Main Edition
US
FR
April 27, 2021 - 12:03pm
One of the phrases I find least convincing is “go woke, go broke” – the comforting idea that promoting fashionable causes is bad for a company or individual, when in most cases it’s clearly not. Woke capital remains very successful and pinkwashing works.
Hitching your brand to anti-racism or equality or whatever doesn’t hurt if you’re just one competing individual or firm in the marketplace. Where it can go wrong is where politics invades shared communal traditions and spaces; then you may well go broke, or at least people will switch off.
The reason for this year’s Oscar ratings hardly need explaining; cinemas have been closed for over 12 months and many people are barely aware of what films have come out. In fact large swathes of the American public had have never heard of the Best Picture nominations.
Yet the Academy Award ceremony has been in decline long before Covid arrived, down from over 40 million until 2013 to under 30 million in 2019.
There are two obvious factors, one being media dispersion, so that people don’t all watch one or two popular shows but instead a number of different, less-popular shows; many also catch up days later. Another is the decline in cinema-going since its last golden age in the 1990s, when television has been ascendent with the arrival of The Sopranos, The Wire et al.
It seems plausible that politicisation plays some role; the Oscars was never a politics-free zone, but it has become far more openly political since the start of the second Obama term in 2013. That year was considered the beginning of the Great Awokening (and when New York Times references to keywords such as “racism” and “white supremacy” suddenly rise rapidly).
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeLooking down on most of your customers and actively hating about half of them is not a winning business model. It simply took time for the reality to surface. When viewership is down more than 50% from last year, you’d think some introspection might be in order. But who thinks that’ll happen?
Ricky Gervais tried a couple of years ago, but he was speaking to people whose job is to pretend to be someone else. Even they know how ridiculous it is to be paid exorbitant sums of money for that, and many desperately want to be taken seriously. But instead, they simply read a new set of lines someone else wrote.
As part of the process of introducing someone to some of the great Czech films of the 1960s, YT recently fed me Milos Forman’s acceptance speech for either Best Film or Best Director in 1976 for Cuckoo’s Nest.
More or less all of the six or seven films nominated remain rock solid classics to this day. Among them were Nashville, Dog Day Afternoon, and a Fellini. The contrast with the utter garbage that Hollywood puts out today was jaw dropping. Not only are the ceremonies themselves unwatchable these days but so are, for the most part, the films.
You’re right there. There shouldn’t be a category for best foreign film, it should be best Hollywood film. And they did used to produce good stuff, back in the day. It’s like the modern stuff is written by an algorithm designed by the marketing department.
Is there anything as depressing as scrolling through Netflix, over and over, searching for something which is bearable to watch? Drek, degenerate, stupid, venal, obscene, sadistic, evil, dull, puerile, occult, disgusting, depraved, and just BAD is 98% of it easily.
I guess Amazon Prime – which is even worse, I would say it is Evil, and proof Bezos sold his soul to the devil, or at least feels harming society and people’s psyche is OK.
I wouldn’t know. I don’t have Netflix or Amazon Prime or Sky or a TV or any such nonsense.
Fraser, get the free 2 week. There are a coupls good WWII documentaries (I am a WWII reader/watcher as it is amazing) Breaking Bad, Narcos, I even liked ‘Episodes’, although am embarrassed to admit it. Not much else I remember though, except the BBC/PBS kind of costume dramas from before PC went mad.
Episodes was the best thing that any Friends’ alumnus has been in. Matt LeBlanc was surprisingly good.
Yes the nominated or winning film awards were something you could probably see in your local cinema eg French Connection , Anne of a Thousand Days or Mary Poppins. The Oscar nominated films then moved onto the art film which were only shown in a few cinemas in a few cities and the Film Festival world began to grow so that every art film had a chance of winning some award. Award winning film now means something few have ever heard of and I can’t see how the business ( outside franchise films) makes any money.
Classic foreign Films 1957 ”The Red balloon” 1969 ”Z” Costa Gravas on Greek colonels .1960 ”la strada”
I (hope) it’s a sign of people’s general apathy towards the status of celebrity. I suspected as lockdowns continued that people would grow tired of the pontification of celebrity politics (and the whole ‘Imagine’ debacle proved this I think, as well as generating some delicious Memes, and that’s bracketing out Madonna in her bath). I know a lot of Aussies are less than happy at the growing celebrity ex-pat community that have moved down under, being that they can afford the exorbitant flight costs, whilst native Aussies are left trapped abroad. I think lockdown proved (as if further proof was needed) that Hollywood especially exists in a bubble far removed from the people they talk (lecture) to.
