Viola Davis has made history and will continue to make history this awards season. She is now the most-Oscar-nominated African-American woman in the history of the Academy. She’s the first African-American woman to win five SAG Awards. It’s pretty much a certainty that she’ll win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar too. So what else does Viola have going on? Well, she’s about to star in a film about white supremacists.

Viola Davis and Julia Roberts are starring in a movie version of Jodi Picoult’s novel “Small Great Things” for Amblin Partners. The attachment of Davis comes a day after she won a SAG Award for best supporting actress for “Fences.”

“Small Great Things” centers on a labor/delivery nurse who takes care of newborns at a Connecticut hospital who’s ordered not touch the baby of a white supremacist couple. When the baby dies in her care, she’s then taken to court by the couple.

[From Variety]

I’ve never read a Jodi Picoult book in my life, so I had to look up the story to see if Variety’s summary was on-point. So, it seems like Viola will be playing the nurse who gets sued and Julia Roberts will play the lawyer defending her. It seems like an interesting story and like it will be another showcase for Viola’s talents, honestly.

Speaking of Viola and telling stories about people other than white folks, Viola spoke a bit at the SAG Awards about inclusion in storytelling and whether this year’s diverse nominations were a signal that #OscarsSoWhite is over. Viola said:

“There’s a lot of typecasting — age, sex, color, dark-skinned, light-skinned. Response to OscarSoWhite? No. I think that every nominee from Naomie Harris to Octavia Spencer to ‘Hidden Figures’ to ‘Fences’ to ‘Moonlight’ to Mahershala Ali are up there because they deserve to be there. They’re not there because of the color of their skin. They put in the work. So the answer to that is no.”

“February 27 is gonna come, and now what? Is it just going to be a trend to talk about inclusion — and I’d rather say inclusion than diversity — or is it going to be a norm that we’re all part of the narrative, that all of our stories deserve to be told, and that art indeed has to reflect life and our culture? And people are going to demand it. We’re not ‘The Brady Bunch’ anymore. We’re ‘Black-ish.’ We’re ‘Fresh Off the Boat.’ We’re ‘Jane the Virgin.’ We’re ‘Stranger Things.’ We’re a hodgepodge of races and sexes and sexualities. I saw an absence of women who look like me on TV eight years ago. And to tell you the truth, we’re still sort of absent in leading roles, especially if you’re darker than a paper bag.”

[From Page Six]

Viola never fails to impress me, you know? She could have just taken her SAG Award and thanked the people she needed to thank, but she made her acceptance speech about telling diverse stories and then afterwards, she was talking about colorism in how projects are being cast. She’s amazing.

Photos courtesy of WENN.