Monday, February 23, 2015

More on the Oscars and politics

So I brought up a bit of politics in my post yesterday mentniong the Oscars. I didn't watch the show, instead finally getting the chance to catch The Man Who Would Be King on TCM, a movie that's well worth a watch.

Earlier in the day, at dinner time, I had CNN on nd most of their "news" hour was the female presenter in studio talking with their correnspondent on the red carpet out in Hollywood. She did, however, also do an interview with a man who studied Oscar nominees and the political donations of the people who made those movies. Unsurprisingly, the donations skewed heavily toward the Democratic party and causes that would be associated with "Team Blue". Probably also unsurprisingly, the Best Picture nominee that skewed least this way was American Sniper. That having been said, it's certainly possible to make good movies regardles of one's political persuasion; I don't know the political leanings of a whole lot of the stars and directors that made the classic films we all know and love. A lot of those movies have little in the way of political sensibilities anyway.

The RSS feed for Australia's Radio National this morning included a report titled Oscars podium becomes political platform:

Today's Academy Award ceremony in Los Angeles became a platform for people to discuss womens rights, civil rights, privacy and immigration, but is any of that relevant when people are looking for an entertaining movie to watch?

Remember that Australia, being 19 hours ahead of Hollywood, sees the Oscars on Monday afternoon local time. That link leads to a transcript, if you want to listen to the audio, you can download it directly here, a 1.9 MB MP3 that runs about four minutes.

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