The Oscars last Sunday threw a somewhat unexpected spotlight on the issue of sexual assault. Best Picture Spotlight is famously the true story of journalists covering the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Room is about a girl who is raped and imprisoned and ultimately escapes with her son. A Girl in the River, winner for best documentary short, is about honor killings—something that is intimately tied to the sexual control of women. And Lady Gaga’s much discussed performance was of a song about surviving rape, featured in a movie about campus rape, The Hunting Ground.
In general, when awards shows and sexual assault go together, there’s a kind of gawky, almost porny pandering. Pat ourselves on the back for giving an acting award to the rape victim—yes, I’m looking at Joanne Froggatt, who has done very fine work on Downton Abbey, but who won her Golden Globe for getting raped on the show.
But that’s not what we saw Sunday night. What we saw was respect for survivors, and the will to change.
Bookending the night were Spotlight’s two wins. To begin was Best Original Screenplay. Tom McCarthy’s acceptance speech honored survivors...
We have to make sure this never happens again.”
Closing the night was its Best Picture win, with its producer Michael Sugar speaking.
This film gave a voice to survivors, and this Oscar amplifies that voice, which we hope will become a choir that will resonate all the way to the Vatican".
I don’t think that Spotlight was this past year’s best movie or the best of the nominees (For the record, Carol and Brooklyn, respectively) but I recognize the power of that sentence. I recognize what it means to thousands of survivors.
Watching Spotlight was a weird experience for me. I’m both an experienced rape crisis counselor and a survivor of child sexual abuse. When I first read of the growing child sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, I kind of nodded my head, like, 'Oh, of course.' I wasn’t shocked, just sad. But I watched Spotlight with my spouse, child of a devoutly Catholic family, and for her, it was different. The need to resist the truth was so palpable in her family; it was as if she was one of the on-screen Bostonians, but sitting next to me.
Between the Spotlight bookends was something that moved me far more: Lady Gaga’s extraordinary performance of “’Til It Happens To You”. This emotional highlight of the Oscars was introduced by Vice President Joe Biden, who presented ItsOnUs.org in a powerful plea to the audience to “sign the pledge” to intervene. Gaga was joined onstage by fifty sexual assault survivors (mostly women—the Instagram photo shows three who seem to be men). Written on their arms were “Unbreakable” and “Not My Fault” and “Survivor” and so on.
I cried a river. Did you? Did I cry because I’m a survivor? I can’t answer that, I’ve never been anything else.
Here’s the thing. It’s not the lyrics. It’s not the story. It’s not Spotlight, or The Hunting Ground, or the Vice President. What it is: Standing up, telling the truth, speaking the pain without shame, on the biggest stage in the world.
If you are not a survivor, I assure you, you know one. More than one. Biden’s daughter cited a statistic of one in five women who will be assaulted on campus. That’s just on campus: That’s not rape or sexual assault anywhere else in the world, it’s not incest or child abuse or gropers on the subway or flashers in the park. People fight about these statistics. They call them overblown, want them dialed back. But doesn’t that imply that there’s an acceptable number?
To me, the acceptable number is zero.
Sunday night was not a night about the pain of sexual assault. It wasn’t about statistics and it wasn’t about agony. It was about surviving. It was about standing up. Biden says we can change the culture. I’ll stand up for that.
Brie Larson, who won an Oscar for playing a survivor in Room, hugged every one of the fifty survivors who stood with Gaga. Tell me this doesn’t make you all gooey inside.
Brie Larson hugged every survivor from @ladygaga’s #Oscars performance (via @chrissGardner)pic.twitter.com/zCSvYs0XCK
— Mic (@micnews) February 29, 2016
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Deborah Lipp writes about television and movies at Basket of Kisses.