Politicians kiss plenty of babies come election season.
It’s part of the process, like eating too much at the nearest town fair to pressing the flesh of potential voters.
Hollywood’s biggest stars perform a spin on political pandering this time of year. It’s Oscar season, which means the stars steer clear of movie sets to promote their latest films early and often.
Magazine profiles. Swanky dinners. Awards show galas. And some stars go as woke as possible to earn press accolades and woo potential voters.
Take Taraji P. Henson. The veteran actress co-stars in “The Color Purple,” the musical update on the classic Alice Walker story first brought to the screen in 1985 by Steven Spielberg.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
Henson could snag a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work as Shug Avery, the sexy jazz singer in the celebrated film. She’s hedging her bets by offering one woke sermon after another in recent weeks.
The actress has complained about the lack of drivers on the film’s set, the allegedly low pay she’s endured through the years, and the bug-infested trailers from TV’s “Empire” set.
Playing both the victim and the race card at a key point in the voting process is a calculated bet for Henson, a versatile star who must have known those anecdotes would go viral.
And they did.
She isn’t alone in pushing identity politics at a crucial time in Oscar season.
America Ferrera, angling for a Best Supporting Actress nod for her work in “Barbie,” has been on fire of late. She took on those who found her character in the film a walking TED Talk for third-wave feminism.
Darn right, she said.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Critics Choice Association
Her character goes on a rant mid-film about how “impossible” it is to be a woman. She’s defending the monologue as a vital addition to the culture.
“There are a lot of people who need Feminism 101, whole generations of girls who are just coming up now and who don’t have words for the culture that they’re being raised in. Also, boys and men who may have never spent any time thinking about feminist theory.”
Ferrera got to play the identity politics part of her brand while accepting the SeeHer Award at the Critics Choice Awards.
“To me, this is the best and highest use of storytelling … To affirm one another’s full humanity. To uphold the truth that we are all worthy of being seen. Black, Brown, indigenous, Asian, trans, disabled, any body type, any gender, we are all worthy of having our lives richly and authentically reflected.
Awards show stages are like batting cages for baseball sluggers. They take some swings, get their bodies loose, and, hopefully, show their coaches they’re ready for their time at the plate.
Not to be outdone, fellow Oscar hopeful Lily Gladstone picked a curious time to shake up her pronouns. The actress, a standout in Martin Scorsese’s fact-based drama “Killers of the Flower Moon,” told People magazine why she’s tweaking her personal pronouns.
“My pronoun use is partly a way of decolonizing gender for myself … when I’m in a group of ladies, I know that I’m a little bit different. When I’m in a group of men, I don’t feel like a man. I don’t feel [masculine] at all. I feel probably more feminine when I’m around other men.”
Stefanie Keenan/Getty Images for FIJI Water
Will that help or hurt her cause? That’s rhetorical given the current state of Hollywood.
One star has taken the opposite approach to snagging an Oscar statuette.
Robert Downey, Jr. is no stranger to award season. He’s been famous for decades, and when he put on that iron mask his career soared to new heights.
The Downey comedy that hit theaters mere months after his “Iron Man” breakthrough, 2008’s “Tropic Thunder,” cast him as a vain actor hungry for awards season glory.
He’ll do anything for his career, even having his fair skin altered to make it appear as if he were a black man. The character, much like the rest of the film, shredded Hollywood vanity and the stars’ willingness to do almost anything for industry adulation.
Presley Ann/Getty Images for SeeHer
The performance earned Downey his second Oscar nomination to date, but in recent years many “blackface”-style performances were censored following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Except his. (The 1986 comedy “Soul Man” also got grandfathered in, apparently.)
The actor has defended the role in the past, most notably during a 2020 chat with podcaster Joe Rogan weeks before the May 25 death of George Floyd.
The erstwhile “Iron Man” doubled down on that defense in recent days, courtesy of actor Rob Lowe’s “Literally!” podcast.
“There used to be an understanding with an audience, and I’m not saying that the audience is no longer understanding — I’m saying that things have gotten very muddied. The spirit that [Ben] Stiller directed and cast and shot ‘Tropic Thunder’ in was, essentially, as a railing against all of these tropes that are not right and [that] had been perpetuated for too long.”
Should Downey have caved to progressive wisdom and thrown one of his most famous roles under the Greyhound bus? Perhaps. It might help his Oscar cause.
Instead, he’s relying on the strength of his performance as Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” to score the industry’s most coveted award.
And, given that he’s already won similar honors from the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards, he’s probably right.
* * *
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at @HollywoodInToto.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
