Last night’s Academy Awards featured a lot of generalities and not much inspiration or speaking truth to power.
Last night’s Academy Awards broadcast was Hollywood’s way of addressing the sexual-harassment scandal without really addressing it, discussing it without really discussing it, and assuring the public that all the worst stuff is in the past and that no one needs to worry about it anymore.
Yes, it was nice to see Ashley Judd and Annabella Sciorra again, up on stage alongside Salma Hayek. But no one involved in the ceremony could ever quite come out and say why those three were up on stage.
.. The president’s defenses of protectionism are incoherent babble that is just factually wrong; Trump insists that “our Steel and Aluminum industries are dead” when the U.S. Department of Commerce figures show that since the beginning of 2009, the six major U.S. steel companies have collectively reported net earnings for 20 quarters... The president still hasn’t figured out that you can’t change government policy as quickly and impulsively as you type out and send a Tweet.By midnight Wednesday, less than 12 hours before the executives were expected to arrive, no one on the president’s team had prepared any position paper for an announcement on tariff policy, the official said. In fact, according to the official, the White House counsel’s office had advised that they were as much as two weeks away from being able to complete a legal review on steel tariffs.
There were no prepared, approved remarks for the president to give at the planned meeting, there was no diplomatic strategy for how to alert foreign trade partners, there was no legislative strategy in place for informing Congress and no agreed upon communications plan beyond an email cobbled together by Ross’s team at the Commerce Department late Wednesday that had not been approved by the White House.
.. By Thursday afternoon, the U.S. stock market had fallen and Trump, surrounded by his senior advisers in the Oval Office, was said to be furious.
.. This reminds me of Steve Bannon’s “plan” to announce the immigration restrictions without any warning in the first days of Trump’s presidency. No one in the rest of the government was prepared to implement them; John Kelly, then the secretary of Homeland Security, learned from television that Trump had signed the order.
.. he’s flat-out wrong when he claims, “Maybe it’ll cost a little bit more, but we’ll have jobs.”
.. the decline of jobs in the steel and aluminum industries predates the competition with China by decades. Industry experts know that this is mostly because of innovation and industry consolidation. The era of labor-intensive metal production is over.
For the Oscar-winners, the times, they’ve a-changed
The four-hour ceremony threatened to turn into a lecture on how Hollywood is already busily vanquishing racism, sexism and other ills
But the ceremony eventually came to feel less like an outraged call to arms than a long lecture, written in thick black gold capital letters, about what a wonderfully warm and welcoming place Hollywood is. Everyone agreed that the times weren’t just a changin’. They had already changed.
.. It’s understandable that, in the wake of the Weinstein scandal, the ceremony’s organisers wanted to repair some of the damage done to their industry’s reputation. But the Academy isn’t practising everything it preaches. There may have been a utopian range of presenters on the stage, but they handed the main prizes to a male director, male screenwriters, a male composer, a male cinematographer, a male editor, a male costume designer, and so on. Over all, there were six female winners on the night, and 33 male winners, which means that, basically, men won everything they possibly could, and that the female nominees didn’t get to stand up until Ms McDormand insisted that they do so during her rabble-rousing speech.
We Got Rid of Some Bad Men. Now Let’s Get Rid of Bad Movies.
TV and film are in the thick of an unprecedented sociopolitical reckoning, the first ever of such scale and ferocity, a microcosm of our ever-more-literal national culture war. But to make that reckoning stick, we have to look ahead and ask ourselves what we want of this new Hollywood, and look back to avoid repeating the past.
Hollywood is both a perfect and bizarre vanguard in the war for cultural change. Perfect because its reach is so vast, its influence so potent; bizarre because television and movies are how a great many toxic ideas embedded themselves inside of us in the first place.
.. When I was growing up, I didn’t chafe at the shallow, exploitative representations of my gender that I saw on screen; I took notes. I added item after item to my mental lists of how to be a woman and the things I should yearn for and tolerate from men.
.. From makeover shows, I learned that I was ugly. From romantic comedies, I learned that stalking means he loves you and persistence means he earned you
.. From Disney movies, I learned that if I made my waist small enough (maybe with the help of a witch), a man or large hog-bear might marry me, and that’s where my story would end.
.. “The Smurfs” taught me that boys can have distinct personalities, like being smart or grumpy, and girls can have only one (that personality is “high heels”).
.. From “The Breakfast Club,” I learned that rage and degradation are the selling points of an alluring bad boy, not the red flags of an abuser.
.. From pretty much all media, I learned that complicated women are “crazy” and complicated men are geniuses.
.. What we could really use from Hollywood is about 100 years of phase cancellation.
.. We are not done talking about why so many men feel entitled to space, power and other people’s bodies.
.. We are not done talking about how to get justice for “imperfect” victims
.. Unseating a couple (or a score, or even a generation) of powerful abusers is a start, but it’s not an end, unless we also radically change the power structure that selects their replacements and the shared values that remain even when the movement wanes. Art didn’t invent oppressive gender roles, racial stereotyping or rape culture, but it reflects, polishes and sells them back to us every moment of our waking lives. We make art, and it simultaneously makes us. Shouldn’t it follow, then, that we can change ourselves by changing the art we make?
Hollywood Producer in the Spotlight in Netanyahu Probe
Israeli police said last month that they had questioned Mr. Milchan—who has financed Academy Award-winning movies such as “12 Years a Slave” and “Birdman”—about whether he gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gifts in return for favors.
.. Mr. Netanyahu has denied wrongdoing. “It is allowed, according to the law, to accept presents from friends,” the prime minister said in response to questions at a January session of Israel’s parliament, after the probes were first reported publicly.
.. Mr. Milchan has had connections with several Israeli politicians over the years. Ehud Olmert, who later served as Israel’s prime minister, came up with “Pretty Woman” as the title for the 1990 film produced by Mr. Milchan, according to a 2011 biography, “Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan.”
.. Police are investigating whether Mr. Netanyahu in return lobbied former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a visa for Mr. Milchan, Israeli media reported.
According to former U.S. officials, Mr. Netanyahu asked U.S. officials in 2014 to intervene at the State Department to renew a visa for Mr. Milchan.
.. In his role as an Israeli agent, Mr. Milchan helped procure equipment from the U.S. for Israel’s secret nuclear program, according to the biography, which said Mr. Milchan served as an officer for Israel’s now-defunct Bureau of Scientific Relations.
.. Mr. Milchan’s business partner in the U.S., Richard Kelly Smyth, was charged in 1985 with smuggling materials to Israel that could be used for nuclear purposes. Mr. Smyth was charged with breaking U.S. export laws and spent 16 years on the run before being convicted in 2002 and sentenced to 40 months in prison. Mr. Milchan wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing.