President Trump is putting pressure on NATO allies to assist the US in opening the Strait of Hormuz. One Battle After Another won the Oscar for Best Picture. The cost of renouncing US citizenship will be cut by about 80 percent. And an intense winter storm brings high winds and a tornado risk to Washington, DC. This is Today from The Spectator’s US team.
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Oscars night was one yawn after another
Alexander Larman
The results of this year’s Oscars were so predictable as to be entirely unexciting. Months ago, the pundits had called the major results: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another to win Best Picture and Best Director, Jessie Buckley to win Best Actress for Hamnet, Sinners to win Best Original Screenplay. It wasn’t hard to predict because they had won these prizes in ceremony after ceremony. And so, last night in Los Angeles, events unfolded with the dull pre-ordination of awards voters who had seen what they liked and liked what they saw.
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Daniel McCarthy
Our filmmakers would do better if they took human nature, not themselves, as their subject
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Julie Bindel
It is surely time to dismantle the ‘artistic tyrant’ archetype
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GIVE IT TO ME STRAIT Donald Trump is putting pressure on NATO countries to help the US open up the Strait of Hormuz. He told the Financial Times that “if there’s no response or if it’s a negative response, I think it will be very bad for the future of NATO.” The responses from NATO countries have been reluctant.
DISAPPOINTED DAD United States intelligence has informed Trump that the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was wary of his son Mojtaba, Iran’s new Supreme Leader, ever taking power. The White House has mostly dismissed this as irrelevant and believes Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is in charge.
WEST BANK SHOOTING Four members of a Palestinian family of six were shot and killed by undercover Israeli police as they were driving through the West Bank, coming back from a Ramadan shopping trip.
ANCHORS AWEIGH Around 2,500 Marines and at least one amphibious warship will be deployed to the Middle East in the coming days. They will form part of a rapid-response force protecting shipping and countering Iranian attacks in the Gulf.
BAD PRESS Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr wrote on X that “fake news” broadcasters “have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.” Carr’s comment cited a post by Trump on Truth Social accusing mainstream outlets of misleading reporting on the war in Iran.
SLASHING COSTS The State Department will cut the fee for renouncing US citizenship by about 80 percent. Starting April 13, giving up citizenship will cost $450, rather than $2,350.
TORNADO WARNING Washington, DC expects rare, intense storm conditions today, including high speed winds and possibly tornadoes. The bad weather is likely to be most concentrated around rush hour.
WHITE HOUSE SCHEDULE Trump will have meetings with members of the Kennedy Center board and the United States Ambassador to Japan.
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Plane language
Seventeen days into the US-Israeli war in Iran, and no end in sight, it’s still not totally clear why America opted in to the conflict. Step forward President Trump to clear things up.
While gaggling on Air Force One last night, the President was fielding a question about what other support America’s allies should offer. He then deviated a little, and said, “You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all, because we don’t need it, we have a lot of oil. We were the number one producer anywhere in the world, times two. We’re double, at least double. Now I think it’s much higher than that.”
Trump went on to say, “we also do it for some very good allies we have.”
What would the world look like if three weeks ago, Trump had listened to the cabinet members who were telling him “we shouldn’t even be there at all”? How much would gas cost?
The President added further context by posting lengthy screeds on Truth Social about tariffs and critics of Fox host Mark Levin. There’s that rigorous message discipline we’ve come to know and love.
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Screens in schools have been a catastrophic failure
Mary Wakefield
About a decade ago, the people I dreaded meeting most at parties were the ed tech evangelists – men and women who lit up with zealous excitement about bringing screens into schools. If only every student had a laptop, they thought, then humanity could flourish, nurtured by the great river of the internet and by an exciting stream of educational apps. It was as if a school laptop was a Mary Poppins bag out of which whatever they most wanted was sure to appear. For the ed tech utopians of the right, what they dreamed of was a great stream of savvy little Einsteins, liberated from turgid teachers. For those on the left, it was about equal access, fairness, “pupil-centered learning.” Both enjoyed talking eagerly of “enhanced engagement” as fellow guests muttered into their drinks and backed away.
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‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’
Richard Bratby
By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is in freefall. In the first opera, Das Rheingold, Wotan is a confident protagonist; a world-builder. In Die Walküre, we’ve seen him discover the limits of power, and felt his heart break. Now, in Siegfried, he’s a haunted figure; the solitary Wanderer, searching the world for answers that his all-powerful wisdom can no longer supply. He confronts the young hero Siegfried, and his law-giving spear shatters on the sword of a reckless, clueless boy.
“All he can say is, ‘Go, then. I can’t hold you any more,’” says Christopher Maltman, who has sung the role of Wotan throughout the Royal Opera’s current Ring cycle, and brings it to completion when Siegfried opens later this month. “It says in the score, ‘He fades into darkness.’” The final opera is called Götterdämmerung, “Twilight of the Gods,” but Wotan never appears. How does a performer handle the final, devastating fade to black of a character who has dominated three vast dramas – a role which Maltman has compared, in its scale and complexity, to Hamlet or Lear?”
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Will Trump avoid Bush’s Iraq mistakes?
Freddy is joined by Jacob Heilbrunn and Robert Bryce
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