Truth Matters at the Oscars
When winners -- and documentaries -- lie
Announcement: Former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer created USA Facts to help people understand the country better. For a limited time, sign up for their free weekly email using this unique link: bit.ly/4kijcq5. Thanks to a paid partnership, you’ll be helping support They Stand Corrected!
The Oscars, coming this weekend, reach tens of millions of people worldwide. So it matters when winners use their acceptance speeches to lie and spread hatred. That happened last year.
As I explained in Newsweek, Jonathan Glazer, writer-director of a Holocaust movie, pretended to speak for his fellow winners as well, and said they “refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack in Gaza." Everything about that was false.
More than 1,000 Jewish entertainment figures rightfully condemned Glazer in an open letter saying:
“We refute our Jewishness being hijacked for the purpose of drawing a moral equivalence between a Nazi regime that sought to exterminate a race of people, and an Israeli nation that seeks to avert its own extermination.”
Richard Trank, Oscar-winning producer of another Holocaust film, called Glazer an “incredibly arrogant man who equated Israeli Jews to Nazis.” László Nemes, director of a third Holocaust film, noted, “Had he embraced the responsibility that comes with a film like that, he would not have resorted to talking points disseminated by propaganda meant to eradicate, at the end, all Jewish presence from the Earth.”
My column explained that he was also wrong about “occupation,” the topic I went on to cover in the first episode.
Still, far more people heard Glazer’s lies than heard all of these responses combined. With disinformation inundating humanity at an unprecedented scale, the world needs a truth countermovement. We should expect and demand accuracy from the media always. In “covering” the Oscars, news agencies talk up the winners, “highlights,” and glamor. Their first job should be to fact check anything they report.
This isn’t the only way the Oscars platforms deception. Some Oscar-nominated “documentaries,” as Grunge put it, “lied to your face.”
These problems could merge this year, given that Yuval Abraham, director of an Oscar-nominated documentary, already used an awards speech in Berlin to push the “apartheid” lie about Israel. Complaining that he and his Palestinian co-director do not have the same rights, he failed to mention that he lives in Israel, while his co-director does not. It’s up to the Palestinian Authority to establish rights for its citizens. Thankfully, Berlin’s mayor called Abraham's remarks “intolerable relativization.”
When people speak at the Oscars, they know it’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to send a message to the world. They also know it’s incredibly unlikely that the mainstream news will fact check them.
I’ll keep an eye on the ceremony and the news coverage. If people use their speeches to mislead the world, I’ll provide an episode to make sure they stand corrected.