Oscar nominations for The Help remind James McBride—musician, novelist, and author of the memoir The Color of Water—of 1940, when Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar… also for playing a maid.

Accepting the US Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at Sundance for her film on Ai Weiwei, director Alison snapped a photo of audience members flipping the bird, a gesture seen in some of Ai’s art.

Filmmaker Miranda July has been called to speak before Congress on “questions that have puzzled the nation for much of the past decade, namely what public figure Miranda July’s whole thing is, exactly,” according to fake news site The Onion.

“A series of posters from the world’s biggest movies of modern cinema have been re-imagined—as classic movies from the 1950s and 60s.” Included: Transpotting if Godard shot it, and Inception, starring Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster.

Tilda Swinton sees “light” in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which screens at the Walker in February. Of her character, who continues loving a troubled son, she says, “It’s like she’s got no brake pads on her brakes, but she still goes on doing it.”

Documentary filmmaker Alison Klayman’s Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry drew “a rare standing ovation and a general activist fervor” when it screened at the Sundance film festival Sunday.

For On Death Row, a series on Investigation Discovery late this year, Werner Herzog will interview death row inmates in Florida and Texas to “look into the dark recesses of the human soul.” The series sprang from his film Into the Abyss.

Not a dance fan, Wim Wenders was “literally dragged” to a 1985 performance by Pina Bausch, the subject of his new 3-D documentary, in 1985. “And then I found myself on the edge of my seat, crying like a baby after five minutes.”

Miguel Gonçalves Mendes’ Oscar-nominated José and Pilar chronicles the life, love, and occasional cantankerousness of the late Nobel Prize winner José Saramago. Financially backed by Pedro Almodóvar, the documentary is up for best foreign-language film.