This is from a reader of this site named Jane Rusher…
I disagree with you about the acceptance speech last night by the man who wrote Milk. Wouldn't it be better if we just agreed that the Oscars are not a place for politics?
Sure…that would help remove another way in which they might be interesting and relevant. Better to have the winners spend more time congratulating themselves on being in show business and pretending that's the only world that matters.
Seriously, I think one of the things a person wins when they win an Oscar is that 45 seconds to talk to the world. Are we so fragile and incapable of dealing with loud opinions that we can't endure certain things someone might say? If they want to get up there and sell Amway products or list their favorite foods, fine. It's their 45 seconds.
The remarks about Milk were totally appropriate. I thought the way Sean Penn said what he said was clumsy and likely to alienate those who most need to be convinced. But he and the screenwriter were both talking about what the movie they'd just won for meant and what they hoped moviegoers would take away from it. They were talking about what was relevant about the film and about the story of Harvey Milk. That's more meaningful than if they spent the time thanking their agents.
There's another matter I'd like to address. A lot of folks today are discussing what certain Oscars mean and how the victory of Sean Penn over Mickey Rourke means that Hollywood was making a statement about gay rights or Proposition 8 or something of the sort. I think that's assuming an awful lot of facts that are not in evidence.
First point: Anyone who believes "Hollywood" speaks with one mind hasn't spent any time in Hollywood. I don't think I've ever been in a meeting here with more than three people where everyone agreed about what time lunch should be. Secondly, even when a majority votes one way, it doesn't mean they all had the same thing in mind. Imagine if all you knew about the last presidential election was that Barack Obama won. You didn't know if he got 97% of the vote or just one person more than John McCain. You didn't know which states he'd carried, which ethnic groups, which age groups, etc. All you knew was that he won. How much would you really know about what America was saying with its vote?
Well, that's about how much we know about the Oscar voters.
The Academy has about 6800 voting members…people who could have voted. How many did? We don't know. It's rumored (rumored, now) that about half vote each year. Let's say 3400 did. For all we know, 1300 members voted for Mickey Rourke, 1301 voted for Sean Penn and the rest was split between the other nominees. What would that say about the mindset of the Academy, as opposed to Penn winning in a landslide?
And maybe the margin, whatever it was, was because the advertising campaign mounted to persuade Academy voters to cast their ballots for Milk was just plain more effective than the one for The Wrestler. I was mailed a screener DVD of Milk but I don't think I got one for The Wrestler.
It's even possible that some voters didn't care about gay rights when they voted. Maybe — and yeah, I know this is a stretch — someone voted for Sean Penn just because they thought he gave a better performance than Mickey Rourke. It could happen.
I can name a hundred reasons someone might have had for voting for Penn over Rourke…and yes, some of them might only have tipped a vote or two. But we don't know that Penn didn't win by a vote or two.
As you may recall, I thought Rourke would win. There seemed to be something in the air…some way in which that felt like a better ending to the story than another Penn victory. But some number of voters, the quantity of whom we'll never know, thought Sean Penn belonged up there. Why? I dunno. And neither do you.