The Oscars’ self-defeating identity politics

I moved to this country from the USA 30 years ago and this year I’ve finally understood why: it was to spare myself the more self-defeating elements of America’s identity politics. Last week, the Oscars announced diversity guidelines, at least some of which films will have to fulfil to be considered for an Academy Award, such as that the film must ‘centre on women, LGBTQ people, a racial or ethnic group or the disabled’. Yet nowhere in these guidelines is there acknowledgement of one of the biggest predictors of quality of life in the US and, indeed, everywhere: social class. Going by the Oscars’ new rules, the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy about a phenomenally wealthy African prince, Coming to America, would get more points than, say, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. Having said that, I’d rather watch Coming to America a million times than I, Daniel Blake ever again, so perhaps the Oscars are cleverer than I appreciated.

A colleague texted, ‘So is it true?’ and told me some gossip about the PM so scurrilous I can’t repeat it, but so scandalous I had no choice but to believe it at once. ‘WHAT?!’ I texted back. ‘You haven’t heard? Everyone knows. What kind of journalist are you?’ she replied. This is the problem with being a journalist who loves gossip (a tautology, surely): every time someone tells you something, you have to pretend you already know, which takes half the fun out for me.

‘When do you think you were radicalised?’ my friend asked when we met for falafels on Hampstead Heath (gaze upon the north London elite, dear readers). It was a fair question: I’d spent the past ten minutes ranting about modern gender ideology, and how if we all accept that gender and sex are different, as gender ideology very specifically argues, then why does changing gender now mean a person has actually changed sex, and that trans women athletes should compete against female ones? And if gender is something spiritual and innate (part of one’s ‘soul’, according to failed Lib Dem leadership candidate Layla Moran), then why has Mermaids, an organisation ‘helping gender-diverse kids’, given lectures to the police where they define gender as something that ranges between the famously soulful entities of a Barbie doll and a GI Joe? And — OK, I’ll give it a rest.