The Screen Actors Guild announced nominees for its 13th annual motion picture and primetime television acting honors this morning, and as I feared, my fellow SAG members slept on the best drama on television, failing to recognize the talented ensemble cast of The Wire.
Amazingly (totally fucking amazingly!), they included the cast of Boston Legal in that category. Give me a break! Boston Legal next to The Wire is like comparing a paper match to a raging forest fire. There is no comparison, but apparently the latter show is too deep for the limited attention spans of some actors.
ANYWAY, Dreamgirls received nominations in both individual and ensemble categories, as did a movie I thoroughly enjoyed, Martin Scorcese’s The Departed.
Read the entire list of nominees here.
Because actors make up the largest contingent of Oscar voters, these awards are often seen as an indicator of likely voting for that award. The SAG Awards will be held Sunday, January 28 and broadcast on TBS and TNT cable networks.
Were it not for the very reason for the trip, it would have been a truly wonderful weekend.
I am finally beginning to recover physically from the whirlwind cross country journey out to Los Angeles and back last week for my grandmother’s funeral. While the trip itself was from December 28 – 31, the whole odyssey and the planning required to pull it off began on the 22nd when we learned of Gram’s passing. All through the Christmas holiday, small mountains had to be moved to find flights and hotels. In my immediate family alone there were six people traveling from five cities, all on the east coast. Among extended family also descended from Gram, there were another nine travelers from three east coast departure points.
My cousin Alesia in California pulled off the Herculean task of booking the accommodations. She’s not a professional travel agent but she certainly could be. She not only worked the web but worked the phones talking to her personal contacts at the airlines to negotiate the lowest possible fares, taking into consideration the short travel time, the bereavement allowance and our various starting points, date and time requirements. Wheelchair arrangements were also made for my mother at every point going and coming, and she pulled strings with friends at an LA area hotel to get us rooms that were not far from where family lives in Inglewood.
Tuesday after Christmas with the family, my younger brother and I had to travel back to Atlanta and New York City respectively to pack, take care of personal affairs, then fly out on Thursday. Two other brothers also departed that day, while Mom and my oldest brother left a day earlier.
Now I must tell you, I don’t travel well. I hate flying. I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t care for it, especially when it’s such a long distance, you have to make connecting flights (I narrowly escaped being snowed-in in Denver during their most recent storm) and when there is such a short turnaround. Being cramped in those small seats, in that sealed capsule, with nowhere to go for six hours is hell on earth. It would have been far easier to pack me in dry ice and ship me FedEx. Add to that the fact that the four days spent out there wasn’t enough to adjust to the three hour time difference, so I was always going to bed at what would be the wee hours of the morning here in the east. I was a hair shy of punchy the entire time.
As funerals go, Gram’s home-going was a very lovely and respectful affair. She was quite a beloved member of her churches (plural, she belonged to one years ago, then moved to another) and ministers from both were represented. They spoke not in the general platitudes one gives to just any old deceased person, but with glowing and heartfelt comments of someone they genuinely knew and loved. Gram in many ways had raised them too. One younger minister told of how she had corrected him on some scripture passages and educated him about how things were done when he first arrived. It was interesting to hear comments from so many people who were not related but who also considered her like family.
Gram was a towering presence. She was the first in a long line of very dynamic women in our family, my mother, aunt and cousins, all carry on that trait, so much so that the entire ceremony was organized almost entirely by them. I had a hand in writing an early draft version of her obituary during Christmas that we emailed out, but by the time I arrived, and the programs were being created, it had been expanded to about three times its previous length. One of my older brothers helped in the design and layout, but other than that, most of the men in three families were simply left to do pall bearer duty.
Various grandchildren spoke during the funeral itself. Another of my brothers has become the designated speaker for our family on such occasions, the rest of us would turn into a blubbering mess, I’m afraid. He now calls himself “The Vice President,” the one assigned to speak at official functions.
Thankfully, we don’t have any “throw yourself on the casket” types in our family. Nobody fell out or had to be removed in hysterics or pulled focus away from the purpose at hand. It was all quite tasteful. Afterwards, at the repast in the church hall upstairs, I got to meet several family members I had previously never met before. It has been thirty years since my last trip out west and I have cousins who were teenagers then but who are now married adults with children I have only seen in photographs. It was a somber, yet friendly and relaxed atmosphere.
Finally, we had to make the long journey out to the cemetery. We were instantly reminded of how spread out the LA area is and how long it takes to get everywhere. The church was in Los Angeles, the burial site in Covina, which took us 45 minutes to an hour.
For those of you still shopping for a burial plot, let me make a suggestion. Keep your pall bearers in mind when you look at locations. Gram chose a truly beautiful site, with a lovely view…high up on a steep hill. There were eight pall bearers and every one of us, plus a cemetery official, was needed to safely carry her to her final resting spot. I should have worn turf shoes with cleats instead of Kenneth Cole. We worried my oldest brother was going to have a heart attack, his breathing was so heavy when we finally reached the top. But it was a lovely view. A lovely view.
We said our final goodbyes to Gram and even watched as her casket was lowered into the ground, although I’m not sure any of us were really prepared to see that. We made the long trip back to Inglewood, where everyone gathered for more eating and socializing. While the events of the day weighed heavy on our minds, they seemed secondary to the pleasure of each other’s company.
All of us admitted we hated the fact that it took a funeral to bring everyone together but we were still glad we were there. My late grandfather, Gram’s husband who died before I was born, had eight siblings. There were descendants from at least two other branches with whom I got to talk, exchange contact information and share stories. I learned for the first time how our great-grandfather escaped a slave plantation by outsmarting trackers out to recapture him.
Thanks to digital cameras and laptops, the memories were preserved as well. One cousin who is a photographer, had taken lots of pictures and dumped them to his PC and burned a CD. My brother then took his CD, dumped those pictures to his MacBook, added shots from his own camera, then created a slide show in iPhoto that everyone was able to watch. A day later he added some pictures I took and roughed out a DVD that we watched on a big screen tv. He’ll refine it and make copies for all of us.
There was a family reunion back in 2002 and plans for another in 2005 that failed to come off. So while some of us were out sightseeing Saturday, others were planning the next one, for July or August of this year in Atlanta. Spurred on by this recent set of circumstances and an awareness of a gradual transition on the genealogical chart, we came away from this week turning what could have been a negative experience into an opportunity grow closer. It is undoubtedly what Gram would have wanted.
New goals, new focus, a renewed sense of purpose. A new starting point. Resetting the clock and beginning again, committed to doing it better, smarter, passionately, more efficiently, with greater results.
Happy New Year!