Kia ora koutou. Ko Ngāpuhi tōku iwi. Ko Ngāti Manu toku hapu. Ko Karetu tōku marae. Ko Myles Thomas toku ingoa.

I grew up with David Beatson, on the telly. Back in the 1970s, he read the late news which I watched in bed with my parents. Later, David and I worked together to save TVNZ 7 and also regional TV stations.

The Better Public Media (BPM) trust honours David each year with our memorial address, because his fight for non-commercial TV was an honourable one. He wasn’t doing it for himself.

He wasn’t doing it so he could get a job or because it would benefit him. He fought for public media because he knew it was good for Aotearoa NZ.

Like us at Better Public Media, he recognised the benefits to our country from locally produced public media.

David knew, from a long career in media, including as editor of The Listener and as Jim Bolger’s press secretary, that NZ’s media plays an important role in our nation’s culture, social cohesion, and democracy.

NZ culture is very important. NZ culture is so unique and special, yet it has always been at risk of being swamped by content from overseas. The US especially with its crackpot conspiracies, extreme racial tensions, and extreme tensions about everything to be honest.

Local content the antidote
Local content is the antidote to this. It reflects us, it portrays us, it defines New Zealand, and whether we like it or not, it defines us. But it’s important to remember that what we see reflected back to us comes through a filter.

This speech is coming to you through a filter, called Myles Thomas.

Commercial news reflects our world through a filter of sensation and danger to hold our attention. That makes NZ seem more shallow, greedy, fearful and dangerous.

The social media filter makes the world seem more angry, reactive and complaining.
RNZ’s filter is, I don’t know, thoughtful, a bit smug, middle class.

The New Zealand Herald filter makes us think every dairy is being ram-raided every night.

And The Spinoff filter suggests NZ is hip, urban and mildly infatuated with Winston Peters.

These cultural reflections are very important actually because they influence us, how we see NZ and its people.

It is not a commodity
That makes content, cultural content, special. It is not a commodity. It’s not milk powder.

We don’t drink milk and think about flooding in Queenstown, drinking milk doesn’t make us laugh about the Koiwoi accent, we don’t drink milk and identify with a young family living in poverty.

Local content is rich and powerful, and important to our society.

When the government supports the local media production industry it is actually supporting the audiences and our culture. Whether it is Te Mangai Paho, or NZ On Air or the NZ Film Commission, and the screen production rebate, these organisations fund New Zealand’s identity and culture, and success.

Don’t ask Treasury how to fund culture. Accountants don’t understand it, they can’t count it and put it in a spreadsheet, like they can milk solids. Of course they’ll say such subsidies or rebates distort the “market”, that’s the whole point. The market doesn’t work for culture.

Moreover, public funding of films and other content fosters a more stable long-term industry, rather than trashy short-termism that is completely vulnerable to outside pressures, like the US writer’s strike.

We have a celebrated content production industry. Our films, video, audio, games etc. More local content brings stability to this industry, which by the way also brings money into the country and fosters tourism.

We cannot use quota
New Zealand needs more local content.

And what’s more, it needs to be accessible to audiences, on the platforms that they use.

But in NZ we do have one problem. Unlike Australia, we can’t use a quota because our GATT agreement does not include a carve out for local music or media quotas.

In the 1990s when GATT was being negotiated, the Aussies added an exception to their GATT agreement allowing a quota for Aussie cultural content. So they can require radio stations to play a certain amount of local music. Now they’re able to introduce a Netflix quota for up to 20 percent of all revenue generated in Aussie.

We can’t do that. Why? Because back in the 1990s the Bolger government and MFAT decided against putting the same exception into NZ’s GATT agreement.

But there is another way of doing it, if we take a lead from Denmark and many European states. Which I’ll get to in a minute.

The second important benefit of locally produced public media is social cohesion, how society works, the peace and harmony and respect that we show each other in public, depends heavily on the “public sphere”, of which, media is a big part.

Power of media to polarise
Extensive research in Europe and North America shows the power of media to polarise society, which can lead to misunderstanding, mistrust and hatred.

