Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 12

Should There Be an Oscars This Year?

The Academy Awards have long existed uncomfortably alongside politics. The ceremony’s most notable moments of public protest—Marlon Brando sending an activist for Native American rights to accept his trophy for The Godfather, or Michael Moore’s anti-George W. Bush speech in 2004—attracted as much ridicule as they did praise. The Oscars will always be the grandest industry party Hollywood throws for itself every year, making them inherently frivolous in many ways. As such, political speeches made at the event are often dismissed as a largely progressive industry preaching to the choir, or as egotistical posturing from out-of-touch stars.

For this year’s ceremony, however, something more immediate is at stake. The Oscar-winning Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, the director of The Salesman (nominated this year for Best Foreign Language Film), recently announced he would not attend this year’s ceremony. The decision was in response to President Trump’s recent executive order on immigration, which bars citizens of Iran and six other countries from entering the United States. Whether Farhadi could even attend (on some sort of waiver) was quickly put aside; as he explained in a statement, “[It] seems that the possibility of this presence is being accompanied by ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip.”

He’s not the only one missing the show: Hala Kamil, the Syrian subject of the Best Documentary Short nominee Waitani: My Homeland, also cannot enter the U.S. under the executive order, and neither can the subjects of The White Helmets, another Documentary Short nominee about the Syrian refugee crisis. Their absence, and Hollywood’s generally outspoken response to President Trump, will make for a charged Oscar ceremony, similar to last weekend’s SAG Awards, where many of the night’s presenters and winners took the opportunity to speak out against the executive order. In response, some dramatic options have been floated: a boycott, or even canceling the ceremony altogether. But these ideas overlook the fundamental purpose of the Oscars, which—despite sometimes missing the mark—recognize some of the best cinema Hollywood has to offer, including films that deserve greater exposure.

The suggestion that the Oscars be canceled this year stems in part from principle. The idea of artists being barred from attending the ceremony because of their country of origin is markedly against the global principles of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Though it’s often derided for its stodgy choices, the Best Foreign Language Film category does bring wider attention to international filmmaking. The Academy called Trump’s executive order “extremely troubling” in a statement, adding that the group “celebrates achievement in the art of filmmaking, which seeks to transcend borders and speak to audiences around the world, regardless of national, ethnic, or religious differences.”

As a result, some critics and moviegoers are suggesting the awards be scrapped, as a grander, symbolic gesture. The prospect of not holding a ceremony at all, as explored by Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff this week, is an interesting one. Though it’s often decried as a “liberal Hollywood bubble,” the Academy Awards are watched by far more than just coastal elites. Their cancelation would be noticed around the country, though perhaps it wouldn’t be as deeply felt as the loss of, say, the Super Bowl. (A general boycott by nominees would also provoke widespread discussion, but would be even harder to coordinate.)

Despite their perceived triviality, the Oscars also have the power to champion art that might otherwise be overlooked.

The last time the Academy Awards abutted a huge moment in current events were in 2003, when the 75th Academy Awards aired just days after the beginning of the Iraq War. That ceremony was a subdued one, with barely any red-carpet festivities, but it aired as scheduled despite pleas from broadcaster ABC to delay it. That alone should indicate that the chances of the Oscar telecast ever being canceled, let alone delayed, are essentially zero. The ceremony is, after all, a crucial moneymaker for the Academy, which uses the revenue to pursue its other activities, such as film restoration and sponsoring fellowships for young writers and directors.

It’s unlikely that a hypothetical total shutdown would even have the intended effect of drawing attention to protests over the executive order. The Oscars are, after all, first and foremost a celebration of art—even if that art is more often than not the middlebrow fare favored by a consensus vote of industry luminaries. The widely viewed awards ceremony provides a highly visible platform for less commercial work, taking care to highlight each of the year’s Best Picture nominees. The box-office impact of that attention is undeniable: Oscar-nominated films remain in theaters twice as long and can boost their take by several million dollars. La La Land, a throwback musical of no particular political import, is tipped to be the night’s biggest winner, but films like Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Loving, Fences, and Lion might not have otherwise received nationwide releases without awards attention.

There are, of course, downsides that come with that audience. If La La Land dominates, as many suspect it will, the Oscars will seem more frivolous than ever, overlooking weightier cinematic efforts for a dreamy musical about show business in the opening months of the Trump presidency. Additionally, some of the nominees have attracted negative press because of incidents in their past—like the sexual-harassment allegations against the Best Actor nominee Casey Affleck, or the Best Director nominee Mel Gibson’s history of battery and anti-Semitic ranting. (Gibson’s publicity work for his film Hacksaw Ridge has doubled as a sort of apology tour that has largely lacked for a real accounting of his past behavior, which he has referred to as a “rough patch.”)

There is no denying that the Oscars sometimes shine a spotlight on films, and filmmakers, that many would deem objectionable. But despite their perceived triviality and occasional misguidedness, the Academy Awards also have the power to champion art that might otherwise be overlooked. This influence makes the show a platform that can’t be ignored this month, no matter who will be in attendance. Even if no winner gives a charged speech, the Oscars are always an inherently political event based simply because of the works they honor. This is certainly not the year for the Academy to ignore that responsibility.

Is the Refugee Deal With Australia ‘Dumb’?

Donald Trump’s reportedly tense conversation on Saturday about refugees with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is indicative of just how much the president wants to limit who’s allowed into the U.S.

At issue are the 1,250 refugees from Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Vietnam, and other countries that the Obama administration committed to accepting from an offshore Australian detention center after last November’s presidential election. That deal came two months after Turnbull agreed to help the U.S. resettle refugees fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who are in a processing center in Costa Rica. At the time, Australian officials rejected the idea that these Central American refugees would be swapped for those being detained in the offshore detention centers. “There will not be a people swap,” Scott Ryan, a special minister of state, said at the time.

When asked last November about whether the incoming Trump administration would maintain that commitment to accept the refugees, Turnbull was circumspect: “We deal with one administration at a time,” he said.

Indeed, he may have had reason to be cautious: Trump’s executive order last week suspended, among other categories of people, the U.S. refugee intake for 120 days, and barred all Syrian refugees indefinitely. The goal, Trump said, was to keep the homeland safe. Refugee advocates, human-rights groups, and even U.S. government officials, have criticized the order. But Australia’s refugee policy has long been the focus of similar criticism.

Although Australia accepted 13,756 refugees in 2014-15, the period for which the most recent data are available, the country’s policy of offshore-detention centers for asylum-seekers who arrive by boat has been widely criticized. Under a longstanding policy, Australia maintained two offshore facilities—one in Nauru and one in Manus, located in Papua New Guinea. The numbers themselves are relatively small—about 400 in Nauru and more than 800 in Manus, according to the most recent data—but the reportedly poor conditions at the centers, and the time that asylum-seekers spend there, coupled with deaths and reports of sexual abuse, have made them an easy target for criticism. Indeed, Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court apparently agreed, ordering the government in April 2016 to close the Manus Island center, calling the facility a violation of the migrants’ personal liberties.

