Ryan Gosling star of La La Land elbowed out during upset at the Oscars
KEN Loach’s film
‘I, Daniel Blake’,
against expectation in the UK, failed to get nominated for an Oscar.
I suspect that it was too plebian and didn’t fit-in with the current sub-prime politics or the now fashionable alphabetic soup: LTBQI or the requirement for what one of my fellow workmates in the local foundry use to call ‘a compulsory Coon’*.
The day before the Oscars were awarded, Damien Thompson in the Mail on Saturday predicted that ‘Moonlight’ ticks ‘every conceivable box, the story of a black child – living in Miami with his crack-addicted mother (Naomie Harris) – who grows up gay. Cue an examination of the difficulties of homosexuality in the ghetto.’
None-the-less, last year the Los Angeles Times reported:
‘Its another embarrassing Hollywood sequel: For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated an all-white group of acting nominees.‘
In 2016, the civil rights film ‘12-years a Slave’ also failed to land a slot on the director list, spurring the social-media movement #OscarsSoWhite and a pledge from the academy to do better.
This year, Price Waterhouse Cooper (PwC), which has organised the Oscar balloting event for the last 83-years, has had to apologise for mixing up the envelopes:
‘We are currently investigating how this could have happened, and deeply regret that this occurred. We appreciate the grace with which the nominees, the Academy, ABC and Jimmy Kimmel handled the situation.’
It is worth mentioning that during the Miner’s Strike of 1984-85, Price Waterhouse Cooper was the company of accountants which did work for the Thatcher government in tracking down the funds of the National Union of Miners (NUM). The Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom has posted evidence from Cabinet papers about the links between the security services MI5 and Price Waterhouse in the pursuit of NUM funds during the Miner’s Strike:
‘Government-backed legal action to seize the £8.5 million that had been transferred to banks overseas was so successful that law officers had to advise that a case involving the sequestrators might have to be abandoned because of fears that the scale of the surveillance would be revealed in open court.
‘Assisted by highly-accurate intelligence about the NUM’s clandestine operation, chartered accountants Price Waterhouse managed to freeze secret accounts in Luxembourg, Zurich and Dublin without the union’s knowledge and before further withdrawals could be made.
‘When senior civil servants realised that evidence of widespread telephone taps had leaked out to lawyers, the Cabinet Secretary warned the Prime Minister that her government would have to be careful.’
'PwC' would seem to have better at pursuing the NUM than managing the Oscars.
* A coon is a black actor or actress, who takes roles that stereotypically portrays black people. They think theyve made it but they are slaves to the same images.
* A coon is a black actor or actress, who takes roles that stereotypically portrays black people. They think theyve made it but they are slaves to the same images.
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