All eyes are on Barbie to save the Golden Globes tonight when their beleaguered ceremony rolls out at long last on CBS. To get there, they would have to add 200 new members who were intersectional enough to satisfy the activists who had scolded them and shamed them out of business for being “racists” just a few years ago.
They would have to be bought by Jay Penske, who also owns the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, Indiewire, and Gold Derby. They would have to put out bylaws and rules to ensure they would be fair and equitable. And now, they can host their show and have some high-profile celebrities in attendance.
Gone are the days when Ricky Gervais laid waste to the ruling class with jokes that mocked them, exposed their hypocrisy, and were fearlessly funny. Remember funny?
Things might be “back to normal” at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, thanks to the Barbenheimer phenomenon. But is it just a new coat of paint covering an industry in decay? Or is Hollywood “back” from the brink?
How did it all go so wrong?
The leaders of Hollywood stopped listening to the free market and became Good Puritans in their new Woketopia. Once they took a side against the people, they sealed their fate and hastened their demise.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The same thing has happened to the Democratic Party and the Left writ large. In forming their #resistance, they became the most insulated ruling class since the Gilded Age. These things never end well.
I’ve been at this game since 1999, when I started an HTML site called Oscarwatch.com. When it made money, I was sued by the Academy and changed it to awardsdaily.com. I watched an entire industry rise around my little site, an industry of “Oscar blogging” that would eventually include the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and other outlets all earning money off the lucrative “For Your Consideration” ads.
I was also at the epicenter of the “Woke” religion that has strangled the life out of not just Hollywood but art, science, music, and comedy.
Back in 2001, I’d been calling out Hollywood and the Oscars because no black woman had won in the Best Actress category since they began.
I raged about this loud enough that eventually, people started to notice, and that year, Halle Berry won Best Actress along with Denzel Washington, making Oscar history. It felt like a victory won against an oppressive system that favored white people who got the best parts, won all of the awards, and shut out those who couldn’t open a movie.
That was years before Barack Obama would become the first black — or mixed-race — President. The high we received from that election is hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t a part of it. You have to think about the self-help revolution in the 1990s - therapy, Big Pharma allowed by the FDA to market directly to consumers — that led all of us on a path toward “self-improvement” and perfectionism that would eventually take us one step closer to collapse.
After the Clinton era ended, slowly, we would build a new utopia on the Left where character mattered. Bush would be the bad guy, along with the Koch brothers and other evil demons who supported fossil fuels and white people, or so we convinced ourselves. By the end of it, when Barack Obama rose to power, we were a new society — New Puritans, colonizing the New World online.
I followed Obama on Twitter, and he followed me back. Silicon Valley leaned Left, and as they became the richest people in the world, they shaped our New World in the image of Obama - now, we’d be hellbent on repeating the pattern of making history, or none of it mattered.
The problem? We didn’t notice that we’d abandoned half the country. We weren’t paying attention. Our bubble just felt so good. We were good. We were building a better world. Raising perfect children in our perfect Utopia.
I sent my daughter to a high school my more critical thinking nephew dubbed a “social justice military Academy.” I didn’t think twice about it. Around that same time, Black Lives Matter was taking root in our online Utopia, and before long, the hashtag #oscarssowhite appeared, sending the ruling class into a freaked-out tizzy.
I was way ahead of the curve back then because I’d already been on the bandwagon of pushing race and gender into the Oscars. It was “Critical Theory” in practice. I didn’t know the term for it. We all came to the same point at roughly the same time, around 2013, just after Obama’s second term.
Around this time, we began to notice the pushback against Obama himself. Any criticism against him was interpreted as “racism,” and from then on, that became the thing we feared the most. Gender and gender “identity” would come later.
When Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director and Best Picture (2009), I quietly patted myself on the back, knowing I’d had a part in screaming about gender and the Oscars. And it had worked.
Every year, there I’d be, counting heads. If they snubbed an actress like Viola Davis, choosing Meryl Streep instead (2011), I’d call them racists, suggesting they hadn’t changed since the days when Hattie McDaniel had to enter through the back of the auditorium when winning for Gone with the Wind.