My colleague J. Weston Phippen, who wrote last year about the Australian policy here, pointed out:

To be sure, it’s not that Australia has an issue with refugees––in fact, it has agreed to resettle 12,000 Syrians, atop the refugees it typically takes through its Humanitarian Programme. It granted 13,800 refugee visas between 2013 and 2014, and 20,000 between 2012 and 2013.

But the arrivals by sea seem to prompt anger. One reason for this could be that migrants and refugees who try to reach Australia by sea are, in fact, coming illegally. Those that are being resettled through its Humanitarian Programme, meanwhile, are registered refugees being accepted under Australia’s international obligations. The two main parties also contend that its policies deter human-smuggling.  

It’s these offshore detainees—about 1,200 of them—who would be coming to the U.S. under the onetime deal struck last November, terms of which were published by the Guardian and others. Trump, who spoke to Turnbull last Friday, reportedly called it the “worst deal ever,” according to The Washington Post—though Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, on Thursday called the conversation “cordial,” but said the president was “unbelievably disappointed in the previous administration’s deal.”

Trump, the Post said, reportedly accused Turnbull of seeking to export the “next Boston bombers”—a reference to the Tsarnaev brothers whose parents came to the U.S. from Russia on a tourist visa in 2002, and applied for, and received, political asylum—and told the Australian leader that Trump was “going to get killed” politically, apparently because the refugee intake would run counter to his campaign pledges of keeping the homeland safe from those who wish to enter the U.S. posing as refugees and attacking the homeland.

After news reports of the call emerged on Wednesday, Trump took to Twitter and cast doubts on whether the U.S. would keep its word.

Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 2, 2017

The Australian view of the call, as well as that of Spicer’s was different.  

Turnbull said Thursday: “He is saying that this is not a deal he would have made, but the question is will he honor that commitment? He has already given it.” Spicer, speaking Tuesday, said: “Those people—part of the deal is that they have to be vetted in the same manner that we’re doing now.”

“Extreme vetting” is what Trump has said all potential refugees to the U.S. should go through. The 120-day ban on refugees would allow the Trump administration to put in place new checks on who is allowed in. The top sources of refugees to the U.S. are Congolese, Somali, Burmese, Iraqi, and Syrian. They already undergo more rigorous screening than any other category of visitor to the U.S., often waiting as long as two years after they apply to be resettled in the country to make it to the United States.

The last group of refugees who were in transit when Trump announced the ban last week was due to arrive in the U.S. on Thursday; the refugees excluded citizens of seven Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. Those refugees, numbering in the tens of thousands, who had been previously cleared for arrival in the U.S. will likely have to restart their applications once the ban has expired, said Linda Hartke, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

Hartke pushed back at the idea that the U.S. must control the refugees it allows in in order to put “America first.”

“This is a big, generous, free, strong, great country, and part of its strength has been the willingness and, in fact, the desire, to welcome newcomers to this country,” she said. “If we turned the dial back and said ‘Americans First,’ this would be a thinly populated nation. The reality is the newcomer 20 years ago is the American today.”

Superior Donuts Tries to Update an Old Classic

It’s not overstating things to say that Superior Donuts is definitively the only Tracy Letts play that could ever be reworked as a multi-camera sitcom. (Although it’s fun to fantasize about what, say, Marti Noxon or Lisa Hanawalt might do with August: Osage County). When it premiered in 2008, the same year Letts won a Pulitzer and a Tony for August, Superior Donuts was something of a surprise: a gentle, odd-couple drama about a crunchy old Chicagoan running his family-founded doughnut store and the young black employee he hires. Multiple critics have interpreted the play as a love letter to the Norman Lear comedies of the 1970s. So CBS’s new half-hour sitcom feels like an organic development, if not an entirely fresh one.

Superior Donuts, which airs its first episode in a special preview Thursday night before settling into a regular Monday-night timeslot, comes on the heels of One Day at a Time, Netflix’s widely praised update of a Lear comedy that ran from 1975 to 1984. And like that show, Superior Donuts seems to be trying to prove that there’s life in the format yet. Judd Hirsch plays Arthur Przybyszewski, kind-hearted curmudgeon and purveyor of decidedly untrendy confections (his signature product is, tellingly, an “old-fashioned”). Jermaine Fowler, an up-and-coming comedian, is Franco Wicks, an artist and sometime poet who begs Arthur for a job, then commits to dragging the shop into the modern era. Although both performers do admirable work fleshing out their hackneyed characters, they’re limited by a conceit that thinks kale smoothies, Starbucks beverages, and occasionally racial stereotypes are punchlines.

And yet there’s potential here, if the show could relax on the gentrification jokes and maybe commit to finding more depth in its characters, who in the first three episodes are little more than archetypes. Hirsch’s Arthur is introduced as a lonely Boomer befuddled by modernity and rooted in tradition (“My parents didn’t smuggle me out of communist Poland in the hold of a cargo ship so 65 years later I could sell you a damn cronut,” he snaps at an oblivious hipster.) Fowler’s Franco, by contrast, is an energetic, social-media savvy, endlessly creative millennial whose instant bond with Arthur is made believable by the pair’s genuine chemistry. A workplace comedy of sorts, Superior Donuts is set almost entirely in the shop itself, where a cast of characters including a wisecracking cop (Katey Sagal), her bumbling rookie (Darien Sills-Evans), an Arab American businessman (Maz Jobrani), a privileged grad student (Anna Baryshnikov), and a wacky jack-of-all-trades (David Koechner) hang out.

Between the neighborhood-haven-for-oddballs vibe and its comedy of errors, the show feels most akin to Cheers (Superior Donuts’s first few episodes were directed by James Burrows, who co-created the long-running NBC drama). But its sense of its characters is much less fully formed, and its sharper jabs land anywhere on a spectrum between actually funny and ill-advised. Jobrani’s Fawz, who runs a dry-cleaning store next door and invests in real estate, makes several glib jokes about mustard-gas attacks on his village back home that seem bizarrely off-key. Sagal’s Officer Randy presents opportunities for some sharp mentions of police brutality, but the show misguidedly treats them as punchlines rather than very real issues. Plus, the show’s writers teeter perpetually on the brink of running out of story ideas, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series. There are only so many zany concoctions Franco can appall Arthur with—his Sriracha doughnut is obviously an Instagram hit—and the dramatic tension in Arthur’s inner conflict over whether to sell his shop is milked dry by the second episode.

