Trump and Circumstance: How Oscars Will Meet the MAGA Moment
With the country in social and political turmoil in 1969, Paramount Pictures released Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler’s form-breaking, question-raising, cinematic signal-bearer to a nation going off the rails.
More than a half century later, one struggles to imagine Paramount guiding us this way again. These days, the studio grabs a lot more headlines for potentially paying off Donald Trump for 60 Minutes journalists doing their jobs, in a storyline that matches Medium Cool and its power-challenging cameraman John Cassellis in drama, if hardly in moral fortitude.
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We shouldn’t pick on Paramount, of course. Studios in those years just before and after Watergate produced a host of establishment-challenging films, from All the President’s Men to Three Days of the Condor to Apocalypse Now — a nation badly in need of moral truth served by a Hollywood happy to supply it. Those movies reoriented how a country saw its leaders. In the process, they brought down a president and lifted up a generation of changemakers.
But the studios behind them are a lot less likely to repeat the feat in these Trumpian days, in part because some literally don’t exist and in part because others have seen their mission vanish. Corporate times are different now, with many studios owned by billion-dollar behemoths in league with the president. Film companies today are interested in the industry of global exports, not the business of good trouble.
Yet a look at the films the Oscars present us with illustrates that hope is not lost. Movies like The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Wicked all embody an ideology of protest — of dimensionalizing the marginal in the face of the powerful.
Now, the first two of that trio were made outside of Hollywood and only jumped on by mainstream companies after audiences at festivals embraced the films. And the third happened because it was itself some billion-dollar Broadway bigness. But the message lies within just the same. As Wicked producer Marc Platt tells THR, “What makes a work of art timeless is when we can make it so that we see something of our world in it. Part of what Wicked is about in 2025 is finding your voice and not trying to silence the voice of others.”
The question is whether those vocalizations will continue. Will the serious side of the movie business that the Oscars represent double down on such work — on the challenges to demagoguery that began, really, when Trump started his ascent, with the Moonlights and Parasites and BlacKkKlansmans and Jojo Rabbits and Get Outs and all the other Oscar nominees that bristled at the politics of fear and isolation?
Or in 2025, does Hollywood go the other way, the Big Tech way, toward acquiescence, toward eliminating the fact-checking departments, toward platforming the trolls, toward filling the coffers of the first lady?
Protest will be evident in (some) Oscar acceptance speeches, of course. But podium talk is cheap. Productions cost money. Fortunately, Hollywood has some of that. It also has time. Four years is a long stretch, in a depressing way. But it’s also many months to write, develop, shoot and release movies that meet the moment.
So will the Oscar seasons that follow bring the next wave of Brutalists and Emilia Pérezes — in the Trump years, perhaps even more pointed and, more to the point, produced by studios themselves? Or do Hollywood companies become the backlot equivalent of a 60 Minutes payout — eager not to provoke, enthused only to placate?
Does the industry have its new Medium Cool moment, pushing back on a president who dubs anti-American any art that doesn’t fit his politics of jingoism and exclusion? Does it draw upon its own history to show that such art is the most American of all?
Does it bring out the big guns? Or does it make only more Top Guns?
Yes, the political challenges come at a larger transition point for a Hollywood still reeling from a pandemic, labor strikes, Big Tech takeovers and fires that scarred so much of Los Angeles physically and psychically.
And yes, the arguments against Hollywood taking a page from the ’70s are many. The corporate caution is now greater, the president’s weapons more powerful, the tools of disinformation more plentiful and even some members of minority groups supposedly more autocrat-friendly. And how to begin to tangle with a force that politicizes the basic human tragedies of wildfires and plane crashes?
But look closer and those arguments start to seem more like excuses. Everyone has access to the same media tools. And Trump won the same 20 percent of the Black vote in 2024 that Nixon did in 1968, giving the lie to a big historical swing.
As for corporate caution, well, there’s a template of someone doing the pushback thing right now. The boldest counterprotest of Oscar season isn’t any of those buzzy frontrunners but Walter Salles’ Brazil-set, fact-based drama I’m Still Here, a literal warning about the dangers of a fascist takeover and a chronicle of a woman who uses the system to fight it. That movie also is nominated for best picture. And it comes from a division of a billion-dollar behemoth: Sony Pictures.
“We will sometimes find ourselves in regimes that are threats to democracies,” Salles tells THR. “Cinema’s role is to show a way to overcome those threats on both a personal level and a collective level.” He says that after a recent tastemaker screening in New York, a person came up and told him, “I was so moved by the film but also I was so energized by the film,” an epigraph that every jaded film-industry exec in town might want to keep on their desk.
When the Dolby lights go down March 2, some anti-fascist speeches will inevitably come up. They may well be inspiring. Applaud them; take heart in their calls. And then realize the only thing that really matters is whether anyone in the room is listening.
This story appeared in the Feb. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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