Blame Greta?

Who’s to blame for the cultural fiasco evinced by the Academy Awards ceremony? Not one movie of the ten nominated for Best Picture was any good, and the winner — Sean Baker’s Anora — was merely the low-down crowd-pleaser of a very small crowd. Very few people saw the foul-mouthed, sexually explicit indie, and those who liked it fell for Baker’s vulgar depiction of corrupt immigrants (the travails of a Russian-American hooker played by Mikey Madison) and spiritual degradation (said hooker’s greed and alienation from her own emotions).

Anora herself personifies the state of contemporary immorality and Millennial Hollywood — endorsed by Baker’s farcical approach to society-wide iniquity, a last-gasp vision of Biden’s America. Ignorant reviewers have called it a Cinderella story, but Baker and Madison were more honest in their acceptance speeches when they both paid tribute to “the sex-worker community.”

That euphemism for prostitution represents a change in cultural standards, some would say the degradation of traditional ethics about women and men and social roles. This connects Anora to the new trend in morals and behavior that transgressive hipster Baker shares with dilettante Barbie director Greta Gerwig and that she disseminated during her tenure as president of last year’s Cannes Film Festival Jury. That’s when Anora made its international premiere, winning the Cannes festival’s Palm d’Or.

Gerwig’s choices last spring had a negative impact on film culture throughout the year, concluding this week when Gerwig’s selection of Anora was rubber-stamped as also the Academy’s Best Motion Picture of the Year.

Consider how other Cannes winners shadowed 2024 film culture. There was a clear and obvious feminist slant to all of Gerwig’s prize-winners: All We Imagine as Light (Grand Prix), Emilia Pérez (Jury Prize and Best Actress), and The Substance (Best Screenplay), plus the International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI) and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury to The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

These choices set the stage for film culture’s dissipation, which was undeniably on display at the Oscars with its red-carpet parade by a community of tabloid celebrity “sex workers.” It’s evident now that Gerwig’s judgments were not just personal preferences; they illustrated a current set of Barbie-fied social resolutions that deserve serious contemplation.

“If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg scolding,” as Vice President Vance quipped to the audience at the Munich Security Conference, we can — with similar good humor — scrutinize how the other Greta’s position of influence affects our survival.

Gerwig, at age 41, represents film culture’s new feminist vanguard; her renown is an extension of the media celebration that established the international activism of Thunberg, now 22.  Their resemblance is not mere “sisterhood,” but a comparable callowness was evident when Gerwig took the stage at Cannes to announce her Jury duty.

“I hardly know what to say,” she began. “I love the cinema, and this is holy to me. Art is sacred, and films are sacred, and I can’t believe I’m getting the opportunity for the next ten days in this house of worship. I am floored right now, and I can’t wait to share these films with you.”

This inarticulate-Yankee fumbling was not an auspicious commencement. Like schoolgirl climate-activist-plant Thunberg, Gerwig seemed a Hollywood-feminist plant who took advantage of her prominence at Cannes to favor the feminist agenda that would go on to disorder the past year’s film culture.

A kind of philosophical chaos became apparent starting when Gerwig and the jury at Cannes broke categorical norms to award the Best Actress prize to the four lead performers in the transgender musical Emilia Pérez: Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and the male actor Karla Sophía Gascón, né Carlos. That decision bore rotten fruit when the Oscars similarly used Gascon to break its own categorical norms. There was no fanfare — indeed no announcement or change in Oscar rules — but a firestorm of controversy resulted, followed by the Academy’s cowardly, pusillanimous silence on the issue.

Anora doesn’t enlarge our compassion as Midnight Cowboy did when that X-rated feature won the Best Picture Oscar in 1969; instead, Anora sentimentalizes the self-contradictions of feminism. Greta’s stealth revolution may look natural, but the change is weak and dishonest. It may seem that no one is to blame, but the simple fact is, no one in the community of reprobates takes responsibility. This is how an institution fractures, a culture declines, and Hollywood’s love for hookers and thieves degrades itself.