Comic levels of self-regard from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who expelled Harvey Weinstein last Sunday after an emergency sitting of its board. However, according to a letter sent to members a couple of days later by its president, John Bailey, “The Academy cannot, and will not, be an inquisitorial court”. That’s a relief. This is, after all, the collective body that awarded Crash with best picture and judged Kevin Costner a better director than Martin Scorsese. Of course it can’t be an inquisitorial court. That would be like ceding judicial process to Torquemada’s pet goat.
What he’d like, the Oscars president continued, is for the whole horrid business to serve as “a turning point in our industry – and hopefully in our country, where what happens in the movies becomes a marker of societal zeitgeist”. And yet, does it really?
I am already hugely enjoying all the movies they aren’t even going to try to develop that might illuminate this difficult time, despite the fact that it is a story in which many people are feverishly interested, and to which so many can – even in the dowdiest of our civilian workplaces – relate. I suppose there’s an outside chance they’ll search the furthest reaches of the Marvel back catalogue and unearth some guy – it’ll be a guy – whose superpower is wrestling hot lady actors out of taxis so some monstrous blob can’t feed on them.
Then again, it’s been just the 37 years since 9 to 5, so perhaps Hollywood doesn’t want to look like it’s obsessed with the subject matter. And frankly, how would it ever be possible to better Disclosure, the town’s seminal piece on sexual harassment in the workplace? If you haven’t seen this 1994 classique, you should probably know that the abuser is a woman. Demi Moore harasses a mildly reluctant Michael Douglas, and – if you like your markers of societal zeitgeist served with an eyeball roll – you may care to know the movie also doubles as an “erotic thriller”.