Nostalgia's Not What It Used to Be

Amid the usual hand-wringing about how the Oscars were boring, out of touch, silly, meaningless, etc, one point mentioned in various outlets was that the Academy itself is comprised of older white men, making it unsurprising that the Oscars are so, well, unsurprising. It's only natural that these members, though well-meaning and often politically liberal – if not progressive – would cast their votes for things white men like.

Much like Mark Twain's complaint that everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it, it's worth a quick thought as to why the Academy is so white and male, and considering what to do. One need only look at all the teams of men winning the technical awards (the ones everyone always thinks are so boring and yet it's the good work of these teams that make movies look and sound terrific so a bit more respect might be warranted – no reason not to give them a moment in the sun after all the time they spend in the dark. Besides, they often give the speeches that have the most spontaneity and humor). The women who work behind the scenes tend to be in the expected fields of costume, makeup, hair, and set decoration. They are brilliant, but they aren't doing sound effects editing. That's the sort of job a man gets into after having spent an adolescence developing wicked computer skills (social skills questionable).

So that's why there are so many men – the issue of why they are almost uniformly white can be answered with a few depressing considerations. Clearly, the stars in this field should be engaging in outreach, finding young women and people of color with strong aptitude and offering classes, internships, and fellowships to bring them into the audiovisuals room.

As to age, well, it's a lifetime membership and a numbers game. But considering most people don't perfect their skills to award level until they are at least in their late twenties, it's unreasonable to expect a younger Academy. In point of fact, the Oscars is just the big show – what the Academy really does year round (it works in film preservation, education, outreach) is far more involved and demands members who know what they're doing. By last count, that isn't going to be the average 14-year-old, no matter how many movie tickets he buys.

But the other question begged in considering the average age of the Oscar voter is, "So?" Does age mean an end of discretion, or talent? Christopher Plummer's Oscar is of the sort people insultingly refer to as an award for longevity and a body of work, but his work in Beginners was almost universally hailed as very fine, some of his best. So why not allow that everything came together and this was his time to win an award for a specific job and not denigrate it by insisting that it's only because everyone felt guilty?

Then there's Woody Allen.

As everyone carped that the nominees and winners this year were all about nostalgia and had nothing to do with the modern world and what life really is, Woody Allen and his film Midnight in Paris was dropped into the category of "irrelevant film written by irrelevant old white man." Never mind that Midnight earned glowing reviews and made extremely respectable box office returns – the best of Mr. Allen's career. Once he won the award, plenty of people had to comment on his age and the "nostalgia trip" his film was – an old man's yearning for youth and a glittering past. Which completely ignores the film's full story. It's not about wallowing in the past, but embracing the present…and the future.

The film's hero, Gil, is obsessed with Paris of the 1920s, as is just about any lover of art and literature. By chance, he is able to visit that long-gone world and take part in its glories, meeting Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, and Hemingway, among others. He also falls in love, despite the fact that he's in Paris with his fiancée and her family. Frustrated with his writing and lost in his life, Gil is renewed by these jaunts into the past. Stein advises him on his work and the others advise him on his life. But in the end, though sorely tempted to stay in this past he loves so much, Gil opts for the possibility of a new life for himself in the modern world. Which is to say, he learns from history and uses that knowledge to inform his decisions in the present and the future. The movie is about looking back only to guide you in going forward.

In other words, exactly what the study of history is all about.

Guest Post at Women and Hollywood

I'm honored to have a guest post at the Women and Hollywood blog regarding the ongoing Leveson Inquiry.

Sex, Lies, and Phone-Hacking: British Tabloid Journalism on Trial

A Blog for Choice

I had a friend who was born on January 22, 1973. She told me that all her life, people joked about how lucky she was to have made it in under the gun like that, else she might have been aborted. Whatever end of the political spectrum they fell upon, somehow anyone who knew her birthdate felt compelled to comment on its being the date abortion was made legal throughout the United States.

My friend was always very easygoing about these comments, although she told me privately that she found them astounding. Why anyone would think it was all right to joke about her being possibly unwanted was bizarre. She handled it with a remarkable aplomb, however, and always made a point of emphasizing that she was wanted, planned for, prepared for, and welcomed. That this made all the difference in the world. That her entering the world, this already loved child, on a day when it was at last legal for women to end unwanted pregnancies, was something in which she and her parents took great pride. Because all children should be born this way – loved and wanted. Because to have a family and a home are blessings that, if guaranteed at the very first breath, will help create a good life from the outset.

In 2004, she and I attended a special screening of 'Vera Drake', where Mike Leigh talked quite bluntly about issues surrounding legal abortion in the UK and conceded that there was certainly a movement to abolish it, but it was nothing like the "barbaric medieval fundamentalism" seen in the US. We couldn't help laughing – it's just not often that you hear people being that marvelously blunt – but as someone who's studied medieval history, it's definitely not a time I'd like to see re-created for the modern era.

And yet medieval thought is very much the order of the day. Many Republican politicians are proud of their anti-science, anti-intellectual stances, which is effectively anti-Enlightenment. To say nothing of profoundly dangerous. In proclaiming their insistence that, the minute they have the power, they are going to plunge us all back into a pre-Enlightenment world, they are touting the sort of early-Modern mindset that led to witch-burning being the major entertainment of the day.

