mostly david ephgrave

Sometimes, it pays to be childish. Wholly unedited. Like a fool, I today committed the double heresy of clicking on an article by Piers Morgan on the Daily Mail website, in which he bemoaned the terrible inconvenience of having to listen to people showing solidarity for whistle-blowing campaigns such as #MeToo, #TimesUp and #NeverAgain at the Oscars. True to form, Morgan seems to completely miss the point: for him, hearing - as he puts it - “actress after actress playing the victim card on Sunday night” is far too tiresome, as if somehow, years of patriarchy and gun crime have all been solved by being raised by figures in the media once or twice. (But would you expect anything less from a man who proudly displays a picture of himself standing shoulder to shoulder with alleged serial-committer of sexual misconduct, Donald Trump, as his Twitter profile picture?) Don’t get me wrong; I know the game people like Piers Morgan (and fellow Ma...

I hate the self-congratulatory nature of the Oscars and award ceremonies in general. Perhaps I'm being miserable or jealous, but I don’t think it’s necessary, particularly in the world of entertainment. I think actors are celebrated and raised on a pedestal enough, especially at the high end of their industry. Switch on BBC Breakfast of a morning or Graham Norton of an evening and their respective sofas will be bursting with performers hyperbolizing about the strenuous emotional journeys they took to bring a characterization to the stage or screen. They’ll act like they’ve stumbled across the cure for cancer or the secret to time-travel, while the interviewer laps it up. Giving an actor the chance to discuss the agony of their craft is like showing a rag to a bull. I know because I’m one of them. (An actor and not cattle, though there's very little difference.) Don't get me wrong. Film, television and theatre has its place. We a...