It feels like Oscar season just ended, but “Get Out” is already getting into next year’s contest. 

Oscar campaigns typically rev up around Labor Day with the Telluride, Venice and Toronto film festivals, where many of the hopeful contenders premiere. That doesn’t prevent studios from planting awards-season seeds early, especially for movies that open in the first half of the year. With that in mind, it appears we have our first bid for the 2018 Oscars.

Universal Pictures will host a conversation with director Jordan Peele and a “garden party” at the studio lot to celebrate the May 9 release of “Get Out” on iTunes and Amazon, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Sources “insist” it’s not an awards ploy, but the guest list suggests otherwise: Members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which oversees the Golden Globes, and the Broadcast Film Critics Association, which puts on the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, are invited to the event, among others. 

Whether or not Universal intends it as such, this is a signature campaign move. A Q&A with a filmmaker in front of a hotshot voting body? Food and/or cocktails and/or whatever else this garden party will entail? These are the kinds of things that occur almost daily throughout November, December and January, when studios are actively chasing nominations. The only difference is that the “Get Out” shindig is divorced from the common awards-season calendar. 

But that, too, makes sense: It’s hard for films from the first quarter to make a splash nearly a year later when Academy voters are completing their ballots. The most recent Best Picture winner released before May was “The Silence of the Lambs,” which opened in January 1991. Conveniently, that’s also the last horror movie to garner the prize, which could leave Peele following in the prestigious footsteps of “Lambs” director Jonathan Demme, who died Wednesday. 

HuffPost reached out to two Universal reps to ask about the studio’s awards strategy, but we haven’t heard back. No matter what, there’s proof that Universal wants “Get Out” in the awards game: The studio rented out a Los Angeles theater in March to host two screenings ― one for Academy members and another for BAFTA folks. A week later, New York-based Academy members got a screening of their own at the Museum of Modern Art.

With fawning reviews, layered topicality and an unexpected $171 million in domestic grosses to its name, “Get Out” seems to have a keen chance of being remembered when Oscar season begins in earnest. Considering it doesn’t read as conventional awards fare, we did make an early argument that it’s the type of movie that should be feted. Onward!

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Warning: This article features artworks depicting nudity and other explicit scenes. You’ve been warned. 

When Carol Rama was 12 years old, her father committed suicide. Three years later, her mother was committed to a psychiatric clinic. Without any formal training, Rama turned to art as a form of therapy. She continued to make work, with limited recognition, until her death in 2015 at 97 years old. 

The words “art therapy” call certain images to mind: smiling flowers and gentle trees, pointy-roofed houses and birds like lowercase m’s. You know, Bob Ross–type stuff. Rama, however, was interested in more unorthodox subject matter: tongues and teeth, prosthetic limbs and animal pelts, masturbation and puddles of shit. 

The first New York museum survey of Rama’s work, titled “Carol Rama: Antibodies,” is now on view at the New Museum in Manhattan. Featuring 150 of Rama’s works, it is a stunning overview of an artist who followed no one and learned nothing, making work in her 80s the same way she did at 18, by following her gut. Despite the fact that Rama was born in 1918 and raised under Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule, her work feels current, frighteningly so. In a variety of media and styles, Rama visualizes the ecstatic horror of existing in a female body ― sexual, deranged and unbound.

Today, women are creating the most visceral and compelling material in the horror genre, whose borders are bleeding out at an ever increasing pace. There is Julia Ducournau’s “Raw,” described in Rolling Stone as a “cannibal coming-of-age” movie ― a film so grotesque some theaters stocked up on barf bags for queasy viewers. There is also “XX,” an anthology of short horror films directed by and starring women, which made waves at the film festival circuit earlier this year. 

Horror has crept outside the confines of film as well. Musicians including Jenny Hval, Bat for Lashes and even Beyoncé have incorporated the genre’s tropes and aesthetic into their mangled and monstrous music videos. And on TV, there’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a thriller that verges on horrific, based off Margaret Atwood’s haunting 1985 dystopian novel, visualized with a “radical feminist aesthetic.” 

There are two interrelated ideas lurking at the core of most works of feminine horror. Firstly, the experience of being a woman can be a horrific one, plagued by restrictive standards, a persistent fear of violence, a sense of enforced silence and ― if you think about it all too much ― subsequent madness. The other key of feminist horror is, however, to subvert these terms, to take ownership of femininity and all the monstrosity it possesses. “I desire, I bleed, I make, I bite,” says the monstrous female, feeding off her own suffering and even taking pleasure from it. 

Rama herself made a conscious decision to confront the unfathomable suffering she endured at such a young age, turning pain into power. “Private circumstances put me in a state of psychological amputation and loss,” she said in 1986. “I understood that I was obeying a mechanism of repetition of pain. And that when I turned it on its head, it became a sort of devotion to pain, to joy, to death.” 

Rama was inspired after visiting her mother in a psychiatric clinic and observing the other patients housed there. People, she described, “with their tongues sticking out, their legs apart or crouching down in some other position.” This blatant disregard for societal norms enthralled young Rama, who found in women with mental illness something stimulating and even hopeful. “The sticking-out tongue is the object of desire,” she said in 1995. “The desire that we have too, except that etiquette enables us to swallow our tongues.”

In the 1930s, Rama began creating delicate watercolors of undressed women, desirous and deranged. She often returned to the image of “Dorina,” a nude woman reclining blissfully as a snake writhes from between her legs. Her labia is blood red, as is her tongue, which dangles from her lips like a slab of raw meat. 

“Sin is my master,” Rama once said, when asked about artists who influenced her. The snake, a symbol of sin in Christianity, often manifests in her work, though its presence often seems more pleasurable than agonizing.

During the time Rama was creating her early work, Fascism labelled deviant bodies of any kind as wicked ― whether they be physically disabled or sexually unorthodox in any way. Rama made such persons her subjects, rendering women in wheelchairs and strapped into hospital beds, men touching themselves while admiring dead horses and a lady mid-squat, producing a watery pile of poop. Through her work she bestowed the de-humanized deviants persecuted by a Fascist regime with subjectivity, and this, humanity. 

“I believe there is no freedom without derangement,” Rama said in 1997. “But then, we are all pretty deranged.”

When Rama first exhibited her work in 1945 at Turin’s Faber Gallery, the show was abruptly shut down by the police for public indecency. Over 25 works were lost or destroyed as a result. This incident prompted Rama to explore more abstract avenues for exploring similar subject matter. Moving from figuration to expressionist collage, she continued to create works that growled and licked and scratched, never aligning herself with any particular movement, tradition or man. 

Rama’s abstract works, it turned out, were even more ghastly than her figurative depictions, the kind of nonsensical scary most of us only encounter in a dream state. Her canvasses are first covered with oozing globs of black, red and brown, then sprinkled with objects like doll eyeballs, fingernails or dirty syringes. The paintings resemble botched autopsies, glimpses inside bodies that refuse to remain silent any longer, their bloody insides at long last coming out to play.

With her 1950s and ‘60s work, which she called bricolages, Rama took the unbound body one step further, exorcising all unnecessary parts like hair and skin. This is body horror at its finest, inspiring a mix of terror and fascination in the viewer. Rama threw the unknowability of our own bodies back at us, illuminating that few real-life monstrosities can compare to the excrescence of our own blood and guts. 

