Any awards release with political overtones faces a conundrum: To win the Academy Award, it must court Hollywood liberals, which can mean alienating the ticket-buying public at large.
A day after Universal’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man opened to a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival on Aug. 29, a political rocket came blasting out of the conservative netherworld to knock it from its orbit. That’s when news spread that the movie had omitted a real-life scene: Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon.
Right-wing outrage was immediate and helped ding the picture at the box office, where it failed to draw a crucial male demographic and earned a muted $44 million domestically.
What’s intriguing in this isn’t just how politics suddenly and explosively intersected with an awards-season release, it’s how the studio failed to punch back. Universal execs could have argued that the film is a celebration of an American hero; they could even have offered to screen the movie at the White House (a risky strategy, admittedly, if the president didn’t end up liking it). They did neither, partly because the filmmakers refused to compromise their principles, and partly because they knew that placating conservatives would backfire at the Oscars.
In the molten firmament of today’s politics, any major release faces this dilemma: If it wants to win over the public, it must…
