Regina King won best supporting actress at the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday for her role as a fiercely protective mother in “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
In a teary speech, King thanked the writer James Baldwin, whose novel inspired the film, as well as her mother. “It’s appropriate for me to be standing here, because I’m an example of what it looks like when support and love is poured into someone,” said King, adding “God is good all the time.”
“Free Solo,” a look at rock climber Alex Honnold attempts to summit El Capitan, was another early winner at the Oscars, picking up a best feature documentary prize. “Vice,” an incisive biopic about Dick Cheney, earned a makeup honor, while “Black Panther” nabbed a costume statue.
This year’s Oscar contest is a race between a cluster of traditional studios such as Universal and Warner Bros. and streaming services such as Netflix that are trying to crash the Oscars. It’s a wide open race for best picture, with Netflix’s “Roma,” a black-and-white family drama, and “The Favourite,” an off-beat costume drama about an obscure British monarch, entering the night with a leading 10 nominations. “Green Book,” a drama about the unlikely friendship between a bigoted bouncer (Viggo Mortensen) and a black musician (Mahershala Ali), may be the film to beat for best picture after it nabbed top honors at this year’s Producers Guild Awards. It has five nominations.
In lieu of an opening monologue, Queen and Adam Lambert got the evening started with an amalgam of “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” that leaned heavily on smoke machines and cascading lights. The audience of well-heeled movie-makers and executives clapped along, at times awkwardly.
The Oscars are being handed out at a time of tectonic changes in the entertainment industry, an era of mergers, consolidation, and emerging technology that is upending traditional ways of doing business. Twentieth Century Fox, which has 20 nominations, the most of any studio, is staring into an uncertain future. Much of the film and television giant has been sold to the Walt Disney Company. Thousands of people are expected to be laid off as a result of the union. Other major contenders include the musical biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a look at Queen frontman Freddie Mercury that scored five nods, as well as “A Star is Born,” a romantic drama that paired Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper and picked up eight nominations in the process.