Rama went on to fold themes into her work that inspire feminist horror of all genres to this day. For example, one series titled “Omens of Birnam” is based on the Three Witches in “Macbeth,” who use their powers to control the fates of men. Rama was enthralled with mythical, occult women, a subject which was recently explored in 2016’s “The Witch.” 

For another series, Rama worked with textiles to transfigure the traditional bridal gown, eschewing traditional white for black frocks accentuated with red gashes and welts. Blood-splattered wedding dresses, symbolizing the perversion of purity, have become a horror flick mainstay, most memorably appearing in prom dress form in “Carrie.” 

In the 1990s, Rama became fixated, along with much of the world, on bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a deadly illness also known as mad cow disease. Research revealed that an epizootic in the U.K. was a result of cattle being fed a cattle meat-based product, therefore unwittingly committing cannibalism time and time again. Infected beasts would convulse wildly as their brains deteriorated, a visceral physical manifestation of their mental anguish. 

In this bizarre tale of cannibalism and madness, Rama glimpsed her own story, and the story of womankind. She connected human’s hunger for cow meat with men’s hunger for women’s flesh, thereby aligning pornography with cannibalism. “The feminine body is meat and animal meat is a body that has been sexualized by the normative heterosexual gaze,” Beatriz Preciado writes in The Passion According to Carol Rama. 

The madness that results from this cannibalistic chain of bodies consuming bodies, Rama believes, has been cast over time as “female hysteria.” The artist summed up her conclusions by stating, “The mad cow is me and that has given me joy, an extraordinary joy.” Her mad-cow-centric works take the shape of large-scale collages featuring pieces of rubber cut in the shapes of breasts, testicles and meaty sacs. It’s hard to decipher which parts are food and which are not. 

In the film “Raw,” eating meat serves as a metaphor for self-discovery and self-empowerment, feasting off others to strengthen oneself. The taboo act of eating meat generates a chain of rule-breaking discoveries ― some sexual, others psychological, some straight-up cannibalistic. The film offers an empowering alternative to Rama’s mad cow premonition ― finally a woman gets to do the consuming, for once. 

Today, it still qualifies as news when a “unlikable woman” appears on television. Yet decades ago, in the 1940s, Rama was pushing boundaries by depicting, in dainty watercolor, a woman sticking out her tongue while spreading her cheeks and taking a shit. 

Throughout her life, Rama followed no “masters,” accepted no instruction and adhered to no tradition. Her oeuvre is as loose and leaky as the innards of a dead animal. She preferred to work untrained and untethered, thus making art which which she believed “belonged to everybody,” because “madness is close to everybody” ― male or female, man or beast. Sadly, she did not receive widespread acknowledgment for her work until she was in her 80s. Even now, she remains largely unknown and underappreciated, especially given the unorthodox and insurgent nature of her work. 

In subject matter and style, Rama’s work most closely resembles work made decades after her ― by artists working in film, music and television. A true pioneer of the monstrous feminine, Rama realized the brutality inflicted on women’s bodies and minds and the seed of pleasure buried within that brutality. Embrace the depravity, she teaches, embrace the lunacy, embrace everything. When there is desire, even amidst unbearable suffering, there is joy. 

“Carol Rama: Antibodies” runs until September 10, 2017 at New Museum. 

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Alicia Garza was just 11 years old when riots erupted in the streets of Los Angeles 25 years ago ― but her memories of the events that unfolded are vivid.

Garza, who is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, was born and raised in the Bay Area and currently lives in Oakland, California. She credits the rebellion as one of the reasons why she has since committed her life’s work to the fight for justice for black Americans.

She remembers the video that captured four police officers violently beating Rodney King, a black man who was pulled over after a high-speed chase; the trial and the ultimate acquittal of all officers involved that prompted immediate outrage; the videos that showed L.A. in flames, stores set on fire and “shit hitting the fan”; the tensions between the city’s communities of color following the killing of Latasha Harlins, a black teen who was fatally shot by a Korean store owner just months before the riot; the images both of people helping each other and pushing back against the police; and, most distinctly, she remembers how black protesters were demonized for the anger they expressed in the aftermath of such a gross act of racial injustice.

“I remember all of the stories,” she told HuffPost in an interview this week. “I remember this went on for days; it changed the course of history.”

Saturday marks 25 years since one of the most profound and violent acts of protest in modern American history, which involved days of rebellion largely led by L.A.’s black residents. Fights broke out, buildings were burned, more than 50 people were killed, over 2,000 were injured and the city suffered $1 billion in property damages. The overarching narrative of the unrest is complex, with some people who say it was useless and destructive, while others believe the demonstration was to be expected considering the oppressive conditions black people lived under. 

Decades later, the conditions have not changed much: Police brutality against black Americans is rampant, and the relationship between cops and communities of color requires much more work. Cameras and social media have helped to rapidly amplify news of the police killings of black men and women and revolutionize the ways in which residents respond ― much of which is a result of efforts by Garza, along with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, who collectively birthed the Black Lives Matter movement.

“[Let's] figure out together how to ... build a strategy that helps us get us from where we are to where we deserve to be.”
Alicia Garza

As someone who has stood on the front lines of countless black-led protests, Garza understands the significance of the L.A. riot. But she also strongly believes that in order to understand the anger and rage that was displayed at the time, it is important that we unpack the circumstances that led to such levels of outrage ― as seen in L.A. and cases around the country ― and continue to identify ways to channel that outrage into more impactful and productive outcomes.

“We should be pissed off about people getting shot down in the street, we should be pissed off that police officers are abusing their power and raping poor black women, we should be pissed off that the murders of black trans women go completely unnoticed, unrecognized and uncared for ― and if we’re not pissed about that then we’re not human,” she said. “And at the same time, rage and anger is not sustainable, it is not a sustainable way to fuel a movement. Rage and anger can actually just burn you out and make you not able to keep fighting and that’s a larger consequence for our movement.”

“What’s important is that we are able to figure out how to channel the rage and anger ― not to get rid of it, but instead how to channel it into sustained resistance and really clear and sharp strategies that allow us to actually change our conditions,” Garza added. “I’m really an advocate of letting that anger and that rage fuel you into action and we then figure out together how to transform that into a vision for the world that we actually wanna live in and build a strategy that helps us get us from where we are to where we deserve to be.”

BLM has made promoting peace a central part of its mission while still acknowledging the pain, anger and frustration that comes with being black in America. The organization was founded in 2012 following the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Since then, countless black men and women have died at the hands of police, and BLM has grown in prominence and expanded its efforts to dismantle systemic racism.

King’s beating was unprecedented at the time in that it was one of the first instances where police brutality was captured on camera and shared publicly. Now, people anywhere can instantly access video footage of the police killings of black Americans like Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

But the fight for justice and liberation for black lives also requires an understanding that the experience of black people in America is not monolithic. L.A. itself has one of the highest populations of black immigrants, which includes a diverse community of Nigerians, Ethiopians, Afro-Mexicans, Afro-Latinx people and black Central Americans who identify as Garifuna, as well as people from Caribbean countries like Jamaica and Haiti, says Tia Oso, the national organizer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. There are more than 2.1 million African immigrants in America alone (that number is steadily climbing), and BAJI ― where Tometi is the executive director ― fights for the racial, social and economic justice of all black immigrants.

“Just as African Americans, black immigrants face issues of racial discrimination and state violence,” Oso told HuffPost, noting the recent police killing of Zelalem Eshetu Ewnetu, who migrated from Ethiopia just eight years ago. “Systemic oppression hits black immigrants and African Americans at the same pressure points.”

