Tomorrow night, it’s the biggest party of the year in Hollywood: the 97th Academy Awards. In the last couple of months, we’ve sent several Free Pressers to the movies, to report back on Best Picture nominees. Michael Moynihan thought “A Complete Unknown,” the much-hyped Bob Dylan biopic, “misses a major point.” Paula Froelich wrote that “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore, perfectly captures the horror of being a woman who ages in the spotlight. River Page took one look at “Émilia Perez”—“a musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord and her underappreciated girlboss defense attorney”—and called it out for being “Oscar bait.” And yesterday, we published a lyrical piece by Peter Savodnik about “The Brutalist,” an epic film that asks a painfully relevant question: Do Jews belong in America?
In recent years, as Kat Rosenfield writes in today’s piece, the Oscars have become less about the movies and more about politics. Winners feel the need to turn their acceptance speeches into sermons about feminism, or immigration, or Donald Trump. But the average American doesn’t want political advice from jesters in $10,000 evening gowns. In fact, there was a time when actors would be booed for using the podium as a pulpit. As Kat argues below, it was a better time. —The Editors
If I have to listen to an actor talk about politics, let that actor be Gabriel Basso.
You might know Basso from his breakout role in Netflix’s hit series The Night Agent, in which he stars as an FBI agent who works in a secret basement office beneath the White House. But Basso has another White House connection. In 2020, he played J.D. Vance in the big-screen adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, which was based on the vice president’s memoir about his childhood in Appalachia—which means we now live in a world where the vice president could be Netflix-and-chilling in the White House, watching the man who once played his own younger self doing espionage in the basement of the building he’s sitting in.
In a recent interview, Basso called his entanglement with Vance’s timeline “kind of weird,” which it is—but what’s weirder is that Basso describes Vance himself as “a cool dude,” as if he’s talking about some guy in his Wednesday night bowling league as opposed to one of the most powerful and polarizing political figures in the United States.
This type of comment is typical for Basso, who doesn’t believe actors should embroil themselves in politics. “We’re saying words that we’re told to say. We’re told how to say them. We’re told where to stand. And then we’re telling people how to vote?” he said on a recent episode of the Great Company podcast. “You should be quiet; you should do your job. You should be a jester, entertain people—then shut the fuck up.”