As the most hyped awards event of the season, the Oscars may also be the most political.
After a string of recent charged Hollywood gatherings, Oscar winner John Irving weighed in on the upcoming Academy Awards. “What is needed from Hollywood now,” he wrote in a Feb. 20 guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, “is more outright bias.”
Irving’s wild claim came after a discussion of his own personal experience with politicized speeches.
Seventeen years ago, the screenwriter earned an Oscar for The Cider House Rules, a blatantly pro-choice film. During his acceptance, Irving thanked the Academy for honoring art on the “abortion subject” and Miramax for its courage to produce. As he concluded his remarks, Irving also gave a shout-out to “everyone at Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Rights League,” to thunderous applause.
When Irving’s film first came out, a high school student penned a letter to the editor of the New York Times, pointing out the “outright bias” in Hollywood. This fact Irving did not attempt to deny. “Yes, The Cider House Rules is a pro-choice film,” he conceded, noting that Hollywood’s outright bias is now necessary to combat that of President Trump and “sexual dinosaur” Mike Pence.
The film’s protagonist, budding doctor Homer Wells, is personally pro-life, but not generally anti-abortion. But over the course of the plot, Wells changes his views on performing abortions himself, when his mentor questions: “How can you not feel obligated to help [women] when they can’t get help anywhere else?”
“In a world were abortion is illegal,” questioned Irving, “if women have no choice, why should doctors have one?” The writer then criticized the pro-life movement of failing to help children and women “who’ve been forced to have an unwanted child.”
In the end, Irving clarified that he was not trying to force a political Oscars; rather, he believed that anyone with something to say should say it.
“Whatever the protocol for Oscar acceptance speeches is, or was,” he concluded, “the creative community has an obligation: to be intolerant of intolerance.”