Organizations like BLM and BAJI embrace the diversity among blackness and, now more than ever, deliberately seek to amplify the intersecting struggles people of color face in America. In doing so, these organizations are part of a long history of black-led liberation movements, and have learned valuable lessons from past activists ― and historic moments like the L.A. riots ― to apply in the future.

“The L.A. riots impacted black activism in a way that keeps the movement honest and accountable to the plight of people who are living on the margins, living in poverty, living under the most violent oppression,” Oso said, noting that California is home to the country’s deadliest police force. “The uprising in L.A., similar to the Black Panther shootout with LAPD in the ‘60s, shows us that, though we champion policy remedies and reforms to solve our issues, that sometimes conditions in our communities reach a boiling point. It reminds us that reforms are not enough, and that the system must be transformed.”

Transforming the system requires focusing on much more than just police brutality, and both BLM and BAJI have identified ways to better holistically combat several forms of injustice against black lives. Both organizations elevate the experiences of black people ― including those who identify as queer, women, immigrant, trans and disabled ― and help to tackle issues that disproportionately affect these communities, such as deportation, poverty and incarceration.

“We’ve always said Black Lives Matter is in a long tradition of resistance to violence against black people. In essence Black Lives Matter then is not a new idea, it’s instead an idea and a movement whose time had come,” Garza said.

And the timing could not be more pressing. With Donald Trump as president and a Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions, the stakes are higher and the consequences more dire for communities of color. 

“When you look at Jeff Sessions’ record and what he’s done in the last 100 days, what you see is that he’s moving an aggressive agenda, really quietly ... to give police more power, more secrecy and more leniency, and we haven’t yet seen the impact of what that will do but we will soon,” she added. “My plea to all of us would be: We have to move quickly to stop that from happening because at the end of the day, when the police are allowed to be judge, jury and executioner, everybody loses.”

"Black Lives Matter then is not a new idea, it’s instead an idea and a movement whose time had come."
Alicia Garza

Time and again, America has witnessed racial outrage.

“Whether it’s the Rodney King trials, the L.A. uprising or Hurricane Katrina, we have these flash points where the inner workings of America get laid bare for everyone to see,” Garza said. “That’s why I emphasize that anger and rage are important, [but] how do we channel that anger and rage into resilience and vision and strategy so that we don’t have to spend our lives being angry?”

Speaking out doesn’t necessarily mean doing it through street protests ― Garza said it can also mean using your resources, voice, power and position of privilege to denounce the treatment of marginalized groups and address racial issues before they fester and lead to unfavorable consequences. If there is a collective push to transform the way America functions, then there is greater potential for the progress we all hope to achieve.

“I’m somebody who believes protest is important, and I’m somebody who believes protest is not enough,” Garza said. “It’s also important to change culture, to change the way we understand what’s happening around us, to change social norms, to change our values ― and there’s a role for everybody to play in that.”

“Let’s explore what we can do to spend our lives changing the world and moving towards the world we actually want to live in,” she said, “as a resilience strategy, as a way to come back to ourselves, to be present in our bodies, to be present in our relationships with other people and to be present in the vision that we have for what the world can look like.”

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Vito Acconci, the provocative performance artist who used his body to explore themes of voyeurism, sexuality, narcissism and identity, has died at 77 years old. The cause of death was a stroke, according to art dealer Kenny Schachter.

A radical pioneer who’s still known to many as the man who masturbated beneath floorboards as part of a gallery performance, Acconci was born in the Bronx in 1940. His father was a bathrobe manufacturer and his mother worked in a public school cafeteria. Educated at all-boys Roman Catholic schools from elementary school until college, he received his BA from College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. 

Though he began his career as a poet, creating the mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9 with Bernadette Mayer, he began to focus on performance art in the late ‘60s. “Even though I loved words, I wanted words to be actions,” he told ArtNews last year. 

Most of Acconci’s performance and video works utilized his body as a material. “My early work came out of a context of feminism,” he told Richard Prince in an interview with BOMB, “and depended on that context. Performance in the early seventies was inherently feminist art. I, as a male doing performance, was probably colonizing it.” 

For his most infamous work, “Seedbed” (1972), he lay beneath the floorboards of Sonnabend Gallery, muttering sexual fantasies about gallery-goers while audibly masturbating. Those inside the gallery could hear Acconci’s words and moans over the loudspeakers. His jarring comments included: “you’re on my left ... you’re moving away but I’m pushing my body against you, into the corner ... you’re bending your head down, over me ... I’m pressing my eyes into your hair.” 

“Decades ago, when I first stumbled upon the performative works of Vito Acconci such as ‘Seedbed,’ a monumental mastabatorial endurance test, I was profoundly taken aback,” Schachter wrote to HuffPost in an email. “Not aghast at the seeming crudeness of it all, but in love with the notion of the endless possibilities as to what could be art that the act engendered.”

The controversial piece, like many more of his works, explored the relationship between artist and viewer, establishing intimacy through obviously unconventional and uncomfortable means. Acconci’s other notable early performances include “Following Piece” (1969), for which he spent a month following strangers on New York streets, stopping only when they entered a private space he could not enter. In “Pryings” (1971), a collaboration with artist Kathy Dillon, Dillon closed her eyes and Acconci used his hands to try to pry them open. 

In his interview with Prince, Acconci explained that many of his performances attempted to, in some way, erase his own (white, male) body. “Remember, this was just after the late sixties,” he said. “The time — the starting time of gender other than male, race other than white, culture other than Western; I wanted to get rid of myself so there could be room for other selves.”

In the 1980s, Acconci’s work moved into the realm of architecture. He explained his motivation for the shift to Architectural Record in 2007. “The beautiful thing about architecture, it does have the anticipation of renovation always built into it, which I find so refreshing from art because art is supposed to be unchangeable. The only things that are unchangeable are tombstones.”

In 1988, he established the architecture practice Acconci Studio and in 1992, worked with Steven Holl to create the exterior for the Storefront for Art and Architecture. 

In 2016, celebrating its 40th anniversary, MoMA PS1 hosted an exhibition revisiting Acconci’s immense influence on performance art titled “VITO ACCONCI: WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976.” The show presented a survey of Acconci’s early works, believing they captured the essence of energy and experimentation that defined the institution. 

PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach, who organized the show, communicated the undeniable impact of Acconci’s legacy to The New York Times. “He’s one of the most influential artists of his time because of the way he connects the private with the public sphere, the body with the street, the media space with the personal space,” he said. “He’s challenging our limits about what we want to be private and what we want to be public, and those questions have only become more important.”

When asked during his BOMB interview “What do you live for?,” the artist replied with the following: “What keeps me living is this: the idea that I might provide some kind of situation that makes people do a double-take, that nudges people out of certainty and assumption of power. (Another way of putting this: some kind of situation that might make people walk differently.)” 

Through his daring, bizarre and distinctly mortal works, Acconci accomplished just that. His spirit will be missed but always remembered. 

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Let’s talk about your new book, The Maddie Diaries. In it, you talk about important lessons you learned in your career. What’s one piece of wisdom you’ll never forget?

You’ve guest-starred on shows like “Pretty Little Liars” and “Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn.” Your movie “The Book of Henry” comes out in June. Do you plan to do more acting?

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American teenagers are not excelling in the arts, and President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts will likely make matters worse, experts say.

