Seen & Heard: Vol. 11

Television: The Oscars telecast – Sunday night was the Academy Awards show on ABC. I watched it for an hour before moving on with my night (I go to bed early and like to read before that). What I saw was enjoyable. The host, Conan O’Brien, was funny and didn’t have many “cringe” moments. I saw the Best Supporting Actress award which went to Amy Madigan who I’m not familiar with for her role in Weapons which I’m not familiar with either, although I just watched the trailer and it looks creepy but interesting. I also watched a musical number built around Sinners which I did see and enjoy. I’ve enjoyed reading the followup newspaper stories about the event which were mostly positive, and I was pleased with the results because I did see the movies that won the most awards (One Battle After Another, Sinners, Hamnet, FrankensteinI). I also saw Train Dreams which was good but didn’t win any big awards. I’d like to watch more movies which I like doing at home and with all the films available via streaming, there is no shortage of choices. I think writing this weekly column helps motivate me to keep watching which is one of the reasons I do it. 

Movie Review: Hamnet – I watched this 2025 film before the Academy Award Ceremony. It won the Best Actress Award for Jessie Buckley, who I understand is the first Irish woman to win that award. Directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Paul Mescal as Will Shakespeare and Buckley as his wife Agnes, the film is based on the well-received 2020 historical novel by Maggie O’Farrell. The movie follows Agnes Hathaway (an eccentric and earthy “healer”) and Will Shakespeare, an aspiring writer, as they meet, fall in love, and start a family. Their happy life takes a devastating turn when their 11-year-old son, Hamnet, dies from the plague. The rest of the movie explores how each parent dealt with the grief of that loss and suggests that Will’s play, Hamlet, was his outlet for that. (Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably at the time). The movie is now available for streaming on Peacock and is one of this year’s Best Picture nominees at the upcoming Academy Awards. While it is a strong, emotional film much deserving of the nomination, so were several other nominees, particularly Sinners and One Battle After Another. 

Op-Ed: “History is being erased in Lowell” – by Renee Loth in the March 6, 2026, Boston Globe. This essay tells of two historical films once regularly shown at Lowell National Historical Park that have been purged in accordance with President Trump’s executive order that bans any items that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The offending portions of these films, presumably, recount the onerous and unhealthy working conditions faced by Lowell mill employees and the responding labor organizations that fought such conditions. So organized labor joins slavery, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and climate change as things being erased from our history. Some are fighting this in court but the fear among historians is that institutions will self-censor to avoid the controversy altogether. Revisionist history is nothing new in America. In the early 20th century, Southern historians promoted that narrative that the Civil War was all about “state’s rights” and that slavery had little to do with it. Unfortunately, that view, undoubtedly boosted by rampant racism throughout the country, came to dominate the “accepted version” of the Civil War. But by highlighting the words of rebellious southerners that the war was unequivocally about slavery, current historians have restored some accuracy to that narrative. But since “Make America Great Again” involves a restoration of the open racism that plagued the country in earlier eras, these new narratives must be suppressed. 

Op-Ed: “America cannot withstand the coming economic shock” – by Gina Raimondo in the March 9, 2026, New York Times. The Secretary of Commerce under President Joe Biden and the former governor of Rhode Island, Raimondo writes of the employment threat posed by artificial intelligence and how the country is failing to prepare for the resulting economic disruption. Personalizing the story, she writes of how her father, a 30 year employee of the Bulova Watch manufacturing plant in Providence, was left unemployed at age 56 when, taking advantage of the new free trade rules of the 1990s, the company chased cheaper labor and moved all manufacturing overseas. His story was repeated millions of times across America and this hollowing out of manufacturing jobs with nothing to replace them helped “produce the politics of division that plague us today.” Raimondo asserts that history is about to repeat itself with the broad deployment of AI and that the government today is doing the same as what was done in the 1990s to prepare for this – which is nothing. She advocates the transformation of higher education into something more modular and credentials-based with financial assistance to help those displaced by new technology to rapidly acquire the skills needed for the jobs that are available.