But media can also strengthen social cohesion, particularly for minority communities, and that same research showed that public media, otherwise known as public service media, is widely regarded to be an important contributor to tolerance in society, promoting social cohesion and integrating all communities and generations.

The third benefit is democracy. Very topical at the moment. I’ve already touched on how newsmedia affect our culture. More directly, our newsmedia influences the public dialogue over issues of the day.

It defines that dialogue. It is that dialogue.

So if our newsmedia is shallow and vacuous ignoring policies and focussing on the polls and the horse-race, then politicians who want to be elected, tailor their messages accordingly.

There’s plenty of examples of this such as National’s bootcamp policy, or Labour’s removing GST on food. As policies, neither is effective. But in the simplified 30 seconds of commercial news and headlines, these policies resonate.

Is that a good thing, that policies that are known to fail are nonetheless followed because our newsmedia cater to our base instincts and short attention spans?

Disaster for democracy
In my view, commercial media is actually disaster for democracy. All over the world.

But of course, we can’t control commercial media. No-one’s suggesting that.

The only rational reaction is to provide stronger locally produced public media.

And unfortunately, NZ lacks public media.

Obviously Australia, the UK, Canada have more public media than us, they have more people, they can afford it. But what about countries our size, Ireland? Smaller population, much more public media.

Denmark, Norway, Finland, all with roughly 5 million people, and all have significantly better public media than us. Even after the recent increases from Willie Jackson, NZ still spends just $44 per person on public media. $44 each year.

When we had a licence fee it was $110. Jim Bolger’s government got rid of that and replaced it with funding from general taxation — which means every year the Minister of Finance, working closely with Treasury, decides how much to spend on public media for that year.

This is what I call the curse of annual funding, because it makes funding public media a very political decision.

National, let us be honest, the National Party hates public media, maybe because they get nicer treatment on commercial news. We see this around the world — the Daily Mail, Sky News Australia, Newstalk ZB . . . most commercial media quite openly favours the right.

Systemic bias
This is a systemic bias. Because right-wing newsmedia gets more clicks.

Right-wing politicians are quite happy about that. Why fund public to get in the way? Even if it it benefits our culture, social cohesion, and democracy.

New Zealand is the same, the last National government froze RNZ funding for nine years.

National Party spokesperson on broadcasting Melissa Lee fought against the ANZPM merger, and now she’s fighting the News Bargaining Bill. As minister she could cut RNZ and NZ On Air’s budget.

But it wouldn’t just be cost-cutting. It would actually be political interference in our newsmedia, an attempt to skew the national conversation in favour of the National Party, by favouring commercial media.

So Aotearoa NZ needs two things. More money to be spent on public media, and less control by the politicians. Sustainable funding basically.

The best way to achieve it is a media levy.

Highly targeted tax
For those who don’t know, a levy is a tax that is highly targeted, and we have a lot of them, like the Telecommunications Development Levy (or TDL) which currently gathers $10 million a year from internet service providers like Spark and 2 Degrees to pay for rural broadband.

We’re all paying for better internet for farmers basically. When first introduced by the previous National government it collected $50 million but it’s dropped down a bit lately.

This is one of many levies that we live with and barely notice. Like the levy we pay on our insurance to cover the Earthquake Commission and the Fire and Emergency Levy. There are maritime levies, energy levies to fund EECA and Waka Kotahi, levies on building consents for MBIE, a levy on advertising pays for the ASA, the BSA is funded by a levy.

Lots of levies and they’re very effective.

So who could the media levy, levy?

ISPs like the TDL? Sure, raise the TDL back up to $50 million or perhaps higher, and it only adds a dollar onto everyone’s internet bill. There’s $50 million.

But the real target should be Big Tech, social media and large streaming services. I’m talking about Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and so on. These are the companies that have really profited from the advent of online media, and at the expense of locally produced public media.

Funding content creation
We need a way to get these companies to make, or at least fund, content creation here in Aotearoa. Denmark recently proposed a solution to this problem with an innovative levy of 2 percent on the revenue of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney.

