Sun.Star Cebu

Politics to take center stage

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In almost all award ceremonies preceding the Oscars, winners have taken the platform to talk about politics. The most famous example was when Meryl Streep accepted her lifetime achievemen­t during the Golden Globes last month. She made an impassione­d speech against US president Donald Trump that touched almost all the celebritie­s in the room.

“We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage... So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the committee to protect journalist­s, because we're gonna need them going forward, and they'll need us to safeguard the truth,” Streep said.

At the Producers Guild Awards last Jan. 28, John Legend took a stand against Trump's Muslim Ban: “Our America is big, it is free, and it is open to dreamers of all races, all countries, all religions. Our vision of America is directly antithetic­al to that of President Trump. I want to specifical­ly tonight reject his vision and affirm that America has to be better than that.”

The same was true during the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus honored her father when she accepted her win for Best Actress in a Comedy Series but drizzled it with politics: “I love this country, and because I love this country, I am horrified by its blemishes, and this immigrant ban is a blemish, and it is un-American.”

Hidden Figures won for Best Ensemble and Taraji P. Henson took the stage with her costars to say: “When we put our difference­s aside and we come together as a human race, we win, love wins. Every time.”

So one should expect the big winners to touch on the important issues hounding America as of the moment.

But Academy president Cheryl Boone hopes the winners would also talk about their achievemen­ts.

“At that moment, there was such a heightened concern about the political environmen­t. But that's one topic of conversati­on in the political arena. I'm hoping Oscar winners will speak about creativity and their aspiration­s and if they have been realized,” Boone told USA Today.

 ??  ?? From left, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae and Taraji P. Henson.
From left, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae and Taraji P. Henson.

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