All quiet on the Hollywood front as the first Trump 2.0 Oscars approach

Jane Fonda’s message still resonates on the eve of the Oscars to take place this Sunday at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. The 87-year-old actress has proven to be one of the most combative activists in Hollywood, starting with the Vietnam War, and, as such, she used the stage at the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild Awards last week to get her message across. It was a call to action against Donald Trump’s assault on trans rights, migrants, federal workers etc. “This isn’t a rehearsal. We mustn’t, for a moment, kid ourselves about what is happening. This is bigtime serious, folks,” said Fonda, a lifetime achievement awardee. The speech was met with enthusiastic applause.

Still, despite the response, Hollywood has been in a trance since Trump won the U.S. presidential election last November. The industry’s elite have been virtually silent on his return to the White House, despite him being a traditional target of California progressives.

In 2025, politics has been all but absent from awards season, despite the fact that Trump himself is the focus of one of the films competing at the Oscars. A biopic of his early years in New York, The Apprentice appears in two acting categories. Sebastian Stan is up for best actor for playing Trump and Jeremy Strong, known for his role in HBO’s Succession, is up for supporting actor for playing Roy Cohn, Trump’s lawyer.

Trump made it clear last year that he did not like director Ali Abbasi’s portrayal of him in the film. “It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’” he wrote on Truth Social last October. The film includes a scene of the rape alleged by Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, in their divorce trial in 1989, an aggression she denied years later. Trump’s lawyers tried to block its U.S. release last summer.

Now The Apprentice’s chances are being harmed by a sex scandal. Ali Abbasi has been accused of spanking an anonymous actor during a Golden Globes after-party. The filmmaker apologized for what he considered a misconstrued gesture of camaraderie.

Hollywood is clearly in no mood for such behavior. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organizes the Oscars, has shifted into a gear that is above all prudent. A week after the elections, it announced that comedian Conan O’Brien would host the gala. It is the first time that the comedian and scriptwriter of programs such as Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons has been chosen for the job, following in the footsteps of the likes of Jimmy Kimmel.

Bill Kramer, the Academy’s CEO, described O’Brien as the ideal presenter. “He’s a lovely person, number one. He’s a humanist. He’s apolitical,” he told CNN when asked what makes O’Brien the perfect host. The comedian has sought advice from Kimmel, a passionate Trump critic. Kimmel declined to host the ceremony again after doing so in 2024 for the fourth time. The first time was in 2017, the year of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s monumental gaffe when they announced that the best picture winner was La La Land, when in fact it was Moonlight.

That ceremony was the first with Trump in the White House and it was loaded with political nuance. Renowned Iranian director Asghar Farhadi boycotted the gala despite winning an Oscar for best international film for The Traveler. His stance was in response to Trump’s travel ban on Muslims from seven countries. “Dividing the world into the U.S. and ‘our enemies’ categories creates fear,” his acceptance statement read. At the Dolby Theater many sported a pin in support of the American Civil Liberties Union, the organization that initiated much of the litigation against the most inhumane policies of Trump’s first presidency.

Palestinian activism

Another pin threatens to resurface on Sunday to stir controversy on the red carpet. It is the red hands Artists4Ceasefire pin signaling a call for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Singer Billie Eilish, actor Mark Ruffalo and director Ava DuVernay wore the pin at last year’s ceremony.

The Brigade, a group of 700 Jewish film and television professionals, including powerful agents and executives, has warned that this year it will not be so tolerant. It considers the image of the red hands a symbol of hatred because it has its roots in a 2000 incident in Ramallah in the West Bank that resulted in the murder and torture of two Israelis.

“We turned the other cheek when you pinned a symbol of Jewish murder to your award lapels […] Today, we will not be silent. That pin is no symbol of peace. It is the emblem of Jewish bloodshed,” the group has warned in a public statement. “Have they no shame?” The statement was published shortly after Hamas handed over the bodies of Ariel and Kafir Bibas, the youngest among those kidnapped by the fundamentalist militia on October 7, 2023.

The Artists4Ceasefire collective includes some of this year’s nominees, such as Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande; Australian Guy Pearce, nominated for best supporting actor in The Brutalist; and Strong, of The Apprentice. It remains to be seen if any of these individuals protest this year, particularly given Trump’s dream of turning Gaza into a Riviera owned by the U.S. and cleared of Palestinians.

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