There was so much to celebrate this year. “Can you feel a brand new day?”
Straight Outta Compton's box office victory
Perhaps no one said it better than O'Shea Jackson Jr. when accepting an award on behalf of the cast earlier this month at the VH1 Big in 2015 With Entertainment Weekly event.
"We are part of a movie that has the potential to be nominated for an Academy Award," he said after his father, legendary rapper and actor Ice Cube, presented the honor to him. "The most beautiful part about that to me, at least, is we didn't have to have shackles on our feet. Those films are great, those films are powerful, those films need to be seen, but they're not the only ones that need recognition. Straight Outta Compton speaks to triumph."
And triumph they did. The film, which told the origin story of hip-hop icons N.W.A., debuted at No. 1 when it was released in August, earning $60.2 million its opening weekend and making it the fifth-biggest August opening in history and the biggest August debut ever for an R-rated film. It stayed the No. 1 film for two weeks after its release, and so far it has earned more than $200 million. Not bad for a budget just shy of $28 million. —Kelley L. Carter
Universal
Apple
The suicide episode of Being Mary Jane
Mara Brock Akil makes mirrors. If Hollywood is an industry that prefers its black women silent — or better yet, nonexistent — then Akil’s shows are an even-pitched voice of reason. The writer and producer’s portraits of black women onscreen, from Girlfriends to Being Mary Jane, whisper “I see you” to her audiences. On the Oct. 28 episode of Being Mary Jane, harrowingly titled “Sparrow,” viewers see the titular character lose her close friend Lisa to suicide.
Mary Jane Paul, played by Gabrielle Union, delivers a eulogy for her friend and touches on the ways in which she ignored Lisa’s pain. The moment is both jarring and poignant, the second suicide depicted in the show’s three-season run. Lisa, chronically depressed and under-supported, isn’t pathologized or posthumously shamed. Instead, she is mourned and understood in all of her complexities.
In a world where black women’s mental illnesses are brushed under the convenient, dangerous rug of the Strong Black Woman trope, this episode delivered a necessary corrective. —Hannah Giorgis
BET
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