When Donald Trump was first elected the liberal establishment of the United States entered a state of mania. The notoriously unchallenging Saturday Night Live marked the occasion with Kate McKinnon, impersonating Hillary Clinton, singing Hallelujah on the piano to a silent audience. “I did my best / it wasn’t much” (tell us about it.) “I told the truth / I didn’t come to fool you” (apposite, maybe – heightened emotional response always feels more sane in the moment than it looks in retrospect.) “I’m not giving up and neither should you,” declared the McKinnon/Clinton chimera at the end of the performance. “And live from New York, it’s Saturday Night.”
America’s celebrity class is not good at protest. Who can blame them? Their existence is too far removed from real life to defend those actually condemned to live one. In the early days of the pandemic a multi-celebrity taste-calamity hit our phone screens: a slew of Hollywood mainstays sang, line-by-line, Imagine by John Lennon. Chris O’Dowd was there, Natalie Portman too, while Gal Gadot appeared to orchestrate this first lockdown virtual socially distanced concert. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” Gadot sings (no need after this). It was rightfully mocked as out of touch Kumbuya weirdness.
It is already banal to point out that something big has changed in the culture: dead-end liberal activism is out of fashion; the Trumpian assault on DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has permeated; coarser language has returned to the mainstream; the 2010 extremes of identity politics have retreated. But the Oscars were enough for me to realise that this great soft-power revolution – or call it a vibe shift – is finally complete. Celebrities tend to be the slowest to adapt to new societal weather because they are insulated from it. On Sunday night they proved they had got the memo.
It was chilling – not because the Democrat starlets were full of grá for their new president, let’s not get carried away – but because it was apolitical. The Economist has a helpful rundown: there was a quick joke from host Conan O’Brien about Putin (“I guess Americans are excited to see someone finally stand up to a powerful Russian”) and the winner of the Best Actress award Mikey Madison made a slightly woolly statement about sex-work (the subject of her category sweeping film Anora). But notably absent were direct rhetorical assaults on the president or condemnation of his administration’s immigration policy or mockery of his Mexican “wall” – all of which we have seen before. And remember when stars wore black on the Baftas red carpet in support of Me Too?
Apolitical Oscars a chilling sign of the times
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Debates over Rishi Sunak’s Englishness or Leo Varadkar’s Irishness are deranged
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I have long complained about the self-important virtuosity of Hollywood’s A-lister class and their Mount Sinai moral lectures. I am not sad to see it go. I am concerned, however, about a broader, sighing apathy it indicates. Tolerating and ignoring their gilded hectoring is easy enough. Realising that there are few left willing to screech back at a nastier-and-more-frightening-than-ever Trump administration? A pained and worried grimace is spreading across my face.
We saw it on Tuesday evening, too, as Trump addressed Congress to a braying Republican crowd (looking more akin to an Oxford debating chamber) and their plaintive Democrat counterparts. Washington correspondent Keith Duggan described the latter’s attitude as one of “studied indifference” – the mood among their ranks, he says, was not one of galvanised resistance to the outrageous hyperbole of the new administration but instead was merely sombre. I cannot help but wonder if this is all an overcorrection. True, the Democrats have sounded like moralising and superior dorks in the past – aided by the likes of SNL – but rather that then watching the world sink into a total fatalistic malaise.
There are a few causes for optimism. Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office last week was hard to watch but it was encouraging nonetheless that he was still willing to stand up to the truculent (there are worse words to use) Trump and JD Vance. And Canada’s Justin Trudeau was the opposite of toothless in announcing counter-tariffs on the US on Tuesday. Even Keir Starmer – a man better defined by his legalistic idiolect than his ability to inspire – was forthright in his support of Ukraine and his bid to build “a coalition of the willing” to defend it. Simon Harris wrote on X after meeting Zelenskiy: “I assured him of our support then and that support stands today. Europe must and will remain united. Slava Ukraine.” A tweet is not everything but it is, at least, something.
James Marriott wrote a heartening treatise in the Times of London this week about the need for lofty idealism at a time when the left and right are losing themselves to apathy and cynicism. He is right. And so, back to the empty and vain Oscars to remind ourselves that celebrities are bellwethers, they have never been leaders. Let’s hope they get their moralising flair back – if only as proof that there is still an appetite for resistance everywhere else.
