Mo'Nique Wins an Oscar

[Brian Damage]

Originally Posted by PhilaEaglesHater

She is just LOUD, GHETTO, and HA NO CLASS and that's why I can't stomach her

She might change now that she is an ACADEMY AWARD WINNING ACTRESS

[Brian Damage]

.

[Brian Damage]

On winning: Everything I wanted, everything I waited for, is here. I am a stand-up comedian who won an Oscar! [laughs] Oh, baby, I tickle me! ou know, this role was so not about my acting career. This role has shaped my life and allowed me not to judge and to love unconditionally. If that goes into my career, great, but if it doesn't and I'm just the dynamic person that I strive to be every day, then I've won, baby!""
On seeing any of herself in Mary Jones: Yes, and I'll ask you, have you ever had a dark moment? Did you feel unloved? Everyone has some Mary Jones in them."
On what she would say to the other Preciouses of the world: "You can. You will. And I did."
On returning to her normal life: "You know, I've said this before. When I am at home, I am Sidney Hicks's wife and mother of two.
On her speech: "Everything I wanted to say and everything I needed to say, I say."
On the criticism she received for not promoting enough: "I'm very proud to be part of an academy that says we will not play that game. We will judge her on her performance, not how many dinners she attended."

[spunkygirl]

She is just LOUD, GHETTO, and HA NO CLASS and that's why I can't stomach her

No offense, but there must be ALOT of people you don't like then. I find her very classy, especially tonight.

[TMC]

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/osc...onique-problem

How do you solve a problem like Mo’Nique? The entertainer—stand-up comic, actress, talk-show host and now presumptive Oscar winner—has been a startling presence on this year’s awards circuit, unsettling many with what appears to be her determination to play the game her way. Following the very first screening of the film Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, it was reported that the very first question asked involved Mo’Nique and the Oscars. It was that very sense of inevitability that has made her non-campaign awards campaign so fascinating—and oddly refreshing—to watch.

After Sundance, Mo’Nique would not appear at a public screening of the film again until October’s AFI Fest in Los Angeles, skipping high-profile film fests in Cannes, Toronto, and New York. She seemed to be largely shunning the post-screening Q&A circuit in Los Angeles and New York, thought to be vital parts of any aspiring award-winner’s campaign.

Movie audiences who know her from such comedies as Soul Plane, or her uproarious delivery of the “Black-tino” monologue in Domino would likely have never expected her powerful and unsettling performance in Precious as arguably the world’s worst mother, an enabler of incest, physical and emotional abuse, and a punishingly high-cholesterol diet. She brings to life a dervish of hate, insecurity, and violence, tossing a newborn baby on the floor like she’s flicking away another cigarette and then hurling a TV down a stairwell at her own daughter. Director Lee Daniels seems to have purposefully pitched the film somewhere between the sincere and the ridiculous, and Mo’Nique’s performance often challenges an audience as to whether to cringe in horror or laugh for relief.Yet besides Precious and the race for Oscar, Mo’Nique also her own thing going on. In October she began hosting a daily, Atlanta-based talk show on BET (A channel many Oscar voters likely couldn’t find on their cable box even if the listings were in alphabetical order). From early on, as she began picking up awards for Precious, there was also a swell of chatter that she was being difficult and making diva-ish demands in order to appear on behalf of the film. In one episode of her TV show she had as guests Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, both one-time Oscar nominees, and Mo’Nique asked, “What are you campaigning for, though? That’s what I need to understand.” She then asked, semi-facetiously, “What does it mean financially?”

For those invested in the culture of Oscar year-in, year-out, this sort of skepticism about the glitter parade seemed an outright affront. In the press room at the Broadcast Film Critics Association Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, Mo’Nique was asked by awards blogger Tom O’Neil about some of these questions that have followed her all season—the real underlying issue being whether she wants this badly enough—and she deferred to her husband/manager to answer the question.

When The New York Times’s David Carr, who has become a key anointer of Oscar talent with his awards-season profiles, wrote about Mo’Nique, the interview was not done in some hotel lobby or tasteful cafe in the media centers of Los Angeles or New York. Carr had to go to Atlanta. If you want me, Mo’Nique seemed to be saying, you have to come to me. And why not?

She did not attend the New York Film Critics Circle dinner, where she was bestowed a prize, but did attend The Los Angeles Film Critics Association dinner the night before the Golden Globes. At the Globes she picked up another award, and gave a movingly heartfelt speech that Drew Barrymore later declared onstage “set the bar” for thank-yous for the night. The next morning however, a photo from the red carpet began to circulate that showed Mo’Nique’s legs as being unshaven. At every turn, Mo’Nique seems to challenge, consciously or not, the very foundation of how a sleek, supplicating awards-season actress should look or behave.

“Lots of actors from George C. Scott to Sean Penn proved you can win an Oscar without campaigning,” wrote Tom O’Neil in an email, “but they’re among the gods of acting—it’s OK if they refuse to mingle with we mere mortals.

“But Mo’Nique is a cable-TV talk show host and stand-up comic. Who knew she was even an actress before Precious? Normally, a star like her needs to campaign to win, but she’s benefitting this year from a lack of competition and, as she continues to win award after award this derby season, her winning streak suggests a shocking thought: Hey, maybe you can really refuse to campaign and still win!”

