Some people test the limits of our ability to think clearly about them. President Trump and his Washington playmates fit the description. But movie stars and the whole Hollywood scene will always be in the mix, and over the past week Hollywood took its turn.
But that’s the moment when we see them actually pretending to be someone else. Actors acting no more pretend to be other people than Picasso, painting, pretended to be an old guitarist. Actors observe and invent, in a process as remote from public scrutiny as an easel in an atelier. Though we accuse them of being too blighted by self-regard to think outside themselves, we also expect them to persuade us as characters who are nothing like their true selves—whatever those true selves might be. Almost certainly they’re not the selves we watched Robin Roberts chatting up on the red carpet before the ceremony began.
But as the Academy Awards reached their climax, the contrarian rhetoric aimed at the White House suddenly became inconsequential. In a plot twist that, if scripted, would have been shamelessly symbolic, frothy La La Land, made by and about white folks, was suddenly supplanted as best picture by meditative Moonlight, made by and about black folks.