But that 2 percent rises to 5 percent if the streaming company doesn’t spend at least 5 percent of their revenue on making local Danish content. Denmark joins many other European countries already doing this — Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France and even Romania are all about to levy the streamers to fund local production.

Australia is planning to do so as well.

But that’s just online streaming companies. There’s also social media and search engines which contribute nothing and take almost all the commercial revenue. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill will address that to a degree but it’s not open and we won’t know if the amounts are fair.

Another problem is that it’s only for news publishers — not drama or comedy producers, not on-demand video, not documentary makers or podcasters. Social media and search engines frequently feature and put advertising around these forms of content, and hoover up the digital advertising that would otherwise help fund them, so they should also contribute to them.

A Media Levy can best be seen as a levy on those companies that benefit from media on the internet, but don’t contribute to the public benefits of media — culture, social cohesion and democracy. And that’s why the Media Levy can include internet service providers, and large companies that sell digital advertising and subscriptions.

Note, this would target large companies over a certain size and revenue, and exclude smaller platforms, like most levies do.

Separate from annual budget
The huge benefit of a levy is that it is separate from the annual budget, so it’s fiscally neutral, and politicians can’t get their mits on it. It removes the curse of annual funding.

It creates a funding stream derived from the actual commercial media activities which produce the distribution gaps in the first place, for which public media compensates. That’s why the proceeds would go to the non-commercial platform and the funding agencies — Te Mangai Paho, NZ On Air and the Film Commission.

One final point. This wouldn’t conflict with the new Digital Services Tax proposed by the government because that’s a replacement for Income Tax. A Media Levy, like all levies, sits over and above income tax.

So there we go. I’ve mentioned Jim Bolger three times! I’ve also outlined some quite straight-forward methods to fund public media sustainably, and to fund a significant increase in local content production, video, film, audio and journalism.

None of it needs to be within the grasp of Melissa Lee or Willie Jackson, or David Seymour.

All of it can be used to create local content that improves democracy, social cohesion and Kiwi culture.

Myles Thomas is a trustee of the Better Public Media Trust (BPM). He is a former television producer and director who in 2012 established the Save TVNZ 7 campaign. Thomas is now studying law. This commentary was this year’s David Beatson Memorial Address at a public meeting in Grey Lynn last night on broadcast policy for the NZ election 2023.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It was announced yesterday that Australian actress Rose Byrne will star as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in an upcoming movie about the response to the Christchurch mosque terror attacks of 15 March 2019, titled They Are Us.

The movie will be directed by New Zealand’s Andrew Niccol. The movie’s focus is apparently going to be on the positive impact of a strong leader in the wake of tragedy.

Let’s take a moment to unpack that oversized baggage of white nonsense.

To be clear, this is the peak Karen of film announcements.

We are barely over two years on from one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern history.

The 51 people who were killed and the 40 who were wounded were specifically targeted for their Muslim faith. Those families are still traumatised and recovering from injuries, mourning and missing their loved ones.

They are still painfully experiencing firsts without their loved ones: first day of school, first grandchild being born, first jobs, university graduations and so much more. Their wounds have barely had time to scab over.

Witnesses fighting for ACC support
Uninjured witnesses to the horrific shootings are still fighting for support from the ACC for their mental injuries.

A survivor of the attacks, whose own father was killed that day, reported as recently as Friday that he encountered racist abuse outside his workplace, with no bystander intervention to help.

The Christchurch mosque attacks destroyed the lives of entire families and confirmed the worst fears of the Muslim community in New Zealand: that we aren’t safe anywhere. Not here. And certainly not if we’re Rohingya, not if we’re Uyghur, not if we’re Palestinian, not if we’re in our places of worship or even just crossing the street.

Somebody explain to 9-year-old Fayez Afzaal how to feel any other way as he recovers in a hospital in Ontario, the sole surviving member of his family after his parents, sister and grandmother were murdered by yet another white supremacist terrorist with Islamophobic views.

This attack in Canada happened just this week. You probably didn’t hear about it. Because white women like Rose Byrne and Jacinda Ardern will dominate the headlines while our communities are suffering.

