The authoritarian government of China on Wednesday reportedly ordered state television not to carry the Academy Awards ceremony next month, because one of the films nominated for an Oscar is about the Hong Kong protest movement.
The thin-skinned Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also nursing a grudge against Chloe Zhao, director of Best Picture nominee Nomadland, because she criticized the Party several years ago.
The film that reportedly got the Oscars banned from Chinese television is Do Not Split, a short documentary about the Hong Kong protests of 2019 directed by Anders Hammer of Norway. The 35-minute feature traces the protests from their origins as pushback against a controversial extradition law to China’s imposition of a tyrannical “national security law” on Hong Kong last summer, effectively criminalizing political dissent and crushing the city’s limited autonomy.
Watch below:
Do Not Split – Trailer from Field of Vision on Vimeo.
Hammer told the Hong Kong Free Press on Wednesday his goal was to “capture the intensity of the streets in Hong Kong as the young protesters were risking everything in a fight for their future.”
“This uprising started as demonstrations against a proposed extradition bill, which could have allowed people to be sent to Mainland China for trial. Soon it developed into a broader protest campaign for basic human rights, and hopefully the Oscars nomination can contribute to creating attention around how important it is that these human rights are not suppressed,” he said.
The CCP, which is very eager to demonstrate that human rights can be suppressed without any meaningful opposition from the free world, railed against the Oscar committee for daring to nominate Do Not Split in a frothing editorial at the state-run Global Times on Wednesday.
The Global Times hissed that Hammer’s film “lacks artistry and is full of biased political stances,” accused the Oscars of becoming “political tools,” and warned that giving an award to Do Not Split could “hurt Chinese audiences’ feelings and may lead to a heavy loss in the Chinese film market, which exceeded North America to be the largest box office market in the world for the first time last year.”
The Communist paper advised Hollywood to learn its lesson from the National Basketball Association, which humbled itself before the CCP after now-former Houston Rockets manager Daryl Morey dared to express sympathy with the Hong Kong protesters.
As for Chloe Zhao, Deadline reported she was “initially heralded in China after the success of Nomadland at Venice, but that reception turned sour when comments she made in a 2013 interview resurfaced.”
Watch below:
In an interview that has since been deleted from the Internet, the Beijing-born Zhao reportedly described China as “a place where there are lies everywhere.” She also supposedly told an Australian interviewer in 2020 that she is “now an American” after living in the U.S. for 20 years, but this remark was later dismissed as a typographical error, and Zhao actually said she is “not an American.”
These comments were enough to get Zhao headlines like “From the Pride of China to Disgracing China in a Few Short Days,” coupled with a burst of hatred from some quarters of Chinese social media, although others applauded her for making Nomadland because it supposedly exposes the “declining U.S. and the evils of a capitalist system.”
Zhao has been tapped to direct a big Marvel superhero film, The Eternals, and the Chinese box office is vital for turning a profit on such enormous projects, suggesting Hollywood will likely find a way to return her to the Communist Party’s good graces.
Deadline saw signs that Zhao will probably weather the scorn of the CCP and emerge relatively unscathed, perhaps after making a few gestures of submission and fealty, because the CCP loves the idea of Chinese directors prospering in Hollywood, and the Politburo likes how Nomadland makes capitalism look horrifying. Anders Hammer, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t hold his breath waiting for Disney to offer him the next Thor movie.
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