It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a show about movies should offer what you haven’t seen before, leaving you with a little of the magic in your own home, rather than scratching your head wondering what they pay these people so much more money for in the first place.
Hollywood is supposed to be the entertainment capital of the world, where the best and brightest in the storytelling medium earn millions upon millions of dollars because of their unique creative talents. The words they use to describe themselves and their relationship to their craft ring with their own approval. They are variously geniuses, brilliant, gifted, deftly communicating emotionally and logically, weaving an inescapable spell over their audiences. According to them, they break down barriers, illuminate what’s hidden in the human condition, bring people together in joy or pain, reflecting the best and worst in humanity and the world at large. They are, in their own words, more than merely entertainers, at times producing transcendent works of art that can literally change the world for the better. They even insist, occasionally, that it’s pure magic, something that can’t easily be described in words, a secret only they possess and out of their greatness rather than the mere quest for material gain, choose to selflessly share with everyone else. The Academy Awards, therefore, is said to be the pinnacle of their achievements, the most prestigious honors in the industry, that recognize the best and brightest of the year at a gathering of the very best and brightest, allowing the rest of the world a peek inside the rarified air of Hollywood and the chance to be collectively mesmerized by their betters. This, after all, is an unprecedented gathering of producers, directors, screenwriters, actors, musicians, and other celebrities, celebrating the greatest among them, some of which are living legends in their own right, the most famous people in the world.
To be sure, at least some of this is true in a sense, if overhyped and exaggerated like almost everything else these days. I didn’t go to film school because I don’t love movies, nor do I continually try to make them on my own as well as write like an addict because I do not enjoy the creative process. Once upon a time, in high school and college in particular, I would go to the movies almost every week, seeing some in the theaters multiple times (I think Braveheart was my record at eight, a full 24 hours watching that epic) and I wouldn’t miss the Academy Awards for anything. These days, however, I need to be dragged close to kicking and screaming to the TV to suffer through more than an hour of the Oscars and, if the ratings are any indication, I’m not the only one. At the height of the Titanic craze in 1998, 55 million people tuned in, but viewership dwindled to 43.7 million by 2014, only to collapse over the past ten years. In 2021, less than 10 million people bothered to watch. This year saw that number increase to almost 20 million, but still a far cry from the halcyon days of even 2019 with 29.6 million. Many have attributed the decline to Hollywood’s insufferable penchant for promoting their progressive politics. Pick an Oscar’s since President Trump arrived on the scene, and almost undoubtedly some rich, limousine liberal leading a life of ease and leisure will lecture you on what’s wrong with the world. Perhaps my personal favorite was a few years ago, when Trump was actually in office, and one of the winners claimed with a straight face that actors were “migrant” workers. “Actors are migrant workers; we travel all over the world. We built a life that cannot be divided,” Gael Garcia Bernal, an actor who starred in Motorcycle Diaries proclaimed. “As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that wants to separate us.” Yes, they are migrant workers with private jets, limousines, catering, and multimillion dollar paychecks, the same as day laborers standing on a street corner or gathering to pick vegetables under the hot sun in some field. Of course, who could forget Leonardo DiCaprio in 2016, who spends most of his free time with women barely old enough to drink, cavorting on luxury yachts, and flying all over the world, exhorting us all against pollution? “We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters, but who speak for all of humanity, for the indigenous people of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people out there who would be most affected by this,” he said before taking a model by the arm and retiring to his personal cruise ship. “For our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed,” he continued while amassing a net worth of $300 million.
Last Sunday’s ceremony was thankfully a little more muted in that regard, but Hollywood can’t help itself, like an addict that just needs a straightener out of Succession. Host Jimmy Kimmel, who’s breakthrough hit The Man Show is beyond misogynist by today’s standards, simply had to insult a female Republican Senator for daring to counter President Biden’s State of the Union Address. “Emma Stone is an Oscar nominee for a fifth time. Right? The fifth time,” he said. “This is, and she is — Emma, you are, you were so unbelievably great in Poor Things. Emma played an adult woman with the brain of a child, like the lady who gave the rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday night” he continued in one of the cheapest shots imaginable. Dare we even suggest what would happen if the same were said about a female Democrat Senator appearing on a national platform for the first time? Later in the broadcast, Mr. Kimmel referred to former President Trump being up past his “jail time,” but rather incredibly he found no opportunity to zing President Biden, whose mental decline is so precipitous his own Department of Justice claimed he was too much of a doddering old man to stand trial, or in their words a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who happens to have is fingers on the nuclear button. Otherwise, the Israel-Palestine conflict was necessarily front and center with many attendees wearing pins to signify their support for an immediate ceasefire, though one that would have the unfortunate effect of leaving Hamas in power to carry out more atrocities. Ramy Youssef, an actor in Poor Things, explained to Deadline, “This is for Artists for Ceasefire. We have a growing list of so many artists who want a permanent immediate ceasefire in Gaza. To get really universal about it, it’s about stop killing kids.” Pins are one thing, speechifying another, leading to perhaps the most bizarre moment of the evening when director Jonathan Glazer, who’s film Zone of Interest is about the Holocaust appeared to renounce his own Jewishness, at least in part. “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather, ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present” He continued, “Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?” On a side note, the film was undoubtedly shot long before October 7, so the idea that they made every choice to reflect that particular present seems a stretch.