But there are moments of ingenuity, like Koechner’s character, a newfound devotee of the gig economy, who does everything from walking dogs to selling bodily fluids to get by. The undeniable highlight of the show is Fowler, who gives Franco a zany intelligence and a quick wit that jibes pleasingly with Arthur’s Eeyorish affect. Franco, right now, is the lone leading character of color in CBS’s comedy lineup, and it would behoove the network to hire writers who can do him and Fowler’s performance justice. It’s worth nothing that One Day at a Time works so well in part because of its Cuban American executive producer, Gloria Calderón Kellett, and in part because it actually engages with issues like PTSD and poverty rather than just mining them for laughs. But if Superior Donuts can recognize its strengths and bolster its ambitions, it could evolve into something like Franco’s hot sauce spiked-creation: paying homage to its humble roots while giving them a modern kick.

Beyoncé's High-Art Pregnancy Photo

As a celebrity, Beyoncé has a personal life that can’t be fully personal; whether she consents or not, it is content for the public’s consumption. As a particularly brilliant celebrity, Beyoncé has leaned into this fact in a way that bolsters her mystique while maintaining privacy. If biographical tidbits are bound to be as scrutinized as her actual art is, she seems to say, then such tidbits should be as meticulously presented as her art is. In fact, they should actually be art.

Her Wednesday announcement that she’s pregnant with twins was fated to break the internet however it was delivered. Beyoncé and Jay Z’s first child, Blue Ivy, is an adorable cultural icon at age 5, the subject of both memes and conspiracy theories demonstrating the obsession that greets any offspring of two extremely famous people. The worshipful reverence for Beyoncé among her fans, combined with the rarity (and mythological significance!) of twins, makes the announcement of two more children particularly chatter-causing.

She could have made like lots of stars and sold her info to a tabloid. She could have made like the Beyoncé of 2011 and revealed her baby bump at the end of an awards-show performance. Instead, she released a self portrait that, within hours, became the most-liked Instagram post ever.

We would like to share our love and happiness. We have been blessed two times over. We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two, and we thank you for your well wishes. - The Carters

A photo posted by Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Feb 1, 2017 at 10:39am PST

What do you see when you look at the image of her seated in front of a colorful wreath, on a bed of ivy, wearing a bra and a veil? My first thoughts were of the Virgin Mary—Our Lady of Guadalupe, Renaissance Madonnas. But others viewers have mentioned Dutch flower paintings, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt’s Hope, II. There are more modern references: Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, a family portrait taken by a mall photo studio in 1998. It’s recent and yet classical. Themes about motherhood and blooming life and femininity are right on the surface. The colors, the composition, and the content make it hard to look away.

Artnews reports that the image was taken by Awol Erizku, a conceptual artist working in New York and Los Angeles. A recent Fader profile of him spotlights his connections to the pop-music world and says that he tries to “distill notions of black beauty and ‘update’ key canonical and contemporary works in Western art.” That certainly seems to be what’s going on with Beyoncé’s pregnancy image. Photos later posted on the singer’s personal website suggests that she tried a variety of approaches for her announcement—and then, like a curator or a magazine editor, chose the most striking shot.

In this, Beyoncé is continuing in her long dialogue with the high-art world. The likes of Warsan Shire’s poetry and Pipilotti Rist’s video works and Victorian painters have all been referenced on her magpie-like visual albums, a fact that sometimes brings accusations of plagiarism but more often demonstrates her knack for collage, reinvention, and synthesis of disparate influences. The resulting blend of familiarity and newness leads to what my colleague Derek Thompson calls “the aesthetic aha,” essential to both indelible art and radio hits.

The pregnancy announcement also offers another example from her of how a celebrity can effectively manage the inevitable commodification of her own image and life. Rather than fight a war with the media over rumors about her super-famous marriage, she foregrounds that marriage and those rumors in her work. For example, last year’s Lemonade shocked the world and sold big in part because it seemed to admit Jay Z had cheated on her. At the same time, she has improbably avoided personal overexposure by letting her occasional art statements double as press releases and otherwise only giving interviews in the most controlled circumstances. From a politician this might be an odious, Orwellian tactic; from an artist trying to shield a young child from the spotlight’s glare, it just seems smart.

There’s a traditionalism and social message to her ongoing depiction of domestic beauty and bliss.

She is also rewriting the rules around public pregnancy, an extremely fraught part of the female-celebrity-gossip-media economy. To click through a slideshow of magazine covers depicting famous pregnancies is to note how Beyoncé preempted the usual visual barrage of tabloid headlines. To click through a slideshow of “creative” celebrity pregnancy announcement is to realize what a higher level Beyoncé is playing on compared to most. Some stars slap an Instagram filter on their tummy; others post a cute visual metaphor of baby boots next to adult boots. Beyoncé has orchestrated something that could hang at a gallery.

And why not? Some might call it crass, narcissistic, or exploitative to make your womb’s contents into a cultural event, but there’s a traditionalism and social message to her ongoing depiction of domestic beauty and bliss. Moreover, art history is littered with images of motherhood and fertility. It makes sense that one of our reigning modern artists—pop artist, but still artist—would contribute to the canon.

Which Lady Gaga Will We Get at the Super Bowl?

The Super Bowl halftime show might be the ultimate modern pop-music event: a swirl of commerce, image, politics, and art that represents one of the few times Americans of all cultural bubbles train their eyes on the same stage. As such, it has reliably minted some of the most memorable pop-culture moments of our time. Frivolous memes, like Katy Perry’s Left Shark or Bruce Springsteen’s crotch-slide, can come out of it. So can real provocation, as with Beyonce’s Black Panthers formation or M.I.A.’s middle finger.

This year’s performer, Lady Gaga, would seem born for such a stage. Her career is a monument to spectacle and statement-making, and she makes no apologies about living for the applause. “I’ve been planning this since I was 4,” Gaga said in a promo for Sunday’s halftime show. “So I know exactly what I’m going to do.” Reports indicate she will perform some sort of stunt involving the roof of Houston’s NRG Stadium. Bettors are speculating about what color her hair will be and how many outfits she will wear. But two factors may determine the exact kind of statement she makes: her own career trajectory, and Donald Trump.

In the early years of Gaga’s career, her chart-conquering choruses were matched in memorableness by meat dresses and prosthetic cheekbones and a general deluge of meta-commentary about fame. But after the lukewarm reception to her hyperactive 2013 effort Artpop, the queen of artifice went on an authenticity kick by duetting with Tony Bennett, singing The Sound of Music, and dabbling with rock and country in the admirable but undercooked Joanne. Commercially, she waned. But for some more traditionalist types, her credibility rose.

All of which makes this moment a surprisingly fertile one for a Lady Gaga Super Bowl show. If she’d gotten the gig in 2011, we’d have been guaranteed an explosion of glitter and gruesomeness that would have led some viewers to decry the depravity of modern society and others to coronate Gaga a long-awaited messiah who demonstrates that bold art can also be popular. But now there is more suspense about what direction she’ll go and the prospect of her comeback as a hitmaker. There’s also the tantalizing possibility of synthesis—a reconciliation of her tasteful-gowns phase with the earlier Fame Monster. She could hint at a new pop center featuring “real instruments” and folk-singer sincerity but also outrageousness and raver sounds and mania.

