Twenty-two years ago, the last time Adrien Brody won the Academy award for best actor, film-maker Michael Moore accepted his own Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, a documentary about America’s obsession with guns, by offering a preview of sorts of his next feature, Fahrenheit 9/11. He decried then president George W Bush as “fictitious” (alluding to his fishy, supreme court-assisted election win a year and a half earlier) and excoriated the Bush administration for sending the United States to war with Iraq – just three days earlier, in fact – for “fictitious reasons”. It was received with a mixture of applause and boos, probably the most memorable moment of the night, give or take Brody planting a kiss on Halle Berry.
Two years later, when Fahrenheit 9/11 might have been similarly honored (and almost certainly would have been, as it became the highest-grossing non-music doc ever in the US, a record it still holds after two decades), Moore wasn’t on stage. Months earlier, he had decided not to submit his movie for consideration, nominally because he didn’t feel like he needed to steal focus from other, less widely seen docs, and also because he was negotiating an airing of the film on TV, which would scotch its eligibility anyway. By the time the Oscars rolled around, however, the presidential election Moore had hoped to affect with that television airing was long over; Bush won again, and maybe a documentary designed to prevent this from happening wouldn’t have seemed worth all the fuss, anyway. The administration’s worst policies were still in place, but protesting them seemed less urgent. Better to just put on a fun show.
Politically speaking, this year’s 97th Academy Awards felt more like that ceremony 20 years ago: we lost; let’s forget about it. But considering that the second Trump administration is embarking upon the most destructive and illegal government purge seen in modern US history while also shifting alliances toward strongman figures overseas, it felt conspicuous that it was barely commented upon, beyond host Conan O’Brien’s joke that Anora was well-received because it featured a character actually standing up to Russians. Even this felt more like a typical (if barbed) current-events laugh than a direct rebuke of fascism, a remnant of Brien’s dutiful-late-night-monologue days.
Brody, returning to the stage for his work in The Brutalist and lacking Berry to clinch (though she did find him on the red carpet for a revenge smooch), rambled on about career pitfalls, the less glamorous side of acting, and … what was he on about, exactly? Nevertheless, he shushed the encroaching orchestra for an emotional crescendo that never quite arrived. Through this record-setting speech, literally the longest in Oscar history, Brody never seemed to land on anything in particular to say; he thanked his co-stars and his partner and his parents, like most people do, but on a more roundabout path. The closest he came to making a bigger-picture statement was a sort of mealy-mouthed pro-peace, pro-tolerance lip service that’s intentionally difficult to ascribe to any particular things happening in the real world (perhaps in keeping with the ambiguities of The Brutalist, the thorny but sometimes elusive movie he won for).
That’s not to put the lack of politics at the Oscars purely on Brody – or even to say that politics at the Oscars make a bit of difference beyond burnishing their self-styled reputation as an important event, and perhaps confirming some rightwingers’ perception of Hollywood as a haven for condescending far-left elites. Of course, the political makeup of Hollywood is more complicated than that; for one thing, it’s collectively about as revolutionary as the most entrenched centrist Democrats. (In New York terms: more Schumer/Pelosi than AOC.) But this also means that anything to the left of “We love you, Dear President Trump” will be received in certain corners as leftist rhetoric anyway. In other words, there’s nothing anyone can say – including nothing itself – that will turn the event into the “apolitical” ideal rightwingers claim to long for. As such, it was a little bit strange to see this particular time, of all times, being treated like business as usual. No one famous had anything more specific than allusions to Trump and other sources of global discord, beyond Daryl Hannah saying briefly supportive words about Ukraine in the wake of their president’s disastrous encounter with Trump’s bulldozing?
Admittedly, these gestures don’t necessarily affect much, if any, change. In the past, some of them have been downright clumsy or self-important. But movies are about image-making, and at a time when so much rightwing radicalism is being passed off as normal, there were plenty of opportunities to refute that narrative, rather than just referring vaguely to “divisive” times. Though there’s something charming about Sean Baker’s single-issue campaigning on behalf of the theatrical experience, certainly an appropriate topic to address at the Academy Awards, it’s also a bit mordantly funny that the director of Anora, one of the more provocative best picture winners in recent history, has so little appetite for controversy (regardless of his much-discussed-online Twitter habits). And for those addicted to bragging about their 65-inch TVs providing a better experience than a giant movie screen, “take your kids to the movies for real” could still read as controversial anyway.
Perhaps appropriately, the most political moment of the night was in Moore’s old category, best documentary feature. The Academy awarded No Other Land, a film that sounds, on paper, like an act of healing: it was made by a collective of both Palestinians and Israelis, about the friendship between a Palestinian activist and a Jewish Israeli journalist. But the movie is also about the displacement of the Palestinian people by Israel, and its pro-Palestine point of view was considered radioactive enough that (despite months of acclaim and awards) it hasn’t yet secured official US distribution, instead booking its showings through its PR handlers. The Academy, not always known for their bold choices in this category, will most assuredly bring more eyes and ears to No Other Land, moreso even than the platform the film-makers received as winners on the telecast.
That’s ultimately the kind of Oscar politics that can make a difference; any movie fan should know that actions do often speak louder than words (or, specifically: movies are louder, and more memorable, than most acceptance speeches). Yet it’s still possible to take something chilling away from this year’s ceremony: “politicizing” the Oscars with a speech is known as something that typically has no greater consequence than, well, more complaints about politicizing the Oscars. Yet even with the risk far lower than, say, anyone who works for the government right now, most were too cowed, or maybe too exhausted, to bother speaking up. Actions speak louder, but the silence can still be pretty deafening.
