As Hollywood prepares for the Academy Awards, we are looking forward to a vintage year of protest speeches. There have already been some belters – from Meryl Streep (on getting the Cecil B DeMille award at the Golden Globes) and Mahershala Ali (best supporting actor from the Screen Actors Guild). I personally hope every single winner pays tribute to an Iranian nominee, director Asghar Farhadi, who is staying away in protest at the travel ban, and declining any personal exemption from it. He is nominated for The Salesman, which incidentally features people in Tehran taking part in a theatre production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
But people keep saying that Hollywood is 100% anti-Trump. And that, as I keep telling everyone, is not true. The president’s new treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, is a movie investor and an executive producer on the Tom Hanks film Sully – nominated this year for a sound editing Oscar. And Disney chief executive officer Bob Iger is part of Donald Trump’s new strategic and policy forum. He hasn’t felt any need to resign yet. Disney has three Oscar nominations: two for Moana, one for Zootopia. If any of these films win, it would be great to hear some rousing speeches of internal dissent against Trump.
Oxford’s PM dilemma
Theresa May appears very happy to be compared by her cheerleaders to Margaret Thatcher, and of course it is a fair parallel in many ways: second female Conservative leader, second female prime minister. But May could find herself following in Thatcher’s footsteps in a very specific way.
In 1985 Thatcher – who had taken a degree in chemistry at Oxford – was sensationally refused an honorary doctorate by the university, as a protest about education cuts. In some ways it was the most intimately painful, acrimonious event to affect the British establishment in that entire decade. Many moaned that Oxford should have offered her the honour when she was first elected, before it became contentious.
As for May, she got her geography degree at Oxford in 1977. And how do Oxford academics and students feel about her immediately offering a state visit to Trump while declining to condemn the travel ban, and all the other outrages? If any pro-May factions at Oxford wish to give her the honorary degree and wipe out the anguish of the Thatcher incident, they had better get on with it.
The last lift of a lifetime
Just before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. That’s the theory. At the moment of death, you get a whizzingly speeded-up view of childhood, school, job, first love, job, second love, marriage, children, dream holiday, retirement, ashen-faced visit to hospital to discuss test results.
But now researchers at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center say that life-review experiences aren’t as boringly straightforward as this. They’re not linear. Subjects who came near to death say they saw events out of narrative order; they saw the same event repeatedly, from lots of different perspectives, and saw events in other people’s lives as well as their own. It’s as if the life review experience is going through a kind of modernist revolution.
Tolstoy’s fiction repeatedly showed people on the point of death being shown a beatific vision of the absurdity of this life, with its striving for money and prestige. I wonder if Tolstoy himself died like that. I think that my life review experience is going to feature just one event: intense regret at stepping through the doors into the liftshaft without first checking to see if the lift was actually there.
