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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE ENDURING PREDICTABILITY OF THE MOSTLY APOLITICAL OSCARS  
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Eileen Jones
March 11, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Yet another “return to normal” Oscars — briefly disrupted by
a statement from Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer criticizing
Israel’s assault on Gaza — only demonstrates just how boring even
a “good one” can be. _

The Oscars 2024, Mike Blake/Reuters

 

What can you say about the Academy Awards ceremony this year that you
don’t say every year, if you happen to keep watching? It’s one of
the few American events that still reliably draws a mass audience —
the Super Bowl is another, far more popular event — and as such, it
can be widely discussed the next day. If only you can find something
worth discussing.

But what can you say about it, beyond complaining about the usual
things? There are the general snob complaints about how stupid all
these award ceremonies are, and marveling that any intelligent person
could care about dumb prizes for dumb movies. There’s the sour
observation that the Oscars are a messy annual spectacle, an
old-fashioned variety-show kind of entertainment lingering on
awkwardly in the twenty-first century, but on the other hand, any
attempts to reformulate it to bring it up to date are invariably
disastrous. I’ve argued that one myself, at length.

Then you can be a bit more specific about this year’s ceremony, but
even at that you tend to echo the same kinds of complaints that get
made every year, creating a haunting effect of déjà vu.

There’s the invariably meh hosting — by Jimmy Kimmel, in this
case. There’s the intensifying boredom as it becomes clear that an
epic-scale film on an important issue that seemed practically designed
by committee to sweep the Oscars was sweeping the Oscars — this
year, _Oppenheimer
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There’s a small gem of a film that gets bupkis because it is small,
and maybe because it’s a comedy or something — _The Holdovers
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time around. There’s the startling shutout of a major filmmaker’s
work — this year, Martin Scorsese’s _Killers of the Flower Moon
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which didn’t even score what had seemed to be it’s one guaranteed
award, the historic Best Actress honor for Lily Gladstone, who
would’ve been the first Native American ever to take home the golden
statuette. There’s the botched “In Memoriam” segment honoring
the recently departed, this one even more truncated and badly staged
and stupidly filmed than all the ones that came before it, ending very
strangely on long-held images of Tina Turner, who was a great talent
but by no means a primarily cinematic one.

One complaint you can’t make this year that’s been a prevalent
source of discontent in earlier years: you can’t complain that a lot
of stars got up and used their time at the podium to make impassioned
political statements, because only a couple did — although the ones
who did, _Zone of Interest
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Jonathan Glazer and _20 Days in Mariupol_ director Mstyslav Chernov,
have drawn significant attention. The relatively low number of
Gaza-related statements by awardees was notable, considering protest
speeches at other recent film awards ceremonies
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attendees had all just run the gauntlet of hundreds of protesters made
up of Film Workers for Palestine members and their Screen Actors
Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
(SAG-AFTRA) allies who were blocking the route to the Dolby Theater,
forcing many attendees to get out of their cars and walk. That’s why
the Oscars ceremony started late, in case you were wondering about
Jimmy Kimmel’s joke about the notoriously long show just starting
but already running five minutes over.

A few famous attendees
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red “Artists4Ceasefire” pins in mute solidarity with the
Palestinians in Gaza, including Mark Ruffalo (who was nominated for
Best Supporting Actor for his riotous turn in _Poor Things
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his fellow _Poor Things_ actor Ramy Youssef, and Billie Eilish and
her brother Finneas O’Connell, who performed “What Was I Made
For?”, the Oscar-winning song from_ Barbie
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Also wearing red pins were director Ava DuVernay (_Selma
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and _Anatomy of a Fall_ actors Milo Machado-Graner and Swann Arlaud.

Glazer, whose _The Zone of Interest
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Best International Film, made a speech trying yet again to convince
people who refuse to recognize that his “Holocaust drama” isn’t
just about the Nazis and their Final Solution. It’s about us in the
present day living comfortably while atrocities are committed in our
names by our governments and approved of by many of our fellow
citizens. Sometimes it’s genocide on the other side of a real wall;
more often it’s on the other side of a metaphorical wall.

Here’s what he said
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Thank you to the Academy for this honor and to our partners A24,
Film4, Access, and Polish Film Institute; to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
State Museum for their trust and guidance; to my producers, actors,
collaborators. All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in
the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather,
“Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads,
at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we
stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being
hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many
innocent people. Whether the victims of October the
— _[Applause.]_ Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel
or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization,
how do we resist? _[Applause.] _Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk,
the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I
dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.

The uneasy but still relatively warm reception to his speech can be
attributed to his evenhandedness in equating the October 7 Hamas
attack on Israel with the ongoing, genocidal Israeli attacks on Gaza
since that date, five months later. His phrasing of more incendiary
points (“the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led
to conflict”) that make equal “all the victims of
dehumanization” is distressing in the way its vague and tortured
formulation actually made it a bit hard to understand what he was
saying at the time.

For the sake of comparison, take a look
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1978 speech at the Academy Awards, when she won Best Actress for her
performance in _Julia_ and managed to enrage everybody in the
theater and the majority of the viewing public, all at the same time.
The apparent incoherencies in her speech relate to the fact that she
was responding to vociferous criticism
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at her by Jewish groups for having produced and narrated a sympathetic
1977 documentary entitled _The Palestinian_:

Her comments were directed at extremists in the Jewish Defense League,
who had not only burned her in effigy but had offered a bounty to have
her killed. There was even a firebombing at one of the cinemas showing
the documentary. But the phrase “Zionist hoodlums” discredited
Redgrave for many — even if she concluded her speech promising “to
fight anti-Semitism and fascism for as long as I live.”

Her Oscar speech was greeted with boos, and Redgrave faced a fierce
backlash, including a boycott of the movie _Julia_. Redgrave’s
public image was never as everlastingly controversial as Jane
Fonda’s following the “Hanoi Jane” scandal, but it ran a close
second for many years afterward. Redgrave’s immense stature as an
actor, coming from a legendary acting family and alternating between
acclaimed stage and screen performances, prevented permanent damage to
her career. Nevertheless, Redgrave was regarded as something of a
lunatic for decades afterward.

People who deplore political statements at the Academy Awards ceremony
on the grounds that it’s no place for such divisive rhetoric must
have been pleased at the muted response during and after Glazer’s
speech, and at the way nobody followed it up with similar speeches.

We’re in an era when many people agree that “civility” should
rule when it comes to political speech, which means no one should ever
be made to feel uncomfortable by the airing of a controversial
opinion, just as no one should ever be inconvenienced by protests or
strike actions in the streets. It’s not a new attitude. After
Redgrave’s speech, she was rebuked by a presenter, an “ardent
supporter of Israel,” the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, who said,
“I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an
Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a
proclamation, and a simple ‘Thank you’ would’ve sufficed.”

He got a standing ovation. And Redgrave’s speech is still regarded
as “a cautionary tale” in the industry when it comes to speaking
at the Oscars.

But that’s a mug’s game. Where in the United States is the correct
place for anything but the limpest centrist neoliberal political
speech such as is generally preached in Hollywood? When you’ve got
an enormous public forum, such as most people can never hope to find,
use it.

As Redgrave said cheerfully, decades after the reviled speech,
regarding her political commitments, “I had to do my bit.”

And the Oscars are so dull anyway, it’s a mercy to liven it up with
passionate utterances of people who hear the rarest of all speeches,
by those who have genuine hard-left political beliefs and aren’t
afraid to state them.

* Film
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* Oscars
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* Jonahan Glazer
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* Vanessa Redgrave
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