Sean Penn blames Oscars’ ‘extraordinary cowardice’ at Marrakech Film Festival

Sean Penn has criticised the organizers of the Oscars for being cowards who, for in his opinion, limit the kinds of films that can be funded and made.

The 64-year-old actor said at the Marrakech Film Festival that he gets excited about the Academy Awards only on rare occasions.

“The producers of the academy have exercised really extraordinary cowardice when it comes to being part of the bigger world of expression and, in fact, have largely been part of limiting the imagination and very limiting of different cultural expressions," Penn said at the festival, where he received a career achievement award this week.

“I don’t get very excited about what we’ll call the Academy Awards,” he said, noting exceptions when certain films grace the ceremony, including Sean Baker's The Florida Project, Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here and Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez - the latter which is seen as a favourite to win at this weekend's European Film Awards.

Penn's remarks dovetail with longstanding criticisms of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for lacking diversity within the ranks of its members and the films that they celebrate with awards.

It has in recent years taken steps to reform and rebrand itself, but has faced criticism for not going far enough.

Penn also lauded Iranian-Danish director Ali Abassi and his latest film The Apprentice about President elect Donald Trump. It faced difficulty finding an American distributor in the lead-up to the US election in November.

“It’s kind of jaw-dropping how afraid this ‘business of mavericks’ is when they get a great film like that with great, great acting,” he said. “They, too, can be as afraid as a piddly little Republican congressman.”

In our review for The Apprentice, we said: "While it mostly deals in known facts - frustratingly, there isn’t much we don’t know about Trump these days, making it a challenging ask to say something new about about Ahent Orange – The Apprentice works best as a performance-propelled portrait of so-called American exceptionalism. It’s not a great film, but a compulsively watchable one, destined to polarize even those who despise Trump. It will be berated for not being enough of a hit job by some; not political enough considering the current climate by others." Read our full review here.

Penn continued: “Around the world [there is] this demand for diversity – but not diversity of behavior and not diversity of opinion or language. I would just encourage everybody to be as politically incorrect as their heart desires and to engage diversity and to keep telling those stories.”

Among the films expected to be in the running at the Oscars early next year are Baker’s independent drama Anora, which won the Palme d'Or in Cannes earlier this year, Audiard's experimental musical Emilia Perez, and Brady Corbet's masterful American saga The Brutalist, which wowed when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

Additional sources • Variety