The most recent results of a wide-ranging national educational assessment known as the Nation’s Report Card left significant room for improvement in the visual arts and music, the National Center for Education Statistics reported Tuesday.

Students scored an average 147 in music and 149 in visual arts on a scale of 300, dipping very slightly from 2008, when the test was last administered. A sample of 8,800 eighth-grade students from public and private schools participated in the 2016 National Assessment of American Progress, which evaluates comprehension based on a series of questions and original work. 

The NCES found students’ lack of access to arts education significantly contributed to their underwhelming scores. Students who took art classes or music lessons inside and/or outside of school, visited museums, or attended theater performances generally scored better on the test.

“If students take more courses in these areas and also have engagement [in the arts] outside of school, they tend to do better,” said Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner for the NCES.  

To illustrate the benefits of increased arts education, Carr pointed to the narrowing score gap between white and Hispanic students, whose participation in arts activities both inside and outside of school rose from 2008 to 2016 along with their scores.

But as overall scores remain stagnant, Trump is preparing to bulldoze key pathways to arts education for some of the country’s most underserved populations. His budget proposal includes axing 19 publicly funded bodies, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Despite public backlash, the White House has stood by its proposed budget.

“Look, we’re not going to ask you for your hard-earned money anymore … unless we can guarantee that money will be used in a proper function,” White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said last month during a news briefing. “That is about as compassionate as you can get.”

For hundreds of students in Providence, Rhode Island, local nonprofit CityArts provides their only exposure to arts education. While the organization receives some funding through the NEA, the bulk of their school-based arts integration initiatives are made possible by AmeriCorps ― a civil society and service agency housed under the CNCS.

Vanessa DeNino, the director of CityArts’ AmeriCorps programs, said Trump’s budget proposal would “detrimentally impact” the number of children they can serve, likely cutting off access to arts education for more than 700 students.

Providence’s Delsesto Middle School employs just two full-time art teachers for roughly 900 students. CityArts helps fill in the gaps by installing an additional two AmeriCorps teaching artists in the classrooms.

Eliminating CNCS funding “would basically cut the number of art teachers at Delsesto Middle School in half,” said CityArts executive director Nancy Safian. “I’m really concerned about school culture. I think that when there’s a strong arts presence in a school there tends to be a more positive school climate and a bigger sense of community.”

The arts expand horizons and opportunities. They have economic value and are a cornerstone to cultural tourism.
Lydia Black, Alliance for the Arts

In fiscal year 2015, NEA grants reached every county in the country. Many state and local arts organizations depend on federal funding to sustain accessible arts programs throughout the country ― not just in major metropolitan areas.

“The people who are performing lower in rural communities are also going to be impacted because that support is being taken away from them, too,” DeNino said.

Students in the Northeast performed relatively higher than other regions of the U.S., including the South, where some of the lowest score were recorded.

Lydia Black is the executive director for the Alliance for the Arts in southwest Florida. Her organization serves Lee County, where roughly 16 percent of individuals live below poverty level, and offers a wide variety of youth arts programming, including spring, summer and winter camps. The Alliance recently received a $10,000 grant from the NEA to help fund their annual family arts festival.

“We are seeing from the top administration of the United States, the lack of interest in telling [this country’s] story,” Black said. “Most countries have a division of cultural affairs from the national level, and so the NEA really fulfills that role. I think it would be a real shame to lose the NEA’s ability to tell the story of the United States.”

Dennis Inhulsen, chief learning officer at the National Arts Education Association, worries the budget cuts could weaken American students’ competitive edge internationally.

“Students are not achieving, at least according to the assessment, as well as they should,” said Inhulsen. “You can’t say we want a well-rounded student for the 21st century in college and career readiness and then really reduce programs and offerings for kids. It makes no sense.”

“We just don’t like the idea, frankly, of children not being exposed to the arts,” Inhulsen said. “It’s just not what we could call a world-class education.”

Art advocates have noted that the NEA and NEH’s $148 million budgets account for a fraction of 1 percent of the budget, yet provide access to thousands of arts education programs as well as funding for museum exhibits and galleries, which could also bolster students’ ability to perform better on arts assessments.

Artistic ability isn’t the only area subject to improvement. Studies show how increased access to arts education can lead to better grades and higher rates of graduation and college enrollment.

Safian said her staff interviewed parents before and after their children enrolled in CityArts programming. Roughly 65 percent believed their children’s grades had improved since joining CityArts and nearly 90 percent said their children seemed happier at school.

“The fact that the parents perceive their children are doing better in school and that they are enjoying school more is significant,” Safian said.

Arts education benefits aren’t limited to academic performance; they can also positively affect behavior and decrease disciplinary referrals. Black said children who participate in Alliance’s art camps become more open-minded about diversity and other communities.

“There is a return on investment in the dollar spent [on youth arts programs],” Black said. “The arts expand horizons and opportunities. They have economic value and are a cornerstone to cultural tourism.”

“We’re not just developing artists and musicians,” Black said. “Arts can be used to solve environmental challenges. They can be used to solve conflicts. They’re a way to communicate.”

The fate of Trump’s proposed budget ― and our nation’s cultural agencies ― is now in the hands of Congress. While the House and Senate are ruled by Republicans, there has historically been bipartisan support of the NEA and NEH.

The fiscal year 2018 budget is set to take effect on Oct. 1.

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Victor and Marie Luna, a husband-wife photography team in Texas, might have come up with the most magical maternity shoot ever.

On April 7, Victor, a photographer, and Marie, a photo editor, went to Newman’s Castle in Bellville, Texas, for a maternity shoot with five women. The theme? Disney princesses.

The couple was first inspired by the new popularity of “Beauty and the Beast” and then decided to expand their idea. 

“It started out with a Belle-inspired shoot, but as we talked about the ideas and planned it, the more we wanted to go outside of our own element,” the couple told HuffPost. “That is where the group shot of the Disney-inspired photo shoot with all the princesses came to be.”

For the shoot, the mothers (who were either previous clients or models) dressed as Tiana from “The Princess and the Frog,” Snow White, Cinderella, Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” and Jasmine from “Aladdin.” Sew Trendy Accessories, a business that makes handmade maternity gowns, provided the dresses.

Victor and Marie told HuffPost that they aligned the “beautiful mommies” with the princesses they thought they represented. They also described the shoot as “a mix of magic and chaos.”

“Between the wardrobe changes, the makeup retouches, the pee breaks, and one mommy close to giving birth, we managed to make it come together beautifully,” they said.

The couple didn’t want to dive too deep into the characters, but did add a few touches to the shoot like ribbons, headpieces and flowers to represent the princesses. For example, the mom who dressed as Cinderella held a glass slipper for some of her photos. 

The moms in the shoot were “incredibly excited” to see the final results, according to the couple, and Victor and Marie said they were happy to make the moms feel like Disney royalty for the day.

“When we noticed that a few people started to share the photos, our mommies would get in contact with us to let us know that they were famous!” they said. “It made us feel so happy that they were feeling like actual princesses.”

See more photos from the shoot below and see more work from Victor and Marie on Facebook and on their site.

H/T PopSugar

The HuffPost Parents newsletter, So You Want To Raise A Feminist, offers the latest stories and news in progressive parenting. 

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“The Circle” commits a terrible movie crime: It botches its own premise, coming up hollow and spineless. 

