Lights, cameras, a global TV audience: the awards season is the moment for what in calmer times can look like virtue signalling. Now, though, 2017 has become a moment where, in the words of Viola Davis (Bafta, best supporting actress), it is a duty and a privilege to turn fame to protest.
Nothing new here: in 1973, The Godfather star Marlon Brando sent the native American actor Sacheen Littlefeather to turn down his best actor Oscar in protest at the way Hollywood treated native Americans. Patricia Arquette has protested about pay inequality, Leonardo DiCaprio about climate change, Richard Gere about the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
But political rage is having a global moment that made Sunday’s Grammys in Los Angeles and the Baftas in London a kind of angry night out, a contest for the unofficial Toni Morrison (“This is precisely the time when artists go to work”) award for best political intervention of the evening.
In reality, stars were either timid or diffuse. At the Grammys, tight targeting of subjects from the Dakota Access pipeline to the appointment of Jeff Sessions as US attorney general just created a kind of anger aura. Only Ken Loach – collecting the best film Bafta for I, Daniel Blake, and attacking a “callous and brutal” government – left, like his film, an unequivocal message.
• This article was amended on 15 February 2017 to correct the spelling of Viola Davis’s name.
