Honors for Oldman and Bryant are a slap
Gary Oldman’s and Kobe Bryant’s wins revealed how much Hollywood really cares about purging the industry’s toxic men: not as much as advocates hoped.
Even at the Me Too Oscars, two men accused of abuse won two of the night’s biggest awards. And their wins were greeted with a shrug.
Gary Oldman won his first career Oscar on Sunday for his performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Oldman was a clear favorite in the category, sweeping the precursor awards to the Oscars and winning the Golden Globes trophy for best actor in a drama.
And Kobe Bryant, another first-time winner, took home the trophy for best animated short with Dear Basketball, a six-minute film based on a poem Bryant wrote in 2015 announcing his retirement from the NBA.
Both men were applauded on the Oscars stage and on social media as fans celebrated Oldman’s victory and Bryant adding a different kind of trophy to his collection of sports-related honors.
It’s as if neither man has a history of alleged harassment and abuse. At face value, the Oscars were full of rhetoric celebrating women’s achievements and honoring the Me Too and Time’s Up movements. But Oldman’s and Bryant’s wins revealed how much Hollywood really cares about purging the industry’s toxic men: not as much as advocates hoped.
Call it classic Hollywood hypocrisy, or a failure of the motion picture academy voting bloc to subscribe to the Me Too movement’s message, but the Oscars sent a clear message to its problematic men on Sunday that their time may not be up just yet.
The claims against Oldman came in 2001, when Oldman’s ex-wife, Donya Fiorentino, said in her divorce papers that the actor choked and beat her in front of their children. “As I picked up the phone to call the police, Gary put his hand on my neck and squeezed,” she claimed in papers filed in L.A. Superior Court. “I backed away, with the phone receiver in my hand. I tried to dial 911. Gary grabbed the phone receiver from my hand, and hit me in the face with the telephone receiver three or four times. Both of the children were crying.”
Oldman denied Fiorentino’s accusations, and charges were never filed against him.
In Bryant’s case, the then-NBA star was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault in 2003 after a hotel employee in Eagle, Colo., accused him of rape. The case was dropped after Bryant’s accuser refused to testify and Bryant’s defense strategy focused on questioning the woman’s reputation. Bryant publicly acknowledged having had a sexual encounter with his accuser, though he said it was consensual and settled a civil lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.
Contrary to the myth that rape or assault charges are instant career-enders for the accused, Oldman and Bryant went on to have illustrious professional lives, capped off by their Oscar honors on Sunday. Save for several articles and some social media buzz resurrecting the allegations, there was no wave of backlash greeting either man’s win.
And for all the ceremony’s uplifting moments that were meant to signal a shift in Hollywood after last year’s Harvey Weinstein revelations, the 2018 Oscars actually did worse on the whole “awarding accused rapists and domestic abusers” front than last year’s awards, which controversially awarded Casey Affleck the best-actor trophy after two lawsuits resurfaced that accused him of sexual harassment.
Yet, even as Oldman racked up all of the early awards, making Sunday’s win a near-inevitability, the awards season seemed to be shifting in other ways that suggested a more evolved industry post-Weinstein. Me Too dominated the awards season conversation. Celebrities wore all black to the Golden Globes in solidarity with Time’s Up — though they abandoned the dress code at the ensuing awards. James Franco, who won the Golden Globe award for best actor in a comedy before facing mounting accusations of sexual misconduct, did not receive an Oscars nomination, suggesting the backlash reached a critical mass among Oscars voters. And Affleck, who had been scheduled to present the best-actress category on Sunday, withdrew his appearance, and the Oscars skirted what probably would have been a controversial moment.
All that made Oldman’s and Bryant’s wins, which arrived in between a series of rousing speeches from actresses promoting the work of women in Hollywood and praising the Time’s Up movement, all the more frustrating. For the two steps forward the industry has seemingly taken over the past few months, Oldman’s and Bryant’s wins were a step back, proof that Oscar voters — and some portion of Hollywood at large — are willing to separate male artists’ questionable histories from their art and honor them on the industry’s highest levels.
And that’s a tragedy, for the academy, for the women working to change Hollywood for the better, and for movie fans everywhere.