Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: February is Black History Month, so we’re looking back on great performances by Black actors that the Academy Awards ignored.
Girls Trip (2017)
As Jack Black and Will Ferrell once sang, it’s not easy to win an Oscar for a comedic performance. Even getting nominated is tough, and much more likely to happen in the supporting categories—which is exactly where Melissa McCarthy found herself when the Academy recognized her scene-stealing work in Bridesmaids. (She lost to Octavia Spencer in The Help.) Six years later, another future star scored her breakthrough in a raunchy women-led blockbuster comedy. But unfortunately, though she’s just as funny and instrumental to her film as McCarthy, an Oscar nomination didn’t follow.
Tiffany Haddish was fourth-billed in Girls Trip, behind more established talents like Regina Hall, Jada Pinkett Smith, and one-time Oscar nominee Queen Latifah. The quartet play college friends (a.k.a. the Flossy Posse) who reunite after five years to attend the Essence Festival. Naturally, each character is dealing with her own issues and will get a moment in the spotlight. But before the four have even landed in New Orleans, it’s clear that Haddish’s outrageous Dina is going to steal the whole show in the best way.
Though Haddish had already made a name for herself on The Carmichael Show, it was Girls Trip that catapulted her to stardom—and for good reason. Of the four friends, Dina is the most immature, passionate, and loyal. While some of the women harbor resentment toward each other or worry about their lot in life, Dina’s love for her girls and her faith in herself never falters. There’s no hint in her performance that Haddish is remotely intimidated by her more famous co-stars. Her character is the funnel cloud of chaos that fuels the whole trip, whether she’s gleefully spraying Bourbon Street partiers with urine from a zip line, demonstrating how to add citrus fruit to oral sex, or (accidentally, sort of) dosing her friends with absinthe right before they hit a club. She’s also the first to clock someone who’s messing with one of her girls.
On top of her acting credits, Haddish also had a history as a stand-up and has expert comic timing. From pretty much the moment Dina appears on screen, you’re leaning in so as not to miss a single syllable of her asides. But it’s the unbridled joy of the performance that keeps Dina from becoming a mere over-the-top caricature. “I know you guys just keep me around for laughs… but I would die for every last one of you,” she says, and Haddish makes you believe it. Even when fighting with the other women, she professes her loyalty: “I love you, but I hate you, bitch!” Girls Trip works so well because we buy the friendship among its leads, and Dina is the glue that binds them all together. At the end of their very long first night in New Orleans, Dina gathers her friends again—not to do another shot but to say their prayers and give thanks for another day of the life she’s obviously living to the fullest.
Many expected Haddish to follow in McCarthy’s footsteps and score an Oscar nomination for her breakout performance. But her name wasn’t on the Best Supporting Actress list the following winter. She was cited, however, by some critics groups—including the New York Film Critics Circle—and immediately beloved by the moviegoing public. Part of the charm was that Dina appeared to be an exaggerated version of Haddish herself (“I imagine Dina as myself times 10,” she told Vanity Fair), and she easily won over the late-night talk-show circuit. Her film career soon took off in earnest, leading to above-the-title roles in movies like Night School (with Kevin Hart) and Like A Boss (with Rose Byrne). A few months after Girls Trip’s release, Haddish became the first Black female stand-up comedian to host Saturday Night Live, and officially ended her major awards drought: She won an Emmy.
Availability: Girls Trip is currently available for digital rental and/or purchase via Amazon, Google Play, Apple, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango Now, Redbox, DirecTV, and VUDU.
23 Comments
People always say someone should be nominated for an Oscar, but they never say who in their place should be cut from the nominees. Who would be cut? The nominees for Supporting Actress were stacked for the 2018 Oscars.
Sort of beside the point of the article, but if you really want an answer: Allison Janney. I, Tonya is a good movie (and Margot Robbie is mind-blowing and deserved every award for it), but Janney’s character is a one-note, unchanging character. Allison Janney is Allison Janney and I love her to death, but she could have acted that role in her sleep.
Aw no she’s really really great in I, Tonya. And I thought that was a pretty great year of supporting actresses and no reason Haddish should’ve been nominated over anyone. Don’t even think it’s in the same class as McCarthy, who created a pretty weird, unique character for Bridesmaids, and even had to add some gravitas and pathos to the role by the end. Haddish is a great comedian and intrinsically funny, but nothing in that role was unique or Oscar-worthy imo. She even said the character’s basically her times ten.
