Oscars 2019: The Oscars, pure politics | Culture

Oscars 2019: The Oscars, pure politics | Culture



Of the protest of Marlon Brando for the treatment of the American Indians, to that of Jane Fonda for the Vietnam War or the one sitting for the honorific award to Elia Kazan - delator during the witch hunt -, that of the Oscar gala has always been a political story. The incendiary presidency of Republican Donald Trump has only emboldened more to a liberal bastion such as Hollywood, which in recent years has also turned to the recognition of the cinema of a country with which the president is especially focused: Mexico. The lack of love is mutual: last year, annoyed with criticism of their policies, he scoffed at the bad hearing data of the ceremony. "The Oscar with the smallest audience in HISTORY The problem is that we no longer have stars, except your president (kidding, of course)," he wrote in his Twitter account.

It's no joke that for That same evening of the previous year, just arrived at the White House, Trump tried to counterprogram the ceremony by calling a big party at the presidential residence. Six out of 10 of their voters change channels when the speeches of the winners are put in political mode. Last year, at the moment Common and Andra Day performed one of the Oscar-nominated songs, a rosary of activists, including Spanish chef José Andrés, carried a Puerto Rican flag; Tarana Burke, of the MeToo against bullying, or Patrice Cullors, of the African-American protest movement Black Lives Matters. All with something in common, the opposition to Trump.

Says film historian Jonathan Kuntz, a professor at UCLA, that these have not been, however, the most controversial ceremonies anywhere near. "Perhaps some of the most serious polemics that have ever occurred were those of the early 1930s [al poco de nacer la gala], during the Great Depression, when there were a lot of industry people in Hollywood, actors, directors and writers, who wanted to boycott the Academy Awards because they considered that the producers, who controlled the academy, were unfairly cutting their salaries ", explains by phone.

In 2016, when for the second year in a row there was a single African-American performer nominated, there was also a call for boycott by stars like Spike Lee. The racial trauma accompanies the history of prizes born almost a century ago, when there would still be blacks who had been born slaves and the laws of segregation prevailed. The protest has not only come from the hand of African-Americans. The absence of Marlon Brando in the collection of his Oscar for best actor in 1973 The Godfather figure in the top ten of the political moments of Hollywood, to give the honor to an already famous American Indian who introduced herself as Sacheen Littlefeather and denounced the bad treatment of American Indians in the cinema.

And this, the cinema, also carries a deep political burden, as the prizes, according to some experts, including Claudia Puig, of the Los Angeles Critics Association. Did they have the prizes to Coconut or a The shape of Water something also of political statement? "Some prizes have more than a dose of politics. Coconut It was the best animated film of last year, but to reward a film that celebrated Mexican culture and traditions at a time when the president slandered immigrants horribly of that country was something that the Academy also wanted to do, "he explains by email. Rome, of the Afonso Cuarón, with a string of nomination, is for Puig "a masterpiece". Also, however, it will mean, if he wins, to shed light on the class struggle. Nothing new from at least Charles Chaplin and those sequences of workers on an assembly line.

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