Eight years ago, Amanda Palmer, cultish American singer, greeted that year’s US election results with a facepalm moment. “Donald Trump is going to make punk rock great again,” she wrongly predicted. There was worse. “There is this part of me – especially having studied Weimar Germany extensively – I’m like, ‘This is our moment’,” she ventured. Those comments positively demanded reference to Peter Cook’s famous remark about his own Establishment Club in 1961. The comedian wryly compared the new home of satire to “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second World War”.
The artistic resistance has, this time round, been a little more circumspect. Nobody (well, almost nobody) wants a repetition of the incident in 2016 when a cast member of Hamilton lectured Mike Pence, then vice-president elect, about “our children, our planet, our parents” from the stage. The less grandstanding outside the text itself the better. Everyone knows that. Or do they? As I was pondering this, an acquaintance raised a horrifying prospect. Are awards speeches about to become stuffed with insufferable jeremiads about the incoming apocalypse?
Probably not. Aside from anything else, celebrity political engagement received a bloody nose on November 5th. The Democrats always expect support from the cultural cream, but there was a particularly voluble torrent of hurrahs this time round. Taylor Swift’s recommendation of Kamala Harris attracted 10 times the attention that the Washington Post’s failure to endorse generated. We had all that tedious “Brat” hoopla after Charli XCX, whose latest album is so titled, bigged up the vice-president. Beyoncé actually turned up at a rally. Yet nobody much cared.
It was worse than that. A reasonable argument can be made that the election was a victory, in significant part, for the “sod the elites” tendency. Ignore anyone who tells you the result was about Just One Thing. It seems undeniable, however, that many Trump voters were offering a finger to bleeding-heart content creators in cushioned penthouses. At best the electorate was ignoring Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez. At worst the endorsements were a net negative.
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A much-quoted poll from YouGov told us that, whereas Swift’s recommendation made just 8 per cent more likely to vote Harris, a whopping 20 per cent claimed the pop star’s statement made them less keen on ticking the VP’s box. All right, there are plenty of voluble Swift haters out there. But the statistic still deflates myths about the worth of celebrities recommending candidates. George Clooney is good at selling espresso makers. He is less good at flogging potential presidents.
So the upcoming competitors at the Oscars now know the public are unmoved by their pontifications on public affairs? They will keep to bigging up agents and family and acting teachers? Well, yes. But, in truth, though false memory may tell you otherwise, they never were that interested in dissing Trump at awards shows. The most powerful counter-example came from Meryl Streep at the 2017 Golden Globes – addressing “that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter” – but, even then, she failed to mention Trump by name. And this was at the boozy Globes, not the actually-matters Oscars. Robert De Niro, who has been admirably incensed since 2016, yelled “f**k Trump!” from the stage at the Tony awards in 2018. That’s about it. At the 2017 Oscar ceremony, host Jimmy Kimmel did a few decent jokes, but the winners pretty much stuck to weeping and gushing.
All of which is worth remembering the next time some right-wing blowhard tells you the Oscars were better when they stayed away from politics. As noted in this place more than once, the ceremony was infused with political anger during the 1970s and 1980s. Marlon Brando sent Sacheen Littlefeather to accept his Oscar and note his opposition to oppression of Native Americans. Bert Schneider, winning best documentary for Hearts and Minds in 1975, read a statement from the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks. And so on.
If anything, awards season has become less political and more anodyne. It will probably stay that way. One may (and why not?) facetiously note this leads to fewer self-congratulatory pats on the speaker’s own back. But it also means that the protests that matter stand out. Jonathan Glazer’s brave repudiation of “the ongoing attack on Gaza” as, earlier this year, he accepted his Oscar for The Zone of Interest really did matter. It mattered because few others were daring to say such things in such spaces. It mattered because we genuinely wanted to hear what the industry felt about that conflict.
Trust me. We know what almost all of you think about Donald Trump.
