‘The Post’ Was Made For Oscar Season, and Might Succeed

From its cast of Academy Award winners to their dramatic scenes of powerful men, clustered in a room smoke-filled room, colors unbuttoned and sleeves rolled to their elbows, The Post was made to be an Oscar darling. It’s almost distracting, even, the number of stars spread throughout the film, beyond Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, so numerous that even the extras include faces you can recognize or plainly name for their own leading and supporting roles across television and film. It’s no wonder the Steven Spielberg-directed film attracted such talent despite the turnaround of this project – it’s said that he first read the script just early this year and committed himself to finishing the full project for a 2017 release – due to the obvious-but-unspoken connection to modern times since the election and inauguration of President Donald Trump. The Post is about moral authority against the spread of tyrannical power; freedom of the press versus the government’s ability to squelch it. The unsung hero of this film’s success is its timeliness, the year 2017. What follows then is a film whose relevance adds a type of tension that the film itself can barely create being that we all know the result: The Pentagon Papers were indeed published and the Vietnam war is over. No one’s life is threatened nor stands on the cliff of losing everything they worked to earn (though Streep’s character is close enough to the latter). Rather, the tension comes from the underlying protagonist we can call…