Why is no one talking about Donald Trump? The question could only come from a place of escapism: the movies. At Sunday’s Oscars, Best Actor nominees include Sebastian Stan, who plays the man who would be president in biopic The Apprentice. He is joined by Jeremy Strong, the Succession star up for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Roy Cohn, the early Trump’s infamous legal fixer.
And yet the pair and their film are awards-season bystanders. Neither will win. Nor did they ever have a chance.
Delayed by the Los Angeles wildfires, the Oscar nominations were finally announced on January 23. By then, it was three days after the presidential inauguration, watched from the VIP seats by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Compared with the ring-kissing of the tech moguls, the honouring of Stan and Strong felt like notable dissent — not least with observers already asking what place the cluster of studios and streamers once known as Hollywood would have in the US of Trump 2.0.