These people
Remember when the most contentious thing about the Oscars was actresses and their taste in dresses? Office pools for guessing the winners and bad jokes from Bob Hope? Yeah, it's been a while.
Americans no longer get even one night off from baring their teeth at one another. Social media ended that -- the complaints get posted before the acceptance speech is halfway over. Everything now sets off an argument, usually a predictable, exhausting one. All awards are political, but the Oscars became politically political in the last few decades, when the comfortable consensus of mainstream America broke down around civil rights and the Vietnam war. It had to.
The first time reality broke up the self-celebration was 1968, as Mark Harris describes in his indispensable book Pictures At a Revolution.* New Hollywood was reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King; old Hollywood, as represented by Bob Hope, didn't see why the big show needed to be postponed until after his funeral. It was postponed, mostly because all the black presenters and performers (and many white ones) refused to appear otherwise. The fault line had appeared. A few years later, Marlon Brando won and sent a spokesperson to upbraid Hollywood for its treatment of Native Americans. Say what you will about Joaquin Phoenix, at least he delivered his comments about cattle insemination in person. But he was hardly the first to confuse an award for acting with an invitation to lecture America.
Oscar now brings out the ugly, and I'm not talking about dresses. Bong Joon-ho won for the screenplay of Parasites and chose to deliver most of his remarks in Korean. It was too much for superpatriot Jon Miller (not the San Francisco Giants broadcaster, I hasten to add), who wrote, "These people are the destruction of America." On the one hand, it was not immediately clear if he meant Asians, the Academy, foreign writer-directors, the movie business in general, or people who don't speak much English. (Mr. Bong's speech, if the translation is accurate, was pretty standard -- it's not like he slammed Trump for snuggling up to Kim Jong-un or anything.) On the other hand, he works at Alex Jones's digital crack house The Blaze, so it was perfectly clear. Miller backed up and tried again -- "those in Hollywood awarding a foreign film that stokes claims of class warfare." I haven't seen Parasite but I've seen plenty of Hollywood product about class warfare, from My Man Godfrey and Stella Dallas to Dead End and The Philadelphia Story, and those movies are all older than I am. Miller should click over from Fox News to Turner Classic Movies once in a while. The clash of classes is the subtext of huge quantities of celluloid. It's race that Hollywood could never deal with.
Miller has nothing to worry about. Most of his and Trump's people will never see Parasite, even though it also won Best Picture. They'd have to read the subtitles.
*Mark Harris, Pictures At a Revolution, Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, New York, The Penguin Press, 2008
Americans no longer get even one night off from baring their teeth at one another. Social media ended that -- the complaints get posted before the acceptance speech is halfway over. Everything now sets off an argument, usually a predictable, exhausting one. All awards are political, but the Oscars became politically political in the last few decades, when the comfortable consensus of mainstream America broke down around civil rights and the Vietnam war. It had to.
The first time reality broke up the self-celebration was 1968, as Mark Harris describes in his indispensable book Pictures At a Revolution.* New Hollywood was reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King; old Hollywood, as represented by Bob Hope, didn't see why the big show needed to be postponed until after his funeral. It was postponed, mostly because all the black presenters and performers (and many white ones) refused to appear otherwise. The fault line had appeared. A few years later, Marlon Brando won and sent a spokesperson to upbraid Hollywood for its treatment of Native Americans. Say what you will about Joaquin Phoenix, at least he delivered his comments about cattle insemination in person. But he was hardly the first to confuse an award for acting with an invitation to lecture America.
Oscar now brings out the ugly, and I'm not talking about dresses. Bong Joon-ho won for the screenplay of Parasites and chose to deliver most of his remarks in Korean. It was too much for superpatriot Jon Miller (not the San Francisco Giants broadcaster, I hasten to add), who wrote, "These people are the destruction of America." On the one hand, it was not immediately clear if he meant Asians, the Academy, foreign writer-directors, the movie business in general, or people who don't speak much English. (Mr. Bong's speech, if the translation is accurate, was pretty standard -- it's not like he slammed Trump for snuggling up to Kim Jong-un or anything.) On the other hand, he works at Alex Jones's digital crack house The Blaze, so it was perfectly clear. Miller backed up and tried again -- "those in Hollywood awarding a foreign film that stokes claims of class warfare." I haven't seen Parasite but I've seen plenty of Hollywood product about class warfare, from My Man Godfrey and Stella Dallas to Dead End and The Philadelphia Story, and those movies are all older than I am. Miller should click over from Fox News to Turner Classic Movies once in a while. The clash of classes is the subtext of huge quantities of celluloid. It's race that Hollywood could never deal with.
Miller has nothing to worry about. Most of his and Trump's people will never see Parasite, even though it also won Best Picture. They'd have to read the subtitles.
*Mark Harris, Pictures At a Revolution, Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, New York, The Penguin Press, 2008
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 11:32 AM
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