Putting aside that without the scientific advancements borne of the Enlightenment, Newt Gingrich would likely have died twenty years ago (we think about all the ramifications of that progress and then politely move on), it is a continuing peculiarity of conservative politicians to aim further and further backwards. Doesn't that go against all tenets of Western civilization? We're supposed to take the lessons of history and use them as guidance to propel us forward, seeking to improve upon our past, not wallow in it. If you must wallow, I can recommend a number of reenactment societies.

What the extreme conservatives need to understand as they rail against abortion and birth control (and before they start railing against women's education and right to go out in public by themselves), is that a free society is never going to measure up to one group's aesthetic ideals. Freedom is not by its nature tidy and orderly. In artistic terms, it's a bit more like abstract expressionism. It looks easy, but that doesn't mean it is.

Above all, a free society means that there will be aspects some people don't like. The fear of change looms large, and even though birth control and abortion have been legally available for decades, the change they represent in so far as women enjoying real freedom to direct their lives and their health is still alarming to a contingent that would prefer to see women controlled. The control of women, relegated strictly to a defined and intransient sphere, represents a perceived continuity. An incorrect perception, because women have insisted upon equal rights for centuries, but frightened and desperate people cling to whatever they can. That's sad for them, but it's vital that their fear not be allowed to dictate societal practice and state and national laws. A quick scan of history indicates that doing so has never worked out very well.

I've lost touch with my friend in the last few years, but I hope she hasn't had to deal with anyone joking about how lucky she is to be here today. If she does, I know she'll answer as she did before, saying, "Yes, I am lucky that I was wanted before I was conceived and welcomed with ecstasy when I was born. With abortion being made legal and birth control accessible, the hope was that every child would start off that way. I'm still fighting for that, cause I can tell you from experience that it's a pretty great way to grow up."

Happy Birthday!

Meantime, in Publishing News...

Economies on the brink of disaster and youth unemployment at 25-year high, but there's some good news from the publishing world: Pippa Middleton has been paid to - maybe - write a book!

Hermione Granger and Hollywood

As Hermione Granger grew up, her bookish, brainy persona was reduced to being more sexy, less threatening – and less magical. --- In The Guardian

Pride in the Yankees

It was a good month to be proud – proud to be a New Yorker, proud to be on the right side of history. On June 24, New York became the largest state to legalize marriage equality. There were predictable howls, of course, but they were hard to hear amid the cries of joy. As though it had been staged, the vote came through on Friday night, still early enough to bring hordes of people to the Stonewall Inn, the bar where on June 28, 1969, riots began that presaged the modern gay civil rights movement. This night, things had come full circle. And with the annual Pride Parade on Sunday, it was icing – and a couple – on the cake.

With a majority vote and the governor's signature, citizens became that much more equal and the union that much more perfect.

But what took so long? Because for every person who insists it's too soon, that humanity isn't ready for single-sex marriage, there are hundreds of others who are sorry and ashamed that the path to equality in what's supposed to be one of the freest nations on earth has been so slow and rocky, to say nothing of unfinished.

Future citizens will cringe. Much as we cringe at photos of water fountains with the word "Colored" tacked over them, or at images of Phyllis Schlafly leading the battle against the Equal Rights Amendment, so will there be universal shuddering at photos of the 2008 California state ballot, with Proposition 8 inside – people's basic civil rights, being put to a vote, as though the rights of people to live and love as they want were no different than determining allocation of funds for state parks.

But as Martin Luther King Jr. said, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." We rarely move with the haste we should, but we do move. We turn our anger into power, and we achieve change.

And it does take anger. Organizations like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis had worked tirelessly to achieve gay rights, but the rage unleashed by Stonewall pushed everything out into the open. It's a point made in Larry Kramer's 1985 play 'The Normal Heart,' fortuitously in revival on Broadway. The play is about the rise of the AIDS crisis. At the time, it was a call to action. Now, it is history.

Thirty years ago, on July 3, 1981, the New York Times published its first article about AIDS. It was written by Lawrence K. Altman and called "Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals." The slowness of state, government, and media to take action during the early days of the pandemic is another point that makes us cringe – San Francisco ran rings around New York in pouring money into health care. In 'The Normal Heart,' a character asks why those who rioted at Stonewall and formed the Gay Liberation Front didn't fight for right to get married, instead of the right to legitimize promiscuity. Later, it's pointed out that "Maybe if they'd let us get married to begin with, none of this would have happened at all."

With the "Defense of Marriage Act" still federal law, 'The Normal Heart' isn't yet as purely historical as we'd like it to be.

'The Normal Heart' won three Tony Awards on June 12, 2011. The ceremony was hosted by openly gay actor Neil Patrick Harris and featured an opening number in which he sang that Broadway "is not just for gays anymore." It was hilarious and even audacious and highlighted the historical home theatre has always been for gay men and women. But the Tonys of the past few years are also remarkable for what hasn't been part of the ceremony. As the 1980s wore on, the "In Memoriam" segment featured dozens of young men. Year after year, the audience was shown an entire generation of theatre professionals being destroyed. Those faces, each a slap in the nation's face for not doing more, more quickly, have been mercifully absent in recent years. The men, and the theatre, are alive.

We're still too far away from full equality for all citizens. But New York took an important step towards making what was once deviant, normal. And for that, we can be truly proud.

My Post on Guernica's Blog

I am very honored to be published on Guernica Magazine's blog today, discussing the current war on women and how keeping poor women down is literally medieval:

Guernica / Sarah-Jane Stratford: The Taming of the Screw

Comments at Guernica most appreciated. Thank you!