Queen Latifah Prepares For Oscars

03/19/2003 12:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Yves Erwin Salomon

(3/19/03, 12 p.m. ET) -- Queen Latifah is riding a wave of success with the Number One movie in the country, Bringing Down The House. However, the Chicago Oscar nominee recently shared that she's looking forward to getting all the freebees included in the Academy Awards gift bag.

Latifah told AP, "I'm looking forward to that basket. I can't wait to see what's in it. I don't care how much money you have, free stuff is always a good thing."

This year's gift bags will include: Godiva chocolates, leather handbags, candy-colored pens, hair products, perfume, and holistic skin moisturizers. Some will also include new camera phones from Motorola and Sprint, and customized Victoria Secret's undergarments.

Latifah is keeping cool about her Oscar attire. While other Academy Award nominees might stress about what they're wearing to the big event, the rapper-actress delegates the worrying to her stylist. "I let her do all the running around and legwork, and I just look at pictures and I tell her how I want to feel--what I want to wear in terms of my level of comfort and colors and things like that," Queen Latifah said. "But I'm not really taking on the stress of that whole thing--I've been working, doing other stuff, so I haven't even had time to just get all totally caught up in it."

Latifah is up for her first Oscar for her portrayal of crooked prison warden Matron "Mama" Morton in Chicago. She faces some stiff competition for the best supporting actress Oscar. She will face off against Kathy Bates (About Schmidt), Julianne Moore (The Hours), Meryl Streep (Adaptation), and her Chicago co-star Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The 75th Annual Academy Awards will air live from Los Angeles on March 23rd beginning at 8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.

-- Yves Erwin Salomon, New York

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