Oscars

Thursday

Toby Young

The most politically correct Oscars ever?

Last year, the Oscars came in for quite a bit of criticism within the American film community. The problem wasn’t that the nominees were too worthy, or the speeches too long. Nor was it that some of the best films of 2015 – Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Martian, Steve Jobs – were snubbed. Nor did anyone complain that the picture that received the most nominations – The Revenant – was a three-hour snorefest starring the finger-wagging environmentalist Leo DiCaprio. No, the reason for all the grumbling was that the 88th Academy Awards weren’t politically correct enough. The good burghers of Hollywood got on their high horses about the

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Oh joy! Sean Penn has tried to crack a joke

What a pleasure it is to see the Hollywood actor Sean Penn neck deep in PC ordure. The rodentine thespian was handing out an award at the Oscars to his friend the Mexican film director Alejandro González Iñárritu, for his film Birdman. ‘Who gave this sonofabitch a green card?’ Penn quipped about his mate — at which point the moronsphere went into overdrive. There was splenetic fury and deep sadness and heartfelt outrage and condemnations at this racism, online and beyond. Some demented loon called Stephen W. Thrasher, writing in the Guardian (natch), said: ‘Racism from friends assumed to be benign can be the worst kind, especially at an awards show.’

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Why we need to cancel the Oscars to save the Oscars

Oscar has a problem, and I say that as a fan. If I could, I’d take one of those famous statuettes by its tiny golden hand, and show it a happy life in the bars, restaurants and movie theatres of its native Hollywood. But, clearly, others don’t feel the same way. The number of people who tuned into the Academy Awards last year was the lowest it has been for eight years. Even the traditional box office boost for victorious movies isn’t necessarily worth as much as it used to be. Viewing figures and box office receipts are, however, only the visible tip of what is a deeper problem: the

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

I want Elle to win an Oscar – but I also wish it hadn’t been made

Is it possible simultaneously to want a film to win an Oscar and to wish it hadn’t been made? That’s how confused I felt after seeing Elle with Isabelle Huppert – a woman for whom the adjective hard-boiled (in a French way) doesn’t even come close to her unvarying self-possession. Elle, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is about rape, violent rape, and the aftermath of rape, but this is as odd a depiction of victimhood as you can get. Huppert – Michèle Leblanc in the movie – is plainly brutalised by a sudden attack in her home by a masked intruder, in a wetsuit, who hits her repeatedly to subjugate her

Wednesday

Francesca Steele

Affleck carries the film – with the help of that jaw: Manchester By The Sea reviewed

Everyone in Hollywood knows that if you want some good jaw-clenching you go to an Affleck brother. To older brother Ben for the big budget moves, for a chin dimple that looks good in a bow-tie or Batsuit. And to younger brother Casey for something a little more low key. Casey may have the jaw that is less defiantly handsome, a chin that is a little smaller, weaker and more upturned, but that jaw’s acting skills in Manchester By The Sea are off the charts. As Lee, a man withdrawn and weighed down by grief amid the beautiful but bitter frost of a coastal Massachusetts town, Affleck’s Oscar glory seems

Wednesday

Damian Thompson

Sins of the fathers | 23 March 2016

A feature film about priests who abuse children is being released on 25 March. Which happens to be Good Friday. Geddit? The sacrifice of the innocents. A conspiracy of religious hierarchs. Hand-washing by the secular authorities. I’m sure I can think of some more analogies if you give me time, but that’s enough to be going on with. Enough, certainly, for the distributors to boast that the movie is ‘controversially slated to be released on Easter [sic] Good Friday’. As publicity stunts go, this isn’t subtle. But the film is. The Club, directed by the Chilean Pablo Larraín, sets out to perplex us from the first frame until the last.

