Hollywood refused to step out of La La Land
With no winner raising a voice against the xenophobia unleashed by Trump, the event was an opportunity lost
sonal.kalra@hindustantimes.com
With over a billion people watching it live across the world, the Oscars made the largest platform for the American film fraternity to raise a voice against the xenophobia being unleashed by United States President Donald Trump and his government.
Actor Meryl Streep’s incredibly hardhitting speech at the 2017 Golden Globes Awards in Beverly Hills, California, in January further led to expectations that a collective, loud and clear point that the film fraternity is not willing to be a silent spectator to the businessman-president’s anti-secular and non-inclusive ways, would be made from the Oscar stage.
None of the main winners however — best actor Casey Affleck, best actress Emma Stone, best supporting actress Viola Davis and best supporting actor Mahershala Ali — chose to touch upon the highly sensitive racial atmosphere that grips their country at the moment.
With Davis and Ali among the record seven actors of colour nominated for Oscars this year, and Ali being the only black Muslim actor ever to have made it, it was indeed an opportunity lost.
The saving grace was the absence-inprotest of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi whose intense drama, The Salesman, won him his second Oscar in the best foreign film category.
That his award was received by Iranian astronaut Anousheh Ansari, the first Muslim woman to travel to space, spoke volumes against what Farhadi called “the unjust circumstances” created by Trump’s executive order banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries, including Iran.
With all the media attention having squarely shifted to the embarrassing faux pas made by Warren Beatty in declaring La La Land as the best film in place of the actual winner Moonlight, the 89th Academy Awards will sadly be remembered for a shocking gaffe, and not for the rare opportunity which could have allowed American artists to step out of their La La Land, and make a significant point.
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