We have no come to the end of another unit. This unit was confusing for me as I wasn’t really sure how it correlated to the rest of the units that we have this year. Our previous unit was about horror, and the one after this one is about Ideologies. This one is about historical significance, as you can see there is a large disconnect. Anyways, this project was nice because it was an individual project and we were able to choose from a large variety of topics. The only rule when picking a topic was that we had to choose from the events and people that were mentioned in Billy Joels song, “We didn’t start the fire.” I wanted to shake up what I was doing in school and choose something that I knew almost nothing about. The topic I chose was Marlon Brando. I had no idea what he did besides star in one of the highest rated movies of all time. Turns out he was nominated for an Oscar after he starred in “The Godfather”. This was actually one of the most controversial Oscar nominations of all time because he decided that if he won he was going to boycott the Oscars. With that information in mind I decided to make my driving question “How did Marlon Brandos boycott change Hollywood and the Oscars?”
We were being assessed on two curricular competencies. The first was communicate, which meant that we had to show how we share our own ideas. The other was historical significance, which was how do we make choices about what is worth remembering. This project was very open ended, all we had to do was explain how our topic was significant in a keynote presentation and in artifact(Painting, Sculpture, Photo Essay, Video, Podcast, etc.) of some kind. I decided I was going to show Marlon Brandos historical significance in a video. Before any of that I had to do a lot of research. I started with why he wanted to boycott the Oscars in the first place. It turns out there was a huge indigenous rights protest going on around that time as well. Approximately 200 Oglala Lakota and more followers of the AIM(American Indian Movement) took over the area on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Wounded Knee. The protest followed the failure of an effort to impeach tribal president Richard Wilson. The United states government was criticized for there lack of ability to fulfill treaties with Native American people and demanded the reopening of treaty negotiations. The area was cordoned off by several law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the United States Marshals Service. Wounded knee was chosen because it had significance from a previous massacre that happened there. It got national attention as supporters traveled far distances and there was widespread public sympathy for the supporters.
That was what pushed Marlon Brando into boycotting the Oscars and changing them forever. My video was a direct representation of what my Keynote was. Sadly neither of them turned out that great. I put in a lot of work behind the scenes trying to get everything I needed for a great project but it did not work out. Both the video and the Keynote were “lacklustre”. I am not really sure what went wrong as the amount of work I put into the project was not shown in the result I created. But this is what I came up with.
I enjoyed this project as I was given a lot of freedom with what and how I wanted to do everything. I enjoyed what I was researching and I learned a lot about something that I thought was insignificant. Turns out its not as Marlon Brando has had an effect that has lasted almost 50 years.