The 2017 Academy Awards’ ceremony will indubitably be best remembered for the confusion over the Oscar for best film. As the team behind Damian Chazelle's La La Land (2016, USA/Hong Kong) began their acceptance speeches for the award, they were interrupted to be told that the Oscar should in fact have gone to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016, USA). The first Oscars’ ceremony of the Trump presidency was always going to be a turbulent occasion as Hollywood's stars used their moment on the global stage to air their opposition to the new administration. However, the embarrassment caused by Faye Dunaway's reading out of the wrong envelope caused quite unexpected levels of consternation, not least as some commentators felt that Moonlight, a film about African- American life with an African-American director, had been robbed of its chance to fully celebrate its success. After 2016's ‘Oscars so white’ protests the award to Moonlight was of particular significance so it was not surprising that some saw the mix up over the prize as yet another curtailment of diversity and difference.

Rather less high profile, but extremely significant nevertheless, was another Oscar acceptance speech that similarly played into questions of diversity and difference. The Oscar for best foreign language film went to Asghar Farhadi's Franco-Iranian co-production Forushande/The Salesman (2016). Farhadi had initially intended to travel to Los Angeles for the ceremony in order to highlight ‘the unjust circumstances that have arisen for the immigrants and travellers of several countries to the United States’ (Shoard 2017). However, he ultimately decided against attending the ceremony saying that, following Trump's recent attempts to block entry to the US for the citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen, the conditions that would be attached to a potential entry visa were unacceptable. The award was collected instead by Iranian-American engineer Anousheh Ansari who read out a statement on Farhadi's behalf: