TRUMP’S NAME LOOMS IN MIND AND SPEECHES

You might not have predicted it, but the first person thanked from the stage of the Academy Awards this year was President Donald Trump. “I mean, remember last year,” said the show’s host, Jimmy Kimmel, “when it seemed like the Oscars were racist?” It was indeed just a year ago that the controversy hanging over the Oscars was #OscarsSoWhite, when no minority actors received nominations. This year, with a more diverse field of nominees — and controversy over race and xenophobia hanging over the entire country — the film industry was ready to turn its flagellation outward. The Oscars 2017: It’s not us — it’s him! Kimmel does less political material than many of his fellow late-night hosts. But he has a roastmaster streak that he showed off in a brisk, biting opening monologue. Announcing that the show was airing in “more than 225 countries that now hate us”, he congratulated in advance the winners who would “give a speech that the president of the US will tweet about in all caps in his 5am bowel movement tomorrow”. But Kimmel, typically, didn’t spare the privileged crowd. His monologue included a bawdy joke about Moonlight, the kicker of which was how few people in the crowd saw it and got the plot point he referenced. There have been years in the past that the Oscars have been an uneasy blend of celebration and seriousness. This year, they were also a reminder that there are few escapes from politics in public life right now. It was in the animated-film winner, Zootopia, whose co-director Rich Moore said the film, about a rabbit police officer who teams up with a fox, was a statement against “fear of the other”. It was in that category’s introduction, as Gael García Bernal said that, “as a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that wants to separate us”. But given the awards’ exclusionary history, maybe the strongest rejoinders to the political arguments of the day — over whom to let into the country, and to whom the culture belongs — were the winners. We saw Viola Davis win best supporting actress for her role in Fences. We saw a Muslim man win best supporting actor (Mahershala Ali, for Moonlight). We saw the Italian-born Alessandro Bertolazzi, dedicate his make-up award for Suicide Squad to “all the immigrants”. We didn’t see the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose The Salesman was named best foreign-language film, because he was boycotting the ceremony in protest of Trump’s ban against travellers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. But he sent a statement: “Dividing the world into the us and our enemies categories creates fear, a deceitful justification for aggression and war.” The broadcast will probably be polarising, because what isn’t today? No one is entitled to an audience for political speech. Nor is anyone entitled to an awards show free of political speech. And the presidency of the guy who hosted Celebrity Apprentice is a tough time to argue “keep your politics out of it, celebs”. The Oscars being a vast show, though, there was plenty of time for material that wasn’t topical. Kimmel, whose ABC late-night show is heavy on man-on-the-street stunts, brought a tour-bus group into the theatre. Denzel Washington performed a mock wedding for one couple. The bit felt endless, much like the Oscars themselves. But it was a way of bringing regular people to the party. One of the more moving appearances of the evening, in fact, was not a celebrity but Katherine Johnson, one of the African-American women whose contributions to the space program were celebrated in Hidden Figures. Her appearance illustrated the moving acceptance speech by Davis, who said that the actor’s job is to tell “the stories of the people who dreamed big and never saw those dreams to fruition, people who fell in love and lost”. On a night that Hollywood was collecting its hardware and feeling its voice, these moments reminded us that none of it would happen without the people who buy the tickets and live the stories.