emmy nominees, folklore, and another turn around the sun

Everything can be traced back to a Taylor Swift album

hello,

This is my first newsletter/letter/conversation and I’m still trying to figure out Substack so you’all are going to have to give me a little bit of reprieve. So this is how it’s going to go: the newsletter will come out every Wednesday, and I will talk about some things that are on my mind that week, as well as a hot take and who was on the podcast this week. Little things.

This week’s line-up: the Emmy nominations, Taylor Swift’s new album, The Bodyguard and other shenanigans.

emmy awards

I love the Emmys. Yes, yes I love film, I love the history and glamour of the Oscars, but there is just something about the Emmys and the work that goes into television that just has me so invested. I want to see these folks rewarded for consistently putting in the good work over a whole lot of episodes.

This year’s awards are very interesting - not only because of the pandemic - but because a lot of the big-time shows that used to dominate awards season (Game of Thrones, Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory) have ended so different shows have a chance to be noticed.

I’m only going to comment on the shows I’ve seen:

• Watchmen deserved every single one of their nominations. It was one of the best pieces of television that I’ve seen in a long long time. And even though she’s one many Emmys I believe that Regina King was sensational in the role, and deserves yet another accolade.

• euphoria was one of my favourite series last year. I was 100% on the Zendaya bandwagon because she acted the F out of that role - she made me laugh, she made me cry, and she deserves the Emmy nomination. I would love to see more young people’s shows being awarded (other than Glee). Side note: I also love that they got nominations for costume and make-up. euphoria make-up was literally a cultural reset. I wrote about euphoria for Cosmopolitan here.

• Little Fires Everywhere - Kerry Washington gave her all in the role of Mia and this show was gripping from beginning to end, so I’m glad that it got recognition. I do think, that Reese Witherspoon should have been nominated because her nefarious meets sweet was so perfectly balanced and it didn’t fall into camp as it did in Big Little Lies. I wrote about Little Fires Everywhere for Channel24 here.

• This Is Us - While I always believe that Sterling K. Brown does excellent work on This Is Us, I am kind of disappointed that Mandy Moore (as Rebecca) and Griffin Dunne (as Uncle Nicky) were not nominated. Dunne crying in the car during the Thanksgiving episode made me ugly sob.

• The Marvelous Mrs Maisel - This show is Emmy bait, and even though the character of Midge Maisel might annoy me at times, I have to admit that the directing, writing, production and costume design etc is top class. All of the acting nominees deserved to be there (sigh, even Rachel Brosnahan) but once again Sterling K. Brown deserves, Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce deserves (love of my life), Marin Hinkle, Alex Borstein and Tony Shalhoub deserves, and I was so happy to see Wanda Sykes get a nomination for playing Moms Mabley! I do however wish that LeRoy McClain was nominated for playing Shy Baldwin.

• Hollywood, although it had some mixed reviews with regards to the writing, the acting (and the technical achievements) are what made the show worth watching. I’m so glad that Jeremy Pope, Jim Parsons, Holland Taylor and especially Dylan McDermott were nominated in the acting characters. I do think that Joe Mantello (as Dick Samuels) did one of the best performances this year, and was crudely snubbed. I reviewed the series for Channel24 here.

• Other snubs were The Good Fight (acting for Christine Baranski and DeRoy Lindo and consistently amazing writing), Never Have I Ever (Poorna Jagannathan should have gotten a Best Supporting Actress nod), and Dickenson, which was one of the smartest comedies I’ve seen in a while.

There’s a lot of other nominees that I loved in various technical categories, but these were the ones I just needed to talk about.

folklore

I measure moments in my life by Taylor Swift albums.

From ages 20-21, Fearless was the soundtrack of my life. I remember selecting my copy of the CD at Musica Cavendish, playing on my dad’s old hi-fi and reading and rereading the lyrics in the album sleeve. I even had an exact replica of her dress she wears in the sleeve made so I could wear it to my 21st.

Speak Now was there when I felt my first real heartbreak. Red got me through the first job I was fired from. 1989 which is still a very special album for me, got me at the point where I really really was finding myself. And then Lover gave me hope once my life was finally moving into the direction I wanted it to

And then came 2020 lol. I lost my dream job, became consistently suffocated in my childhood bedroom and, of course, ole COVID made it v v difficult to not live in a state of constant panic. And as my 31st birthday draws nearer, the sads are now a regular thing.

Cue Taylor Swift popping up with her latest album, folklore. How did she know that I was spending my nights writing lower-case poetry about ghosts? Taylor Swift has the innate ability to just find you where you are, to make you feel seen and understood, and give you a kinda hope that things might get better. And she does this all by just being herself. This album is a piece of art, and I’m not just saying this as a fan, I’m saying this as someone who lives by sad music. We all know how important it is to express your art when you feel it, and we are so lucky that she decided to share her art with us during this time.

So maybe I’m ready to celebrate age 31 on Sunday? Lol, we’ll see.

what else I’m talking about:

• I liked The Kissing Booth 2 much more than the first one, but the Noah/Elle relationship is definitely not doing it for me. I wrote more about it here.

• I haven’t really been listening to new music other than folklore, but I really loved Chloe and Halle’s new album, Ungodly Hour.

• This powerful speech by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez defending herself and other women after she was verbally abused by another congressperson. You watch the entire speech here:

pop culture hot take:

So I’ve been watching a lot of movies on Netflix with my parents and we watched the classic Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner epic, The Bodyguard. Now I do know the dangers of real-life shipping but guys, I really think that Kevin Costner was in love with Whitney Houston. The way he looks at her… And I heard that he personally chose her for that role. And I spent a lot of time on chatrooms and message boards in my youth, and the word on the street was that Bobby Brown was not fond of Kevin and Whitney’s chemistry.

crushing on:

This week on the podcast I chatted to Leandra Engelbrecht, the TV and Movie Editor at Channel24. It was amazing chatting to someone who has such deep knowledge about the film and tv industry in South Africa. We also spoke about K-dramas, the future of reality TV, movies in the time of COVID, and what shows we loved growing up. Listen here.