Vast tracts of scorched earth. Burnt-out shells of cars. Block after block of apocalyptic rubble. Clearly, it’s time to do what any sensible person would: send for Mel Gibson.
As red flag fire weather warnings return to Los Angeles and the city’s most famous industry weighs up how exactly it will make the show go on, over in Washington, Donald Trump has a cunning plan.
It’s not a plan to mitigate wildfires as such. “Climate crisis, what climate crisis?” really is a reusable line these days. It’s a proclamation that Hollywood, “a great but very troubled place”, can be forcibly returned to its “golden age” by dispatching Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone to the epicentre of entertainment – somewhere the veteran actors haven’t, for various reasons, been spending too much time of late.
Now that they’re acting – and I use that word loosely – as Trump’s “eyes and ears”, they should be addressed by the title “Mr Ambassador”, the president says, once again zeroing in on the most important matters. This one might require an executive order as Voight’s de facto title in the media these days, whether he likes it or not, is Father of Angelina Jolie.
Will these ready-to-serve diplomats from Trumpville be given White House-appeasing invitations to Hollywood’s most glittering event in six weeks’ time? It feels too soon to speculate. Everything about this year’s Oscars, from the guest list to the all-important “tone” remains in flux.
Author Stephen King’s conviction that the Academy Awards should be cancelled on taste grounds – “no glitz with Los Angeles on fire” – unsurprisingly has few supporters, even as the Santa Ana winds pick up once more. The problem is that no one can adequately explain how ditching the 97th edition of the ceremony would help anyone. And if the Grammys can go ahead at LA’s Crypto.com Arena on February 2nd, Oscar will be even less inclined to take one for the team.
The mentality witheringly referred to by King as “the show must go on, blah-blah-blah” is so embedded in Los Angeles, any suggestion it might not be resilient enough to dish out a few gongs has received a fractious response, with The Hollywood Reporter bluntly dismantling a “baseless” name-dropping story in the Sun claiming the Academy was hovering near the cancel button, “on the verge” of pressing it.
This was before King, an Academy member, announced he wouldn’t be voting this year and lamented the Nero-esque spectacle of people “wearing fancy clothes while LA burns”. Still, it is a measure of how inured people have become to stark collisions of celebration and glamour with grief and devastation that the rolling-out of a red carpet not far from the destruction is an incongruity most can tolerate.
True, the Dolby Theater was last week subject to an evacuation order prompted by the fire on Sunset Boulevard. But that was last week. If I had to guess, the superficiality and backslapping will barely be dialled down at all come March 2nd, just reframed with tacked-on gratitude aimed at firefighters so attendees can fret less about appearing crass.
Another sensitive dimension when it comes to striking the right balance on the night hinges on the relationship between two interconnected but distinct Hollywoods: the local community and the global industry.
The self-mythology of Tinseltown can be potent to drink. It wasn’t until my first visit to LA in 1999 that I understood the extent to which Hollywood was a contemporary place of work in sunny California and the extent to which it should be considered a historical location turned screen-industry metonym.
The gates and backlots of Paramount Pictures were present and correct, but not much else was, because even by the 1990s, film and television production was being lured away from LA by financial incentives. The truth is out there, declared Mulder in Vancouver-located The X Files, and so were the Canadian tax credits.
As Trump has bellowed, with unerring accuracy on this occasion, LA has “lost much business” in recent years to international rivals who can do what it does, but cheaper. The glitz has faded. Some local film crew who endured pandemic shutdowns, streamers’ spending downturns and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes were left struggling to pay mortgages on homes that have now burned down.
Can there be a happy ending? On the plus side, California’s Democrat governor Gavin Newsom – dubbed “Gavin Newscum” by Trump in a disinformation-spreading wildfires rant – has proposed a doubling of the budget set aside for production incentives. It’s not exactly the stuff of silver-screen magic, but there have also been calls for the LA dream factory to lower the cost of its film permits.
On the downside, Trump, who likes to beat Hollywood at its own game, has indicated he will “probably” drop in on LA soon, presumably to recruit some new executive producers for his administration.
The Academy says it wants to “bring a sense of healing to our global film community”, glossing over industry fault lines in the name of showbiz unity. The president sees the global film community as a villain and reckons Hollywood, California, can come back “BIGGER, BETTER AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!”
As ever, amid these clashing approaches, some suspension of disbelief may be required. It certainly will be if Mr Ambassador wins the Oscar for best original screenplay in 2027.
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