Cocaine Bear’s Oscars snub is puzzling: it’s a parable for our times

Well, the inevitable happened. Cocaine Bear walked away from this week’s Oscars without a single statue in its big lethal paw. Not to overstate matters: it was the biggest injustice since Rocky beat All the President’s Men, Network, and Taxi Driver to Best Picture in 1977.

I know everybody (everywhere) wants to talk about Everything Everywhere All At Once (aka Always Be Nice To Your Mum) but it didn’t do half the things that Cocaine Bear did this year.

“Really?” you ask. “But surely, David, you jest?”

Well, “yes, really” and “of course, I’m jesting”…

But let’s pretend for a moment that I’m serious. Did any of this year’s Best Picture nominees capture what it’s like living in a hysterical world quite like Elizabeth Banks’ B-movie masterpiece? Take this past week, for example.

We needed to be talking about China’s expansionism in light of its decision to increase military spending by 7.2% and… ROAR! Watch out! Here comes Gary Lineker crashing through the shrubbery shouting something about 1930s Germany.

Let’s discuss the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and what it says about the fragility of the global banking system… GGRRRR! It’s Lineker again, this time frothing at the snout about a tolerant nation while BBC chiefs flee in terror.

Want to talk about the government’s response to migration? ARRGH! RUN AWAY! It’s Lineker now on his hind legs and beating his chest about his freelance contract. Get back or he’ll rip your throat out!

It gets to the point where one begins to wonder how one bear can cause so much damage.

Not that any of this is Lineker’s fault. He was just doing what all celebrities do on Twitter: sniffing around on the edges of relevancy. At some point, he got a whiff of the strong stuff and it went to his head. He made a comment that was vague enough to be factually accurate but also ambiguous enough to allow his enemies to track him through the undergrowth. It was pitch-perfect to enrage both sides. Yet even then the whole panic might have settled down had the BBC not poked the proverbial bear by suspending him from Match of the Day.

Then it was a case of ROAR! Plot twist! Two more cocaine baby bears in the form of Alan Shearer and Ian Wright joined the rampage. And then Carol Vorderman got involved like some Opioid Hamster and Fiona Bruce (Quaalude Swan!) said something on Question Time about Stanley Johnson… and… TUT TUT TUT!!! What’s this? Is it the inevitable sequel, Ketamine Kangaroo? No, it’s Peter Hitchens arguing that Hitler was, in fact, a left-wing dictator. And here comes Lawrence Tobacco Fox to take up the challenge and… well… suddenly there were so many bears, kangaroos, koalas, sheep, ducks, gazelle, and racoons running amok in the forest that even David Attenborough was calling for a cull.

Yet there is a serious point behind this protracted and hopelessly overextended analogy, and it’s about the UK media which just didn’t have a great couple of weeks. You know that sign they have at zoos: “Please don’t feed the animals”? Well, that’s all that the media have been intent on doing for the past fortnight. Every newspaper front page has been obsessing over Lineker. Every B-list celebrity has been weaponised and every C-list pundit has been given the mandate to riot. This was a good week to be a Professor of European History with a speciality in Germany in the 1930s. Every single one has been asked to debate whether Hitler was a right-wing or left-wing dictator and whether “fascism” is a legitimate word when talking about modern parliamentary democracy.

And almost forgotten in all of this was the very reason people were getting aggravated in the first place. While everybody screamed about Lineker’s human rights, his freedom of speech, as well as the BBC’s role as an impartial public-funded broadcaster, very few talked about the perils of the Channel, the crisis of the small boats, or the challenge faced by this and every government in knowing what to do. Holding a government to account for its policies might just seem a bit too boring… Who wants to talk about the family struggling to live on a pittance when the airwaves are dominated by chatter about a BBC led by a former chairman of Goldman Sachs and a footballer on over a million a year? Not that the money should matter but it underlines how the whole debacle was as disconnected from the national grid as Rishi Sunak’s new swimming pool (at least, before he paid to have it all wired in).

And perhaps that’s the reason nobody wants to talk about hard news. Much easier for the media to become transfixed by celebrities, star contracts, the inefficiency at the BBC, football, wealth, social media hysteria, and a culture war split. Much easier to talk about the cocaine bear crashing through the forest than it is to even talk about the forest itself. Easy to dismiss all those broken, splintered, went-nowhere stories left forgotten in the wake of one outlandishly oversized bear of a headline.

@DavidWaywell

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