During Oscars telecast, Leonardo DiCaprio, 41, kept the focus on the ''cli-fi'' genre in his acceptance speech for best actor in a starring role

 

During Oscars, Leonardo kept the focus on ''cli-fi ''

by Pola Lem

@polalem

February 26, 2016

 

SUBHEADLINE:

It's Oscars Telecast Day in Hollywood, and Leonardo DiCaprio was at it again.

 

SEE THE TRANSCRIPT OF LEO's OSCAR ACCEPTANCE SPEECH:

http://www.bustle.com/articles/144803-transcript-of-leonardo-dicaprios-oscars-acceptance-speech-gets-political-about-climate-change

It's Oscar season, and Leonardo DiCaprio was at it again in his acceptance speech.
The 41-year-old actor took a moment to speak about a cause that's very close to his heart: environmentalism and climate change.

 

Yes, "The Revenant" won for best actor, but that's not what we're talking about.

 

"Alaska is warming 2x fast from #climatechange as the rest of the US. Hello #drought & fire," read the actor's retweet from the U.S. Geological Survey last week.

If you landed there accidentally, you might mistake the actor's Twitter account for the Sierra Club homesite.

 

There's a GIF of a glacier shedding a mammoth load of ice, courtesy of NASA; a post on Africa's ivory trade; and a petition to repeal Nevada's anti-solar legislation -- not exactly Hollywood gossip column fodder.

 

Leonardo DiCaprio. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

''And lastly I just want to say this: Making ‘The Revenant’ was about man's relationship to the natural world. A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the Indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of under-privileged people out there who would be most affected by this. For our children’s children even 30 generations down the road, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of conservative rightwing ideology, corporate money and persona greed. I thank you all for this award tonight. Let us not take our planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted. "

 

The actor and environmentalist has long been outspoken about the need for climate action, even appearing last year at the international climate summit in Paris.

 

Now he may be part of a small but growing movement to bring climate change fiction, or "cli-fi," to the big screen.

 

DiCaprio recently bought movie rights for a climate-relevant, post-apocalyptic YA cli-fi novel, "The Sandcastle Empire." The book, written by Kayla Olson, attracted DiCaprio because of its environmental themes.

 

While cli-fi films may be a new undertaking for DiCaprio and a fairly recent phenomenon in Hollywood, climate change has long been alive in films, says Michael Svoboda, an author in Yale Climate Connections and a professor at George Washington University.

Svoboda is an assistant professor of writing and director of the Sustainability Minor at the George Washington University (GWU). He is also a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections, where he first began to write about climate change in popular culture. “Cli-Fi on the Screens,” his survey of climate change in over 60 fictional films, can be downloaded for free from the January 2016 issue of WIREs Climate Change.

http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WiresArticle/wisId-WCC381.html

 

"It's like a virus from a strange subculture that gets into the mainstream and becomes part of pop culture," Svoboda said of the emergence of climate issues in Hollywood.

The influence of 'bad science' in movies

Svoboda, who conducted a recent survey of cli-fi on the big screen, published by WIREs Climate Change, says he is surprised by the number of films he found -- over 60 -- that reflect climate change issues.

 

The issue took center stage in movies like 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," the most widely viewed by far in the genre. Featuring Dennis Quaid as a climatologist whose research is ignored by U.N. officials, the film shows catastrophic natural disasters brought about by climate change.

Global warming also has appeared in a spate of recent films, including "Sharknado," "Happy Feet Two," "Interstellar," "The Rover," "Young Ones" and "The Last Survivors." That group includes another Oscar contender, "Mad Max: Fury Road," a nominee for best picture.

 

While many of those films appeared in theaters in the last decade (experts say 2006, the year former Vice President Al Gore's 2006 documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" came out, marked a turning point), their precursors go back to the environmental movement of the 1960s and '70s, said Svoboda.

Films like the 1970 apocalyptic science-fiction film "No Blade of Grass" began to dip their toes in climate issues, though often veering far from science. The 1977 "Day of the Animals," for example, blamed violent encounters between humans and animals on ultraviolet rays passing through a thin patch in the ozone layer.

 

That's a worry to some analysts, like Chip Knappenberger, assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

 

"We live in a democracy where people with the wrong impressions can vote, and there's a possibility you get bad science or exaggerated science in those impressions," he said.

 

While movies on climate change abound, their messaging is far from unified, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication at Yale University.

Leiserowitz conducted a study of the public before and after "The Day After Tomorrow" came out. He found the film had an enormous influence on public understanding.

 

That, he conceded, has much to do with circulation. The Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle came in seventh among the top-grossing films of 2004, according to movie statistics site Box Office Mojo. The film had a far wider reach than documentaries like "An Inconvenient Truth," which reached roughly 10 percent of the public, said Leiserowitz.

 

"People became more concerned, more worried, more willing to take initiative," he said.

'The Revenant' -- a brush with climate change?

Scholars disagree about the negative impact of Hollywood's representation of science. But Leiserowitz said the benefits of films like "The Day After Tomorrow" to the understanding of climate change far outweigh their harm because they portray the issue in a forum where people are more open minded and less likely to view it through a political lens.

 

Today, the ranks of climate change deniers are falling. Roughly 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is real, according to a 2015 report by National Surveys on Energy and Environment (NSEE), a nonpartisan survey.

 

And experts say Hollywood has played its part.

 

DiCaprio, who won for best actor for his portrayal of Hugh Glass, a 19th-century American frontiersman who is left for dead after being mauled by a bear during a winter expedition, described filming "The Revenant" as having his first-hand brush with climate change.

 

"We shot at high altitudes in Calgary, and weather conditions were unprecedented. We had fluctuation from hot to cold, and the local people told us that it had never happened before -- weather extremes like that -- since they've lived there," DiCaprio said.

 

"Our weather is dramatically changing. We had to go to the southern tip of Argentina just to be able to find snow to complete this film," he said.

 

The next step, said Leiserowitz and Svoboda, is creating films that offer solutions to the issues they portray.

 

"We've gone from 'There's a problem,'" said Svoboda, "to 'We need to do something about this problem.'"
LINK behind a wall: but free trial sub if you register:

http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060033060/climate_dige

 

 

 

NOTES:

 

 

Michael Svoboda is an assistant professor of writing and director of the Sustainability Minor at the George Washington University (GWU). He is also a regular contributor to Yale Climate Connections, where he first began to write about climate change in popular culture. “Cli-Fi on the Screens,” his survey of climate change in over 60 fictional films, can be downloaded for free from the January 2016 issue of WIREs Climate Change.