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Kevin Durant and Mike Conley Jr. took home a new kind of trophy Sunday night.
The duo, along with Durant’s business manager Rich Kleiman, won an Academy Award for “Two Distant Strangers” on Sunday when it won an Oscar for Best Live-Action Short Film.
Durant and Conley served as executive producers on the film, and joined Kobe Bryant as the only NBA players to have won an Oscar.
“From the minute we saw the script for this project, we knew it had the potential to be very powerful and we wanted to be involved,” Durant told Slam Magazine in February. “Getting to see it come to life on the screen was an intense experience – I also had the opportunity to screen it for my teammates and coaches at the Nets, and I think everyone came away with the same feeling that I did that the film is telling a really important story about the Black experience, but in a way that is real and raw and not at all preachy.”
Bryant won his award in 2018 for his animated short film, “Dear Basketball.”
“Two Distant Strangers” stars rapper and actor Joey Bada$$, who gets stuck in a time loop where he repeatedly runs into the same police officer and is repeatedly killed.
The film is currently on Netflix.
“I think that’s huge to kind of show that visually for the general public and people to [help them] understand what my uncles and my grandparents taught me, like sometimes when you get pulled over you just pray, man,” Conley told Slam Magazine in February. “There’s nothing you can do sometimes [but] just pray that everything comes out right like you can show your identity you can do everything you want to do in the right manner and still get shot or have something come out of that.
“So it’s just, it was a great way of portraying it and allowing I think all of us to kind of exhale a little bit that we have this film to be able to show all those examples.”
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