I lost my core audience when I went “woke.” We didn’t call it that back then. We just felt the high of a collective sense of purpose, making our new utopia online more equitable, 1984 style. We were building a world “inside” that locked out the world “outside,” and we were taking all of American culture, including the Oscars, with us.
We were already too married to the Democrats so that all of Hollywood, a business that relies on the free market to survive, suddenly had to abandon it because half the country was now the enemy when Trump won in 2016.
We never expected to need people to buy movie tickets and watch our awards shows. We seemed to believe that all of our whining about Trump was something people cared about outside our bubble.
We didn’t notice we’d abandoned half the country until the Oscar ratings went into free fall. You can track them at the beginning of the Trump era. Hollywood took a side, and thus, half their audience vanished.
When COVID hit, the box office collapsed. We kept waiting, year after year, for the box office to come back to life. Top Gun Maverick brought people out to the theaters, but it seemed like a one-off. We all imagined this was finally the end of theatrical.
Then came Barbenheimer. As a meme phenom online, it represented signs of life in a dead industry as TikTok users delighted in taking pictures of themselves in Barbie and Oppenheimer costumes. Every Gen-Zer had to see both movies so as to brand themselves as part of this movement.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Barbenheimer looked a lot like Hollywood movies used to look, with traditional masculine and feminine heroes. There was something retro about it, an echo of the past that seemed to ignite a frenzy at the box office.
But it was too good to be true. Not long after that, the writers and actors went on strike, and the industry once again hit the skids.
When Sound of Freedom came along, the hysteria machine went into overdrive, here was a movie that had defied the odds and became a bonafide hit, but because it wasn’t part of the Woketopia, it had to be viciously attacked and destroyed. The machine went into overdrive, attempting to crucify the filmmakers and the film's subject.
Yet, there it is, in the year's top ten films, besting Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible. It also showed signs of life. People would turn out if someone gave them a movie they wanted to see.
And therein lies the problem for the Woketopians. They continue to give people what they should want rather than what they do want. They could right the ship if they listened to the free market. But to do that, they’d have to abandon their mission of equity over merit.
Film awards depend on merit. They depend on an industry that awards the best rather than an industry that tries to right the wrongs of society.
Since 2020, most film awards seem more motivated to give their awards only to people of color or other marginalized groups because giving out an award to a “white guy movie” feels counterproductive. But in so doing, they’ve destroyed their brand.
The Fix
Understanding the why of it takes you halfway there. The real problem for the Woketopians is their alliance with the #resistance, aka the Democratic Party. If Obama is producing movies, putting out top ten lists, and overseeing his flock in our New America online, then there is no escape. No one wants to offend The King.
Those of us who have been around a while remember what it used to be like in Hollywood and on the Left. Of course, the counterculture revolution in the 1960s broke free from religion’s grip on art, science, education, and culture. That was an easy side to take back when they made Field of Dreams.
But that Hollywood doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have Arthur Miller to write The Crucible or Rod Serling to write The Twilight Zone. We have instead Good Puritans who value their status inside utopia. All of the great work will have to be built outside of Hollywood as a new counterculture takes shape.
What is destroying Hollywood and the Oscars is that they have forgotten why they exist at all. They’re not a church or a religious movement. They’re here for one reason. To entertain us. Do we care what Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Julia Roberts, or Mark Ruffalo think about politics? No.
They should be begging Ricky Gervais, Dave Chapelle, or Joe Rogan to host. These voices are popular and exist in “the real world.” But more than that, they have no problem speaking truth to power. Give people a reason to watch, and they just might.
They won’t do that because streaming has given Hollywood and awards shows a soft landing and a safe space to retire. The SAG Awards will be hosted on Netflix this year, and viewership numbers won’t matter.
Like fixing the Left, fixing Hollywood is likely a fool’s errand. They don’t want it to change. They’ve reached an unfortunate bottleneck that leaves them no option except to let what was once a thriving empire collapse. But out of the ashes, a new industry will grow - because we the people still need one.
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