Monday

Brendan O’Neill

This year’s Oscars was the biggest gathering of smug, self-important asses in living memory

The American comic Toby Muresianu put it best: last night’s Oscars felt like ‘three hours of being told to eat your vegetables’. If there has ever been a more grating gathering of smug, self-important asses keen to educate the TV-watching blob about Serious Stuff, then I’m struggling to remember it. Hollywood has clearly forgotten what its job is: to make us squeal and swoon, not raise our awareness about rape and paedophilia and the heat death of the planet and all the other misanthropic bilge the beautiful people spouted last night. Black people must have been counting their blessings. Sure, being shunned by the 2016 Oscars might have seemed a

Wednesday

Peter Jones

Oscar vs Augustus

There was something admirable about the spirit of careful mockery behind the doggy bags on offer to the finalists in this year’s Oscars and Daftas. The chance to hire a car or visit a New Zealand winery (pay your own airfare) cannot be very high on even the most grasping star’s list of ultimate desiderata. That said, the organisers are missing a trick here — the element of chance. The Roman emperors can come to their aid. Apophoreta, literally ‘takeaways’, were standard features of Roman dinner parties (the satirical poet Martial wrote a book of 221 couplets about them, celebrating everything from bras to nail-scissors and food for dealing with stretchmarks).

Ismene Brown

The Kremlin is dictating Russian culture once more – and it’s neo-Soviet and anti-Western

It’s suddenly gone icy-cold in Russia’s arts relations with us and the US. Last year’s Russia-UK Year of Culture just snicked under the wire before the political chill started building up ice in all sorts of unexpected places. The international acclaim for the epic Russian film Leviathan, up for a Best Foreign Film Oscar, was sneered at by the feverishly nationalistic culture minister Vladimir Medinsky. Recently he denounced the film as ‘perfectly calculated to pander’ to western views of a bleak modern Russia, and he has previously proposed that only movies properly celebrating today’s Russia should be allowed either public funding or a release. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev has been a victim

Thursday

Taki

High life | 28 January 2016

The Dolly Sisters were off to Davos last week for the World Economic Forum: Nat Rothschild and Sebastian Taylor in their finest playing up to Harry Selfridge, in reality Christine Lagarde, the IMF chief. This total waste of a week advertises itself as a discussion of the global issues of the day. In reality, it’s utter twaddle, unless one is networking like the Dolly Sisters, or showing off like Justin Trudeau, the Canadian premier whose mother is Margaret, once upon a time a Studio 54 regular and a friend of yours truly. Old Greek ship-owning families, prominent ones such as the Livanoses, Goulandrises and Chandrises, eschew such shenanigans, leaving them

Toby Young Toby Young

Is this a golden age of protest?

Are we living in a golden age of protest? A bunch of aggrieved citizens only has to raise a murmur of protest, whether it’s about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or Islamophobia, and the institution they’re targeting instantly capitulates. A case in point is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. No sooner had a group of prominent African-American actors and directors complained about the lack of black Oscar nominees this year — ‘whitewash!’ — than the president of the Academy announced she would be taking ‘dramatic steps’ to address the problem. The Academy will enlarge its membership to include hundreds of entertainment industry figures from diverse backgrounds. To date,

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The Oscars have a disgracefully racist record

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsrise-racismattheoscarsandcameronscentre-rightsecret/media.mp3″ title=”Rod Liddle and Tim Robey discuss whether the Oscars are racist” startat=1039] Listen [/audioplayer]In 2017 it will be exactly 50 years since a dapper Sidney Poitier announced to Rod Steiger, in the excellent film In The Heat of the Night: ‘They call me Mr Tibbs!’ Rod Steiger, playing a somewhat right-of-centre sheriff of a small town in Mississippi had hitherto been disposed to refer to Poitier — a senior policeman on his way home to Philadelphia — as ‘boy’, if you recall. I say the film was excellent, but the plotting was flawed, convoluted and unconvincing. The pleasure was to be gained instead from decent dialogue, a very good soundtrack

The Spectator

The View from 22 Podcast: Donald Trump, Cameron’s centre-right secret and the racist Oscars

Donald Trump seems to offer only gloom, insults and arrogance – but America seems to love him for it, says Freddy Gray in this week’s issue. Now there are only a few days left before the presidential election process starts, and ‘The Donald’ continues to storm the polls. He probably won’t be president, but it now looks as if he probably will be the Republican nominee — the heir to Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Eisenhower. It’s a mind-boggling phenomenon. Isabel Hardman joins Freddy Gray and Janet Daley from the Telegraph to discuss the rise of Trump, and whether any of the other candidates have a chance of receiving the nomination. Meanwhile, all round