There’s no use trying to be more measured. The big-screen adaptation of Dave Eggers’ best-selling 2013 novel about a surveillance-happy internet corporation betrays stories that tackle techno-panic in our increasingly digital world. Eggers’ book is a pulpy page-turner that updates elements of 1984 and Brave New World, even if its execution isn’t as immersive or clever. In movie form, almost everything gets lost in translation. The tone isn’t alarming enough to be a thriller, nor is it witty enough to be a satire, offering no effective commentary about the breadth of our electronic footprints.

No movie should be required to preach a message, but what’s the point in depicting the ills of technology without offering a point of view? We’re talking about a genre that has always been rife with sociopolitical subtext. Think of “Minority Report,” the Philip K. Dick adaptation that asks complicated questions about free will by depicting a police state that uses technology to apprehend criminals. Take the arguable hallmark of science fiction, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and its layered story about a sentient computer that nearly robs astronauts’ ability to control their spacecraft. Even more aligned with “The Circle” are “WALL-E,” “Her” and the Season 3 opener of “Black Mirror,” three deft futuristic chronicles of tech’s effects on human communication. 

It’s especially a bummer because “The Circle” does operate on a timely, intriguing premise. But Eggers and James Ponsoldt’s screenplay is such a tonal and thematic mess that the entire endeavor becomes a waste. 

In it, Emma Watson plays Mae Holland, an office drone whose best friend gets her an interview at a hip internet company called The Circle. Virtuosic chieftain Eamon Bailey, a Steve Jobs type played by Tom Hanks, wants to make the digital sphere more connected ― devices linked, social media inescapable, everyone’s whereabouts publicly tracked at all times. Bailey’s motto is “Knowing is good, but knowing everything is better.” It’s a near-totalitarian nightmare, but you wouldn’t quite know that from the movie, which reduces descriptions of The Cicle’s intents to stiff monologues and exchanges characters for what might as well be cardboard cutouts. 

As Mae continues to work there, she becomes more and more of a convert. She joins the company’s prestigious upper ranks and watches her popularity rise in real time. That, in and of itself, is a huge concept. It invokes our addiction to social media’s instant gratification, as well as the obvious ways that enterprises like Google and Facebook are tracking our online data. But “The Circle” only poses questions ― it rarely answers them. The novel has access to characters’ interior lives. Without them, the movie is powerless. As Mae learns more about The Circle’s inner workings, the movie’s tone hardly aligns with the story’s implications. We never fully understand the Circle overlords’ motivations, and Watson’s plodding performance ensures we never fully understand Mae either.

Usually I think movies without redeeming values aren’t worth the word count. But this is different, not only because it’s an adaptation of a popular novel, but because Hollywood studios can only greenlight so many parables about our cyber destiny. That cinematic trend has its roots in the 1990s, when the internet seemed unknowable. “The Net” and “Hackers” jump-started the mini-genre in 1995, using enigmatic paranoia to fuel their narratives. Given how much more we know about the internet now, for “The Circle” to remain so toothless means Hollywood has wasted an opportunity to tell a relevant story. 

The movie’s third act finds Mae “going transparent,” which means she wears a miniature camera that turns her existence into an all-day live feed. Those who’ve read the book know this results in a character’s tragic death, an episode that rattles Mae and leaves her questioning The Circle’s conscience. In the film, her fallout is so ham-fisted and her retaliation is so broad that any inklings of a thesis statement are expunged. 

What went wrong in this adaptation? Hard to say, especially considering James Ponsoldt is known as a director to watch thanks to “The Spectacular Now” and “The End of the Tour.” He and the cast have given few interviews to promote the movie, and the marketing campaign has seemed relatively muted, even though “The Circle” is opening on more than 3,000 screens, a sum commonly reserved for blockbusters. The film’s highest-profile moment was its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, a whole two days before it opens theatrically. That’s not a sign of faith on a studio’s part. Maybe one day we’ll know why such a promising endeavor resulted in such a disastrous product. For now, carry on with your digital activities. “The Circle” might as well convince us there’s nothing to fret.

You can be highbrow. You can be lowbrow. But can you ever just be brow? Welcome to Middlebrow, a weekly examination of pop culture. Read more here.

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Yesica Calderon received a life-changing surprise this week.

The undocumented immigrant and senior at East Boston High School may have a 4.8 GPA, but her immigration status made it difficult for her to fulfill her dream of going to college.

That all changed when Calderon unexpectedly received a full four-year scholarship to Regis College on Tuesday. A teacher had asked her to go to a study space in the library designated for student athletes, but when Calderon opened the door she found teachers, family, classmates, her coach and the media waiting to give her the good news.

A NowThis video posted Thursday shows the moment Calderon entered the room and her emotional reaction after being given the scholarship, which was made possible thanks to both Regis College and the non-profit Boston Scholar Athletes.

“Some nights I would cry, not knowing what I would do with my future,” she told the room.

Many other schools had given Calderon very little financial aid and the high school student could not apply for government loans due to her immigration status.

“If it wasn’t for this scholarship I probably would not have been able to afford college at all,” she said, according to the Boston Globe. 

This fall Calderon is expected to join the Regis class of 2021 as a freshman, and she says she plans to study to become a social worker. 

Phillip Brangiaforte, headmaster of East Boston High School, told ABC News it was Scholar Athletes’ idea to plan the ceremony to present Calderon with the scholarship.

“We are all very happy for her,” Brangiaforte said. “She definitely deserves it, you know. Yesica is so smart and she’s such a great kid.” 

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By now, you’ve probably heard the of Fyre Festival.

It was billed as a multi-weekend luxury musical festival, thrown by Ja Rule on a private island in the Bahamas. It would be sprawling with models in bikinis and social media elite. Ticket packages reportedly cost anywhere between $1,200 to up to $250,000. Yachts would somehow be involved.

The festival didn’t turn out that way. Ticket holders were met with a desolate, unorganized mess. Tents were half-made, catering served sliced bread and cheese, and headlining talent Blink 182 dropped out last minute. Guests who didn’t immediately head for the airport to escape were stranded in what some called “a disaster tent city.”

Some claimed the U.S. Embassy had to help get people home.

Now, Billy McFarland, the 25-year-old head of Fyre Fest, said he’s considering trying again next year ― to which we can’t help but wonder: This has got to be a joke, right?

In an exclusive interview with Rolling Stone, McFarland, who had previously launched a sketchy credit card company aimed at millennials, attempted to explain his festival’s rise and demise. He started with the history of his bromance with Ja Rule.

“Together, we became friends and business partners,” McFarland said in the article, which was published on Friday, roughly when hundreds of people were probably scrolling through the sarcastic memes and bleak photos posted with the #FyreFestival hashtag.

“We were a little ambitious,” McFarland continued. He explained that the undeveloped island had no water or sewage. By the time guests arrived, he said, a storm had ruined tents and water pipes, causing check-in delays. Then, he added, they decided to pull the plug on the event and offer refunds to guests.

“We were a little naïve in thinking for the first time we could do this ourselves,” McFarland admitted. “Next year, we will definitely start earlier. The reality is, we weren’t experienced enough to keep up.” 

McFarland even offered a tentative date for the Fyre Fest re-do: May 2018.

"Next year, we will definitely start earlier."
Billy McFarland, on the disastrous Fyre Fest.

