Hong Kong city's largest free-to-air broadcaster, TVB has chosen not to broadcast the Academy Awards for the first time in fifty years. This year, a Hong Kong-based film had been nominated in the Oscars for the first time since 1993. Derek Tsang's Better Days which got a nomination in the category of Best International Film has become the next film from Hong Kong since Farewell My Concubine to reach the Oscar platform.
Earlier in March, Beijing media regulators had instructed the Chinese media not to broadcast the live coverage of the award event and to focus less on the event. The report further stated that it might be after the nomination of the short documentary Do Not Split, which had been based on the pro-democracy protests that took place in Hong Kong in the year 2019. The city of Hong Kong relatively allows freedom of press and speech compared to the rest of the cities in the country.
How Oscars are perceived
The Oscars have been one of the most prestigious awards shows in the realm of cinema. It was in 2020 when for the first time a South Korean film, Parasite had won an Oscar in one of the main categories of the event, instead of a 'Foreign Film' category. Lately, the fight for equal representations in the main categories of The Academy nominations, and a racially inclusive board had been a few of the main topics of concern. In 2021, Priyanka Chopra, Rajkummar Rao and Adarsh Gourav's starrer Netflix film, The White Tiger got nominated in the Screen adaptation category.
However, in China press, freedom had been one of the talking points in various international debates. It was in one of Hasan Minaj's comedy acts, where the comedian had said, that the country does not allow access to Twitter, Facebook, or any of the social media that's popular worldwide.