This movie purports to centre a white woman character and her role in the aftermath of a heinous tragedy instead of focusing on the stories of the victims and survivors. It’s being directed by a white man. Hollywood will make money off this. Rose Byrne will be paid a pretty penny.

Remember that there were people in that mosque who literally put their bodies in the firing line and died to protect others, but apparently it’s the white saviour’s story that’s worth telling instead.

Where is the Muslim community?
Where is the Muslim community that was most impacted in this?

And I am not mollified by some “consultation with several members of the mosque”. I’m not naïve enough to believe the scope or depth of that consultation process would have been anywhere near adequate.

How is it okay for others to profit off our pain? How is it okay for Muslims to be de-centred from a story about their suffering? How can we celebrate this tragedy as something that was ultimately a triumph because someone got a pretty photo of Ardern in a hijab and it inspired some graffiti art and a light show in Dubai?

The banning of assault weapons, while important, did nothing to address the core issues of Islamophobia and racism festering in our societies under a thin façade of tolerance.

Similarly, this movie will achieve nothing for the community that was attacked either. It’s exploitative. It’s in bad taste.

USC Annenberg recently published a study on Muslim representation in popular film. It found that in popular films between 2017 – 2019, 181 of 200 films had no Muslim characters at all. Of the nearly 9000 characters in these films, only 1.6 percent of the speaking roles were Muslims.

Not only are we grossly under-represented, but when we’re represented at all it’s either as the victims or perpetrators of violence. And Muslim women are all but invisible on screen. The incredibly diverse ethnic backgrounds of Muslims are also erased in favour of the stereotypical portrayal of a Muslim as being either Middle Eastern or North African.

The film will focus the week following the 15 March Christchurch mosque attacks with Australian actrss Rose Byrne set to play New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, according to US media. Photo: RNZ / AFP

Can we have any confidence?
Given that, how can we have any confidence of this story being told with any sensitivity, nuance or even truthfulness?

If the Christchurch attacks are the subject of a movie, how can we be certain the violence won’t be glorified? That it won’t give hope to would-be attackers that their hateful actions would bring them the notoriety they seek?

That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about the attacks, but there are at least 91 people I can think of who I would rather see as the subject of any such movie rather than our Prime Minister. Those 91 people and their families are mostly immigrants and refugees, of all ages, racial backgrounds, genders, working across so many industries. I promise you that any one of their stories would be more interesting, and worthy, of immortalising on film.

But Muslims also don’t want to be depicted only as the victims or aggressors of violence. Believe it or not, most of us can get through our entire lives without having thrown, or being on the receiving end, of a punch. We exist outside this context of tragedy too.

However, no one wants to know us on our terms. “They are us” plays nicely in a soft liberal speech, works well as a caption. What does it mean, in practical terms, if we can’t even be seen as the heroes of our own stories.

Saziah Bashir is a freelance journalist commenting on issues of social justice, race and gender. She completed an LLB, BCom and LLM from the University of Auckland. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

• Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s office clarified that neither she nor the government have any involvement in the film.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Ian Lowe of Griffith University

Documentary maker Michael Moore’s latest offering, Planet of the Humans, rightly argues that infinite growth on a finite planet is “suicide”. But the film’s bogus claims threaten to overshadow that message.

Planet of the Humans is directed and narrated by longtime Moore collaborator Jeff Gibbs. It makes particularly contentious claims about solar, wind and biomass (organic material which can be burnt for energy). Some claims are valid. Some are out of date, and some are just wrong.

The film triggered a storm after its free release on YouTube late last month. At the time of writing, it had been watched 6.5 million times.

READ MORE: Australia could fall apart under climate change. But there’s a way to avoid it

Climate sceptics here and abroad reacted with glee. Environmentalists say the film has caused untold damage when climate action has never been more urgent.

For 50 years, I have studied and written about energy supply and use, and its environmental consequences. So let’s take a look at how Planet of the Humans is flawed, and where it gets things right.

Where the film goes wrong
Critics have compiled a long list of questionable claims made in the film. I will examine three relating to renewable energy.