The preening certainly is nauseating and the advance of left wing politics has likely turned off some viewers, but to me at least, it doesn’t explain the full extent of the decline. It’s not as if Hollywood was a bastion of conservative values in the 1980s or 90s or even earlier. Indeed, The New York Post’s round up of the most political speeches goes back to 1973, when Marlon Brando refused to accept the Oscar and had Sacheen Littlefeather take the trophy in his stead to protest the treatment of indigenous people, who were called American Indians or Native Americans way back then. “The reasons for [Brando’s refusal] are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry – excuse me – and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee,” she said. “I beg at this time that I have not intruded upon this evening and that we will, in the future, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.” If you are a conservative, chances are you have long since come to terms with the fact that your artistic heroes aren’t likely to share your politics, either deciding to live with it or have a very, very small pool of artistic heroes to choose from.
The problem with the Oscars, in that case, has to be of a fundamentally different nature: In a word, they completely and totally suck out loud on every conceivable level. The skits are tedious, so bad that many of the actors forced to deliver them read from the teleprompter like the proverbial deer in headlights, and in some cases go on forever. It’s not easy to feel bad for someone as ripped up and rich as John Cena, but having him on stage, supposedly naked, for five full minutes given a joke that was worth about 30 seconds came close. The hosted portions are just as bad, rarely funny or clever, like something you might expect for a high school talent show, and they don’t even mic the performers when they call upon the audience, resulting in either having to read lips or watch the equivalent of a mime show as when Robert Downey, Jr. and Mr. Kimmel went back and forth for several nonsensical exchanges, during which no one watching at home had any clue what they were bantering about. The speeches themselves, even when they are not political, are usually delivered by someone you don’t know, referencing people you know even less before the music swells up and you can’t hear them anyway, a situation made even worse when the award is shared between multiple people, sometimes fumbling around over who should speak first or even at all. With the exception of Da’vine Joy Randolph’s win for Best Supporting Actress, it was impossible to care about the few I bothered to watch and I found myself hoping they did say something political, just so I would have a reaction of some kind other than boredom, wondering why I was watching this in the first place. I understand that some like the musical numbers, but being far removed from popular music outside of Greta Van Fleet, nothing particularly impressed me, and even so, with only five songs sprinkled throughout a three hour broadcast, it took an hour to get to the first one, so much for opening with a bang. Otherwise, the filming and production values are pedestrian at best, what one would expect from a corporate event not an industry equipped with the latest and greatest motion picture capture technology and the most advanced set design skills on planet Earth.
All this might be tolerable if they actually bothered to showcase their best asset, the movies themselves. For an award show centered on movies, there is precious little about the medium on display other than a few random snippets, rarely amounting to a single line of dialogue. Most of the time they appeared to be selected randomly, providing no reason whatsoever to actually watch the movie save that it was nominated for an award people care less and less about, sometimes with some kind of random overlay like the screenwriting categories where the script was highlighted with cheap typewriter effect straight out of an Amiga Video Toaster. Putting this another way, throughout the approximately 90 minutes I was able to endure, I wasn’t given a reason to see any of the films I hadn’t already, which amount to barely a handful (Oppenheimer, Barbie, Past Lives, and The Holdovers). Given the entire point of the show is to promote the movies nominated in particular and movies in general, they’d be better off running three hours of trailers with an introduction from the filmmaker for each. Speaking of movies, this was the 96th Academy Awards ceremony giving the producers a huge amount of content to pull from, comparing the present to the past, highlighting previous great achievements and more, such as how much has changed and how much has stayed the same. Instead, they showed a streaking incident from 1974 and little else. Also inexplicably absent is any peek behind the scenes of how movies are made save for a few random snippets during the make up and set design categories. The magic, of course, comes in the making and movie-buffs love to see behind the scenes, learning from their favorite actors and directors what went on outside the frame of the camera, offering their unique insight on how a particular scene was put together and the massive amount of effort that goes into a few seconds of footage. One would think this is doubly true as Best Picture nominees are generally big budget movies produced by thousands of people who bring an idea from conception to execution in stages, where a minute of screentime costs a million dollars or more. Who wouldn’t want to see the original storyboards for the Oppenheimer Trinity Test and the army that was on hand that day to see it come to life as a practical effect? Or what the original designs of the Barbie Dream House looked like and how they seamlessly embedded the final models with the actors?
Regardless, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a show about movies should offer what you haven’t seen before, leaving you with a little of the magic in your own home, rather than scratching your head wondering what they pay these people so much more money for in the first place. I could go on, wondering why a show about movies tells you next to nothing about movies except how much Hollywood loves and values itself, but if this is the best and brightest the entertainment industry has to offer, we should all just Netflix and chill instead.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 