I will admit though, a part of me misses the cinema. Not the cinema going public, but the cinema experience itself. It’s just not quite the same on Netflix and Amazon, regardless of how expensive your home set up is.
Where was Ricky Gervais when they needed him?
he tried a couple of years ago, but the glitterati scoffed.
I don’t know about scoffed.
I don’t recall anyone addressing or even challenging his criticisms, they just decided en masse to pretend it never happened. They’re very good at pretending after all.
did you see Gervasis’s Olympic Opening? The mawkish fetishizing, PC gon mad, NHS show still hurts when I think of it. I wonder if the clapping and pot banging is part of the same National weirdness about that organization that Gervasis encapsulated. The TickTocks were definitely an echo of it…
To Hell in a handcart with the whole Hollywood set. As they might say over there “Missing you already”
Three reasons:
The term go woke, go broke is what will happen long term.
But no company seems to have identified with the other side of the culture wars. Why no traditional ‘colonialist’ tea to take on the ineffably woke Yorkshire tea?
Happily I’d lost interest in award shows many decades ago.
My concern is not about the always tedious Oscars. It’s about the movies we can expect from Hollywood in the next few years. I strongly suspect they’ll all be highly politicized, overtly pushing a woke political message to the detriment of story, plot, characterization and everything else that makes a movie memorable.
My public library system provides free access to the Hoopla and Kanopy on-line movie services. I’ve started watching Korean movies many of which are excellent and largely untainted by political correctness.
A one legged bi-sexual tightrope walking Black Cop?…who goes trans…
Why would anyone waste time watching a load of self-indulgent cringeworthy non-entities spouting off about how great each other are ….
Ghastly, ghastly, ghastly ….
Seriously not a good look to have security when one supports defunding police. Also not cool that you can remove the drug-users from your environment when the police do not remove them from areas where mere mortals live, work, and try to play. So, yeah, we weren’t buying into your naaaarative.
It may only be my age but films and stars aren’t what they used to be. Indeed, even in my youth, I preferred an older generation with a lighter touch, that, say, of Cary Grant, to the then-current crop.
In the golden age, film fans had an idea where the favourite stars stood on political matters, Bogart and Spencer Tracy to the letft, James Stewart and John Wayne to the right as were Cary Grant and Fred Astaire more discreetly. Few it any one cared very much and the actors made enough enjoyable films to make ir pointless to worry about how they voted, Now the stars make much more dosh than their predecessors did, give little in the way of entertainment and charm has almost vanished from the screen, being replaced by blither about current affairs.
Mainly Bogart’s wife lauren bacall (left0marched humphrey to hollywood 10 who were ”Blacklisted” Dalton trumbo won two oscars under pseudonym ..for ”roman holiday” 1953 and 1960 ”Spartacus”I preferred gary Cooper ”A man’s politics are his own business”.. Sinatra was left then right;same as Charlton heston..
Sinatra’s son, Ronan, probably will stay wedded to the left.
My wife put the Oscars on but I didn’t take any notice for a while. Some of what I saw from the middle of the show wasn’t so bad. The beautiful white South African woman accepting an award with a countryman on some documentary about making friends with an octopus was the highlight for me. Whatever its other defects the Oscars always had a lot of really beautiful women on it, undressed to kill. When my wife went to bed I flipped back to the beginning to watch and lasted all of two minutes. Who starts an awards show by talking about the Derek Chauvin trial? I flipped to another channel. I doubt that I will watch at all next year.
Film actors should not be allowed to speak unless they are on set and its part of the script. It leads to all sorts of trouble like Ragan, Schwartzenegger, Glenda Jackson etc.
Underlying Woke Culture specifically and the Culture War generally is a War of Beliefs.
It is at the level of beliefs that equality, diversity and inclusion breaks down into a homophilic negation of equality, diversity and inclusion.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily#:~:text=Homophily%20(from%20Ancient%20Greek%3A%20homo%C3%BB,over%20100%20studies%20have%20observed
And where Woke Culture becomes a rationalisation of homophilic segregation.
https://quillette.com/2021/04/16/the-permanence-of-segregation/
Judas and the Black Messiah is a masterful film and Kaluuya’s speech was genuine and very Arsenal if I can make that an adjective. But as for the rest…
And don’t forget the erosion and rot within the awards from the influence of Weinstein who probably did single handedly most to harm Hollywood.
Weinstein went from hero to zero, someone to feast on, to set up as the incarnate contrast to the glittering physical and moral perfection of the Hollywood elite. It’s all show, showbiz.