Among these the silently politicized (from its inception) Oscars. One of the earliest of these marketing prizes in culture. Last night on-line I caught Spike Lee saying he's not going. Not a boycott, but why go when you are excluded. Not in the room where choices are made. The year his Do the Right Thing was made, Driving Miss Daisy took all the Oscars; his film is now studied in colleges, that pastiche forgotten.
So I thought to begin this blog by voting too:
Best films for 2015: Mr Turner, I'll Dream of You, Mr Holmes, Kilo Two Bravo, and not made this year but since I watched it for the first time, The Proposition. Favorite TV mini-series or film: Wolf Hall.
Best new books (to me): Diski's What I don't know about Animals, Apology for the woman writing; Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies; the revelation: Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Best biography: Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life.
Best play I saw produced, RSC Merchant of Venice screened at the Folger, and at Kennedy Center Sophocles' Antigone live (Juliette Binoche).
Izzy and I looked and found 2015 was a lacklustre year for opera for us, so I must stretch beyond 2015: best opera: from 2014 Met: The Death of Klinghofer (which should have gone into 2015 but was stopped by a suit from the fierce Israeli lobbies determined to carry on murdering without the slightest information getting through to the American public in mainstream media); 2015 HD-Met Les Pecheurs de Perles and HD-Covent Garden Cav & Pag.
Best art exhibit: Pathos and Power at the National Gallery (Hellenistic sculpture).
Best concert performance: my first experience of Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion at Wolf Trap this 2015 summer.
And best political commercial (stretching to this year): Oh watch it, watch the look of America, hear hear this resonant widely popular song - and vote with me for Bernie
Miss Drake