Given Gaga’s history, it’d be a surprise if there’s no larger political message to her performance at all.

Right now, though, all national media spectacles are necessarily tinged by the one unfolding in the White House. Gaga has been as anti-Trump as any celebrity has been, not only rallying for Hillary Clinton but also becoming the mascot for heartbroken celebrity liberals with her statements in the days after the election (Breitbart’s commenters had a lot of fun with her protest on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower). The backlash to Janet Jackson, M.I.A., and Beyonce in previous years shows the risk involved in offending any particular demographic at the Super Bowl. But the NFL has denied rumors that Gaga is contractually forbidden from political speech on Sunday, and given her history of championing causes—anti-bullying, LGBT rights, Hillary Clinton—it’d be a surprise if there’s no larger message to her performance at all.

On a spectrum of making like Madonna at the at the Women’s March by talking about blowing up the White House to making like Madonna at the Super Bowl by spelling out “WORLD PEACE,” the safe money is probably on Gaga picking a less specific political statement. She might simply put extra effort into “Born This Way,” with its celebration of “gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life” and “black, white or beige, Chola- or orient-made.” She might hire some talented refugees to play in her band. She might dedicate “Poker Face” to Kellyanne Conway, or rename one of her songs “Don’t Do What You Want With My Body.”

But maybe she’ll just demonstrate the power of the traits that have underlain all of Gaga’s transformations over the years: sincerity, engagement, hope. For a glimpse of what that might look like, revisit her underrated and bonkers rendition of the national anthem at last year’s Super Bowl. With her beating her chest and widening her eyes while wearing bejeweled red, white, and blue, it was a classically Gaga display in that it was so earnest as to seem subversive. It also felt like the ongoing Gaga dialectic resolving itself with a costumed liberal freak embracing tradition and patriotism. Have you ever felt about the country the way Gaga did in this gif? The question she might imply on Sunday: Has Trump?

How Political Will the 2017 Super Bowl Ads Be?

Super Bowl ads, for all their running dachshunds and anthropomorphic foodstuffs and movie stars past their prime, often offer surprising insight into the state of the American psyche. 2016’s ads, with their Seth Rogen/Amy Schumer political campaigns and their opioid-induced constipation meds, took a fairly sharp look at the issues dominating the cultural landscape, while 2015’s largely offered a portrait of masculinity under siege by hunger and tiny cars and erectile dysfunction.

So the question for 2017 is, how political will this year’s Super Bowl ads be? With the country still largely divided over the efficacy and legitimacy of President Donald Trump, will brands lean in to the conflict or try their utmost to avoid it? As some early reveals have indicated, it’s tricky territory to navigate, with even the blandest of cultural icons (Tom Brady, avocados) falling into the divide.

The earliest signal comes from Budweiser, whose minute-long ad, “Born the Hard Way,” debuted early. After a weekend of protests regarding President Trump’s ban on refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, the spot is undeniably timely, focusing on a German immigrant who makes it to America. Despite hazardous voyages and furious crowds who shout, “You’re not wanted here,” the young man arrives in St. Louis, where, it turns out, he ends up becoming one half of the duo that created Budweiser.

The message is indisputable: Immigrants have long formed the fabric of American culture, even birthing the most iconically American beer that exists today. “Adolphus Busch made an incredible journey to this country, and that’s really what this is about. It’s about his vision, his dream, everything that he does to achieve that,” Ricardo Marques, the vice president for Budweiser in the U.S., told Adweek. “Even though it happened in the 1850s, it’s a story that is super relevant today.” But he denied that the ad was deliberately drawing parallels with topical events, stating, “There’s really no correlation with anything else that’s happening in the country.”

Predictably, though, the spot has been interpreted as offering a clear-cut message. “Budweiser Debuts Pro-Immigration Super Bowl Ad,” the right-wing news site Breitbart reported, while The AV Club announced, “Budweiser to ruin red-state Super Bowl parties with pro-immigration ad.” It seems, with this particular campaign, that Budweiser is working on multiple fronts: On the one hand, it can signal its virtue winkingly to liberal consumers, while assuring conservatives that it’s simply telling its own origin story, which happens to embody the archetypal American dream.

By no means is this kind of complex maneuvering going to be anomalous over the next four years. As Nato Thompson, the author of Culture as Weapon told me last week, “I think that under Trump we’re going to be in for a lot more of brands for social justice, because, I suspect, a lot of people are going to be unhappy with him, even if they supported him ... a lot of companies will be able to position themselves as being against the current system, when really in fact they’re not against it at all.”

There are, of course, brands that stay out of the fray altogether, like Skittles, whose new Super Bowl ad plays on the premise that everyone likes candy, regardless of generation. And there are those that are comfortable enough with their consumer base to take a firm posture, like Kia, whose new ad featuring Melissa McCarthy focuses on the perils of being a devoted eco-warrior.

But there are also companies that get dragged into the debate whether they want to or not. Avocados From Mexico’s new ad, timed to coincide with the biggest night of the year for the fruit, has been inadvertently politicized by President Trump’s suggested tariff on Mexican imports to pay for a border wall. And Intel’s ad, featuring Tom Brady at home, attempts to sell the superstar athlete as an everyman (eating breakfast, brushing his teeth, going to the bathroom), but coincides with recent sportswriters stating that Brady no longer gets a pass on his longtime friendship with Trump.

In the end, only time will tell if Budweiser’s pointed ad gets a pass from Trump fans. As recent months have shown, when it comes to the 45th president, not even the most established brands—Yuengling, New Balance—can avoid controversy.

Donald Trump's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Does Donald Trump actually know who Frederick Douglass was? The president mentioned the great abolitionist, former slave, and suffrage campaigner during a Black History Month event Wednesday morning, but there’s little to indicate that Trump knows anything about his subject, based on the rambling, vacuous commentary he offered:

“I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.” Within moments, he was off-topic, talking about some of his favorite subjects: CNN, himself, and his feud with CNN.

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My President Was Black

Trump’s comments about King were less transparently empty but maybe even stranger. “Last month we celebrated the life Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history,” Trump said, employing a favorite meaningless adjective. But this wasn’t really about King. It was about Trump: “You read all about Martin Luther King when somebody said I took a statue out of my office. And it turned out that that was fake news. The statue is cherished. It’s one of the favorite things—and we have some good ones. We have Lincoln, and we have Jefferson, and we have Dr. Martin Luther King.”

Even beyond the strange aside about Douglass and the digression from King, Trump’s comments point to the superficiality of his engagement with African American culture. He named perhaps the four most famous figures in black history with no meaningful elaboration. (Trump was reading from a sheet, but at least he was able to name Tubman, unlike his vanquished rival Gary Johnson.)

