Octavia Spencer Riffs On American Mixup Over Black Films On 'SNL'

“Saturday Night Live” guest host Octavia Spencer was less interested in taking swipes at the Trump administration than in grappling with America’s confusion over its black films at the Oscars.

Spencer joked about the frequent confusion over her most recent movie, “Hidden Figures” ― which has been repeatedly conflated with “Fences,” a separate movie starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis. “People have been so kind to me about that movie. So many people have been coming up to me, saying, ‘I love Hidden Fences!’” she quipped.

They’re only similar in that they feature African Americans. “Hidden Figures” is about the black female mathematicians and engineers at NASA who helped launch John Glenn into space, while “Fences” is a complex story about the African American experience in Pittsburgh that centers on a black garbage collector who once had dreams of the big leagues. Both films were up for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards (the honor ultimately went to “Moonlight”), and Spencer was nominated for best supporting actress.

Spencer also addressed the crazy Oscars ending when “La La Land” was mistakenly announced as the winner for best picture, when it was supposed be “Moonlight.”

“I get it, I get it,” she said. “There were three black movies at the Oscars this year. And that’s a lot for America.” An easy solution, Spencer said, would be a three-way mashup of the films.

”If you’re gonna get confused anyway, I thought I might as well make some money off it. So, that’s why I produced ‘Hidden Fence Light,’” she joked. “It’s the story of three black women who send an introspective gay boy to build a fence on the moon.”

In any case, she quipped, it’s nice not to have to play nurses any longer.

Spencer got to reprise a situation from yet another one of her movies on “SNL” — 2011’s “The Help” — when she reappeared as her character in that film, Minny Jackson (for which Spencer won an Oscar for best supporting actress). She turned up in the cold open with Kate McKinnon’s Jeff Sessions to offer him a version of her famous excrement pie from the movie that Minny served to her employer.

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Source: HuffPost Black Voices

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