That’s rich.
Many movie fans were surprised to learn on Thursday that Richard Gere — nice, likable, “Pretty Woman” Richard Gere — once received a 20-year ban from attending the Oscars.
Twenty years? Must have been very serious!
What outrageous offense did the 76-year-old star commit to deserve being barred from the Academy Awards for 26% of his life?
While presenting the award for art direction in 1993, Gere went off-script and gave a speech pretty much amounting to “Free Tibet.”
The renegade actor, who is a practicing Buddhist and a buddy of the Dalai Lama, encouraged Chinese then-leader Deng Xiaoping to “take his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow people to live as free independent people again.”
You know, the sort of loud and unwanted political statements celebrities make all the time at the Oscars.
And yet hypocritical Hollywood made Gere the fall guy, and for expressing relatively tame views at that. Two decades! What utter lunacy.
Appallingly, Will Smith’s ban from the Oscars for slapping Chris Rock on live TV only lasts a mere 10 years. His Independence Day from being iced out of the Dolby Theater rolls around in 2032. And the Fresh Prince of Misdemeanor Battery committed an actual crime.
Of course, I, like every single person who still watches the show, wish the talent would just shut up. This isn’t C-SPAN. You’re rich and famous movie stars in designer frocks and tuxes being handed trophies — not Nelson Mandela.
And, as Ricky Gervais so wisely told the audience at the 2020 Golden Globes, “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”
However, if the producers kicked out everybody who got on their obnoxious soapbox, the Academy Awards could be held at the In-N-Out Burger on Sunset.
Self-righteous politics are, unfortunately, as much of a baked-in fixture of the Oscars as Meryl Streep in the front row. Winners and presenters jabber on about immigration, climate change, pay equality and veganism year after agonizing year.
At the very same 1993 ceremony as Gere’s Tibet lecture, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins criticized the US government for holding HIV-positive Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay. She was banned for life, which turned out to mean three years.
When Joaquin Phoenix accepted the best actor prize for “Joker” in 2019, he went on a batty PETA-approved tirade about milk.
“We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby,” said the deranged star of a “Batman” spinoff as viewers stared on, gobsmacked.
Yet no rescinded invites for kooky dairy denier Joaquin.
Nobody booted Guy Pearce back in March for his Free Palestine pin.
And no one admonished host Jimmy Kimmel when he threw in last-minute jabs at President Trump in 2024. While he didn’t emcee the following year, ABC still offered him the job.
This nonsense has been going on forever.
In 1978, there was no blackballing of Vanessa Redgrave when she finger-wagged at “Zionist hoodlums.”
Hell, Marlon Brando wasn’t even banned in 1973 when he famously had Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather accept his best actor award for “The Godfather.” In 2022, the Academy actually apologized to Littlefeather.
Classy Gere isn’t demanding a “sorry” from anybody though. He’s not too bent out of shape about his lousy treatment.
“I didn’t take it particularly personally,” he told Variety. “I didn’t think there were any bad guys in the situation. I do what I do, and I certainly don’t mean anyone any harm.”
Or maybe Gere realized that two decades of not having to sit through the three-and-a-half-hour Oscars or answer interviewers’ moronic questions on the red carpet was, in fact, a priceless gift.
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