In a way, Trump isn’t totally wrong about Douglass “getting recognized more and more,” though one is left to scratch one’s head at where precisely he noticed that. Douglass’s heyday of influence was in the mid to late 19th century, but he may be better known than ever among the broadest swath of the American public thanks to his ascension into the Pantheon of black history figures taught in schools since the United States established Black History Month in 1976.

It is a real and praiseworthy accomplishment for Douglass’s name to keep spreading. But the frequent, and often valid, critique of Black History Month is that it encourages a tokenist approach to African American culture, leading everyone from national leaders to elementary-school teachers to recite a catechism of well-known figures, producing both shallow engagement and privileging a passé Great Man (and Woman) theory of history. Hardly any politician is immune to this; faced with the necessity of holding an event to mark the month, they too recite the list. But even by that standard, Trump’s comments are laughably vacuous.

George W. Bush, for example, recalled in 2002 how February was “the month in which Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born, two men, very different, who together ended slavery.” Bill Clinton exhorted audiences to visit Douglass’s home in Washington’s Anacostia neighborhood, at a time when that was well-off the beaten tourist path. George H.W. Bush admired Jacob Lawrence’s depiction of Douglass. Ronald Reagan repeatedly quoted Douglass in his own remarks, and was fond of boasting that Douglass was a fellow Republican.

The gulf between Trump and his predecessors is particularly poignant, of course, in the wake of the presidency of Barack Obama, a man who by virtue of his own skin color never had to resort to the detached tributes of white presidents. When the museum Trump cited opened, Obama spoke, saying as only he could have:

Yes, African Americans have felt the cold weight of shackles and the stinging lash of the field whip. But we've also dared to run north and sing songs from Harriet Tubman's hymnal. We've buttoned up our Union Blues to join the fight for our freedom. We've railed against injustice for decade upon decade, a lifetime of struggle and progress and enlightenment that we see etched in Frederick Douglass's mighty, leonine gaze.

Trump, by contrast, has long spoken of the black community in fundamentally instrumental terms, from his business career to his political one. African Americans were a monolithic demographic to be won or lost, depending on the occasion. The young real-estate developer first made headlines when the Trump Organization was accused of working to keep blacks out of its real-estate developments; the company eventually settled with the Justice Department without admitting guilt. The question in that case was not the personal prejudices (absent or present) of Trump and his father Fred. Instead, the company appeared to have decided that blacks were bad for business and would drive out white tenants, so the Trumps allegedly opted to keep them out.

During the campaign, Trump viewed black voters with similarly cool detachment. He spoke about blacks and other minorities in conspicuously distancing terms, as “they” and “them.” His leading black surrogates included Omarosa, most famous for appearing on The Apprentice with Trump, and Don King, a clownish and past-his-prime boxing promoter notable for killing two men; Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, called on LeBron James, Beyonce, and Obama. When Trump spotted a black man at a rally in California, he called out, “Oh, look at my African American over here. Look at him. Are you the greatest?”

When Trump decided announced a black-voter outreach operation, he mostly delivered his message to overwhelmingly white audiences in overwhelmingly white locales, and employed a series of racist and outdated stereotypes about inner-city crime, poverty, and lack of education, in what he appeared to believe represented benign patronization. Meanwhile, his own aides told reporters their political goal was to suppress black votes by encouraging African Americans to sit the election out.

In the end, Trump won 8 percent of the black vote, according to exit polling, besting Mitt Romney’s showing against Barack Obama but falling well short of the recent GOP high-water mark of 17 percent in 1976 (to say nothing of his prediction that he’d win 95 percent of African Americans).

Trump continues to indicate he holds a view of black Americans that is instrumental, as he showed on Wednesday at his Black History Month event. “If you remember, I wasn’t going to do well with the African American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting, I won’t get into details, but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who have run in the past years,” he said, somewhat misleadingly. “And now we’re going to take that to new levels.” February might be Black History Month, but every month is Trump History Month.

The Daily Show Lives On (on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert)

On Tuesday, just after President Donald Trump announced that Judge Neil Gorsuch would be his nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, Jon Stewart made an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. The segment was, all in all, just like old times. Stewart emerged, at the desk of his old colleague from The Daily Show, wearing a faux animal pelt perched awkwardly on his head; he sported a clip-on red tie of comic length. (“I thought this is how men dress now,” Stewart explained of the accessory.) Stewart proceeded to procure a leather-bound folder from behind Colbert’s desk, announcing that he had, exclusively, discovered the new president’s next round of executive orders.

Stewart proceeded to read the order to Colbert’s cheering audience, with clownish melodrama. (Number one: The United States will import our border wall with Mexico from China. Number three: “Every instinct and fiber of my pathological self-regard calls me to abuse of power. I want—no, deserve—not just your respect, but your adoration.”) In the process, Stewart made jokes about the president’s pronunciation of “China.” He took every opportunity to declare, with Trumpian bravado, “It’s the best.”

The appearance was zany. It was slapstick. It was vaguely juvenile. And it had, underneath it all, an earnest and urgent message to share.

Which is to say that it was the stuff of the old, Stewart-hosted Daily Show—on, as it happens, CBS. As The Daily Show itself becomes just a little more subtle, and a little less wacky, in its comedy, it’s been Colbert, often, who has kept the DNA of the Stewart-hosted version of the show alive … on late-night network TV. As the Republican presidential primary was, last year, in full swing, Colbert mocked its bustling field of candidates with a vaguely Vaudevillian take on The Hunger Games: the “Hungry for Power Games.” Riffing on that classic Samantha Bee sketch for The Daily Show, Colbert mocked 2016’s undecided voters with the help of a MAGA-cap-wearing Rob Lowe. Colbert referred to Rudy Giuliani, after the former New York mayor accused Hillary Clinton of having an undisclosed illness, as “a man with his head up his own ass.”

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Stephen Colbert Finds His Political Gear

Impudence, imprudence, lols: On his show, Colbert has, often, been doing the stuff of basic cable, but on a network. But what’s most Daily Show-esque about the Late Show in the series’ latest incarnation—whether it features Colbert riffing or Stewart guesting or a slapstick political segment—isn’t necessarily the assorted antics of the people onstage. It’s their audiences. One of the Daily Showiest things about the old Daily Show was the sense of community it fostered: communal indignation, communal outrage, communal identity. And the lols Colbert provokes, too, suggest that kind of in-group quality: His jokes are pitched to a knowing crowd, and a partisan crowd. A crowd that will find Rudy Giuliani being referred to as “a man with his head up his own ass”—which is not so much a joke as a fairly straightforward insult—laugh-out-loud funny.

That’s on the one hand neither new or surprising; late-night comedy is becoming steadily politicized, along with so many other elements of current pop culture. Still, though, the shift is remarkable. It used to be that late-night comedy aspired in its politics, to the extent that it aspired to any kind of politics at all, to a certain bigness and broadness. It went out of its way to be non-partisan. Its comic-hosts mocked politicians, certainly, but they generally did so with equal-opportunity irreverence. Carson mocked Carter as readily as he teased Reagan. Letterman had as much fun at the expense of George W. Bush as he did at the expense of Barack Obama (and more still at the expense of Bill Clinton). So did Jay Leno.

