The Academy may have called off its lavish nominees’ lunch amid the fires that ravaged Los Angeles last month, but cancelling the Oscars ceremony was never on the cards. Awards season is Hollywood’s biggest advert for itself, and film-makers need it for survival. As financing becomes more and more challenging, the press and networking the Oscars bring grow ever more important for selling cinema tickets (or online streams) and attracting funding for future projects.
And so Hollywood exhibits a bewildering sort of double-vision. Witness Jamie Lee Curtis alternating campaigning for The Last Showgirl (in which she stars opposite Pamela Anderson as an ageing Las Vegas showgirl) with fundraising for her home town. Some of the largest donations to the relief effort have come from Disney and the super-agency CAA. That’s LA: there is space for compassion, but business is business, and the show must go on.
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