Oscars 2018: Fresh Outrage on Twitter Against Academy For Giving Awards to Gary Oldman, Kobe Bryant - Here's Why
Did this year's Oscars let down the Times Up campaign?
This year's Academy Awards was quite special for a few reasons. For one, it was the 90th edition of the award ceremony. Secondly, it has some major first like Rachel Morrison being the first woman to get nominated as a cinematographer for Mudbound or Jordan Peele getting nominated for Best Film, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay (which he won). The most important factor being the ceremony comes right at the time when the Times Up and Me Too campaign, a movement to empower women to come out against sexual predators in the industry, is at its strongest. The movement was mentioned in host Jimmy Kimmel's awesome opening monologue. Then Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek and Annabella Sciorra, who were the most outspoken against disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, took centrestage to talk about the Times Up movement.
James Franco, who was supposed to be a frontrunner for Best Actor for his performance in The Disaster Artist, was not even nominated after five women accused him of sexual assault. Ben Affleck and Casey Affleck also gave the event a miss after allegations of sexual misconduct were levelled against them.
However, there are stills some Twitter users who felt that the Oscars failed to live upto its support for the campaign, and that has something to do with the jury awarding Gary Oldman and basketball champ Kobe Bryant trophies. Gary Oldman, who won the Best Actor for his performance in The Darkest Hour, was previously accused by his ex-wife, Donya Fiorentino, of physical assault in 2001. However, he was cleared off all charges by the court. Kobe Bryant, who won the Best Animated Short Film (Dear Basketball), was accused by a hotel employee in 2003 of raping her. Again, Bryant managed to get out of unscathed, but his reputation took a huge beating.
But it looks like Twitter is not ready to forgive them so soon, as they shamed the Academy for awarding these stars.
...and these are some more voices who are annoyed with the whole fraternity for being silent over the years, despite being aware of the sexual predators amidst, and cheering for them when these people got awards. Like the one below,
So what do you make of this whole controversy? Share your thoughts below...
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 05, 2018 05:29 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).