The Oscars have come and gone. However, for many, Sunday’s 87th Academy Awards were surely memorable, as several Oscar winners, apart from enjoying the cheers and applause from the star-studded audience, broke from the traditional roll call of family members and agents to use their acceptance speeches to call for action in political causes and social awareness.
Among them was US actress Patricia Arquette, who, when accepting the award for Best Supporting Actress for Boyhood, made a call for wage equality.
“To every woman who gave birth, to every taxpayer and citizen of this nation, we have fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” the actress said, to which the crowd responded with a standing ovation.
Also seizing the moment on stage to deliver inspiring and moving social statements were US singer John Legend and US rapper Common during their acceptance speech for Best Original Song for Glory, the title track from the Martin Luther King biopic, Selma.
Common, noting the role of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the film as the place where Martin Luther King marched for civil rights 50 years ago, spoke of the fight against social injustice and paid tribute to Hong Kong’s Occupy Central pro-democracy protests.
“This bridge was once a landmark of a divided nation, but now is the symbol for change. The spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and social status,” he said to rapturous applause from the audience. “The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the South Side of Chicago dreaming of a better life to those in France standing up for their freedom of expression, to the people in Hong Kong protesting for democracy. This bridge was built on hope, welded with compassion and elevated by love for all human beings.”
Then there was Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who, while accepting the Best Film award for Birdman, used his time on the stage to highlight the issue of immigrants seeking fair treatment in the US, and producer Dana Perry, winner of the Best Documentary Short Subject for Crisis Hotline: Veteran’s Press 1, who spoke of veteran suicide awareness.
It is touching to see celebrities putting their star power to good use for the benefit of all.
However, as the world applauds these Oscar winners for invoking calls for activism and social justice in their acceptance speeches, one cannot help but notice the sharp contrast with Taiwanese performers, who are known for lacking the guts to take a stand on social causes or issues of critical importance to the nation.
Other than a handful, such as pop-rock idol Bobby Chen (陳昇), Taiwanese rapper Dog-G (大支), pop-punk band Fire Ex (滅火器) and hip-hop group Kou Chou Ching (拷秋勤), who have been vocal in addressing social problems and matters that concern the nation’s core values of democracy and human rights during performances, many celebrities are known for intentionally distancing themselves from issues of social, cultural and political sensitivity for fear of upsetting Beijing and being blacklisted by the Chinese government.
Sunday’s Academy Awards showed how Hollywood stars have taken the opportunity to speak out on issues that they see in the US. Hopefully, more Taiwanese high-profile celebrities will follow suit and emulate their US counterparts by making good use of their fame to be voices for the voiceless, the needy and the unjustly deprived.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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