Trump Era Invites a Bolder Hollywood Red Carpet

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/movies/trump-era-invites-a-bolder-hollywood-red-carpet.html

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At last weekend’s round of movie and television awards, doled out by the producers’ and actors’ guilds, the likes of John Legend and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, among others, swung hard at President Trump and his travel ban, to rapturous applause. The friendly reception to hostile fire represented a departure for awards shows, where political acceptance speeches have elicited reactions from eye rolls to noisy dissent.

In 1973, the Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather was met with jeers and later, she said, Hollywood blacklisting after Marlon Brando sent her to refuse an Oscar on his behalf. After Vanessa Redgrave, a supporter of Palestinian rights, deplored “Zionist hoodlums” while accepting her Oscar in 1978, the screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky drew hearty applause for upbraiding “people exploiting the occasion of the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal political propaganda.” Boos rained down on Michael Moore, winner of the 2003 documentary prize, for tearing into George W. Bush’s newly started Iraq war. Getting political at the Oscars was risky, and the assorted causes were always scattershot.

But now Hollywood finds itself in 2017. If current trends hold, using stage time at the Academy Awards to take a stand won’t be just de rigueur, but expected.

Mr. Trump’s travel ban, along with his combative rhetoric and internet outbursts, have directly shaped this year’s awards race. And Hollywood’s ever more polarized face-off with him has imbued the season with a heightened sense of both superfluousness and purpose.

On the one hand, against a backdrop of geopolitical unrest, the monthslong circuit has felt, to whiskered campaigners, especially frivolous. On the other hand, stars are using the spotlight to broadcast their resistance, starting with Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes.

Not everyone wants to hear actors bang on about politics, and audience reception depends on political bent. Many in America who are supportive of Mr. Trump already feel alienated by “Hollywood elites,” and might not be tuning in to the Oscars anyway.

But as public arts funding is threatened with cuts, and Mr. Trump unveils other contentious policies, many actors suddenly feel that they must speak out, even if they’re preaching to a choir eager to lap up their every word.

Matters came to a head when the travel ban went into chaotic effect over the weekend.

One Oscar contender who was immediately affected was the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose drama “The Salesman” is up for the Academy Award for best foreign-language film. (His “A Separation” won in 2012.) Now he’s subject to the ban, which sharply limits travel from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Mr. Farhadi said that even if he were granted an exemption to travel, he wouldn’t attend. “To humiliate one nation with the pretext of guarding the security of another is not a new phenomenon in history and has always laid the groundwork for the creation of future divide and enmity,” Mr. Farhadi said in a statement. He went on to condemn “the unjust conditions” the order had forced upon citizens of the seven nations.

Will this affect Mr. Farhadi’s Oscar chances? You betcha. Not only has the fracas raised the visibility of his film, but it has also made voting for it a political act. The same goes for the nominated documentary short “The White Helmets,” about civilian Syrian rescuers. One of the film’s subjects and a cameraman were to attend the Oscars, according to the filmmakers, but now are shut out, too. The Iranian-born Swedish actress, Bahar Pars, a star in the Swedish entry “A Man Called Ove,” has said that she is determined to attend as a statement but that details were still being sorted out.

The ban, which the United Nations says has imperiled 20,000 refugees, also stands to raise the profile of nominated films that explore migrants’ plight, like the documentary feature “Fire at Sea” and the shorts “Watani: My Homeland” and The New York Times’s Op-Doc, “4.1 Miles.”

As widespread protests roiled airports last weekend, there were questions in Hollywood about whether speakers and winners would take aim at Mr. Trump at the Producers Guild Awards on Saturday, and the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday.

Ms. Streep had already set a precedent at the Golden Globes in January: She publicly castigated Mr. Trump for being a bully.

If that speech increased her chances at landing an Oscar nomination for her role in “Florence Foster Jenkins” — and Hollywood chatter holds that it totally did — Mr. Trump sealed the deal. His tweet the next day, calling her one of Hollywood’s “most overrated actresses,” fell smack in the middle of the voting window for Oscar nominations. And, lo, a few weeks later, Ms. Streep became a 20-time Oscar nominee.

But she’s Meryl Streep, occupying the tippy top of Hollywood’s living pantheon. Awards strategists rarely want their clients to get political, for it could cost them their audiences, especially in red states. While this might not matter much for this season’s smaller films like “Moonlight” or “Loving,” it could hurt films with bigger box-office ambitions, or television shows with outspoken stars.

This year, though, Hollywood doesn’t seem keen to hold back. At the Producers Guild Awards, presenters and winners emphasized religious freedom, empathy and diversity. Mr. Legend, a presenter at the PGAs and a star of “La La Land,” said he and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, had wrestled with attending given the larger national controversy afoot, and then drew cheers for declaring, “Our vision of America is directly antithetical to that of President Trump.”

Then came the SAG Awards, which are way more lustrous, for they dole out prizes to glamorous actors and are televised.

If the night’s winners were not emboldened by, erm, Ashton Kutcher, who kicked off the ceremony by welcoming “everyone in airports that belong in my America,” they surely were by the first winner, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus.

A member of Hollywood royalty, and clearly comfortable in the spotlight as well as in her own skin, Ms. Louis-Dreyfus made the political personal by revealing that her father had fled religious persecution in Nazi-occupied France and by denouncing the immigrant ban as “un-American.”

This opened the door, making it O.K. for those who followed to speak out. And they did: Sarah Paulson, Bryan Cranston, Lily Tomlin, Emma Stone, David Harbour and Taraji P. Henson all made assorted impassioned pleas.

The classiest one came from Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight”), who, in a quavering voice, spoke of how he and his Christian mother had overcome their differences after he converted to Islam 17 years ago. Mr. Ali is favored to win the Oscar for best supporting actor, and his speech, perhaps the night’s most quietly profound, all but made that certain.

If there was one consequence Mr. Trump probably didn’t foresee from his travel ban, it would be helping a Muslim American secure an Academy Award.

Whether all of this portends a night of politicizing come the Academy Awards, on Feb. 26, depends on whether controversies set off by the White House or incendiary executive tweets settle down in the next three weeks. Will things calm down? Inshallah.