Someone once said that peace is an act of freedom or it is not peace. And that it is not advisable to confuse peace with submission. This could be the summary of Sunday's Oscars gala. The Academy chose not to upset a president, Donald Trump, with a long history of animosity towards it. In other words, it decided, without making it explicit, to obey him. So much so that he was not even mentioned, despite the nominated films being the most blatant display of the agenda against the Administration that humiliates Zelenski in public, ranging from the feminism of Anora or The Substance to the anti-racism of Nickel Boys, passing through the open discussion of the American dream in The Brutalist or, once again, Anora, the anti-Bolsonaro stance of Still Here or, more evident, the declared anti-Trumpism of The Apprentice. We won't discuss Emilia Pérez because everyone else has. Whether one agrees with Trump or the nominated films, what is surprising, due to its contradictory nature, is how the latter remained silent in the way they did.
It could be said that, amidst all the noise, the submissive Academy chose to discard any added message and focus on the work itself. In other words, the Academy decided to obey that which is adamantly demanded from the stands of the righteous: to separate the work from its circumstances, from its world. As if that, in a year when the world is facing all ecological, economic, migratory, and Trumpist abysses, were possible or, at the very least, desirable. And so, giving birth to the least committed, whitest, laziest, and, in its own way, most indecent gala in decades.
Just two very, very discreet jokes from the host, a reference to Ukraine by Daryl Hannah, a pro-Palestine pin on Guy Pearce's lapel, and, as a discordant note among so much silence, the emotional, reasonable, desperate, and raw intervention of the directors of the documentary No Other Land, the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Jew Yuval Abraham. "There is a different path, a solution without ethnic supremacy. The foreign policy of this country [the United States] blocks this path," said the former.
The statement was related to the Oscar for a film that dissects the harassment of the former's family in Cisjordania by the government and the latter's fellow citizens. To put it in context, theirs is a film, yes, but what it shows and how it does so transforms the viewer probably forever. In reality, before being a film, before being cinema, No Other Land is the perfect materialization of a prolonged and almost eternal outburst of rage. We are facing an irrefutable and ruthless chronicle of suffering, and also of injustice, in the face of the brutality of an ethnic cleansing that destroys everything. But above all, we are facing the most brilliant and heartbreaking refutation of the idea of the motionless and solitary viewer that recent cinema has given. It is cinema to change everything. As it is supposed to be the cinema that leads films like the winner Anora. To award Sean Baker's film and turn a deaf ear to its profound meaning, to its will to transform reality and perception, is rare. And that is why the immaculate whiteness of a supposedly independent cinema gala is surprising.
Yuvel's was the only phrase with some resonance beyond the chatter of the always feigned glamour that was heard. Donald Trump got his way. It was not peace, it was submission.