Jimmy Fallon, last year, was roundly criticized for his hair-rumplingly friendly treatment of then-candidate Trump; Fallon was operating, however, in the old tradition of network late-night TV: He was offering up a teasing of his guest that was light and frothy and, above all, equal-opportunity.  

One of the Daily Showiest things about the old Daily Show was the sense of community it fostered: shared outrage, shared identity.

Equal-opportunity, however, is a rarer and rarer thing in late-night comedy, which is becoming, like so much else in pop culture, steadily more political in its outlook. The late-night show, of course, takes on the character of its host; The Tonight Show under Fallon has the aw-shucks air of the omni-talented comedian; Jimmy Kimmel Live! has adopted, overall, the impish quality of its eponymous prankster; Late Night with Seth Meyers offers a sharply satiric take on the day’s news and entertainments. And hosts are finding it, it seems, increasingly difficult to eschew partisan politics, to place their shows within a tent that is even bigger than the big one. They’re often rejecting the nonpartisan fun-poking of the past for more substantial, and opinionated, fare. Meyers grilled Kellyanne Conway. Trevor Noah, on the newly sober(er) version of The Daily Show, debated Tomi Lahren. Samantha Bee is weaving political outrage into nearly every joke she makes on Full Frontal. John Oliver has doubled as an activist.

And Stephen Colbert, who shed his old Comedy Central persona when he moved to CBS, is not only reviving that character when the occasion warrants; he’s also inviting Jon Stewart to his couch to mock—and bemoan—President Trump. Stewart referred to the nation’s new chief executive as “Donald J. Lincoln Kennedy Trump the Third.” He proclaimed that, per the nation’s new chief executive, the United States has a new official language: “bull[bleep].” Stewart mixed, in classic Daily Show style, satire and slapstick. But he also, in classic Daily Show style, had a civic message to share. “It is going to take,” Stewart, as the president, intoned, “relentless stamina, vigilance, and every institutional check and balance this great country can muster to keep me, Donald J. Trump, from going full Palpatine.”  

At that point, Stewart, as “Trump,” turned away from Colbert to face the Late Show camera—and the show’s audience, in the studio and beyond. “No one action will be adequate,” Stewart said, his expression grave. “All actions will be necessary. And if we do not allow Donald Trump to exhaust our fight, and somehow come through this presidency calamity-less and constitutionally partially intact, then I, Donald J. Trump, will have demonstrated the greatness of America—just not the way I thought I was gonna.” The crowd broke into applause. They were cheering Stewart’s satire, sure; they were also cheering, however, the political convictions that underscored the joke. As Stewart had told them earlier, after they laughed at the animal pelt he had strapped onto his head: “People! This nation is in crisis! This is serious.”

Nominated for an Oscar, Barred From America

While Hollywood has been loudly critical of Donald Trump since the early days of his presidential campaign, that relationship has only grown more adversarial with the former reality-TV star’s assumption of office last month. As my colleague David Sims noted Monday, the current awards season has seen many filmmakers, performers, and others in the industry calling out Trump, whether for his behavior toward women and minorities or for moving ahead with campaign promises to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico or to keep Muslims out of the country for professed national-security reasons.

Then, on January 27 came a confusing and messily enacted executive order that, in part, temporarily bars citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S. It quickly emerged that the order would likely mean that at least one important face would be missing from this year’s Oscars: the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose film The Salesman is nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film award. A few days later, Farhadi confirmed to The New York Times that he wouldn’t be attending:

I neither had the intention to not attend nor did I want to boycott the event as a show of objection, for I know that many in the American film industry and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are opposed to the fanaticism and extremism which are today taking place more than ever ... However, it now seems that the possibility of this presence is being accompanied by ifs and buts which are in no way acceptable to me even if exceptions were to be made for my trip.

In addition to celebrities condemning the executive order, which also bars refugees, the film industry has expressed its support for Farhadi. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences called the travel ban “extremely troubling,” and on Tuesday, the American Film Institute praised Farhadi’s work while saying, “We believe any form of censorship—including the restriction of travel—to be against all values we cherish as a community of storytellers.” Immediately after the order was announced, one of The Salesman’s stars, Taraneh Alidoosti, said she would be boycotting the ceremony and called Trump’s move “racist.” Others have reportedly also been prevented from attending.

The absence of Farhadi and Alidoosti at this year’s Oscars is the result of a unique dovetailing of events: the timing of Trump’s executive order ahead of the Oscars on February 26, and the fact that both the order and the Academy Awards happened to highlight Iran. Iran is one of just a handful of majority-Muslim nations to have a movie win an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. (The first Iranian film to nab the award was 2011’s A Separation—also directed by Farhadi.) As a result, Hollywood is being forced to reckon with Trump’s executive order in a very concrete, albeit specific, way.

To get a better sense of the cultural and geopolitical context of Farhadi’s recognition by the Oscars and his eventual boycott, I spoke with Hamid Naficy, a professor at Northwestern University’s School of Communication who has written several books on Iranian cinema and media. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Lenika Cruz: What sorts of issues do you think Farhadi’s absence brings to light?

Hamid Naficy: What’s interesting here is the tactic that Farhadi and The Salesman actress, Taraneh Alidoosti, chose. In some ways, you could say that if they had come, or if they had been willing to come to the Oscars, they would have had a fantastic platform, and whatever they would say in opposition to Trump’s executive order would get a lot of publicity. On the other hand, that platform would depend on them winning an award—like Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes. The boycott is probably a better strategy, because at least this way they will get some press.

Cruz: Can you describe the cultural exchange between the U.S. and Iran in recent years, and how that relationship might change moving forward?

Naficy: It’s important to realize there are different partners in this cultural relationship between the U.S. and Iran. The players as I see it are: the U.S. government and the U.S. commercial media; the Iranian government and its media; the Iranian internal public and dissidents and their media; and lastly, the Iranian diasporic population and their media.

Look at the situation in Iran since the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, when the Iranians took 50 American diplomats in their own embassy in Tehran hostage. There hasn’t been any diplomatic relationship between the two countries for over 30-something years. Americans have never forgotten, and Iranians have never apologized. This hostage crisis is like a thorn in the side—any time politicians in the U.S. talk about enemies, Iran comes up.

It’s in that context that you have this very complicated diplomatic, media, and cultural dance between Iran and the U.S. As part of this anti-American cultural diplomacy in Iran, American films were banned in the country after the Iranian Revolution, but a whole active underground market developed for them.

On the one hand, the government of Iran declares that there is a cultural invasion of Iran—that Americans are trying to win the hearts and minds of Iranians, not through force but through culture. On the other hand, Iranian cinema, in particular arthouse cinema, has after the revolution become quite a credible presence in international film festivals and in commercial cinema. Those films are valued because they’re so artistic and interesting, but also partly because the view they represent of Iran is almost diametrically opposed to the view the Iranian government presents of itself and that the Western media presents of Iran.

