Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2015

The Contenders:

Eddie Redmayne: The Danish Girl
Matt Damon: The Martian
Leonardo DiCaprio: The Revenant (winner)
Michael Fassbender: Steve Jobs
Bryan Cranston: Trumbo

First Amendment

Film: Trumbo
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Any country and every country have dark days in their past. For the U.S., you don’t have to look too hard to find things lie centuries’ worth of slavery or the Japanese internment camps. The time of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee certainly exists as one of the most shameful from a civil liberties perspective. During this time, people were jailed for their beliefs, a version of Orwell’s thought police trying to restrict what went on between someone’s ears. One of those jailed was screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who is naturally the focus of the film Trumbo.

Flash back to the war years where Dalton Trumbo is one of the most successful Hollywood screenwriters in history. The man had a golden typewriter and was a natural for the film industry, having come from a world of writing fiction (the man had previously won a National Book Award). But, as was not uncommon at the time, Trumbo joined the Communist Party during the war. The U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union, after all, and no one was more anti-fascist than the communists. While certainly not what anyone would call patriotic, there was far less stigma attached to the idea of communism in the early 1940s.