Watch scenes from the films nominated in the category of best picture at the 96th annual Academy Awards, as well as interviews with the filmmakers below. The 2024 Oscars were presented on Sunday, March 10, and you can see the list of winners here.
Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s satire “American Fiction” (adapted from “Erasure” by Percival Everett) is the story of Black author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), a struggling author who is frustrated with his failure to crack a marketplace seemingly enamored with stereotypical perceptions of Black life. He reacts by creating a fake writer, Stagg R. Leigh, an ex-con and fugitive from justice, whose fake life story accentuates every stereotype in the book, from profanity-laden dialogue and dysfunctional families to drugs and violence.
But to Monk’s shock, what was written as a protest becomes a cause-célèbre, when his manuscript is scooped up by a publishing house anticipating a bestseller (just in time for Juneteenth!).
In this scene, Monk asks fellow writer Sintara (played by Issa Rae) about the popular book that he has secretly written (whose title consists of an Anglo-Saxon term that must be blurred during television appearances). Her opinion matters: after all, she wrote a bestseller called, “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto”:
A former journalist, the Emmy-winning Jefferson’s credits include “Master of None,” “Watchmen” and “Succession.” In an interview with CBS Station WBZ, he reflected on how he was familiar with the attitudes about race that are explored in “American Fiction”: “I had an executive come up to me and tell me that they wanted a character that I wrote to be ‘Blacker.’ I asked them what it means to be ‘Blacker’ and sort of like if they could explain to me, and they didn’t want to answer that question. …
“All of us, everybody in the world – I think it’s particularly acute for people of color and women and queer people, of course – but everybody in the world can empathize with the idea that you know that you’re a unique individual with your own passions, ideas, hopes and dreams. At some point, the world tries to box you in and say that you are not a unique individual and in fact we’d rather think of you as being sort of like part of this monolithic culture and we can understand you based on stereotypes.”