It’s not clear why McFarland and Ja Rule think the festival-going public will trust them again. But, for what it’s worth, McFarland seems committed to his future, hypothetical event. He even offered to donate a portion of each ticket ― $1.50 ― to the Bahamian Red Cross.

“The one change we will make is we will not try to do it ourselves,” McFarland said. “We will make sure there is infrastructure in place to support us.”

Ja Rule, for his part, apologized for the failed event and wrote on Instagram: “this is NOT MY FAULT.”

Read McFarland’s full interview with Rolling Stone here.

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You’d have to be fairly clueless about the current political moment not to feel a shiver of recognition watching “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the new dystopian drama on Hulu.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s bestselling novel, the show debuted Wednesday after weeks of politically fueled anticipation. The timing is apt. The action takes place in Gilead, a fictional future America that has been taken over by a fundamentalist group of men who systematically strip away women’s rights.

That description might remind viewers of President Donald Trump’s first Monday in office when, surrounded by other men, he signed off on the global gag rule ― an anti-abortion order that restricts women’s reproductive rights around the world. Or, perhaps it also brings to mind Vice President Mike Pence, who chooses not to socialize alone with women who are not his wife.

Even Trump fanatics saw the connection, calling the show anti-Trump propaganda.

But there’s plenty of reason to believe American women are not headed toward the extreme fate faced by their fictional counterparts, whose highest purpose is to serve their husbands and bear children ― and if they can’t do the latter, so-called handmaids are forced to serve as surrogates.

That’s not us. The resistance in the U.S. is very much alive and well. And in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, it’s been remarkably effective. Indeed, just last week ― under pressure from activists energized by the election ― Fox News was forced to oust longtime star news host Bill O’Reilly, who was under fire for sexually harassing women.

Other executives at the network seem to be headed for the chopping block, as well. It’s a sign that even at one of the most conservative, pro-Trump companies in the country, women are finally being heard.

Paradoxically, O’Reilly’s ouster seemed to be made possible by Trump’s election. Putting a man in office who’d been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women didn’t scare anyone into silence ― it sparked a massive wave of outrage, energy and activism.

So much so that Trump’s first nominee for labor secretary, Andy Puzder, was forced to withdraw his name from consideration after decades-old domestic violence allegations resurfaced.

The day after the inauguration, millions of women took to the streets in dozens of major cities around the world wearing pink pussy hats and decrying the patriarchy. The marches were largely peaceful.

There’s more: The first shot at Obamacare repeal ― which would have left so many women without health care ― didn’t work. His anti-immigration orders have been stopped by the courts, with the help of a huge number of female immigration lawyers, as New York magazine noted.

Emily’s List, the nonprofit progressive group that helps women run for office, says it has seen an “unprecedented” level in interest since November.

What is happening now in the United States is actually real progress for women. 

It’s easy to forget that up until the 1990s, it was still legal for a husband to rape his wife. Until the 1970s, a woman accusing someone of raping her wasn’t considered a reliable witness in court (a situation eerily recalled in a terrible courtroom scene in a later episode of the Hulu show). And we haven’t even noted how women’s rights are curtailed around the world. 

Of course, there’s no doubt that putting a misogynist in the Oval Office is an enormous setback. There’s not a single woman in Trump’s inner circle, aside from his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and a spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, who’s been recently silenced. Only 23 percent of his White House staff is female.

But he’s hardly alone. There are only 21 women who run Fortune 500 companies out of 500. Congress is 81 percent male. 

Despite progress, women in the U.S. still have a frighteningly long way to go. 

The overwhelming majority of married women in this country still take their husband’s names, some without questioning why. And only recently, a Republican state representative from Oklahoma referred to women as “hosts” for fetuses.

More troubling? A majority of white women voters went for Trump, an echo of “Handmaid’s Tale,” too. In the book, elite white women ― the wives of the new political leaders ― seem to be true believers in the new world. Internalized sexism is a modern-day plague.

“The Handmaid’s Tale” came out in 1985, a perfect comment for those times, when Reagan-era conservatives were working feverishly to restore “traditional” values, i.e., restricting women’s reproductive rights, demonizing single mothers (particularly ones of color) and generally making it harder for women to choose to work outside the home. The Hulu show got the green light before Trump’s candidacy turned real.

Atwood, for her part, based the book on real historical examples.

“One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the nightmare of history,” Atwood explained in the New York Times this year. She explains that she’s grounded the book and its setting in 17th century puritanical American values (remember those witch trials).

One of Atwood’s favorite signs at the Toronto women’s march read “I can’t believe I’m still holding this fucking sign,” the 77-year-old author told The New Yorker.

When asked whether her book is a prediction for our future, Atwood offers hope and a warning.

“No, it isn’t a prediction, because predicting the future isn’t really possible: There are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities,” she writes.  “Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.”

Progress does not happen in a straight line. Setbacks are inevitable. What’s critical is what comes next.  

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The excitement in the room was contagious as fans filled the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Friday evening to watch legendary actor Tom Hanks interview legendary singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen for Tribeca Talks: Storytellers. 

The crowd, made up of mostly middle-aged men and women, sipped on some cold beers and took photos of the empty stage, capturing the seats in which Tom and Bruce would soon to be sitting. A few minutes before showtime, former first daughter Malia Obama, alongside a friend, found her seat in the orchestra section. Then, Hanks’ wife, Rita Wilson, and Springsteen’s wife and bandmate, Patti Scialfa, walked in together with people screaming, “Patti! Woo, Patti!” She waved to the crowd as she found her seat while Wilson and Gayle King stopped to say hello and check in on Malia.

Showtime was fast approaching. 

And, soon enough, Hanks and Springsteen were introduced to stage and the crowd went wild. “BRUUUUUCCCEEE,” fans chanted, as they do at every one of his shows. Of course, Hanks made a joke about how he doesn’t understand why we “boo” The Boss, before leaping into a discussion on director Jonathan Demme and his recent death to cancer. 

“The strongest union of our two names is from the motion picture ‘Philadelphia,’ Hanks, who won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in the Demme-directed 1993 film about a man with AIDS, said. “God bless Jonathan Demme. We just lost him.”

Springsteen also won an Academy Award for the movie for his work on the song “Streets of Philadelphia.”

“I had some lyrics and, eventually, I just came up with that tiny little beat and the track. I figured it wasn’t what [Demme] wanted, [but] I sent it to him anyway. He sent me that opening piece of film where the camera moves slowly through Philly and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he says, ‘Great.’ And that was it,” Springsteen explained. “Took about two days.” 

Hanks chimed in, “If you ever want to have a great moment in a motion picture, walk out the door and make sure they put on a Bruce Springsteen song.” The audience cheered yet again. 

Throughout the conversation, Hanks would weave in Springsteen lyrics ― like “My machine, she’s a dud / out stuck in the mud” ― and then request the crowd play a game of “call and response” to finish the phrase ― like “Somewhere in the swamps of Jersey.” Let’s just say true, hardcore Springsteeners were in the building.

Hanks spent the next 50 minutes or so chatting with Springsteen about a lot of what was mentioned in his recent memoir ― everything from his humble beginnings to meeting with Clive Davis and the success of the “cinematic” “Born to Run.” But what really struck a chord was Springsteen’s take on living your life and not letting it pass you by. 

