If you were hoping the 2017 Academy Awards would be more about the arts, creativity and entertainment than politics — then it may be disheartening to learn about the recent comments made by one artist who will be attending the ceremony.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” will be attending his first Academy Awards ceremony Sunday night — and he is very much hoping the night goes political.
Miranda is nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar for his tune “How Far Will I Go,” heard in Disney’s hit “Moana.”
“My brain is a compendium of Oscar moments: Tom Hanks’ beautiful acceptance speech when he won Best Actor for ‘Philadelphia’ in 1994,” Miranda told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. “Roberto Benigni climbing over chairs and wanting to make love to everybody in the world when ‘Life Is Beautiful’ won Best Foreign-Language film in 1999. Kim Basinger presenting in 1990 and telling the audience that one of the best films of the year, ‘Do the Right Thing,’ was not nominated.”
Miranda is nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar for his tune “How Far Will I Go,” heard in Disney’s hit “Moana.”
He continued, “It’s a political time — so I imagine the Oscars will look exactly like your Twitter or Facebook feed.”
Ouch. Is that really what viewers want — for an awards ceremony meant to celebrate the best in film achievement to turn into our Facebook and Twitter timelines? Shouldn’t something like the Academy Awards be meant as an escape from all that constant political chatter and arguing?
It should be a night of unity, rather than an evening where we get to see the divisiveness of social media come to life.
But Miranda added, “Why should we ignore for three hours what we’re talking about 24 hours a day?”
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That comment is where Miranda shows the true colors of Hollywood’s insular bubble. It’s true that Tinseltown is in full meltdown mode over the new president and their “resistance” to him is all they want to talk about. Reading many of their Twitter feeds informs us they think they are living under a dictatorship and that the sky is falling.
People outside of Hollywood don’t talk about politics 24/7. In fact, the reason many regular Americans are so fed up with people in the arts world pushing their obvious agendas is that they don’t want politics to bleed into everything they consume.
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Most people have jobs, kids, lives to worry about. They crave escapes from blatant political talk. Because of people like Lin-Manuel Miranda, they are not getting it. Art is about unification — but artists like Miranda would rather see it degraded to social media diatribes made from a stage and in front of a camera.
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Sunday night’s host Jimmy Kimmel hasn’t inspired much confidence with his recent comments, either. The late-night host said in an interview with People magazine that he expects to weave in political material on Sunday night. “A lot of it depends on what happens that week. There are one, sometimes three, new interesting stories coming out of the White House every day, it seems,” he said.
The comedian did say, however, that he hopes not to get too serious while hosting the awards show: “I just hope whatever is happening is light.”
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