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I didn’t love Taika Waititi’s movie, but I feel his shoulder – and back, and neck – pain

<span>Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images

Apologies for bringing up the Oscars again, but I need to talk about a speech that touched the core of my very being. Not Joaquin Phoenix’s, with its suggestion that drinking milk is analogous to racism. Nor Renée Zellweger’s free associative one, in which she thanked people who had meant a lot to her, but sounded as if she was doing a sequel to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire: Neil Armstrong! Sally Ride! Fred Rogers! Harriet Tubman! It was always burning as the world was turning!

The speech I’m referring to was not, strictly speaking, an acceptance speech. But it was a speech, given by a winner, at the Oscars, so it totally counts. It was Taika Waititi’s rant against Apple keyboards.

Now, a word about Waititi, who won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for Jojo Rabbit, which he also directed and starred in. I believe that 80% of watching any awards show involves thinking, “Do I find this person hot? Or maybe not?”, with the remaining 20% given over to faintly caring about the results. It’s a little different when you’re actually at the event – at least it is for me, as I’m generally too focused on writing about proceedings to attend to the siren croon of my libido.

But there was a point at this year’s Oscars when I suddenly realised that, yes, I did indeed find Waititi quite hot. This was unnerving, because Waititi plays Adolf Hitler in Jojo Rabbit, and it’s hard to think of many things more likely to result in very intense therapy sessions than a Jewish lady realising she is quite taken by the man who plays Hitler. It’s Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List all over again! To make matters worse, I did not like Jojo Rabbit, because I am deeply averse to twee stories about the second world war, and am baffled by the love so many people feel for this movie. Did they not learn from the mistake they made over Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie Life Is Beautiful, another extremely twee story about the second world war, also starring, written and directed by one man, also garlanded with awards, and yet not a film that has exactly endured?

Anyway, despite all that, I did, as I say, quite fancy Waititi, which says a lot about his fanciability. This has nothing to do with today’s topic, but I’m glad to commit it to paper and posterity.

After Waititi won his award, he went backstage to answer questions from the world’s press and was asked what writers should be asking for in the forthcoming Writers Guild of America talks. Without a pause, he launched into the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard: “Apple needs to fix those keyboards. They are impossible to write on and they’ve gotten worse. I’ve got some shoulder problems. What happens is, you open the laptop and you’re like this…” Waititi assumed a hunched-up, cramped pose. “We’ve got to fix those keyboards. The WGA needs to step in and actually do something,” he concluded.

Related: It’s easy to dismiss boomers as know-nothings – but they got some things right, OK?

Every year, there is much discussion over whether it is appropriate for celebrities to use the platform they are given at these events to talk about their various causes. Well, I reckon Waititi has kiboshed this question once and for all because this is a celebrity cause we should all get behind. Because I, too, have a dream. It’s that one day I will be able to use a laptop without giving myself sciatica.

Like Waititi, I have hideous shoulder – and back, and neck – problems and when they first arose two years ago, I assumed I could blame my kids (another thing to add to the list). But no, it turned out that my job was at fault, according to the doctors I saw, who pointed squarely at my tiny laptop. (I won’t, for legal reasons, name the brand. Let’s just say Waititi and I think very much alike on this issue.) Hunching over this stupid keyboard gave me a slipped disc, which in turn gave me a pinched nerve. The all-consuming pain reached its mind-melding peak on my last research trip for my book. (Have I mentioned that I’ve written a book? You can read about it on page 23 of this very magazine!) Alas, my trip was to Auschwitz and so, while my nerves shrieked with raw pain, I walked around this monument to death and all I could think was, “Truly, no one has ever suffered as much as me.” (I don’t accept twee movies about the Holocaust, but I’m apparently fine with dumb jokes about it.)

I went home, had a steroid shot, which helped a bit, and swapped the tiny laptop for a chunky PC, which helped a lot more, and was able to finish the book. But still I hunch over my phone like a velociraptor, giving myself the dreaded “text neck”, and I start to feel the pain incoming.

What are we doing to ourselves? What are we allowing to be done to us? We were designed to stand up straight, look forward and hunt (yes, for animals: sorry, Joaquin), not scrunch ourselves around these stupid, tiny, silver rectangles. So although I cannot support Waititi’s movie, I will storm the ramparts for his cause. Metaphorically, I mean. Storming is just terrible for my back these days.