Everyone on social media is a bit of a masochist these days, but none more so than those foolish enough to hold a modicum of hope in Hollywood. From the Super Bowl to the Oscars, it’s time for you all to buck up and realize: the disappointment, the outrage cycles, the 9-to-5 controversy over petty celebrity power plays while actual criminal offenses in studios and casting couches remain ignored. They are a feature, not a bug, of modern entertainment.
Once upon a time, cinema was art. The Left will blame capitalism for infusing campaigning and competition into the entertainment industry, and the Right will blame the champagne socialists neutered by booze, blow, and friends in high places for corrupting storytelling into cheap social justice propaganda. But if the disaster of the Super Bowl halftime show and the insomnia-resolving Academy Awards demonstrated anything, it’s that cowardice, not radicalism, killed entertainment.
The NFL grappled to find a performer for a show headlined by Beyonce as recently as 2016 for the exact same reason the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences couldn’t find anyone to lead this year’s Oscars: no one wants to take a test that they’ll fail by design.
The obvious example here is the case of Kevin Hart, who stepped down from hosting the Academy Awards back in December when the usual cadre of basement trolls delved into old tweets of his to unearth the most insensitive and offensive of his — from a decade ago. At the time, I jokingly predicted the hosting gig would be relegated to Clint Eastwood’s empty chair, as no other eligible star would want to go under the same gun as Hart, and for the most part, I was right. The 91st Academy Awards were tied together by a garish parade of loofah-inspired dresses and half-baked jokes, with every presenter on tenterhooks hoping to offend as little as possible while slipping in the political catcall or two and hyping films that 99 percent of the country hadn’t ever heard of before.
But the greater immolation of the Oscars and Hollywood at large came at the end of the night, when “Green Book” won best picture, much to the ire of just about everyone.
“Green Book” was textbook Oscar bait, a historical dramedy named after the guides for black Americans traveling in the days of overt discrimination and seeking to avoid trouble. Viggo Mortensen starred as the driver, and the universally acclaimed Mahershala Ali was the metaphorical Miss Daisy. The film attempted to tackle the pervasive racism of the mid-century, and earned early critical acclaim to boot. So what reputation did it earn?
The Los Angeles Times deemed it the “worst best picture winner since Crash.”
“The end result of watching it,” Jenni Miller of NBC wrote, was a “mission to make white people feel smug and self-congratulatory about race relations.”
The Root refused to mince words, calling the film “palatable racism for white people.”
But it was Vox, believe it or not, that actually diagnosed the true problem endemic to “Green Book’s” rapid rise, fall, and unfortunate victory: “Borrowing the name of such a fraught piece of history and making a feel-good comedy about it, then failing to do that piece of history justice, is at best a misstep,” wrote Alissa Wilkinson in her initial review of the flick. “At worst, it’s yet another example of Hollywood’s obliviousness and its willingness to feed into its audience’s self-satisfaction.”
Like every film on the best picture shortlist, “Green Book” fulfilled a formula of wokeness that Hollywood insists that viewers demand. Or at least it thought it did.
Director Spike Lee fairly threw some shade at the film following its win. His cop comedy-cum-racial reckoning diagnosed the sources and symptoms of racial tribalism better than any of the films in the pack by far. But Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” faced its own backlash from the hard Left for its central thesis that conquering racism requires the disenfranchised becoming a part of the powers that be and enforcing the status quo, not trying to blow it all up wholesale.
As “First Man’s” removal of the American flag to appease Chinese audiences demonstrated, producing film for profit is one thing. And as a slew of RBG hagiographies eagerly consumed by liberals shows, producing film for propaganda is another. But Hollywood has fallen in between the two and lost the narrative. If the pitiful display of the Oscars rang true of anything, it’s that the entertainment industry needs to care a little less about teaching us lessons we never actually asked for and start, well, entertaining again.