1. Solar panels take more energy to produce than they generate
It’s true that some energy is required to build solar panels. The same can be said of coal-fired power stations, oil refineries and gas pipelines.

But the claim that solar panels produce less energy than they generate in their lifetime has long been disproved. It would not be true even if, as the film says, solar panels converted just 8 percent of the energy they receive into electricity.

But that 8 percent figure is at least 20 years old. The solar panels now installed on more than two million Australian roofs typically operate at at 15-20 percent efficiency.

2. Renewables cannot replace fossil fuels
The film claims green energy is not replacing fossil fuels, and that coal plants cannot be replaced by renewables.

To disprove this claim we need look no further than Australia, where wind turbines and solar panels have significantly reduced our dependence on coal.

In South Australia, for example, the expansion of solar and wind has led to the closure of all coal-fired power stations.

The state now gets most of its power from solar and wind, exporting its surplus to Victoria when its old coal-fired power stations prove unreliable on hot summer days.

What’s more, a report released this week by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said with the right regulations, renewables could at times supply 75 percent of electricity in the national electricity market by 2025.

3. Solar and wind need fossil fuel back-up
Some renewables systems use gas turbines to fill the gap when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. However renewable energy storage is a cleaner option and is fast becoming cheaper and more widely used.

AEMO forecasts battery storage installations will rise from a low base today to reach 5.6 gigawatts by 2036–37. The costs of storage are also projected to fall faster than previously expected.

South Australia’s famous grid-scale Tesla battery is being expanded. And the New South Wales government’s pumped hydro plan shows how by 2040, the state could get 89 percent of its power from solar and wind, backed by pumped hydro storage.

In Australia on Easter Saturday this year, renewables supplied 50 percent of the national electricity market, which serves the vast majority of the population.

Countries such as New Zealand and Iceland essentially get all their power from renewables, backed up by storage (predominantly hydro).

And putting aside the federal government’s problematic Snowy 2.0 project, Australia could get all its energy from renewables with small-scale storage.

What does the film get right?
Planet of the Humans makes several entirely valid points. Here are a few:

1. We need to deal with population growth
The film observes that population growth is the elephant in the room when it comes to climate change. It says politicians are reluctant to talk about limits to population growth “because that would be bad for business”.

As one observer in the film says, the people in charge are not nervous enough. I agree.

An increasing population means increasing demand for energy and other resources, accelerating climate change.

2. Biomass energy does more harm than good
While the film unfairly criticises the environmental benefits of solar energy, it is true that some so-called clean technologies are not green at all.

As the film asserts, destroying forests for biomass energy does more harm than good – due to loss of habitat, damage to water systems, and the time taken for some forests to recover from the removal of wood.

Most advocates of cleaner energy systems recognise the limitations of biomass as an energy source.

3. Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide
The film calculates the sum total of human demands on natural systems as about 1000 times what it was 200 years ago. It says there are 10 times as many people now, each using 100 times the resources, on average.

Experts have repeatedly warned that human demand for resources is damaging the natural systems that all life depends on.

For large parts of the world, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Get the message
Several other aspects of the film have been savaged by critics – not least its claims about emissions produced by electric cars, which had previously been debunked.

Personal attacks on two prominent US clean energy advocates, Bill McKibben and Al Gore, also detract from the film’s impact.

It is clear renewable energy has an important role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing climate change. But it will not solve the fundamental problem: that humans must live within Earth’s natural limits.

Those cheering the film’s criticism of renewables would do well to consider its overriding message.

Dr Ian Lowe is emeritus professor in the School of Science at Griffith University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Nicola Igusa

The value of different perspectives in film making is valued now more than ever, says Auckland University of Technology screen production Associate Professor Arezou Zalipour.

“We’ve just seen the historic win of Parasite at the 2020s Oscars – the first non-English language production to win Best Picture,” she says.

“In the same ceremony Taika Waititi used his Jojo Rabbit win for Best Adapted Screenplay to encourage Indigenous kids all over the world to pursue art.

READ MORE: Historic Parasite Oscar may be game changer for global film business

“Hollywood is being changed by ‘outsider’ voices and here at AUT we’re helping prepare our students for that world.”

