Kevin Durant and Mike Conley can add Oscar winners to their professional résumés.
The Brooklyn Nets striker and the Utah Jazz security guard served as executive producers for “Two Distant Strangers,” which won the Oscar on Sunday night for the best live action short film.
The film by Travon Free, who also co-directed with Martin Desmond Roe, tells the story of a black man, played by rapper and actor Joey Bada $$, who is stuck in a time warp and reliving a deadly run-in with a cop. “Two Distant Strangers” is currently available to stream on Netflix.
Durant and Conley were among the many executive producers who worked with producer Lawrence Bender on the film, which has already won three Academy Award nominations for Best Picture: “Pulp Fiction” 1995, “Good Will Hunting” 1998 and “Inglourious” Basterds “2010.
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Durant, who came off the bench on Sunday afternoon after missing the previous three games with a left thigh injury, scored 33 points in a 128-119 win over the Phoenix Suns. Hours later, he celebrated his Oscar win.
The jazz that Hold the best record in the NBA and were gone Sunday night, Conley tweeted congratulations.
“The people in the locker room made me sad the other day, just like ‘You could win an Oscar before you win a championship'” Conley said in an interview with CBS Los Angeles before the Oscars. “I thought, hey, if I could win both of them it would be great, but obviously an Oscar wasn’t something I thought I’d ever be a part of.”
Durant and Conley aren’t the first NBA players to win an Oscar.
In 2018 Kobe Bryant was the first professional athlete to win an Oscar when “Dear Basketball” took home the award for the best animated short film in 2018. The six-minute film was based on a poem that Bryant wrote published in The Players Tribune in 2015 when he announced his retirement from the NBA.
