After a frenetic month of round-the-clock, in-your-face, down-your-throat politics, we are due for a soothing break with the Oscars, when the flower of America’s creative fraternity allows us to put politics and culture wars aside for four hours and simply revel in the uplifting genius of great art.
I jest.
In the Trump age, the Academy Awards ceremony has been a primetime opportunity for the be-gowned and be-tuxed aristocrats of the Resistance to Orange Hitler to put on an unironic festival of grievance: a coterie of the most successful and privileged people on the planet demonstrating their solidarity with the oppressed they read about in the newspapers.
This first Oscars since Trump II (The Sequel) opened in January will presumably allow them to play again their role as tribunes of every left-wing cause deemed threatened in the ongoing pillaging of American democracy. It happens on Sunday (Monday AEDT).
Academy organisers, conscious of how alienating the spectacle has become to real people, have urged the presenters and actors in recent years to tone down the political commentary.
Conan O’Brien, this year’s host, a thoughtful chronicler of the absurdities and hypocrisies of modern times, might be up to delivering a genuinely original and funny script.
But most on stage surely won’t be able to resist the temptation to preach, as Jane Fonda did in picking up her latest lifetime achievement honour at the Screen Actors Guild Awards or as the ludicrous David Tennant did at the Baftas earlier this month.
The larger question this year’s Oscars will help answer is whether the revolution Trump has set in train in politics will up-end culture too.
Whether the vibe shift that brought him back to power, when voters rejected the long woke assault on their traditional values, will finally convince the self-appointed custodians of the contents of the books, plays, films, music and television we consume to produce art rather than progressive sermons.
If culture is downstream of politics we might be seeing it already.
But the line-up of expected honorees suggests Hollywood has not got the memo yet. Most of the movies making the noise are the usual exercises in ideological didacticism.
Leading the frame is Conclave, an anti-Catholic fantasy in which the wicked patriarchs of the church are upstaged by a plot twist that feels about five years behind the times, culturally speaking.
But if it does win big, it will be a sure sign that the themes guaranteed for years to get you a book contract or TV or film commission – ideas out of the elite imaginarium in which the values and institutions of Western civilisation all need to be repeatedly trashed – are still very much in vogue.
To be fair, it hasn’t been all plain sailing for the wokerati. The early runaway favourite for best picture and other Oscars was Emilia Perez, a musical with a script and cast that seemed almost designed by committee to win contemporary elite acclaim: a Latina trans actress playing a Mexican cartel boss who becomes a woman.
But disaster struck with delicious irony when, after the nominations were in, old tweets emerged by the actress, Karla Sofia Gascon, in which she said very disobliging things about Muslims and (capital offence alert) George Floyd, the black man killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
Anora, a reworking of the old tart-with-a-heart theme about a stripper who falls in love with a client, is a late contender but its prospects are complicated by geopolitics: the man she falls for is the son of a Russian oligarch played by Yura Borisov, an actor beloved by Putin’s Kremlin.
Then of course there is The Donald himself, portrayed as a young man by Sebastian Stan in best-picture nominee The Apprentice. But an award for anyone associated with this project might be interpreted the wrong way.
Trump seems intent on doing his part to rewrite American culture. Among the blizzard of acts he took on assuming office was to fire the entire leadership of the Kennedy Centre, Washington’s leading venue for concerts, opera and performance.
The aim, apparently, is to replace the usual diet of productions celebrating LGBTQIA+, ethnic minorities and other favoured causes with more traditional American output.
It will be a test of how easy it is to will into existence by executive fiat the foundations of a new culture.
The early signs are not promising.
In place of talentless nonentities depicting the tribulations of the persecuted in modern America we seem likely to get a slew of minor country and western performers; talentless nonentities crooning My Baby Left Me tunes.
But give the man some credit for at least trying to break the cultural mould. The rot in America’s institutions is so deep it will take generations for organic change to get us back to an age when creative minds produce art for art’s sake and entertainment for joy.
One film that doesn’t follow the cultural script but is up for eight awards on Sunday is the Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, a clever oeuvre from director James Mangold featuring Timothee Chalamet as the young bard from Hibbing, Minnesota. Its success or failure may point to the possibility of cultural change.
It tells the story of how, in his emergent years as a young folk singer, Dylan resists the efforts of the musical tastemakers of the time to enlist him in their wider ideological crusade against the evils of capitalist America.
Perhaps it unwittingly captures a shifting zeitgeist today too. But for now, as we observe the stultifying, unimaginative grip the establishment retains on our culture, we can only say: The Times They Aren’t A Changin’.
The Times
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