These films show Iranian people to be normal like everyone else. They love their children, their children fight with each other, they’re jealous, they’re loyal. There are all kinds of humane stories that I think make people sympathetic to Iranian society and culture. So you have these kinds of competing visions of self and other that are taking place in the two film industries.

Hollywood, from the hostage crisis onward, has produced a huge number of films that basically sort of exploit the enmity between the two countries. I guess the last big one was Argo, which was about the rescue mission of the Americans by the Canadian embassy. (Although I must say, the Canadians didn’t get a lot of credit in that film and neither did the Iranians, but that’s Hollywood.)

Cruz: Of the seven countries affected by the immigration ban (the others are Syria, Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia), Iran is the only one globally recognized for its filmmaking industry. What are some of the reasons for that?

Naficy: Partly I think it’s because it has a larger population. Almost all of the Arab countries have a much smaller population. But beyond that, Iran has a very diverse population of Christians and Jews and Muslims and Baha’is and Zoroastrians, and it has a long tradition of culture and art. Cinema also began very early on in Iran, with the first cinemas established around 1900.

Iranian cinema, like American cinema, benefited greatly from the presence of minorities. Many of the first major Hollywood studios in the early part of the 20th century were founded by Jews who had emigrated from the Soviet Union or from Eastern European countries. Likewise, many of the early pioneers of filmmaking in Iran were either emigres to Iran or internal ethnic minorities, like Armenians and Jews.

There’s also a long tradition of mining the mythologies and the oral traditions of the past—and a lot of these were incorporated into the movie business. By incorporating the old and also the new from the West, it created a kind of hybrid cinema in Iran that I think is very vital.

The country also produces a lot of films—not all of it is good, not all of it is arthouse. But Iranian cinema has enough customers at home, and it’s distributed to the neighboring countries, partly because the Persian language, or some variation of it, is still used in countries that once were part of the Persian empire.

You also have a large diaspora population of Iranians abroad, many of whom are involved in the arts—in cinema, television, and music.

Cruz: What was the significance of Farhadi’s film A Separation winning an Oscar in 2012 and becoming the first Iranian film to do so?

Naficy: I think it was a good, intense melodrama about a family that everybody could appreciate, and that everyone outside of Iran could appreciate. It was not political, so that was, I think, another plus.

I don’t think the awarding of the prize itself was political in the sense that the Academy voters were trying to appease Iran or the Iranian reformists. That’s the problem with this long media war between the two countries; anything that happens in either country is usually seen in political terms at first. Especially Iranians who want to see hidden motives behind everything.

There are multiple annual festivals of Iranian cinema that feature new films from Iran and the U.S. I started two of them—one in Houston and one in Los Angeles. When I first started the one in Los Angeles, a lot of Iranian exiles came out against it. They said, “You are appeasing the Iranian government, you’re trying to curry favor with them, you’re getting paid by them.” All of which was untrue.

At the same time, average Iranians who went to see these movies came out of the cinema all teared up, and they hugged me and thanked me for giving them the opportunity to see films from the Iranian point of view.The festival has continued without controversy thereafter, because the films are really the best responses to all these politicized readings of Iranian culture.

The people who were pushing back were entertainers who were being pushed out of Iran and had lost their livelihoods. I think they felt very angry at the government. That’s what exile is about, partly—political exiles, especially, tend to see everything through the lens of politics. They declared a boycott of the first festival, and urged people to not go.

I had invited two key arthouse directors who spanned the revolution—they made films before and after the revolution—to be guests of the festival. One was [the legendary filmmaker] Abbas Kiarostami. When he saw a whole group of well-known entertainers outside the theater holding protest signs and declaring a boycott, he walked up to one of them and he said, “Mr. So-and-So, why don’t you give me the placard. I will carry it. You go in and see the film.” None of the protesters had seen the films; it was entirely political.

Cruz: In a recent statement, Farhadi said some of the things he had planned to tell the American press if he attended the Oscars. At one point, he made a comparison between “hardliners” in both America and Iran, saying that, “In order to understand the world, they have no choice but to regard it via an ‘us and them’ mentality, which they use to create a fearful image of ‘them’ and inflict fear in the people of their own countries.” What is your response to that?

Naficy: Right, you have factions—hardline factions—in both countries, who see this fire of antagonism and exploit it. And the mainstream media here kicks it up, because it fits the normalizing stereotype of Iranians as hostage-takers and belligerent and anti-West. Also in Iran, the belligerence of Trump fits the Iranian narrative of America as being imperialist and colonial. So anybody who wants to do cultural work that brings the two sides together, like the festival I was describing to you, gets oftentimes criticized by the hardliners on both sides.

But there are all kinds of other people in between in both countries. Those are the people who go to see these Iranian films here in America and appreciate them.

Cruz: Right now, Hollywood and the Trump administration have a tense relationship, with each loudly critical of the other. How does this dynamic compare to the one that exists in Iran, between the government and the film industry?

Naficy: In the U.S., obviously, there’s a lot more freedom of speech and press. Someone like Meryl Streep could stand up and read that very incendiary comment about Trump at the Golden Globes and not be worried about being arrested the next day or finding the head of a horse in her bed. But in Iran, when average people talk back to the government, they do it through social media; they are much more elusive.

It’s interesting that at one time, poets in Iran were considered to be the soul of the country, because they spoke for the people. Now I think, in many ways, the arthouse filmmakers are rivaling the traditional poets. They are looked to as spokespersons for the thoughts and minds and emotions of the people. That’s why I think they’re so respected and why many people go into filmmaking.

Those filmmakers who fight the government more head-on have had to accept censorship and prosecution and persecution and jailing. Getting arrested also buys you credit; it gives you a certain prestige as a spokesperson and as a fearless poet, if you will. These are individual decisions that filmmakers make. For example, Kiarostami wasn’t officially banned in Iran, but his films were not really shown much either. That’s partly also because his films were such that only intellectual people or cosmopolitan people would appreciate them, not so much religious viewers or day-workers who are very tired at the end of the day and go to the movies in order to be entertained.

Cruz: What can American film fans, some of whom may not have seen an Iranian film, take away from the circumstances surrounding Farhadi?

Naficy: I think culture—and I’m including cinema—should bring people together and does bring people together, generally. When you share your culture with another society, it’s like sharing a meal. It’s very hard to be antagonistic when you invite somebody to your house to share your meal with that person. I’m not being la-dee-dah about this; obviously politics always intervenes, whether the politics of money or the politics of gender. Sometimes politics is really very useful. Look at the nomination of black people at the Golden Globes and the Oscars this year. It’s clearly a reaction to criticism over the last couple years about how white the Oscars were.

