People involved with the Indie Spirits appeared unsure how to address the protest chant, which continued until the end of the show and could be heard from the stage and on the ceremony’s YouTube livestream. Jim Gaffigan, a presenter, was rattled when the disruption began, losing his train of thought; later, the comedian Jimmy O. Yang likened it to being heckled. Most of the presenters and winners ignored the protest entirely, though the chant underscored their every word.
Outside, a shuttle bus was dispatched to drive in front of the protesters in a feeble effort to block the noise. When I went to investigate, a crowd of indie-film insiders had also gathered, observing the protesters as they paced on the other side of the event barricades. “The irony,” said one onlooker, “is that most of the people in that tent agree with them.”
If it’s true that a cease-fire is desired by Hollywood’s typically outspoken creative class, you wouldn’t know it from listening to their speeches this awards season. After two years in which the war in Ukraine was acknowledged at nearly every awards show, the conflict between Israel and Hamas has gone unmentioned at most ceremonies. “It’s too fraught,” a studio executive told me after the Independent Spirit Awards protest. “People are worried about their careers.”
Cognitive dissonance is always required when global atrocities happen during a glamorous awards season. There’s even a best picture nominee about that kind of selective thinking: “The Zone of Interest,” in which a well-off Nazi couple exult in their good fortune while living next door to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Accepting one of three BAFTA awards for the film earlier this month in London, the producer James Wilson acknowledged those blinders, becoming one of the few artists this season to mention the current situation directly.
“A friend wrote me after seeing the film the other day that he couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind,” Wilson said in his speech. “Those walls aren’t new, from before or during or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen in the same way we think about innocent people being killed in Mariupol or in Israel. Thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces.”
Though some may think an awards show is no place for a political speech, a great movie is capable of no less than changing the way we see the world; because of that, the act of filmmaking can’t help but be political. I’m sure that executives at ABC, the network broadcasting the Oscars, would prefer that participants stay silent about these issues, fearing audience backlash or tune-out. But if “The Zone of Interest” wins the international-film Oscar next month, as most pundits believe it will, I wonder what we’ll hear.
