these pillars were the shows of the Arrowverse. Smallville had proven that there was an audience for long running superhero stories, and Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, and many more would capitalize on this with the dark and gritty reimagining of the Green Arrow with the aptly titled Arrow. With its classic split narrative that detailed Oliver Queen’s time on a mysterious island and his return to Starling City (which would eventually get renamed to Star City in story), the show itself proved to be a fun jaunt through the DC mythos with Stephen Amell at the helm. Until season 2 Manu Bennett’s Slade Wilson got to take the stage culminating in one of the most hype seasons of TV that stood head and shoulders above other superhero adaptations (at least for the time frame). Of course, success came at a cost and the Arrowverse expansion meant that writers from Arrow were moving onto the Flash, and the show never really recovered during the rest of its eight-season run. 

The Flash opened up the proverbial box of goodies by introducing superpowers in a big way after the Miraku drug had seeded such possibility in Arrow. Led by charming Glee alum, Grant Gustin, The Flash and its opening narration that reminded you that Barry Allen was the fastest man alive (except when there was a different speedster big bad on the market that would be a smidge faster for at least a few episodes) continued this unique blend of superheroic soap opera with all sorts of fun interpersonal dynamics interlayed between stopping a variety of crises (and eventual, actual Crisis level events but we’ll get that to later).

And when you have two successful shows, the obvious recourse is to keep making shows within the shared universe which is how we got the Melissa Benoist led Supergirl in 2015 and the ensemble of B-list and C-list characters in Legends of Tomorrow, which ultimately became one of the embodiments of comic book adaptation media solely because of how weird it was willing to get with its premise.

Black Lightning in 2018 was one of many attempts to create non-Arrowverse dependent shows by the media juggernaut that was the CW, and DC Comics habit of constantly rebooting the multiverse quickly corrected course. By the time Batwoman in 2019 came into the fold, they knew better. Of course, the last vestige of the Arrowverse, Superman & Lois is the only show not actually part of the Arrowverse. It came into its own as the Arrowverse itself was dying. So even though Tyler Hoechlin and Elizabeth Tullouch were introduced as their namesake characters in a previous crisis event, their iterations on the show were technically unique. For all intents and purposes, as their run comes to end with their upcoming finale season, it serves as the final parting shot of the extended CW DC universe.

This year also saw the other most emblematic pillar CW property come to a close with Riverdale. Oh… oh Riverdale. The veritable fountain of memes that, for six years, took elements of the Archie comics and decided to take in every which way: Twin Peaks-esque murder to start off the series, serial killer genes, underground boxing rings with high school students, pseudo fascist vigilante groups of high school students, several musicals, a speakeasy under Pop’s diners, secret forested society, cults, the highest stake of not-Dungeons & Dragons, birthday stripteases, interpersonal teen damage, meta-recasting, superpowers, time travel, 1950’s Reggie getting an unexpected redemption arc, a final episode quad romance between principle characters that the writers were still too cowardly to note that Archie and Jughead definitely spent time together for some reason.

All of those things happened. I didn’t make a single one up and honestly, I’m probably forgetting some of the other egregious things that happened. This darky and gritty reimagining of teen fiction would later trickle down to things like Nancy Drew and arguably Tom Swift, but Riverdale was yet another pillar of the CW and between it and the majority of the Arrowverse ending, we all saw the writing on the walls.

The CW also produced fine scripted television throughout its life as well including the zombie police procedural iZombie and martial arts reboot Kung Fu, with solid fandoms that loved their honest approach to storytelling, but they never got quite to the same level of recognition as the other properties we’ve eulogized.

As 2023 becomes a memory, and 2024 heralds one more season of Superman & Lois, the CW will soon be left with All American, All American: Homecoming, and Walker and even that is likely to change. Variety reported that somehow the CW’s average age ended up being 58 which likely motivated a lot of the shifting priorities in properties.

But even as we see the end of an actual era, I think we can still be thankful for the memories, for the ridiculous memes, for the fandoms forged in the fires of cable network, and just hope that easily digestible media remains readily available as a palette cleanser and comfort show.

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The post The End of an Actual Era: A Eulogy for the CW as We Know It appeared first on Black Nerd Problems.

https://www.blackenterprise.com/5-ways-help-keep-that-men-healthy/

Originally Published Jun. 22, 2017 

Prevention is the best medicine. Many of the health issues men face are preventable and treatable. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the top five leading causes of death among men are heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory disease, and stroke. Heart disease is the No. 1 ranking cause of death, reported the CDC.

Men can take charge of their health and wellness by getting important health screenings, eating healthier, being physically active, maintaining a healthy weight, managing stress, staying injury-free, practicing safe sex, drinking in moderation, and being tobacco-free. It may sound like a lot to do, but it’s totally doable, and it doesn’t have to be done in a silo.

Men’s health is everyone’s business. Whether it’s for yourself as a man or you have a husband, son, uncle, or brother. Keeping our men healthy is a team effort. So, where does one start? Here are five heart-healthy suggestions to keep our men healthy.

Get Regular Health Checkups

Annual checkups could save your life. They are a proactive approach to staying well. It allows you and your doctor to identify what’s normal for you, which makes it easier to diagnose issues early on before they become a problem. Sometimes, doctors can even catch things before any symptoms appear. Ask your doctor what screenings are needed and when. This is also a good time to track personal numbers such as blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and body mass index. Maintaining and managing these at normal values is important to prevent heart disease and stroke. And get vaccinated. Immunizations help maintain health, regardless of age.

Get Good Sleep

Not getting enough sleep can be associated with several conditions, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and depression.

The amount of sleep one needs changes with age. According to the Mayo Clinic, adults over 18 need a minimum of seven hours of sleep. It’s also important that we don’t hinder getting good sleep with stimulants like coffee and energy drinks, alarm clocks, and external lights—including those from electronic devices. These things can interfere with our “circadian rhythm” or natural sleep/wake cycle.

Toss the Tobacco

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death. More than 16 million Americans are living with a disease caused by smoking. It’s never too late to quit, producing immediate and long-term benefits. It lowers the risk of heart disease, cancer, lung disease, erectile dysfunction, and other illnesses.

Additionally, it’s also important to avoid second-hand smoke, which is just as dangerous as smoking yourself—if not more so. It can also cause heart disease, lung cancer, and stroke.

Be Active

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of U.S. adults are obese. One way to control your weight is to be active. Staying active helps you to build stamina, stay fit and flexible, and burn calories as you move.

It’s recommended that adults get at least two-and-a-half hours of moderate to intense aerobic activity each week and do muscle-strengthening activities at least two days a week. Remember to work all your major muscle groups, including your legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms.

Eat Healthier

I know this is sometimes easier said than done, so I won’t recommend you “remove” anything from your diet. Rather, I suggest you “replace” certain things, substituting those processed, packaged, canned, and fatty foods with a variety of fresh fruit, vegetables, and lean meats.

Most perishable food is a great source of vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients, which protect against disease. If your food can live longer on the shelf than you can, then that’s a problem. Also, make snacks healthier with portion control, limiting the consumption of food and drinks high in calories, sugar, salt, fat, and alcohol.

RELATED CONTENT:  Health Orgs Push Support Groups For Black Menthol Smokers