Chronic. Many have spoken of shipwreck, even collective suicide, after the Caesars ceremony which took place a week ago at the Olympia: vulgarity, navel-gazing, arrogance. Yann Barthès summed up the affair in his program “Quotidien”, on TMC: strongly that the cinemas reopen to forget what he saw. Let’s be indulgent: the pandemic has enough to drive people crazy. What happened on Friday March 12 reflects a radicalism that wins over cinema, culture and time. A radicality that is confirmed in this shift: from dreams and sharing around cinema, the ceremony has become a corporate platform.
The shift is nothing new, but it is intensifying around the notion of cultural exception. This beautiful principle, carried by the slogan “Art is not a commodity”, allowed France, better than any other country, to save its cinema, its bookstores, its creativity. But when it is brandished all the time, the cultural world can give the impression that it lives in a world apart. This is not the best way to unite the public – the audience for this edition was the worst for ten years. The danger is to weaken the links with the society, which sees less the vitality of the creation which the cultural exception allows than the consequent subsidies which are paid.
Without nuance or lightness
The distress, frustration and injustice that the culture has expressed since the closing of cinemas or theaters are legitimate. These sentiments were repeated to the Caesars. But without nuance or lightness, without a word or almost for the nursing staff or the sick, a lot to mock Minister Roselyne Bachelot. The discourse surrounding the Olympia bubble, like that underway in busy theaters, is above all disconnected from what is happening outside: variants that gallop and upset the landscape of the pandemic.
Let us admit that cultural places are not “dangerous”. Which politician would take the risk of opening cinemas or venues? And then the cultural world knows that a reopening under draconian conditions raises a thousand questions around security, economic viability, works to be programmed. From one city to another, from one venue to another, from one show to another, from one film to another, the puzzle would be tough.
The other question the Caesars raise is how the ceremony has turned into a political platform. The speech is monopolized by the margins, as on social networks. It is one-sided, in a climate radical-chic, in the leftist sense, to use Tom Wolfe’s expression, taken from a famous text from 1970. The writer described through the menu the reception given by composer Leonard Bernstein in his duplex in Park Avenue, New York, in order to raise funds for the Black Panthers, who devoured sofas presented by waitresses (white, fortunately ).
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