March 2021 Entertainment Round-Up Super Quiz

Born in Canada, Drake’s first public recognition was as an actor in Degrassi: The Next Generation. He left the series after releasing his debut mixtape Room for Improvement in 2006. 

New Fact:

Drake has released the new Scary Hours 2 EP, Friday, Mar. 5, 2021. The rapper initially scheduled the release of his sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy, for January 2021 before delaying the release date because “between surgery and rehab, my energy has been dedicated to recovery,” as he wrote in an Instagram story in January. 

Piers Morgan participated as a contestant on Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice. He won the 7th season of the show. Morgan also publicly supported Trump during the 2016 elections but retracted his support amid Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus breakout in 2020.

New fact:

On Tuesday, Mar. 9, 2021, ITV announced that Piers Morgan decided to leave Good Morning Britain immediately following negative comments about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, in the days after the Mar. 7 US airing of the Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan and Harry. Morgan has been hosting ITV’s Good Morning Britain since 2015. UK’s communications regulator Ofcom received over 41,000 complaints from viewers, including a complaint from the Duchess of Sussex herself. On Jan. 17, 2022, Morgan told the BBC he would return to breakfast TV on News UK’s new TV channel, talkTV, this spring.

In 2020 Bad Bunny became the first non-English language act to be Spotify’s most-streamed artist of the year. In 2021, he began making guest appearances in the WWE as a professional wrestler and even became the WWE 24/7 Champion. Oh, and he’s also developing an acting career on Narcos: Mexico, which is still in pre-production.

New Fact

Adidas announced Thursday, Mar. 11, 2021, a creative partnership with Bad Bunny. The first installment of the collaboration, dubbed “The First Café,” is Bad Bunny’s take on the sneaker that references the cup of coffee that starts his day. Launching on March 17th, “The First Café” sneaker will be available on the Adidas app in Europe and the US and through Uber Eats in Puerto Rico.

Pictured is Chris Cuomo, CNN host, brother of current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and film producer Maria Cuomo Cole, and son of former New York Governor Mario Matthew Cuomo.

In the news:

Chris Cuomo told CNN viewers Monday, Mar. 1, 2021,  that he “obviously” couldn’t cover the stories surrounding his older brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The latter has been accused of sexual harassment by three women.

• Read & Listen to Chris Cuomo’s provocative analysis of the harsh truths that the pandemic and Trump years have exposed about America in Deep Denial. Available on Audiobook, Kindle, and print.

“Soul” is the first Pixar movie to have a Black character in the lead. 

Another fact:

It is also the first feature-length Pixar released as a Disney+ Original, without wide theatrical distribution. 

The Los Angeles Times revealed that no Black members were in the 87-person voting body of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and that there hasn’t been one in at least twenty years. 

What’s new:

Within the first half-hour of the 2021 Golden Globes telecast, three members of the HFPA appeared on stage to pledge change. “We recognize we have our work to do,” said vice president Helen Hoehne. “We must have Black journalists in our organization.”

Barbra Streisand was the first female director to win the Golden Globe award – for “Yentl” in 1984.

New Fact:

The 2021 Golden Globes award for best picture drama went to Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland,” a Western set across economic recession and personal grief. Zhao became the first woman of Asian descent to win the best director. She’s also the second woman in the history of the Globes since Streisand to win the award. Until this year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association nominated just five women in the category.

Actress Gillian Anderson was born in Chicago, graduated from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, then moved to New York City to further her acting career.

Where did Gillian Anderson acquire her British accent?

When she was 15 months old, her family relocated to London, UK, where she grew up until returning to the US at the age of 11.

What’s new?

Alec Baldwin has deleted his Twitter account following a backlash to a tweet he posted referencing Anderson speaking in her natural American accent at the 2021 Golden Globes, despite usually speaking with a British accent in her roles. In a video posted to Instagram on Mar. 3, 2021, Baldwin says he’s a “huge fan” of Anderson’s, but that Twitter is “where all the assholes in the United States and beyond go to get their advanced degrees in assholiness.”

Singer Beyoncé won her 28th Grammy on Mar. 14, 2021, passing the bluegrass musician Alison Krauss to become the most honored woman in the Grammy’s history.

Bonus Fact:

Ella Fitzgerald was the first woman to win multiple Grammys. She won two at the very first Grammy Awards ceremony in 1958.

Billie Eilish won the record of the year award for “Everything I Wanted” at the 2021 Grammys. She dedicated the award to Megan Thee Stallion. “You deserved this,” Eilish said to her fellow nominee. “You had a year that I think is untoppable. You are a queen. I want to cry thinking about how much I love you.”

Megan Thee Stallion in the 2021 Grammys

Rapper Megan Thee Stallion received the first award presented during the live telecast: best new artist. She also won prizes for best rap song (an honor she accepted alongside Beyoncé) and best rap performance. In the show’s third hour, Megan Thee Stallion appeared alongside Cardi B to perform their hit “WAP.”

Theodor Seuss Geisel adopted the name “Dr. Seuss” as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and a graduate student at Lincoln College, Oxford. He added the “Dr.” to his pen name because his father wanted him to practice medicine.

Which Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published?

On Dr. Seuss’s birthday, March 2, 2021, which is non-coincidentally National Read Across America Day, the company that preserves the author’s legacy announced it would no longer publish  Six of Dr. Seuss’s books because of racially insensitive imagery. The six children’s titles are If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, The Cat’s Quizzer and the 1958 Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, in which a character described as Chinese has two lines for eyes, carries chopsticks and a bowl of rice, and wears traditional Japanese-style shoes.

In a video posted Thursday, Mar. 4, 2021, on the Twitter account, BurntBanksy, a member of an art group, burns a 2006 print titled Morons, reportedly purchased for $33,000 at Christie’s in December. The BurntBanksy member explains to the camera: “By removing the physical piece from existence and only having the NFT, we will ensure that no one can alter the piece and it is the true piece that exists in the world. By doing this, the value of the physical piece will then be moved onto the NFT.” The video piece is on auction at the Opensea website.

What’s NFT again?

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a particular type of cryptographic token which represents something unique. NFTs create digital ownership for several specific purposes that require individual digital identities like crypto art, digital collectibles, and online gaming.