Stars play their Trump cards in Oscars protests
Hollywood sets its sights on president
IN A climate of fear and unease not seen since the McCarthy witch-hunts, and with the makers of at least one nominated film threatening a boycott, tomorrow night’s Oscars look like turning into open season on Donald Trump.
Star Trek actor Zachary Quinto opened the assault two days early by attacking the president’s stand on school bathroom rules for transgender students.
“I believe it is all of our responsibilities to stand up and be authentic,” Quinto said as he accepted an Oscar Wilde Award for his contribution to film as an Irish-American.
In a volley aimed squarely at the new president, Quinto feared, “as an openly gay man in Hollywood”, that there had been a retrenchment towards Wilde’s time over the “reversal of protections for transgender children in this country”.
Meanwhile, across town, the director and the star of an Oscar nominated film were both saying they would not attend the awards in protest at the president’s immigration policies.
Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose movie, The Salesman, will compete for the best foreign language film, announced he would skip the ceremony whether or not he was allowed to enter the country.
The film’s star, Taraneh Alidoosti, tweeted: “Trump’s visa ban for Iranians is racist. Whether this will include a cultural event or not, I won’t attend the Academy Awards 2017 in protest.”
Farhadi’s film, A Separation won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2012.
It has been an awards season dominated by politics, with Meryl Streep kicking off proceedings by blasting Mr Trump without naming him at the Golden Globes.
“There was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart,” she said, referring to a rally in South Carolina when the presidential candidate appeared to make fun of a journalist with a congenital joint condition.
But political protest on the stars’ big night out is as old as the Hollywood hills, with Marlon Brando, Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave among those who have turned the podium into a political soapbox for the crusade du jour.
The 1999 choice of the director Elia Kazan for an honorary Oscar took the film community back to the depths of the McCarthy era, when Kazan had given the UnAmerican Activities Committee the names of eight former associates from the Communist party.
“His lifetime achievement was the destruction of lives,” said the blacklisted screenwriter, Norma Barzman.
Marlon Brando was a no-show in 1973, when his Best Actor award for The Godfather was accepted by a native American activist named Sacheen Littlefeather. He had sent her, she said, to protest at “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry”.
Richard Gere and Tim Robbins, in 1993, brought up the treatment of HIV patients and human rights abuse in China.
However, Redgrave’s reference in 1978 to “a bunch of Zionist hoodlums” fell on more deaf ears than is likely to be the case during tomorrow’s oratory.
She was named Best Supporting Actress in 1977 for Julia, a film about opposition to the Nazis, at the same time as producing The Palestinian, which presented a sympathetic portrayal of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The Jewish Defence League picketed the Oscars in protest.
His lifetime achievement was the destruction of lives Blacklisted screenwriter Norma Barzman on the honour for Elia Kazan in 1999.