Are we alone in finding something shabby in the Oscar bosses’ decision to award honorary gongs at a separate ceremony? You probably barely registered the fact that Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Brownlow, Eli Wallach and Jean-Luc Godard were thus celebrated at a dinner in Hollywood this week.
Godard was not in attendance but, perhaps predictably, his award managed to stir up the most
sturm und drang
. Several articles speculated that, as a long-time critic of Israel, the great director might have been guilty of occasional anti-Semitism.
Richard Cohen, a Washington Postcolumnist, writing in The Daily Beast, asked readers to remember DW Griffith's racism in The Birth of a Nation.
“Just as no one in the film industry could look a black person in the eye after giving an award to Griffith, so it should be just as hard to honour Godard and look history in the eye,” Cohen wrote.
