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.
Why?
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.
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