But to pander to the radical, intolerant side of each society I think is wrong, and cultural events, instead of polarizing people, really should bring people together. And when they’re together, then they can talk about their differences and find solutions. But if both of you stand on opposite sides of the street and spit at each other, you’re not going to get anywhere.

Super Bowl 2017: It’s Not Too Late to Choose a Side

Last year, 112 million people watched the Super Bowl, and about as many are expected to tune in to the matchup between the Atlanta Falcons and New England Patriots on Sunday. You’re probably one of them. You’ll probably watch with a group of friends or relatives or associates, and those friends or relatives or associates will probably ask you who you’re rooting for. If you’re in New England or Georgia, you have a ready answer; if not, you’ll need one. We’re here to help.

We’ve put together an easy-to-follow guide for choosing your Super Bowl allegiance. Simply go to the section or sections that speak to your priorities—whether it’s politics, style of play, or underdog status—and heed the advice therein.

Tom Brady falls to the field after throwing a pass during the first half of the NFL Super Bowl XLVI football game against the New York Giants. (Eric Gay / AP)

Rivalries

The easiest and most reliable way to forge a short-term Super Bowl loyalty is by rooting against the rival of your local team. Are you a fan of the Denver Broncos, Pittsburgh Steelers, or either New York club? Throw your weight behind the Falcons. You can react to every Tom Brady sack as if it’s the dispensation of some long-awaited justice. Is your team the Carolina Panthers or New Orleans Saints? Pull for the Pats. One more New England win would be easier to bear than another southern team getting where you couldn’t.

Charles Krupa / AP

Politics

Back in 2015, Tom Brady’s locker featured a new addition: a Make America Great Again cap. Though he has since done his best to change the subject when it’s come up, he calls President Trump “a good friend.” The Patriots coach Bill Belichick sent Trump a letter at the tail end of the campaign, writing, “You have dealt with an unbelievable slanted and negative media and have come out beautifully. You’ve proved to be the ultimate competitor and fighter. Your leadership is amazing.” At a dinner the night before the inauguration, Trump wished good luck to the Patriots owner Robert Kraft in the AFC Championship game. Though Massachusetts went blue on election day, the Patriots’ key figures are likely happy with the outcome.

The Falcons, meanwhile, have been quiet on the political front. The allegiances of quarterback Matt Ryan and the head coach Dan Quinn are unknown, and even owner Arthur Blank is connected to the election only by way of his Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, who endorsed Trump. But for what it’s worth, Atlanta as a city mostly voted blue (though Georgia as a whole went red).

If you were celebrating on November 8, you may prefer to double-down with the “winners” and “great champions,” as the president refers to them, from New England. Otherwise, go with the Falcons.

  Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones (11) runs past Seattle Seahawks free safety Steven Terrell (23) during the first half of an NFL game in Atlanta. (John Bazemore / AP)

Style of Play

Maybe you’re a purist who believes the true joy of the Super Bowl lies in watching two great teams compete at the highest level of the sport, and everything else—the commercials, the halftime show, the backstories—is just noise. New England is a study in football nuance, with intricate receiving patterns, a defense that allowed the fewest points all season, and a well-drilled special teams unit. Brady moves the Patriots down the field in eight-yard increments, putting dozens of short throws in inch-perfect locations. The Falcons, on the other hand, are a fireworks show made entirely of the grand finale. They scored more points than any other team and filleted the Green Bay defense in the NFC title game. Ryan will likely win MVP, and his favorite target, Julio Jones, is faster and stronger than every other receiver alive.

So what’s your flavor: tuned expertise (Patriots) or eye-popping athleticism (Falcons)? Choose accordingly.

Atlanta Falcons' Matt Ryan throws during the first half of the NFL football NFC championship game against the Green Bay Packers. (David J. Phillip / AP)

Battle of the Generations

Brady was born in 1977, putting him at the tail end of Generation X; Ryan was born in 1985, making him a millennial through and through. Delightfully, the two quarterbacks adhere to generational stereotypes: Brady was a sixth-round pick and a backup before finding stardom, while Ryan was the third overall selection in his draft and started from day one.

If you’ve had it with these whippersnappers, Brady’s your guy. If you’re watching the game on your phone, go with Ryan.

Gisele Bündchen catches a football before the start of NFL action between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. (Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters)

Celebrities

Brady, of course, is married to the supermodel Gisele Bündchen, who stoked minor controversy after New England lost the 2012 Super Bowl, saying, “My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time.” These days, she’s asking Brady to refrain from discussing politics, which left-leaning Patriots fans might take as a favor. Ben Affleck and Mark Wahlberg also number among the Pats faithful.

The Falcons are relatively celeb-light, but Atlanta hip-hop superstar Future did stand on their sideline during the divisional-round game against the Seattle Seahawks. Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson is now married to Future’s ex-girlfriend Ciara, so the appearance was likely a one-off piece of awkward gamesmanship. The Falcons also count Samuel L. Jackson and Usher among their supporters, but the Patriots’ A-listers tend to be more vocal.

If you’re a screaming-at-the-TV type, join in with the famous New Englanders. If you keep it cooler, stick with Atlanta.

Dave Martin / AP

Uniforms and Mascots

The Patriots’ uniform is a bland bit of star-spangled-and-silver, with a somber militiaman slapped onto the helmet. Were it not worn by one of the 21st century’s best teams, it would largely be forgotten. The Falcons, meanwhile, use a red, black, and white color scheme that benefits to no small degree from one of the better helmets in football. When Jones streaks down the sideline, the Atlanta logo—a bird of prey with wings pumping and talons outstretched—will be coming along with him.

The mascots are a different story. Atlanta employs something called “Freddie Falcon,” with feathery wings and a frozen, grinning beak. Freddie has the classic mascot drawbacks; designed to be able to pump up a drunken crowd and pose for photos with kids, he comes off as neither menacing nor playful. The less you think about him, the better.

The Patriots, in comparison, have the End Zone Militia, a group of war reenactors who look the Revolutionary part. At New England home games, they stand behind the end zone and fire muskets in celebration after touchdowns. They are the rare mascot group that doesn’t seem like a pure branding device.

So what riles you up more: The Falcons’ better duds, or the Pats’ superior cheering section?

Julio Cortez

Favorite or Underdog?

No rooting rationale is as foolproof as this one: “I’m pulling for the underdog.” And though Ryan has put up historic passing numbers and the Falcons have sailed through the playoffs to this point, the Patriots are favored. Vegas has New England as three-point favorites, making official the sense of inevitable success that surrounds Belichick and Brady a decade and a half into their partnership.

If you’re the front-running type, go with the tried-and-true four-time champs. But if you like upsets, pull for Ryan and Jones and the rest of the all-out Atlanta attack to deal a blow to the Patriots’ supremacy. If the Falcons win, you get to crow about it. If New England wins, well, that’s old news; your temporary allegiance will be forgotten by Monday morning.