This year's Oscars better be political.
After the #TimesUp consciousness-raising sessions that were the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs. After the thought-provoking, "What is America?" nature of the Grammys. After the zeitgeist-seizing success of Black Panther and Get Out. After the Olympics, where the only U.S. athletes who could truly hold their heads high were Adam Rippon, the first openly gay U.S. male athlete to win an Olympic medal; and Chloe Kim, the gold medalist in snowboarding who made a point of acknowledging her South Korean immigrant parents. After all the knee-taking, Women's March-ing, Weinstein-suing, DACA-delaying, voter redistricting, Russian meddling and soul-sickening White House lying that was 2017.
And most especially, after high-school kids across the United States began taking to the streets and their statehouses to ask for gun laws that might protect them for a change. It's a seminal moment in America. Any group, especially a group as prominent and quotable as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, can't have a spotlight shone on them at this moment and merely smile. Especially if they want to be on the right side of history.
"Movie history."
"Oscar history."
These phrases are said. These statistics are logged and trotted out. I hope, and believe, that their reasons for saying something significant at the awards ceremony on Sunday will be bigger and more sincere than this, but at the very least, the denizens of Hollywood have reputations and not-unhealthy egos.
They do not want to be remembered as the ones who spent more than US$100-million campaigning for awards, and US$44-million on the ceremony itself, and then said nothing when all around them people were speaking out.
Forget the argument that political speeches are bad for ratings. Oscar ratings are unpredictable. In 2010, 41.7 million people watched Avatar lose to The Hurt Locker, the film with the lowest box office in best-picture history. In 2011, the winner was more popular (The King's Speech), but the number of viewers dropped anyway, to 37.9 million. The biggest audience in the past 10 years, 43.7 million, was in 2014, when 12 Years a Slave won.
Yes, socially aware speeches and performances dominated the recent Grammy Awards, and its ratings were down, to 19.8 million people.
But there were similar speeches and performances in 2017, when 26 million people watched (maybe they all tuned in for Adele). This year, we saw the most political Golden Globe awards ever, and viewership was up: 13.4 per cent of households (19 million people) watched, as opposed to 2017 and 2016, when the percentages were 13.3 and 13, respectively.
Remember, even the relatively low number of 32.9 million people (last year's Oscar audience) is still nearly 33 million people – many of whom are sitting in 224 other countries and territories wondering what the hell is happening in the United States. For better or worse, Hollywood represents its country to the world; winners and presenters are practically duty bound to say something to them. (George and Amal Clooney; Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife, Marilyn; Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw; and Oprah Winfrey set a tone this week by acting with their wallets, donating $500,000 each to March for Our Lives, the planned student-led gun-control rally.)
The Oscars' producers, Jennifer Todd and Michael De Luca, have repeatedly said they want an upbeat, movie-focused show, but they are making choices to ensure that their show looks woke: Presenters include Lin-Manuel Miranda, Gael Garcia Bernal, Common, Kumail Nanjiani, Wes Studi, Mahershala Ali, Viola Davis, Zendaya and Tiffany Haddish, along with Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther), Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman), and Oscar Isaac and Mark Hamill (Star Wars: The Last Jedi) to add blockbuster sparkle.
This year's Academy Awards host, Jimmy Kimmel (reprising his gig from last year), catches a lot of Twitter flack from right-wingers who don't like his monologues about health care and gun control – but his talk-show ratings have gone up and stayed up since he began doing them. (The least political late-night host, Jimmy Fallon, is the one who's currently the lowest rated.) It would look awfully lily-livered of Kimmel to suddenly go mute on substantive subjects.
Here's what perplexes me most, though: The subjects that Hollywood is likely to address are painted as right vs. left. But they're not. Fair wages, gender parity, an end to sexism, a reckoning for racism, concern for the environment, an acknowledgment that too many children have been murdered in schools – these are things that affect all citizens, regardless of party affiliation.
So here's what I hope. I hope that when the stars speak on these issues, they do so in an inclusive, not exclusionary, way. I hope they craft statements and speeches that welcome new people into these ideas, rather than shame them into switching channels.
I hope that Hollywood takes this opportunity to acknowledge its own faults – its culture of sexism, pay inequity and sexual assault.
I hope someone mentions the panel held Feb. 20 by the workplace safety organization iSAFE!, which called for an end to dangerous work practices such as 14-plus-hour days, making crew members drive while exhausted and putting crew in unsafe situations to get shots. I hope someone mentions the recent study from the Women's Media Centre that found "little progress" for women in non-acting roles and spelled out that 77 per cent of this year's Oscar nominees are men.
It is great that Rachel Morrison (Mudbound) is the first woman in Oscar's 90 years to be nominated for best cinematography. It is shameful that the other 449 nominees in that category have all been men.
And despite this year's record number of women and minority nominees, the overwhelming majority of people trotting up to accept statuettes will likely be heterosexual, cisgender white men. I hope some of them acknowledge that.
I know there's a virulent "shut up and act" contingent out there. I know there's also a perfectly reasonable "I'm exhausted, I just want a pleasant, entertaining evening of diversion" contingent. But I don't think Hollywood has that choice – not this year, not in this moment.
Hollywood is more than our dream factory. Like it or not, it's our history teacher (hello, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour and Last Men in Aleppo).
It's our water-cooler-chat generator (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri: sexual assault and criminal prosecution. The Florida Project and economic inequality. The Post and freedom of the press. Discuss).
It's our prejudice-softener (Call Me By Your Name; The Shape of Water), our mind-expander (Lady Bird; I, Tonya) and our mind-blower (Get Out).
It's our collective consciousness.
Hollywood has to lead the way, because it's our industrial-strength storyteller, and this – this confusion of hope and disgust, fear and urgent action, divisiveness and coming together, the need to stop something that's bad for all of us and the need do something that's good for all of us – right now, this is our story.
Johanna Schneller