Jeffrey Wells, proprietor of the website Hollywood Elsewhere, is a veteran journalist and long-time giver and taker of the sharp elbows and heated rhetoric of awards season. He has become perhaps the key figure in the push-back against Mo’Nique. In a seemingly endless series of posts, he has railed against her unstoppable stream of wins, asking if there is perhaps some other actress who gave a supporting performance worth lauding, while also taking umbrage at Mo’Nique’s apparently stand-off-ish attitude to the Oscar process. Wells has, in turn, weathered an increasing series of attacks himself, as commenters on his site regularly call him racist and misogynist, even pointing out that he “hates fatties.”

“Villain performances have won Oscars before with high-style, high-panache acting as the draw and the charm,” Wells wrote in an email. “Mo’Nique’s Mary has no pizazz at all—no flair to speak of. She’s just a low-rent hard-case rage monster in an easy chair. She’s quite good at inhabiting this creature—it’s a searing performance—but at the end of the day you have to ask, ‘To what end?’ Hers is the least enjoyable award-calibre performance I’ve ever sat through.

“As for Mo’Nique herself, she’s a genuine primitive,” continued Wells. “Or so I think. Did she pretend not to understand the financial benefits of an Oscar race during that talk-show chat or is she really that thick? I thought her GG acceptance speech felt acted and lacked class. I thought her ‘talk to my husband’ reply to Tom O’Neil was major chicken****. And the hairy legs thing was just astounding. Has an Oscar contending actress ever been on the red carpet with visible Yeti hair on her calves?”

There is a bigger picture to all this, of course, for what it says about the current culture of Oscar campaigning and the economy of awards season. Plus, with so many critics now groups out there—Mo’Nique has been lauded from Boston to Central Ohio to Kansas City to Las Vegas to San Francisco—the accolades parade does become tiresome.

“Mo’Nique’s spotty campaign and the certainty of her winning the Oscar is proof that you don’t have to campaign as much as most publicists think you have to,” added Wells. “IF you’re the only real standout in your category and IF you’ve got every critics group going ‘baaaah!’ and giving you a win almost every time at bat. Plus there was never a strong Mo’Nique alternative choice.

“But if these factors aren’t working for you then an actor pretty much HAS to campaign. Poor Carey Mulligan seemed to campaign much more than Mo’Nique and what happened? Meryl Streep nearly ran the table.”

But surely some of what Wells in particular has been doing with his coverage is simple gamesmanship, turning reader anger into churned pageviews? He does have a daily blog, and that’s a lot of space to fill.

“She’s been a hot topic and an easy target and yeah, I do have to bang out several items each day so why not?” added Wells. “But I wasn’t saying what I was saying to generate traffic—I found her performance and personality genuinely unappealing. Which of course makes me a racist. Naturally. END.”

For those who find the yearly rituals of Oscar season a bit of a bore, Mo’Nique has been an invigorating presence, one who puts into perspective everything that others seem to take as givens. It’s hard not to feel that those pointing fingers and declaring “diva” may in fact be swanning a bit too grandly themselves.

“Mo’Nique will go on to win the Oscar,” wrote O’Neil, “but she’s ticked off a lot of people along the way—people who may have a chance to pay her back someday.”

[TMC]

Mo'Nique Says Roles in Empire and The Butler ''Just Went Away'': Lee Daniels Told Me I've Been ''Blackballed'

[king of comedy]

I hope she gets back on track.

[TMC]

http://www.insideedition.com/enterta...d-blackballing

Was actress Mo'Nique blackballed by Hollywood after her big Oscar win for Precious?

She told INSIDE EDITION's Les Trent, "I am never willing to put my integrity at risk."

Mo'Nique expected her 2010 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress to be a major turning point in her career, one that would lead to more roles and bigger paychecks.

She said, "When I did the movie Precious for Mr. Daniels I was paid $50,000. I am not complaining about the money because that is what I signed up for."

But over the past five years, she hasn't appeared in a single film that's been released. A few months ago, she asked Precious director, Lee Daniels, what was going on.

She said, "What he did say was, 'You have been blackballed because you didn't play the game.'"

Daniels told Mo'Nique that she made too many demands and no one in Hollywood wanted to work with her because of her reputation for being so difficult.

The headline in The Hollywood Reporter blared, “Mo'Nique: I Was ‘Blackballed’ After Winning My Oscar.”

"To say that I am difficult, any project that I have ever done, when they say 'Wrap' and that's it, we are all hugging and crying, speaking about the great experience that we had," she told Trent.

He asked, "You think there are ways that you can act differently in the future where you wouldn't be labelled as difficult?"

She replied, "You know what, Les? To stand up for what is wrong, I couldn't even do that differently. Would I not stand up for Gabourey Sidibe who they wanted to fly coach to France. That is a long ride, we are big women. I will still stand up for that. I will never stop standing up for injustice."

Mo'Nique says that Lee Daniels did offer her a role in his hit movie The Butler but the part went to Oprah Winfrey instead. Other offers "just went away," she says.

The 47-year-old actress says she's now forging her own path. She does stand-up comedy around the country and is acting in and producing an independent movie called Blackbird.

She described it to Trent, saying, "It is about one family trying to get to the journey of acceptance."

The film comes out in April.