Strong Black Women of This World

Hidden Figures? More like plum Olympic-commercials spot.

The first trailer for Ted Theodore (St. Vincent) Melfi’s self-explanatory adaptation of the publishing-next-month Hidden Figures: The Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, and Kirsten Dunst, among others, was smartly shown on TV during coverage of the 2016 Rio Olympics. During women’s gymnastics, if memory serves.

Which was so super-clever because the film – about Katherine Johnson (Henson), a NASA math wiz who, together with colleagues Dorothy Vaughn (Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Monáe), contributed to the launch of John Glenn (Glen Powell, from TV’s Scream Queens) into space and to his safe return home – is all about women (black women, in particular) going for and reaching new heights.

What. It is.

And I love it.

Hidden Figures is set to be released early in the new year, on Jan. 13. So of course I wonder if the powers that be will run it, if they’ll give the film an Oscar-qualifying run in December....

Guess they could, especially if Henson wins an Emmy for TV’s Empire this year. That would give this one a special kind of momentum.

I mean, everyone involved is pretty well liked in Hollywood, I think. Jim Parsons is part of the cast, and Hans Zimmer collaborated with Pharrell on the music.

Hello!

Photo: 20th Century Fox.