Post Mortem On The Oscars

 

It is a well observed phenomenon that not only do good actresses shine when given good roles in otherwise dull films, sufficient for the actress to be the only person to be nominated for the different awards when the awards season approaches, but that in addition to being nominated such actresses, will also be overlooked for the prize they have been nominated for, in favour of actresses who have performed nearly as well in much more showy and stereotypical roles.

  Thus it was that Lily Gladstone (born 1986), a distant but indirect descendant of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), who was raised on the Blackfeet reservation, and is of mixed Piegan Blackfeet and European origin, was both nominated and snubbed this award season. She won the Golden Globe for her portrayal of Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who survived the Osage murders in Martin Scorsese's lengthy 2023 crime drama 'The Killers of the Flower Moon', beating internationally nominated competition but in the Oscars lost out to showy faux feminist post-Frankenstein melodrama 'Poor Things', in which Emma Stone triumphed against the odd in the role of a woman beset by male expectation where when she survives those expectations it is less by directly challenging them, more by finding a life away from them in spite of the males. Perhaps Ms Stone won the Oscar because of the character she played, more than her acting, the character too much represented certain aspects of Hollywood for Hollywood to resist rewarding her.

  But still I prefer women like the real Mollie Kyle (1886-1937) who shown here aged 17, is as far away from Hollywood as it is possible to be. She showed a resourcefulness well beyond all natural and legally circumscribed means, in surviving her diabetes, surviving her attempted poisoning, she got her poisoners jailed, she remarried after she got her husband poisoner jailed, got the guardianship over her lifted with the new marriage, and finally regained control of the material legacy that her family should have had full control of, all along. 

That is what I would consider to be female resourcefulness at it's best in the face of white Klu Klux Clan being calculatedly murderous with envy at the rightful wealth of other nations.

There the Frankenstein-type monster in the plot is the Klu Klux Clan, which seems to be about right to me. The undead ghost of white supremacy politics from the losing side of the civil has to be properly represented somehow. I have yet to see an image of Donald Trump with a bolt through his neck as the undead ghost of whate male exclusive entitlement but I shall savour it when I do.