Concluding my rundown of personal 2023 Oscar nominations, today I’ll look at the Best Director category.
Great movie direction is even harder to assess than great movie acting. How do you weigh the wide range of skill sets needed to successfully helm a movie, whether it’s working with the actors, deciding where to put the camera and when to move it, or setting the overall tone of the piece?
It’s been a minute since Lizzo dropped new music, and three years since her last studio album, 2019’s Cuz I Love You. But a whole new summer of Lizzo is on the horizon, with the planned release of her fourth album, Special, a week from today.
Setting the table is the rapper-singer’s fourth Top Five single, ‘About Damn Time,’ which has been burning up TikTok for awhile. This is a disco-funk banger that instantly brightens any room — in other words, a typical Lizzo song.
Like the other Lizzo song on this week’s Billboard Top Ten, ‘Good As Hell’ found its success a few years after its initial release.
This track, which currently sits at #6 on the Hot 100, was included on the soundtrack of the 2016 film Barbershop: The Next Cut and failed to find a wider audience at the time. But the mega-success of ‘Truth Hurts’ put a spotlight on Lizzo’s earlier singles and this song found new life.
Back in April, I predicted that Lizzo was about to blow up, although I thought her single ‘Juice’ would be the one to dominate airwaves.
Instead, it was the two-year-old track ‘Truth Hurts’ that showed up everywhere and gave Lizzo the coming-out she deserves. After not charting when it was dropped in 2017, ‘Truth Hurts’ returned with a vengeance, spending 27 weeks and counting on the Hot 100 and hitting #1. This week it’s at #4, up a spot from the prior week.
If you haven’t heard of Lizzo yet, that’s about to change. The Houston-based rapper/singer/flautist just released her third album, Cuz I Love You, and pop culture has finally caught up with her unique brand of sass, humor and positivity. And once you’re exposed to her infectious personality, it’s hard to look away.
I first heard about Lizzo late last year when my daughter started working her songs into her ‘family drive’ playlists. The opening line of one song, ‘Truth Hurts,’ sums up the funny, frank style that makes Lizzo so refreshing: “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% that bitch.”
Meet Me In Montauk 