Hooray for Hollywood! Vox called the Oscars broadcast on ABC on Sunday night “historically weird.” That’s one way of putting it. “Interminable,” “insufferable,” and “painfully woke” might be more descriptive of an event that featured films literally no one had ever heard of, with a cast of nobodies, and directed by non-entities who were congratulated more for their sex and their color than for any achievement whatsoever.
Hollywood likes to blame the downward trajectory of Oscar ratings on changing viewer habits and the length of the show, which usually clocks in at close to four hours. But now there’s more evidence left-wing politics is at least partly responsible for the exodus of viewers.
And… Tonight: Wokest Oscars Ever?
It’s Hollywood’s biggest night on Sunday – the Oscars – when stars are anointed and future classics crowned. Except this year the pandemic, and a longer-term trend away from mass-market movies, mean the nominated films have struggled to cut through.
In case it passed you by, the leading contender for the Academy Awards this year with 10 nominations – four more than any other film – is Mank, Netflix’s black-and-white homage to old Hollywood, starring Gary Oldman as Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz.
It’s a movie about the making of one of the greatest movies ever made – the type of film the Oscars like, even if others are less keen.
Always a silver lining. We can thank the pandemic for hastening Hollywood’s implosion.
The Academy Awards are this weekend. Almost no one has even heard of the movies up for Best Picture.
If nothing else, the pandemic has shown us the weaknesses of our cultural and political institutions.
Case in point, this year’s Oscars. They have problems. Big problems.
You can see those problems in the public’s relationship to the movies up for best picture, the ceremony’s top award.
For one thing, it’s not clear anyone has seen any of the movies nominated.
I have no idea what has been nominated and I know I haven’t seen any of them.
Too few artists—indeed, too few people—have the moral courage to live without the need for external validation, especially in our social media-riven age.
Iwas honored recently to be invited on the “Political Punks” podcast, joining Bret R. Smith, Lisa DePasquale, Chris Baron, and Matt Palumbo. I highly recommend the show, especially the episodes in which I do not appear.
During our discussion of the current cancel culture climate, we touched upon the rank hypocrisy of the entertainment industry. Specifically, we discussed how the Hollywood celebrities and power brokers rushing to harangue Georgia for both promoting and protecting the voting process, are the same wealthy elitists filming in genocidal communist China and kowtowing to the Beijing regime’s racist dictates erasing persons of color and pro-American messaging from films.
Sometimes, you gotta just stop to rubberneck the train wreck.
So it goes with the Los Angeles Times exposé of an e-mail exchange between members of the scandal-filled Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is that tiny longstanding group of press characters who award the Golden Globes.
One of them, a former eight-time president of guild, Philip Berk, sent out an expose to the group of a Frontline Magazine piece exposing the Hollywood money-making of Black Lives Matter elites.
Even with a pandemic locking us all down, including most of our movie theaters, pretty much no one is even aware of, much less watching, this year’s Best Picture nominees. Oh, and the ratings for all the award shows celebrating these nominees have sped right past humiliating into dreadful.
Last year, a whole bunch of these award shows were hitting all-time lows. This year, the audience drop off has been 50 to 60 percent lower than those all-time lows, lol.
When they’re not making movies, TV shows, or albums, left-wing Hollywood elites can be found lecturing average Americans on how to live their lives. Gun control is imperative, lockdowns are necessary, and burning fossil fuels is wrong. Except when they do it, of course.
Roughly 13 months after he was sentenced to more than 23 years in prison (an effective life sentence for the 69-year-old movie mogul) after being convicted of rape, nefarious former Hollywood super-producer (and Democratic mega-donor) Harvey Weinstein and his legal team filed an appeal on Monday. In the filing, lawyers for the mogul argued that his trial was tainted by the involvement of a juror who had published a book about the predations of older men against younger women.
A slew of Hollywood celebrities including Julianne Moore, Brie Larson, Laverne Cox, and Amy Schumer have joined GLAAD in condemning feminists who disagree with the transgender agenda, calling them bigots and their views “damaging and violent.”
We now have the final-final-final Grammy ratings and what we find is yet another catastrophe for the entertainment industry. Just two weeks after the Golden Globes hit an all-time low by losing 62 percent of its viewers, the Grammys lost 53 percent. Only 8.8 million people were interested in watching The Worst People In The World celebrate themselves. This is a jaw-dropping collapse from 18.7 million over last year and 19.9 million in 2019.
A hopeful sign of the entertainment industries’ continued decline.
“Some 70 Hollywood public relations firms are organizing a mass action against the Hollywood Foreign Press Association [HFPA],” reports TheWrap.
What this means is that if the HFPA, which runs the Golden Globes, does not do some immediate affirmative action hiring of certain protected groups, all 87 members of the HFPA will be blacklisted. In other words, the Woke Gestapo will make it impossible for members of the HFPA to do their jobs.
Pasadena, California, officials canceled a coronavirus vaccine clinic after hundreds of ineligible media and Hollywood workers signed up for appointments, they said.
Elderly residents and local workers were jumped over by around 900 appointment slots as media workers who did not yet qualify for the vaccine left only 600 empty slots open for eligible vaccine recipients, the Pasadena Public Health Department said Tuesday.
Sophia Loren will be the recipient of the inaugural Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ Visionary Award when the new venue launches in September.
Loving classic films can be a fraught pastime. Just consider the cultural firestorm over “Gone With the Wind” this past summer.
No one knows this better than the film lovers at Turner Classic Movies who daily are confronted with the complicated reality that many of old Hollywood’s most celebrated films are also often a kitchen sink of stereotypes. This summer, amid the Black Lives Matter protests, the channel’s programmers and hosts decided to do something about it.
The result is a new series, “Reframed Classics,” which promises wide-ranging discussions about 18 culturally significant films from the 1920s through the 1960s that also have problematic aspects, from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Mickey Rooney’s performance as Mr. Yunioshi to Fred Astaire’s blackface routine in “Swing Time.” It kicks off Thursday at 8 p.m. ET with none other than “Gone With the Wind.”
h/t Marvin
