THB #99: Keepers of History

Outrage is all the fashion these days, followed in close order by apathy.

During this weekend, we saw a conversation you could hear at Oscar voters’ dinner tables over the last four months get weaponized to the giddy joy of people who didn’t really pay attention to what that conversation actually was. Then, just 2 nights later, the same person who made that one group of the partisan half-deaf happy got hoisted on her own petard, giddily overreaching in a moment of her own joy, trying to share, but seeming to exclude powerful people of color.

Sam Elliott didn’t say there should be no movies about gay cowboys. And Jane Campion didn’t say that she was superior in her efforts as a 67-year-old white woman to two living legends of tennis who are black american.

But that was the impression some chose.