Hollywood’s Big Lie is that the Academy Awards are about art.
Hollywood publicity is meant to sell, but sometimes it confesses. This week’s announcement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — The Oscars – that it has formally apologized to Native American Sacheen Littlefeather (more on the reason why below) is an unabashed declaration of its “progressive” makeover — and fall. The 95-year-old institution has gone through a number of significant revisions this millennium that reflect similar debilitating changes in our national politics.
The Oscars’ recent reorganization, including a 2016 push for affirmative-action inclusion, might seem immaterial, but the overhaul (which purged old membership rolls) followed the media trend toward social transformation. It’s not hyperbolic to see how this showbiz activism resembles the calls for revolution that threaten our national structures. The Academy has effectively changed the way it is seen and how it is constituted.
Upon the Academy’s founding in 1927, its official purpose seemed auspicious:
Encourage the improvement and advancement of the arts and sciences of the profession by the interchange of constructive ideas and by awards of merit for distinctive achievement. In a word, the Academy proposes to do for the motion picture profession in all its branches what other great national and international bodies have done for other arts and sciences and industries.
Those lofty goals were fundamentally apolitical (despite the myth that the Oscars were created to settle union disputes). But now that the objectives are principally about demonstrating political correctness, the Oscars lack grandeur and fascination for everyone except Hollywood’s left-leaning corporate-media stooges.
Proof of the Oscars’ bygone attraction and integrity is found in a revealing declaration by charter-member actress Mary Pickford, in 1928:
The Academy is the League of Nations of the Motion Picture Industry. It is our open forum where all branches can meet and discuss constructive solutions to problems with which it is confronted. In the past we have never been able to get together on common ground and in making this possible the Academy has conferred a great service. The producer, star, feature player, cinematographer — in fact, every individual can come into the Academy with any problem or proposal and feel that all barriers are leveled, that in this open court his voice carries the same weight as that of any other person, regardless of position and standing. There is no greater force for coordination, no greater avenue for constructive and intelligent cooperation for advancement than that offered by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Performer and businesswoman Pickford (once billed “America’s sweetheart”) was more articulate than most contemporary entertainers. Her charming statement of industry idealism is now lost to group-think pressure and the insurgent political correctness. Recent Academy changes, expelling senior members for new, “diverse” ones, took place without “open forum,” leveled barriers, or “open court.” Fiat has replaced “intelligent cooperation.” In other words, the Oscars are less like the League of Nations and have become more Soviet. Woodrow Wilson’s influence has been replaced by Michelle Obama’s (she presented the Best Picture Oscar in 2013).
Few journalists report the political ramifications of this conversion; instead, the trade press merely praises the apology to Sacheen Littlefeather as part of the routine whereby the Academy, especially its rotating presidents and board of governors, issues dictates like a politburo — moving toward nebulous equity and “justice” on behalf of identity politics before consideration of artistic achievement.
These changes occur in steps. The Academy website currently proclaims: “We recognize and uphold excellence in the motion picture arts and sciences, inspire imagination, and connect the world through the medium of motion picture.” Hollow blather.
But outgoing president David Rubin, in his letter to Littlefeather, made the Academy’s aim more specific, chock-full of buzzwords:
We cannot realize the Academy’s mission . . . without a commitment to facilitating the broadest representation and inclusion reflective of our diverse global population, . . . With the guidance of the Academy’s Indigenous Alliance, we are firm in our commitment to ensuring indigenous voices — the original storytellers — are visible, respected contributors to the global film community. We are dedicated to fostering a more inclusive, respectful industry that leverages a balance of art and activism to be a driving force for progress.
Crude and authoritarian, Rubin disgraced Pickford’s diplomacy, using pop cant: “representation,” “inclusion,” “diverse global population” (that’s a knee-slapper for an L.A.-based guild), and worst of all, Rubin’s combination of “art and activism.” This is what has ruined Hollywood movies and made the Oscars telecast unwatchable.
It was great TV in 1973, when Sacheen Littlefeather (Marie Louise Cruz) stepped up to the podium at the behest of Marlon Brando to decline his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather. Nothing in this era of award-show narcissism can match its shock. It was also great theater: Dressed in Native attire, wearing two perfectly balanced, long tresses, Littlefeather graciously spoke the terms of Brando’s refusal: “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.” She stated, “I’m Apache,” (although today’s trade press identifies her as Yaqui) and brought global attention to the liberal industry’s moral hypocrisy. There were boos, but also cheers and applause — that contradiction has devolved into contemporary confusion as the Millennial Academy now genuflects to 75-year-old Littlefeather. (The merits behind Brando’s stunt — he had provided a five-page statement — deserve future explication.)
Littlefeather had made the first apology: “I beg at this time that I have not intruded on this evening.” It was the only apology necessary. The Academy’s apology is merely self-satisfying political egoism. This is akin to members of Congress sporting fake kente-cloth shawls and taking a knee in a foul moment of fake reverence for ex-con George Floyd, in an act of politically correct prostration. This Oscar apology has nothing to do with the art of motion pictures. It renounces Hollywood’s former artistic purpose to show self-imposed obedience to a new political regime. The Academy has brainwashed itself.