Bong joon-ho

Monday

February 17, 2025

This month in culture: March 2025

With Love, Meghan Netflix, March 4 If there were an award for the year’s least eagerly awaited show, Netflix’s With Love, Meghan would have to be in the running, if not quite the clear front-runner at this early stage of the year. Even the synopsis — “Meghan Markle invites friends and famous guests to a beautiful California estate, where she shares cooking, gardening and hosting tips” — summons up gasps of horror. The footage that has arrived via trailer indicates that this will be as vacuous as an Instagram reel brought to full, unlovely life, with its uniquely dreadful hostess conveying nothing so much as an onscreen vacuum where any kind of charm, grace or likability should be.

Wednesday

June 17, 2020

Will Lloyd

The Oscars and the triumph of Social Justice Realism

Today, politics is show business and show business is politics. Last week the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new efforts to improve inclusion institutionally and for the Oscars themselves. A task force has been created to come up with new inclusion standards for Oscar eligibility by the end of July. The Academy’s president Dawn Hudson said: ‘The need to address this issue is urgent. To that end, we will amend — and continue to examine — our rules and procedures to ensure that all voices are heard and celebrated.’We have traveled a long way from 2003. Then, when Michael Moore made an overtly political acceptance speech about George W. Bush, he was forced off the stage as a result.