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Self-pitying, despairing, often delusional: the real Marlon Brando

Listen to Me Marlon is a documentary portrait of Marlon Brando that has him burbling into your ear for 102 minutes, but if you have to have someone burbling in your ear for 102 minutes — and there is no law saying it’s obligatory — you could do a lot worse. This isn’t one of your regular documentaries. There are no talking heads, and it’s not blah-blah-blah and then he did this and then he did that and then his BMI got ridiculous, and so on. Instead, it is based on the hundreds of hours of personal audio tapes Brando made in his lifetime, which haven’t been heard until now,

Thursday

Francesca Steele

High and mighty

‘Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side,’ sang Miley Cyrus. ‘It’s the climb.’ She’s not usually a musician to be turned to for profound insight but in this case pop’s wild child has captured the absolute crux of this year’s Gravity wannabe, the visually spectacular 3D Everest, which kicked off the Venice Film Festival two weeks ago to a mixed reception. That’s because, even though in the case of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster (in which eight people died) what was waiting on the other side for most people was a cold and lonely death, it was indeed all about the climb. Despite knowing just what a perilous undertaking

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Family matters

God, what a title. The Gathered Leaves. It sounds like a tremulous weepie about grief and endurance with a closing scene featuring three anvil-faced spinsters staring through the rectory window at an autumn bonfire. It’s not quite like that. The play opens with some clumsy exposition revealing the political chronology. It’s Easter, 1997, and Labour’s shiny-fanged messiah is about to evict the Brixton mule from Downing Street. We meet the Pennington family, a high Tory clan nestling in a frondy corner of the Thames Valley, who are eager to heal an ancient rift. Their estranged daughter and her mixed-race sprog have been skulking in France for the past 17 years.

Thursday

Miriam Gross

Miriam Gross’s diary: Why use Freud and Kurt Weill to promote Wagner?

Last week I went to the exhilarating English National Opera production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers — five hours of wonderful music and singing whizzed by without a moment’s boredom. But there was one odd and perturbing factor, I thought. In place of a curtain, there was a huge ‘frontcloth’. It was covered with a collage of 103 faces of well-known artists. These same faces appeared again, during the finale, this time in the form of portraits held aloft by members of the cast. They included Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, Kurt Weill, Billy Wilder, Richard Tauber, Oskar Kokoschka, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Lotte Lenya, Max Ernst, Marlene Dietrich. According to

Monday

Francesca Steele

Oscars 2015: Neil Patrick Harris took it too far

Birdman soared past longtime favourite Boyhood at the 87th Academy Awards, as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hilarious Hollywood satire unexpectedly took both of the top prizes – best picture and director – and joint top number of awards overall, in a slightly awkward ceremony where many of the host’s razor-edged jokes drew clear disapproval from the audience. While many were predicting a slightly irreverent evening, Neil Patrick Harris, a veteran host of the Tony Awards, arguably took his jokes at the podium too far. Following a punchy opener chastising the Academy for the lack of ethnic diversity among this year’s nominees (the 20 acting nominations all went to white actors for

Steerpike Steerpike

Lord Brocket: Eddie Redmayne gives hope to Old Etonians

Chris Bryant found time to congratulate Eddie Redmayne on his best actor Oscar today despite previously claiming that British culture should not be dominated by privately educated actors of Redmayne’s ilk. While the shadow culture minister’s support for the Old Etonian may be lukewarm at best, The Theory of Everything actor can at least count on the constant support of his fellow alumni. Lord Charlie Brocket has come out to congratulate Redmayne on his win. The peer, who was jailed for an insurance scam in the 1990s, claims that Redmayne’s success will hopefully lead the way for more Old Etonian actors. ‘From a parents’ point of view, when you’ve put them through an Eton education

Thursday

Taki

My four great loves were unrequited (though I had a chance with Ginger Rogers)

I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies and Eighties. Alas, it had to do with age, his and mine, 77 and 78 respectively. No, the man on the other end of the telephone did not ask me anything embarrassing. All he wanted to know was if women still come on to an oldie, or are they, as Jack Nicholson claims, a thing of the past. Well, for starters I do not believe that Nicholson is telling the truth, that he’s now alone and fears he will die alone because women have abandoned a sinking ship. He has