And one of them was called ‘Summer of ’84,’ which was about growing up in South Central LA.” In fact, when I applied to USC film school they had a thing that asked you to write three ideas for films. “As I started to think about what I wanted to do with my life, and cinema became an option, it was just natural that this was probably gonna be my first film. “I think I was living this film before I ever thought about making it,” Singleton told Vice in 2016. (“Thelma & Louise” won instead.) At 24, he was also the youngest director nominee in Oscar history. Singleton became the first black director to receive an Academy Award nomination, an honor he would say was compensation for the academy’s snubbing Lee and “Do the Right Thing” two years earlier, and was nominated for best screenplay.
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Singleton would later call it a “rap album on film.” “Boyz N the Hood” was a critical and commercial hit, given a 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and praised as a groundbreaking extension of rap to the big screen, a realistic and compassionate take on race, class, peer pressure and family.
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and Ice Cube and centered on three friends in South Central Los Angeles, where college aspirations competed with the pressures of gang life. Singleton was in his early 20s, just out of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, when he wrote, directed and produced “Boyz N the Hood.” Based on Singleton’s upbringing and shot in his old neighborhood, the low-budget production starred Cuba Gooding Jr. Earlier this month, the director suffered a major stroke. Singleton’s family said Monday that he died in Los Angeles, surrounded by family and friends, after being taken off life support. NEW YORK (AP) - Director John Singleton, who made one of Hollywood’s most memorable debuts with the Oscar-nominated “Boyz N the Hood” and continued over the following decades to probe the lives of black communities in his native Los Angeles and beyond, has died.