It had no affect on me whatsoever. Um... I consider Jay a very good friend of mine. I also consider Dame and Biggs very good friends of mine. With me not being a Roc-A-Fella artist, with me just being a friend of both and not being tied to them in the Roc-A-Fella situation, I was still able to maintain personal relationships with both of em.

Ennio Morricone is royalty. He doesn't really do this a lot and Quentin brought him back [in Hateful Eight]. Quentin [Tarantino] basically went back and made his The Good, The Bad and The Ugly-kind of film, the ultimate epic spaghetti western, and then you've got mister spaghetti western himself scoring your movie. It's gonna be hard to not vote for him in a landslide. Probably the easiest win of the night.

Sylvester wins, obviously [best actor in a supporting role in 2016]. That's the whole point of this. We're all getting dressed up to go to the Oscars to hear Sylvester Stallone, let no one get this twisted. The academy can't pay for a better moment than this: this is the Oscar's original darling.

I sat down with my long time business partner and Rap-A-Lot CEO James Prince to review the music that we had and quickly came up with an outstanding track list.

I'm very surprised at Carol didn't get a best picture. Todd Haynes is an Academy darling, his period pieces are nothing short of brilliant, and they hold up. And I definitely feel like Carol speaks to, even though it's set in the past, it speaks to themes we're dealing with in life right now. It's really really shocking that it didn't get it.

I honestly never sat down and said "OK, here's my style," because my whole thing was knowing everyone's style. Everything I've ever written has bits and pieces of everything I've ever heard. Any rapper that tells you different is a liar.

Basically, I'm going to take what you did, the bare-bones structure of what you were trying to do, how you were attacking the song, and attack it in pretty much the same way, just with more intensity to show you that you could've come harder. Like, I've been in situations where I've had to tell a cat how to rhyme his rhyme.