In 2016, the Academy Awards clearly has its own ideological issues. But these stories and hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite demand we remember the long history of this institutionally sanctioned white privilege in particular.

Orry-Kelly worked on renowned films such as Baby Face (1933), Jezebel (1938), Casablanca (1942), and Some Like It Hot (1959) with Hollywood stars like Bette Davis, Marilyn Munroe, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck and Natalie Wood. Yet Orry-Kelly – whose costume designs garnered him three Academy Awards – is, for the most part, unknown in his home country of Australia. The perplexing question is: why?

What happens when the disengagement of the populace from political life gets thoroughly normalised? In such circumstances, the political class and its agents seem, almost by definition, able to perform feats that ordinary people simply cannot. That seems to me the context for the new hegemony of superheroes. The genre no longer presents as wish-fulfillment so much as a kind of realism – an accurate depiction of the way society works. We are, in other words, already living in a comic book.