We make our own little worlds. They can change the way you approach your own life, but they can’t give you a life.
Bruce Springsteen to Tom Hanks

“All artists at some point believe they can live within their art. What you learn, either quickly or painfully and slowly — what you learn is it’s just your job,” he said. “You get outside of those things in music. We make our own little worlds. They can change the way you approach your own life, but they can’t give you a life. That took me a long time to learn that lesson. Thanks Patti,” he added of his wife, “It was a tremendous struggle to me.”

Springsteen spoke about making his “own little worlds” within his music, explaining that writing lyrics is all about storytelling. 

“Basically, you tell a story to save your life,” he said. “When I was very young, I felt like I was drowning. You are not living. A writer tells a story to save his life. Three minutes of bliss and compressed living, that’s why you can get so excited in such a short period of time. It was that life or death hunger. That is what I wanted my characters to be about. Life awaits you, but taking it is a rough and tumble business.”

As for Hanks' interpretation of all this, the actor put it simply when describing what Bruce, and his concerts, mean to his fans. 

“We will follow you into hell, sir.”

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Demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., and other cities around the world on Saturday for the 2017 People’s Climate March, a rally to demand political action to fight climate change.

This year’s march takes on increased significance, as it occurs on the 100th day in office of President Donald Trump. Trump has derided climate change as a “hoax” and “bullshit” and vowed to roll back regulations for the fossil fuel industries. He’s also said he would pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, a global pact to cooperate to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. His advisers are reportedly still debating about whether the U.S. should pull out.

As people who care about the planet’s future prepared to march on Saturday, many carried funny, creative or just plain beautiful signs to amplify their voices. Here are some of our favorites.

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As one of America’s star directors, Quentin Tarantino has become a larger-than-life personality. He seems relentlessly cocksure today, but there was once a time when Tarantino had to prove to himself that he was capable of this whole filmmaking thing.

Given how trying it can be to forge a movie career, Tarantino had a relatively auspicious start. His first project, “Reservoir Dogs,” made him an instant up-and-comer amid the 1990s’ independent-film boom. Celebrating the crime thriller’s 25th anniversary, Tarantino reunited with Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen and Tim Roth on Friday night for a screening and panel discussion at the Tribeca Film Festival. There, he spoke of his signature memory from the film, which doubles as the “happiest moment” of his life.

It came at the end of a two-week rehearsal period, during which the actors bonded in Los Angeles. Keitel hosted a cast dinner at the house he was renting in Malibu. Tarantino was staying with his mother in Glendale, about 40 miles away. That night, perched around Keitel’s table, he realized the dream he’d maintained since his Tennessee days as a teenage video-store clerk had real potential. Thanks to the “Reservoir Dogs” cast’s harmony, Tarantino’s career was born.

“We’re sitting there and we’re having a great time, and I really realized that, gosh, a lot of the pressure was off my shoulders cinematically,” Tarantino said. “These guys were so perfect in their parts, they were so vibing with each other, they so understood the material. By rehearsing two weeks, they knew the material. I was like, ‘Fuck, if I just keep this movie in focus, I’ve got a movie.’ Anything else I bring to it will just be frosting, but the cake is here — it’s these guys. I watched it at dinner that night. It was a really nice thing for Harvey to do. But I remember that night getting in my car and just taking that drive all the way from Malibu to Glendale, just on [Sunset Boulevard], never getting off Sunset, all the little, windy roads. And that was the happiest time of my life. That was the happiest moment of my life. This thing that I had thought about for so long — not just ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ just making movies in general -- this might just work out.”

Of course, things did work out, despite projector problems and a power outage during the first “Reservoir Dogs” screening at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Tarantino saw it as a mark of achievement that people walked out during the scene were Mr. Blonde tortures the kidnapped police officer. The number of exits during a single screening peaked at 33, according to his count. Even Wes Craven walked out at Spain's horror-focused Sitges Film Festival. “The guy who did ‘Last House on the Left’ walked out of my movie,” Tarantino roared. “I guess it was too tough for him.”

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WASHINGTON ― Until its taping on Saturday, comedian Samantha Bee’s “Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” billed as a response to the storied Washington tradition, remained a mystery.

The show’s producers kept details about the special event under wraps, only revealing that they aimed to honor journalism and that proceeds would go to the Committee to Protect Journalists. 

After President Donald Trump announced that he would not attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, suggesting that it would be a more muted affair this year, Bee’s event became rumored as “the hottest ticket in town,” adding even more intrigue and speculation.

“You can’t compare the two events, really, because we’re filming a television show, and they really are having a dinner,” Bee told HuffPost before the show’s taping, while crew members milled around, wearing shirts saying “FREE PRESS.” “I mean, we’re having a dinner too, but it’s not the same type of event. You know, the purpose of our event is to celebrate freedom of the press, primarily.”

“We’re all here, partially because Samantha’s a brilliant insightful comedian, but also because we’re in support of a free press, and that’s an important thing to continue having a conversation about in a really regular way,” Ana Gasteyer, actress and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member, told HuffPost.

But at times, the event, airing as a special episode of Bee’s TBS show “Full Frontal” on Saturday night, simultaneous to the real White House Correspondents’ Dinner, could easily be mistaken for the dinner itself.

The show successfully delivered in both honoring journalism and roasting the president — whom Bee called the “geriatric orangutan” — in a variety of onstage and pre-taped segments.

Like the actual dinner, the scene outside of Bee’s taping was a strange confluence of the politics and entertainment worlds, with reporters from news outlets like the Associated Press, CNN and NBC conducting interviews next to video crews from “Access Hollywood” and “Extra.”

Inside DAR Constitution Hall, comedians hobnobbed with journalists at banquet tables, while waiters handed out cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

Bee and the “Full Frontal” cast sought to highlight media outlets of all stripes, during the show. Some have been targets of the Trump administration, from the “failing New York Times,” to the “failing ‘what the fuck is ProPublica, it sounds Mexican,’” Bee joked.

But the show also noted the Weather Channel’s coverage of climate change and local newspapers and TV stations, including a shoutout to the Storm Lake Times, the twice-weekly Iowa community newspaper that won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

“We hope we’ve made you proud by taking your amazing reporting and adding our dick jokes,” cast member Allana Harkin said.

A slideshow of “great moments for the press and the presidency” throughout history kept audience members entertained between the onstage segments.

Like the actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Bee’s show also ripped the media, primarily cable news. But it sought to distinguish the networks’ journalism from entertainment, like in a segment mocking CNN head Jeff Zucker for characterizing his approach to political coverage as sports in a recent New York Times magazine interview.

“CNN employs some of the best journalists out there. Please, Jeff, use their journalistic skills,” Bee said, with several CNN journalists in the audience, including Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

Bee left no stone unturned in her jabs at Fox News, riffing on the twin downfalls of former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and host Bill O’Reilly, as well as Trump’s penchant of live-tweeting the network and praising its slanted coverage of him.

Mocking cable news’ penchant for overdramatic, wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s speeches and appearances, Bee teased a “special guest” throughout the show, with on-screen chyrons like “BREAKING: SPECIAL GUEST’S PLANE IS ON THE TARMAC” and live shots of an empty presidential lectern.

That “special guest” did turn out to be a president, sort of: Will Ferrell reprising his celebrated George W. Bush impression, roasting Trump and honoring journalists.

“It’s like being on the Titanic,” Ferrell as Bush said of Trump, joking that journalists “are playing the violin while the ship goes down.”

