Dominic Green

‘The innocence of America is one of its oldest traditions,’ said Oscar Wilde who, like Michael Jackson, was accused of seducing underage boys. Wilde was convicted, and cast into a disgrace that everyone now agrees was a crime against art and morality. Jackson was able to wriggle out of court, more than once. He had money and he had lawyers but, most of all, he had the entertainment business on his side, moralizing to us that he was a great artist. The pagan cult of show business is the real American religion, and the innocence of children is one of its most lucrative assets. The innocence of Michael Jackson, child star turned child abuser, was an article of faith because Jackson could fill a stadium.

‘Spain is an overflow of somberness,’ Wyndham Lewis wrote in The Wild Body (1927). ‘A strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.’ That was before the civil war of the Thirties and the Franco dictatorship. These days, if you cross the frontiers of Spain, or of any state in the southern tier of the European Union, you meet an immigrant wave from Africa, and a somber outflow of unemployed young emigrants. Americans, choosing the happy ending, prefer the overflowing cups of the ‘immigrant experience’ to the severances and silences of the emigrant experience. But an immigrant never quite escapes being an emigrant. The old language is still in your head.

It was a big night for Rami Malek and the Green Book team, and a big night for me too. My palms, closely shaved for the occasion, were sweatier than usual. My tux, freshly laundered and let out, suddenly tightened when the nominations were read out. I was afraid I’d be publicly humiliated, but it turned out that I was a winner. Yes, my Oscar tips were pretty accurate this year — until they weren’t. I thought I’d factored more racial tokenism than a Bernie Sanders campaign video, and more political gesturing than a fundraising disco for the Democratic Socialists of America. But I got the balance of tokenism wrong.

Sunday night is Oscar night, from the red carpet in the early evening to the white line in the small hours. The Oscars, like the most of the members of the Academy, have seen better days. Audience shares are down, and it no longer seems possible to find presenters who can read jokes from an autocue, or, in the case of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in 2017, read the Best Picture winner’s name correctly. This year, it wasn’t even possible to find a presenter. Kevin Hart would have been a great host — unlike most actors in Hollywood, he’s capable of ad libbing, and he can also move the muscles of his face. But Hart was culled on grounds of political correctness.

Jussie Smollett is a long way from rehabilitation. In fact, he has a long way to go before he reaches full dehabilitation. That’s a real word, and I’m willing to hire two Nigerian bodybuilders to prove it while wearing MAGA hats. Dehabilitation is the process of becoming estranged from family, friends and society, usually because of something disgusting like leprosy, or filing false reports of racist and homophobic assault to the police. Smollett is now in dehab, but his apology to the cast of Empire suggests that he thinks he’s moving into rehab. This means he hasn’t yet understood the mess he’s in. This is America. There can only be rehab after dehab.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is too ill to sit on the Supreme Court. When she saw On the Basis of Sex, a hagiography written by her nephew, she must have thought she had already gone to heaven. Directed by Mimi Leder to the highest TV-movie standards, this prequel to the obsequious 2018 documentary RBG will appeal to all purchasers of the grovelling 2015 biography, Notorious RBG. The real RBG totters across the last frames of this movie like the laminated ghost of American liberalism. Such idolatry diminishes Bader Ginsburg’s achievement, the unpicking in 1971 of the first of 178 laws discriminating against you-know-who on the basis of you-know-what. But this film crackles with nylon, self-regard, and unearned privilege. It’s the 1950s.

Reincarnation is like a drug. Everyone’s dying to try it. About a quarter of American adults believe in it. The ranks of the born again and again include a similar proportion of American Christians. If de Tocqueville were to be reincarnated among us, he would say, ‘I told you so’, take a long draw on his Juul, then make some droll observation about religion in a market economy, and the importance of giving the customers what they want, in this life and the previous. Never mind hell and heresy, the land of the second chance is the land of the third and fourth chance. Russian Doll is an ironic comedy about reincarnation set in lower Manhattan. Aging cynics will recognize it as the metempsychotic rebirth of Groundhog Day (1993) and After Hours (1985).

Revenge, like rice pudding, is a dish best served cold. If Liam Neeson offers you a rice pudding, eat it up before he breaks your nose by smashing your face onto the table, then carves out your eye with the spoon. Neeson excels at the role of revanchist mid-lifer on screen and, judging from his admission about having once gone in search of a ‘black bastard’ to cosh after a friend had been raped, he’s done his homework too. Liam Neeson is 66 years old. Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, is 59 years old. The media have universally reviled Northam for putting a photograph of a white man in blackface in his yearbook over three decades ago.

If Super Bowl LIII served no other purpose in this late Roman phase of the American republic, at least it reminded everyone of the Latin numerals. The first half ended III-0, and the halftime entertainment was low-scoring too. II out of X to Adam Levine, Maroon 5 — who at least could have named themselves Maroon V for the occasion — and a cast of several dozen. Maroon 5 sound like a wedding band playing Jamiroquai covers, though it is hard to imagine anyone wishing to soundtrack their special day with ‘This Love’. On this occasion, they were everybody’s fifth choice. Cardi B spoke on Friday of her anguish at turning down an invitation to perform at Atlanta.

No idea is too stupid to be entertained on the op-ed page of the New York Times. I was reminded of this truism last night when, changing the paper in the parrot’s cage, I read that the latest enjoyable vehicle for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s talents is not just a good 20 minutes too long, but also perniciously racist, if not sunk to its Victorian corsets in white nationalist propaganda. ‘Mary Poppins and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface’, wrote Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, professor of English and Contemporary Virtue at Linfield College, Oregon.

Socialists dismiss liberal democracy as false consciousness, but no one falsifies consciousness like a socialist. Socialist history is false history, the march of workers who want to work harder. Socialist economics is false economics, where the numbers never add up, but it’s always someone else’s fault. Socialist art is false art, because it is always propaganda. The socialist individual begins as an impossible fiction, and ends as an enemy of the state, because the aim of socialism is to subordinate individual desires to collective duties. This corruption of human relationships — denouncing your parents, spying on your wife, fearing your children — is not an accident, but an operating principle.

The one program worth watching on PBS isn’t made by PBS. It’s Masterpiece on Sunday nights, and the masterpieces are British-made. PBS puts in a small amount funding before filming starts, then packages the variable results with a flourish of Baroque music and a spoken introduction. Since 2009, this address to the nation has been delivered by Laura Linney, affecting the gown and breathlessness of a Henry James ingénue about to attend a ball in old Vienna. Earlier speakers included Alastair Cooke, and Russell Baker, who died yesterday at 93. Baker and Cooke were writers, not actors.