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The Ongoing Collapse of the Oscars
This year, I wrote a guide, of sorts, to the Hollywood artists worth mentioning in relation to the Oscars, or liberalism’s chance to pull back from the pretentious ideological nonsense that suggests to me death throes. The Oscars aren’t and cannot be popular anymore, they have lost most of their audience and more than half the country, but they needn’t be trash. Yet they are.
The year’s favorite with the academy, The Power of the Dog, with eleven nominations, is ugly and inhuman, to say nothing of its hatred of men, the Western, and America. It won the crazy lady who wrote, directed, and produced it Best Director. Here’s my review for my friends at Acton.
This means that the most all-American movie nominated, Licorice Pizza, by the much more talented Paul Thomas Anderson, didn’t win anything. It deserved to win and I spoke in praise of it.
The musical failure West Side Story did poorly, but won an ideological prize for racial and sexual identity, formerly an acting award for ladies. I deprecate Spielberg’s self-destruction, in search of the respect of a Hollywood that always despised him…
Indeed, the ceremony was celebrity kitsch, as predicted by Ridley Scott’s nasty satire House of Gucci. There’s no Oscar for telling the ugly truth about Hollywood and the American media, so it fell to me to applaud the movie.
Mostly, the news is bad: Wes Anderson’s witty and rather humane The French Dispatch was wasted on Hollywood. I thought it a very intelligent look at mid-century liberal Francophilia. On the other hand, Guillermo del Toro’s sordid mid-century America in Nightmare Alley was a complete bust, so at least we can tell that allegorical anti-Americanism is losing to the much more boring, sentimental variety liberals now seem to be turning toward. Pomposity is declining, philistinism is rising.
Liberal narrowness of mind and blindness to art cost the amazing The Hand of God by Paolo Sorrentino the Best Foreign Film award. So watch it on Netflix, for a taste of a real artist at work. Works of art have simply been replaced by mediocre ideological gestures that fit the ever-greater ignorance and incuriosity of our liberals.
Even the middlebrow art that can beautify American troubles, like Denis Villeneuve’s boy-coming-of-age Dune, simply means nothing in Hollywood. It won the sight and sound awards no one cares about anymore because they are all about the beautiful (sound, score, editing, production design, cinematography). I was less fond of it than other conservative critics, but it’s much better than the movies winning big awards! The other artsy coming-of-age story in Hollywood, The Green Knight, by David Lowery, was even now ignored. I’ve mixed feelings at best about it, but it’s also better than the award winners.
I guess all one can say is “hooray for Hollywood, where you’re great if you’re even good,” and nowadays, even if you’re dragging down the standards of mediocrity… Or you can read my essays and perhaps understand better what art in America now has to offer, which is more than a little.
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Published in Entertainment
Titus! Amazing in the depth and scope of your opinion pieces – wielded with head-shaking incredulity born of your your broad knowledge of what you’re addressing. So enjoyable and informative.
And as you say in your Spielberg piece: “These are strange times . . “
Oh! Love that YouTube “Hooray for Hollywood”!
You forgot to mention that this year’s Oscars missed only Jerry Springer, or perhaps a younger Geraldo, to place them truly in the Hollywood hills. You know what they say, if you drag a thousand dollar bill down Hollywood Blvd…
I did my best to avoid the more sordid realities… Also, for inflation, it’s gotta be ten grand, it would seem…
I know this song because long years back Mark Steyn was playing it for one reason or another…
Funny you should mention that. It so happens that “Hooray for Hollywood” is the song of the week on Steynonline: Hooray for Hollywood: Steyn’s Song of the Week :: SteynOnline
Glad to hear it!