The parallels between Bee’s event and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner were brought full circle in the show’s concluding segment, which imagined an “alternative timeline” with Hillary Clinton as president and Bee as the featured comedian at Clinton’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Like during Bee’s show, the president and his first 100 days in office were not entirely the focus but loomed large, dominating the conversation among guests on the “purple carpet” before the taping. 

“I think the inability of people who know better to convince the president to stop saying things that are just patently false has been a surprise,” CNN’s Jake Tapper told HuffPost. “Because at some point, one would think somebody around him, whether it’s Jared [Kushner] or [Steve] Bannon or whomever, would say: ‘37 percent of the public thinks you’re honest and trustworthy, and that’s a really low number. You can rebuild that, and people are willing to give you another a shot...let’s stick to facts.’ Because I think there’s a lot of leeway the public gives the president, but for whatever reason, they have not been able to do that, and he has not been able to listen.”

Alternatively, “The Daily Show” co-creator and reproductive rights activist Lizz Winstead took aim at Trump’s ability to convince people to “give him a chance.”

“He can not execute things because they are inexecutable,” she said. “And he fooled people into thinking the inexecutable is executable. And so, with this whole ‘let’s give him a chance!’ it’s like, ‘Oh, people, there’s no chance.’

When asked to grade Trump’s first 100 days in office, Winstead struck a more comic tone.

“Expired meat? Is that a grade?” 

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WASHINGTON ― Comedian Samantha Bee roasted President Donald Trump Saturday at her “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” a star-studded alternative to the actual dinner taking place the same night in Washington.

Saturday was also Trump’s 100th day as president. In an interview with HuffPost before her event, the host of TBS’ “Full Frontal” said she didn’t know where to begin when trying to describe what has shocked her the most about Trump’s first 100 days in office.

“I’ve been shocked every day,” Bee said. “I didn’t know I had it in me. Are you kidding? My jaw has been on the floor 300 times in the first 100 days.”

Bee also found humor in Trump’s recent attacks against her native Canada.

“That’s exciting for Canada,” she said. “It warmed my heart.”

Watch Bee’s interview with HuffPost in the video above.

Video by Will Tooke, Mike Caravella and JM Rieger.

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WASHINGTON ― Given President Donald Trump’s incessant Twitter usage, HuffPost asked guests at comedian Samantha Bee’s “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” on Saturday to sum up the president’s first 100 days in a Trump-style tweet.

“You have to tweet from the toilet, obviously,” Bee said. “Whatever it is, it feels like it came from someone sitting on the toilet and shrieking an idea to an assistant nearby.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper theorized about Trump’s preferred tweet formula before thinking about his answer.

“Declarative statement. Declarative statement. Adjective,” he said.

Actress and comedian Retta, star of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” put it simply: “Hot. Mess.”

Watch everyone’s responses in the video above.

Video by Will Tooke, Mike Caravella, and JM Rieger.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

You haven’t seen devotion until you’ve been in a room with nearly 6,000 “Godfather” disciples. The manic fandom typically reserved for Comic-Con and “Star Wars” assemblies was front and center when Francis Ford Coppola and the cast reunited Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing night. 

Capping off a nine-hour event that included screenings of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II,” a 45th-anniversary panel discussion found Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Robert De Niro, James Caan, Talia Shire and Robert Duvall recounting the messy process of making a movie they never expected to become such a defining Hollywood signature.

The sold-out crowd at Radio City Music Hall had been boisterous throughout both films, cheering at iconic dialogue and almost every gruesome death or Corleone victory. Just imagine how enthusiastic they were by the time this A-list group took the stage. 

“The Godfather” is one of the most chronicled movies in history, as proven by the nearly 800-page annotated book Coppola published last year. Much of Saturday’s panel retread well-told stories: Paramount’s resistance to casting the crotchety Marlon Brando, the studio threatening to fire Coppola out of fear that his directorial choices would jeopardize the success, the fateful single take in which Coppola added a cat to the opening scene. 

Frenzy erupted when moderator Taylor Hackford asked the audience to shout out questions. One fan posed something that further explained the film’s fervent following: Could “The Godfather” be made today?

The answer, according to Coppola, is no.

Well, it could be made, he said, but it would be an offer major studios would have to refuse.

The first “Godfather” cost $6.5 million, Coppola explained. That’s the equivalent of about $38 million today, which would make it a mid-budget project in a market that’s overrun by tentpole titles costing well over $100 million apiece, he said. The “Godfather Part II” budget swelled to “$11 or $12 million,” or about $64 to $70 million nowadays. 

“It would never get through the process of getting an OK, or what they now call a green-light,” Coppola said. Contemporary Hollywood studios, he pointed out, are mostly interested in movies with built-in franchise potential ― “pretty much a Marvel comic,” a comment that provoked chuckles from the audience. 

“Basically there’s not enough wires,” Caan joked, referring to the suspension technique used to film superheroes and Hogwarts wizards in flight. 

Coppola and Caan’s assessment is painfully accurate: Original movies are no longer Hollywood’s breadwinners. The mid-budget adult release ― ranging from about $10 million to $70 million ― has become something of a relic over the past 15 years, replaced instead by comic-book adaptations, reboots and pre-determined cash cows. 

Even though it’s based on the popular novel by Mario Puzo, were Coppola to pitch “The Godfather” today, he would have a tough time securing the funds and support needed. The first installment made $245 million worldwide, which today amounts to $1.4 billion. For a film without animation or dazzling technical effects, that seems impossible in 2017.

Coppola said former MGM owner Kirk Kerkorian once asked how one makes a movie that is both financially and artistically successful. “I said to him, ‘Risk,’” he said. “Nobody wants the risk when you get into business.”

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The “Fast and the Furious” pedal earned another medal this weekend, with “The Fate of the Furious” grossing $1 billion.

As of Sunday, the eighth “Furious” installment has earned $192.7 million domestically and a whopping $867.6 million overseas, according to Universal Pictures’ estimates. It’s the 30th movie in history ― and the second in the franchise, after 2015’s “Furious 7” ― to join the billionaires’ club. 

“The Fate of the Furious” pulled this off after just 17 days in theaters, the same amount it took “Furious 7.” The year’s first billion-dollar release, “Beauty and the Beast,” required almost a month to hit that mark. “Fate” is also the highest-grossing film directed by an African-American. 

This news comes as no surprise, given the increasing international fervor surrounding these high-octane movies. Since “Fast & Furious,” the fourth movie in the series, was released in 2009, each installment has outpaced its predecessor domestically and globally. Universal, which is enjoying a bang-up year at the box office thanks to “Fate,” “Get Out” and “Split,” already has two more “Fast and the Furious” sequels planned, and studio executives have reportedly discussed a potential spin-off surrounding Dwayne Johnson’s and Jason Statham’s characters. Plus, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, “The Fate of the Furious” introduces a certain baby who could extend the story’s shelf life far beyond its current expiration date. 

Other franchises with multiple $1 billion earners include “Star Wars,” “The Avengers,” “Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

In other weekend box-office news, “How To Be a Latin Lover” opened to a decent $12 million, while the big-screen adaptation of Dave Eggers’ popular cyber-panic novel “The Circle” collected $9.1 million, a drowsy figure for a title released on more than 3,000 screens. The weekend’s big surprise was the Indian fantasy “Baahubali 2: The Conclusion,” which took in an estimated $10 million despite a mere 425-theater opening. 

The rest of the Top 10 includes “The Boss Baby,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Going in Style,” “Gifted,” “Smurfs: The Lost Village” and “Born in China.”

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