Dr Zalipour’s Contemporary World Cinemas paper, a selected topic in the AUT School of Communication Studies television and screen production department, is first offering by the university in a transnational storytelling approach.

It bridges theory and practice in a unique way through examples of Academy Award winners and nominees for Best Foreign Language Film (Best International Feature Film) and beyond.

Students in the course say it is refreshing and absolutely essential to be able to critically analyse film styles as well as their own choices when making a film.

Film making techniques
The course prompts deeper thought about film making, changing the way students think about film making and enable them to examine a wide range of film making techniques and narratives.

Dr Zalipour has designed a further paper to be offered in Semester 2 this year for post graduate students, Making Cinemas of Difference. This paper takes a “de-Westernising” approach in film and filmmaking by engaging, among other concepts, with issues of racism and postcolonial theories in film and practice, and teaches how to make a video essay.

“We learn from the masters of film making and storytellers, which allows the students to build their understanding of how film can be made to construct and convey a sense of identity and place,” she says.

“By exploring films from the Middle East, Asia and Europe, our students learn to recognise different modes of storytelling and film language, and the way culture, society and storytelling are intimately combined, and then apply that learning to their own film making.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Stuart Richards in Adelaide

Every year it is the same story: the Academy comes so close to catching up with the rest of the film world, only to award the Oscar for Best Picture to the most middling of the bunch.

Many cinephiles the world over were likely scratching their heads, or rolling their eyes, or perhaps throwing something at the television, when Julia Roberts called out Green Book’s name, a film the LA Times later dubbed “the worst Best Picture winner since Crash”.

The film is the story of an unlikely friendship between musician Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his driver Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), as they tour America’s South in the 1960s. It sits in a long line of Hollywood films that feature a white protagonist “saving” the black character, who is rendered passive in the process.

READ MORE: The backlash to Green Book explained

The film has been denounced by Shirley’s family for its depiction of him as an isolated figure, estranged from his three brothers and the black community. (In hindsight, maybe Crash wasn’t that bad?)

BlacKkKlansman director Spike Lee was apparently so incensed by the Best Picture announcement that he stormed to the back of the theatre only to be ushered back into his seat. He and director Jordan Peele reportedly did not clap the winners. Later, with a drink in hand, Lee told the press room that the “ref made a bad call”.

That a film with a white saviour narrative won the big prize shouldn’t really be much of a shock though.

The Academy Awards have battled with a number of controversies over the last few years, from #Oscarssowhite to La La Land being mistakenly read out as the winner of Best Picture in 2017 over Moonlight. An LA Times report in 2016 identified 91 percent of Oscar voters as white and 76 percent male.

It’s clear that the Academy needs to continue to up its game in diversifying the voting demographic.

The role of campaigning, and studios selecting which films to push, also stops the awards from genuinely reflecting the best works. Other films, notably by women directors, were shut out this year. Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here and Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me are just two that deserved wider recognition.

The big takeaway message from this year’s ceremony, if it wasn’t clear already, is that we shouldn’t look to the Academy for any enlightened thinking.

A sea of safeness and whiteness
The optics of the Green Book team accepting their award could not have been more glaring. A collection of predominantly white men (and Mahershala Ali and Octavia Spencer to the side) pronounced that the film, to paraphrase, is about love and loving each other despite our differences and finding out that we are the same people.

For a film that is meant to be about race relations in America, all we got from the speech was a sea of safeness and whiteness.

In 2010, the Academy expanded the Best Picture category to up to 10 nominees. This change also saw the introduction of preferential voting. All voting members rank the year’s nominees from first through to eighth. If the film with the most first place votes doesn’t break 50 percent, then the film with the lowest first place votes is eliminated and its votes redistributed according to preferences.

This will then occur with the next lowest ranking film until a film cracks the 50 percent margin. As such, second and third place votes begin to count just as much as first place votes.

