One complaint you can’t make this year that’s been a prevalent source of discontent in earlier years: you can’t complain that a lot of stars got up and used their time at the podium to make impassioned political statements, because only a couple did — although the ones who did, Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer and 20 Days in Mariupol director Mstyslav Chernov, have drawn significant attention. The relatively low number of Gaza-related statements by awardees was notable, considering protest speeches at other recent film awards ceremonies, and because outside attendees had all just run the gauntlet of hundreds of protesters made up of Film Workers for Palestine members and their Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) allies who were blocking the route to the Dolby Theatre, forcing many attendees to get out of their cars and walk. That’s why the Oscars ceremony started late, in case you were wondering about Jimmy Kimmel’s joke about the notoriously long show just starting but already running five minutes over.

A few famous attendees wore red “Artists4Ceasefire” pins in mute solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, including Mark Ruffalo (who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his riotous turn in Poor Things), his fellow Poor Things actor Ramy Youssef, and Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell, who performed “What Was I Made For?”, the Oscar-winning song from Barbie. Also wearing red pins were director Ava DuVernay (Selma) and Anatomy of a Fall actors Milo Machado-Graner and Swann Arlaud.

Glazer, whose The Zone of Interest won Best International Film, made a speech trying yet again to convince people who refuse to recognize that his “Holocaust drama” isn’t just about the Nazis and their Final Solution. It’s about us in the present day living comfortably while atrocities are committed in our names by our governments and approved of by many of our fellow citizens. Sometimes it’s genocide on the other side of a real wall; more often it’s on the other side of a metaphorical wall.

Here’s what he said: Thank you to the Academy for this honor and to our partners A24, Film4, Access, and Polish Film Institute; to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for their trust and guidance; to my producers, actors, collaborators. All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the — Applause. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Applause. Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.

The uneasy but still relatively warm reception to his speech can be attributed to his evenhandedness in equating the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel with the ongoing, genocidal Israeli attacks on Gaza since that date, five months later. His phrasing of more incendiary points (“the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict”) that make equal “all the victims of dehumanization” is distressing in the way its vague and tortured formulation actually made it a bit hard to understand what he was saying at the time.

For the sake of comparison, take a look at Vanessa Redgrave’s 1978 speech at the Academy Awards, when she won Best Actress for her performance in Julia and managed to enrage everybody in the theatre and the majority of the viewing public, all at the same time. The apparent incoherencies in her speech relate to the fact that she was responding to vociferous criticism directed at her by Jewish groups for having produced and narrated a sympathetic 1977 documentary entitled The Palestinian.

Her comments were directed at extremists in the Jewish Defense League, who had not only burned her in effigy but had offered a bounty to have her killed. There was even a firebombing at one of the cinemas showing the documentary. But the phrase “Zionist hoodlums” discredited Redgrave for many — even if she concluded her speech promising “to fight anti-Semitism and fascism for as long as I live.”

Her Oscar speech was greeted with boos, and Redgrave faced a fierce backlash, including a boycott of the movie Julia. Redgrave’s public image was never as everlastingly controversial as Jane Fonda’s following the “Hanoi Jane” scandal, but it ran a close second for many years afterward. Redgrave’s immense stature as an actor, coming from a legendary acting family and alternating between acclaimed stage and screen performances, prevented permanent damage to her career. Nevertheless, Redgrave was regarded as something of a lunatic for decades afterward.

People who deplore political statements at the Academy Awards ceremony on the grounds that it’s no place for such divisive rhetoric must have been pleased at the muted response during and after Glazer’s speech, and at the way nobody followed it up with similar speeches.

As Redgrave said cheerfully, decades after the reviled speech, regarding her political commitments, “I had to do my bit.” And the Oscars are so dull anyway, it’s a mercy to liven it up with passionate utterances of people who hear the rarest of all speeches, by those who have genuine hard-left political beliefs and aren’t afraid to state them. (Jacobin — IPA Service)