Hope in an Oscar.
If the cracks in Hollywood’s enduring self-image as a progressive bastion have widened in recent years — who can forget the #TimesUp and #OscarsSoWhite campaigns that exposed the industry’s rampant sexism and racism? — this year’s Academy Awards offered a moment of redemption. For the Israeli-Palestinian collective that won the Best Documentary trophy for No Other Land — about the dispossession of a West Bank community by the Israeli military — the Oscar stage offered a space that has been shrinking across the western world.
“Hollywood’s biggest night”, as the event is billed, has never been shy of politics, with the richest and most glamorous residents of Los Angeles often using the platform to “speak truth to power”. Yet, a question mark hangs over the actual impact of these interventions, and if critics have accused the Oscars of hijacking issues so that it can pat itself on the back, they have had good reason to do so. Marlon Brando, for example, refused his 1973 trophy for Best Actor to protest against the treatment of Native Americans in the industry, but it took another 46 years for an actor with Native American ancestry (Wes Studi in 2019) to be honoured on the Oscar stage.
Yet, the Oscar for No Other Land — a film that distributors in Hollywood were unwilling to back — matters, as do the words spoken on stage by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham and Palestinian activist Basel Adra, two of the people behind the documentary. “We created this film together… because together our voices are stronger,” Abraham said, while Adra hoped his daughter won’t have to live like him, “always fearing settlers, violence, home demolitions and forcible displacements”. Adra and Abraham live a reality that is increasingly being made invisible by Hollywood itself. That they could speak, and be heard, on one of the most prominent stages in the world, therefore, offers hope in a time of growing polarisation.