She is great! But it wasn’t a challenging role at all, especially for Janney—she just had to be a raging c-word. It’s one-note.McCarthy was incredible in Bridesmaids, but saying she added some gravitas and pathos near the end while denying that Haddish did the exact same at the end of her movie is just sort of ignoring the end of Girls Trip. I don’t know that it matters how she formed the character, it’s a magnetic, mesmerizing performance that I would argue slightly outdoes McCarthy in terms of stealing the thunder of the stacked cast surrounding her.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Girls Trip, but I didn’t think anything Haddish did with that character was dramatically different from what most comedians do in the last act of a comedy that gets sappy. But it has been a while – it just didn’t leave that impression for me.
I don’t disagree, but I don’t think McCarthy did anything beyond that either.
“A ghost tried to fuck me. You ever been fucked by a ghost?” This movie is a delight.
Oddly, she announced the nominations too I think.
‘Girls Trip’ was terrible. Bridesmaids was quite funny, but this was just painful.
The funny thing about Girls Trip was that it seemed to come out of nowhere. From this side the side of the Pond, I remember the big buzz for a female led comedy being all focused on Rough Night.
That film was supposed to fill the void/pick up the slack left by Bridesmaids, yet GT ended up doing that and RN disappeared fairly quickly.
Or, the movie was not very good and Haddish is simply not funny.I didnt think shriek-yelling for 90 minutes garners an Oscar nom these days.
the first Black female stand-up comedian to host Saturday Night LiveWhoopi has never hosted, despite being a native NYer? I wonder why.
What makes you think “being a native NYer” has anything at all to do with who gets asked to host SNL?
I suppose it doesn’t matter in reality. “Hometown girl makes good” isn’t automatically a thing.
I thought SNL was 80% inspired by the Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, and SNL was more a feeder production flow for various more northernly based production outfits like Second City, rather than a feeder source for NYC based acts, Chase being the one great exception.
Girls trip has a 6.2 on imdb. Not very good even for this type of movie.
I saw it. Was fine, nothing special. Had some laughs. Nothing about it was award worthy to me, it was forgettable overall. I think she is funny, charismatic and good looking. But not a great actress, just ok.
Every movie with black leads is a full point lower on imdb than they deserve, or compared to white-led films with similar critical reviews. Movies with gay or female leads are usually between .5 and 1.0 point lower than they deserve. If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself, it’s crazy
I just googled “movies with black lead actors” and then I clicked each in the list they gave and they were all rated pretty high on imdb. I think its going to be hard for me to search for movies with black lead actors that are not rated high, because I only remember the good ones. And any search I do is going to end up with results showing stuff like django unchained.
I think movies that are targeted towards black audiences might be rated lower than expected, but for some valid reasons. example-If a movie is using comedy that requires you to have grown up in a black household to understand it, you probably wouldnt rate it very highly if you were white. Tyler Perry movies are another good example. Movies targeted to minority racial groups also tend to be lower budget which can negatively affect a movie in many ways from set quality to editing, music selection, etc.
And yes, probably a bit of racism dragging down the scores too. Though I think girls trip deserves about a 6.5, so pretty close to what it has.
Movies targeted to minority racial groups also tend to be lower budget which can negatively affect a movie in many ways from set quality to editing, music selection, etc.Tyler Perry is a notoriously cheap producer and does most of his own writing.
Can confirm. And any Spike Lee movie that comes out automatically gets crazy low initial IMDB ratings, surely from a bunch of people who haven’t even seen the movie in question yet. I know that happened with Chi-Raq, and even more tellingly happened when the much more widely acclaimed BlacKkKlansman was first open to be rated on IMDB. Hmm, yeah, I really wonder why that happens…
Stop it already with the argument that Haddish was even a possibility, and that Girl’s Trip is a “very good movie”. I saw it and it’s bad. Maybe not bad, but at least not good. In line with the Hungover trilogy. You’re still writing articles about this bc people have actually not seen the movie and therefore think that it’s another case of a black actor being snubbed. But it’s just bad. And I’m sorry bc she’s funny but she has no acting chops whatsoever. It’s like expecting Kristen Wiig to be nominated for Bridesmaids, or Ed Helms for Hungover. What. The. Fuck.
I plan to watch this film eventually, but what does “reunite after fiveyears” mean? Based on the ages of the actresses, it’s obviously been much longer than taht since college. Was it the last college reunion? Or was it an event that happened that caused them not to see each other for five years?
Two of them had a falling out, and the rest have seen each other in 2s or 3s, but all of them had not been together, all 4 of them, since the falling out.