After Weinstein: why this year’s Oscars are make or break

After a tumultuous year for the film industry (and the wider world) the Academy will face ridicule unless it starts giving prizes to the truly important films

And to think, we thought last year’s Oscars were unusual. Only six months ago, it looked as if the biggest drama this year’s ceremony could offer would be endless jokes about mixed-up envelopes and retracted acceptance speeches. Now, the movie industry is in a phase that would have once seemed unimaginable, even to people who have made billions from turning Kevin James into a movie star. Instead of throwing his annual pre-Oscars party in LA and strolling through the week like a self-satisfied God admiring his creation, multiply-accused rapist and former uber-producer Harvey Weinstein was last sighted getting smacked in the face by a member of the public in a restaurant in Arizona. Few falls have been harder and faster. For almost 30 years, Weinstein shaped the Oscars arguably more than anyone else by lobbying for his films with infamous dedication – claiming 81 Academy Awards in the process. He made the Oscars seem cool, by shepherding through films such as The Crying Game and Pulp Fiction, and he made them seem hopelessly mediocre, by bulldozing through tedious schlock such as Argo and Chicago. It is striking that his sudden absence from the event coincides with consideration of the first movies made under the tenure of President Trump. Like Trump, Weinstein was a notorious bully who frequently defended other bullies and worse (he was, for example, a very vocal defender of the child-rapist Roman Polanski). So, it will be fascinating to see if, over the next few years, film-makers take advantage of the fact that, while they live in a country in which an accused predator is president, their movies are no longer produced by one.

Meanwhile, the movie industry has spent the past few months openly reckoning with the long-accepted if rarely acknowledged truth that Hollywood is constructed on a system of sexual exploitation, reliant on the complicity and silence of those who work within it, and just because it has always been done this way does not make it right. It is depressing that it still feels shocking to acknowledge this out loud, like pointing out the emperor is not just nude but has been openly humping the servants and no one ever seemed to care.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2F4v92F