The ongoing collapse of the Oscars
Confusion & mediocrity continue at America's most famous public ceremony for the arts
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 & cannot be popular anymore, they have lost most of their audience & 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 & inhuman, to say nothing of its hatred of men, the Western, & America. It won the crazy lady who wrote, directed, & 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 & I spoke in praise of it.
The musical failure West side story did poorly, but won an ideological prize for racial & sexual identity, formerly apparently 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 & the American media, so it fell to me to applaud the movie.
Mostly, the news is bad: Wes Anderson's witty & 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 towards. Pomposity is declining, philistinism is rising.
Liberal narrowness of mind & 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 Works of art have simply been replaced by mediocre ideological gestures that fit the ever greater ignorance & incuriousity of our liberals.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 & 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,” & nowadays, even if you're dragging down the standards of mediocrity… Or you can read my essays & perhaps understand better what art in America now has to offer, which is more than a little.
Amazing, insightful overview of the once great movie industry.
So glad you it. Cathy-- do share it with our film loving friends!