It's Oscar season baby!!!

Plus, the long-awaited return of Hollywood's Golden Age

Last week, I wrote about Hollywood as a fundamentally corrupt industry, reliant on the exploitation of vulnerable people where any attempt to address that exploitation will necessarily be limited and tokenistic.

This week I’m going to write about the Oscars!

My relationship with Hollywood’s annual night of self-congratulation is much like my relationship with the American Presidential election. The former is about as relevant to good films as the latter is to good politics but in either case, we’re cursed to live with the results. There usually isn’t the option of decent outcomes, just less-bad ones and my interest is borne out of an unholy mix of morbid curiosity and muscle memory.

But I'll still keep drinking that garbage!

The Oscars are a “local” awards ceremony

Prior to winning big for his 2019 film Parasite (a rare example of the Oscars getting it right), director Bong Joon-ho had this to say about the Academy Awards:

The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must have been listening because (much like their response to 2015’s #OscarsSoWhite controversy), they tried to do better. In the years since Parasite, a greater number of international films have been nominated. Notably, films in languages other than English were nominated for Best Picture in 2022 (Drive My Car), 2023 (All Quiet on the Western Front), 2024 (Anatomy of a Fall) and this year (Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here).

This may seem like a step in the right direction, but the ceremony is still a nauseating celebration of American hegemony. Last year’s Oscars took place against a backdrop of protests but the only person to explicitly reference the genocide in Gaza (save from a small gesture by Artists for Ceasefire) was Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer. Glazer’s comments drew connections between the genocide depicted in his film and the one being ignored by most of Hollywood and opened him up to the same kind of criticisms as Michael Moore received in 2003. During the broadcast, valuable adspace was given to zionist lobby group AIPAC whose ‘Stand Up to Jewish Hate’ campaign got more airtime than any acknowledgement of Palestinian humanity.

That’s not to say that the 2024 Oscars were a politics-free zone. Its in-memorium section included a tribute to dead white supremacist Alexei Navalny whose political goals happened to align with the United States’. If the Oscars are less ‘local’ than they were a decade ago, their international perspective is extremely selective.

Will 2025 be any different?

In my opinion, this year’s nominees are as terrible as ever, but I do want to give credit where credit is due:

• Karla Sofía Gascón is the first trans woman nominated for Best Actress for her role in Emilia Pérez. As President Trump fast-tracks actions designed to dehumanise trans people, it would have been easy for Hollywood to ignore this performance (especially considering how often it has celebrated men playing trans women). The main issue is that Emilia Pérez (I heard it as Emily in Paris for the longest time) is by all accounts dogshit. I’m not planning to see it but it has been singled out as being particularly poor as an example of trans representation. I can dream about an Academy that recognises outstanding performances by trans actors like Jack Haven and Vera Drew but any gesture towards progressivism by the Oscars will always come with a massive caveat.

• Outstanding Palestinian documentary No Other Land received a nomination which is pretty cool, especially given the disgusting response it received at Berlinale.

I implore you to find a way to watch this film

With the silver linings out of the way, my predictions for the 97th Academy Awards are as follows:

• Neither Gascón, nor No Other Land will win their categories and any acknowledgement of the humanity of trans people or Palestinians will be minimal.

• The (pretty mid) film The Seed of the Sacred Fig will be co-opted to stir up Islamophobic sentiment and may even win Best International Feature Film. Much like Russia was a safe target during last year’s ceremony, as Trump’s regime becomes increasingly hawkish towards Iran, we’re going to hear a lot of bad-faith appeals to women’s rights. This is not to defend the Islamic Republic, but to note that genuine abuses to human rights often get used as justification for military actions that will just make the lives of Iranian women worse.

• Films that deal with historic anti-Semitism like The Brutalist, A Real Pain and September 5 may be co-opted by those seeking to cultivate support for Israel.

• Perhaps most disappointingly of all, I think it is unlikely that Will Smith will get an opportunity to slap anybody.

I would love to be proven wrong on any of the above points but as we experience a period of reaction, I have no reason to believe that Hollywood will take a meaningful stance.

A new ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood?

Although I think it is unlikely that Hollywood will get better, it’s always possible that it will get much worse.

Gaining nation-wide fame by appearing on TV, Donald Trump has long craved the approval of Hollywood. I have heard his career trajectory described as the mirror-image of Barack Obama’s where Trump used show business as a launching pad towards the Presidency and Obama used the Presidency as a way to start making bad Netflix shows. For this reason, it’s unsurprising that Trump recently announced three ‘ambassadors’ to Hollywood: right-wing celebrities Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone:

They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!

It will again be, like The United States of America itself, The Golden Age of Hollywood!

It is unclear what their actual responsibilities will be other than to be his “eyes and ears". They’ll probably lobby for an executive order making it illegal to disown your parents if they’re famous.

The appeal to Hollywood’s Golden Age is particularly interesting though. Referring to the period after silent films but before ‘new Hollywood’ (i.e. the 30s, 40s and 50s), the Golden Age had just come to an end when figures like Voight, Gibson and Stallone were making names for themselves. Of course, there were a ton of great films made during this time but with such bumbling idiots in charge of the initiative, it is unlikely that any great art will result from it under such different material conditions.

Instead, I think Trump’s invocation of a ‘Golden Age’ will likely mean:

• a political crackdown akin to McCarthyism where unfriendly actors are ‘blacklisted’ (i.e. what has already been happening to actors who oppose genocide);

• a return to a vertically-integrated system that gives more power to studios (i.e. what is already happening with streaming providers); or

• an increase in the type of censorship that happened under the Hays Code (again, we’re already on our way).

This is definitely a ‘watch this space’ situation but Hollywood’s progressive bona fides have rarely been more than performative and Trump’s plans for Hollywood don’t need to be particularly well thought-out for the industry to obey him in advance.

Until my predictions are proven wrong, Bong’s criticisms of Hollywood’s ‘localism’ continue to ring very true.