This preferential voting system results in a more agreeable film winning over a divisive one. This is perhaps why The Shape of Water won last year over Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

It also creates an interesting divide between critics and much of the film-going public and the Academy voters. Leading up to the awards, critical consensus saw Roma as the more agreeable choice, with Green Book being the divisive nominee. Turns out, this perspective was reversed in the world of the Academy and Green Book was deemed the most agreeable.

A year of back peddling
The awards this year were contentious before the ceremony even began. Kevin Hart’s previous homophobic remarks resulted in him stepping down. Four awards – cinematography, film editing, makeup/hairstyling, and live-action short – were going to be cut from the live broadcast.

The Oscars also initially snubbed nominated songs from the show, which is not a new occurrence .

The Academy then did a lot of back peddling. There was no main host, all awards were included in the live broadcast and four of the nominated songs were performed live, with the omission of All the Stars by Kendrick Lamar and SZA from Black Panther due to “logistics and timing”. The Academy is really bad at reading the room until it’s too late.

John Ottman, accepting the award for Best Editing of Bohemian Rhapsody, said the production was a labour of love with everyone bonding together. This perspective was an odd contrast to recent statements made by Rami Malek, in which he said that working with the film’s sometime director Bryan Singer “was not pleasant”.

In his acceptance speech for Best Actor, Malek also identified Bohemian Rhapsody as being about an unapologetically gay immigrant, yet it has been reported that Mercury was bisexual. If only the film could have been celebratory of Mercury’s sexuality. Still, the homophobic moralising will most likely be overshadowed by Green Book’s win.

One other glaring lowlight of the show was Broadway actress Carol Channing being omitted from the In Memoriam section. While there are eyebrow raising omissions every year, to not include Channing, who was show business personified, is sad indeed.

Highlights
In the sea of disappointment, there were several delightful moments. The choices of presenters seemed laughably odd. Serena Williams introducing A Star is Born and Queen Latifah introducing The Favourite were interesting to say the least.

Barbra Streisand introduced BlacKkKlansman because apparently she and Spike Lee both grew up in Brooklyn.

Lee, who won an honorary Oscar in 2016, won this year for Best Adapted Screenplay. The reception the film received was notably more rapturous than the one given to Green Book for Best Original Screenplay. The difference was palpable. Lee noted that February was Black History Month in the US:

1619, 2019. 400 years. 400 years our ancestors were stolen from mother Africa and brought to Jamestown, Virginia enslaved. Our ancestors worked the land, from can’t see at morning to can’t see at night.

The ceremony did see a significant number of women artists of colour taking to the stage to collect awards, from Hannah Beachler, production designer for Black Panther, to Regina King winning for her role in If Beale Street Could Talk.

Other highlights included Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s performance of the Best Original Song, Shallow, which evoked old school Hollywood glamour. The chemistry between the two is palpable.

Joyous upsets included Olivia Colman winning Best Actress over the hot favourite Glenn Close, who was nominated for her seventh time. Colman gave a scattered and heartwarming speech which won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

The ceremony tried to pitch itself as being liberal, with several mentions of metaphorically tearing down walls. It’s clear though, that in Hollywood, this will always happen on the power players’ terms.

The Academy Awards will never be as progressive as we want them to be. If that’s what you are looking for, then tune into the Indie Spirit awards.

In the end, final Oscars presenter Julia Roberts was drowned out by music emanating from the orchestra in the pit as she closed the show. Even the producers were done.

Let’s just remember the select moments of joy and forget the rest ever happened.

Dr Stuart Richards is lecturer in screen studies in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. This article was first published by The Conversation and is republished by Asia Pacific Report under a Creative Commons licence.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Radio 95bfm Jemima Huston is joined by AUT Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie and reporter Rahul Bhattarai about the centre’s Asia Pacific Report news stories and issues being covered.

Topics include: the detention of a Bangladeshi photojournalist, in an ongoing protest in Bangladesh; the screening of the controversial movie In the Name of Confucius; ABC’s Asia Pacific shortwave radio cutbacks; and Vanuatu appointing a special envoy for West Papua.

LISTEN: Full PMC Southern Cross radio programme

• Media freedom groups protest over detained photojournalist
• 95bfm link

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz