Which celebrity will throw down first with the sort of sputtering anti-Trump rhetoric everybody in the room is waiting for?
It’s Oscar night, America! Can you feel the waves of meaninglessness gently washing over you? Get ready to soak one more time in Hollywood’s self-regard!
I thought I might pen a brief paragraph or two to mark the occasion, seeing as how it’s unlikely I’ll ever do so again on this subject here at NR. Why? Because this is among the final years the Academy Awards will be nationally televised — it was announced last year that the awards ceremony will retreat to internet simulcast in 2029. Tonight, therefore, marks the unofficial psychological point for me beyond which the Academy Awards abandons the pretense that it remains a “national” event — one that people in Middle America care about — or anything other than a celebration of coastal elite tastes and politics. Sure, they’ll play out the string for another couple of years — maybe Project Hail Mary is the Hail Mary pass Hollywood needs to revive itself — but the end of a national ritual is now in sight.
It’s deeply symbolic, and it’s a shame, because I remember when I used to care about the Oscars uniquely among awards shows. (Nobody cares about the Grammys, I can assure you of that.) I used to feel a far deeper investment in film culture — and my disenchantment with it has less to do with my changing life circumstances than with the changing tastes of Hollywood and those of the mass audiences that drive it. (Surviving the intellectual collapse of the “superhero blockbuster” era of Hollywood — which seemingly now is coming to a forced end — was like crawling across a desert with only salt water in my canteen.)
As the films celebrated at the Oscars became more obscure with each passing year, the politics of the Oscars became ever more obstreperously insistent, impossible for me to ignore or set aside. Now? I feel as if the Oscars exist mostly so we can get yearly updates on what Robert De Niro thinks about the current presidential administration. They have devolved into a surreal fashion show — a political fashion show, far more important to attendees than the one put on for the red-carpet photographers. Who wouldn’t want to watch the richest and most beautiful people in America stroke one another’s vanities all night long?
So I’m watching tonight with at least mild anticipation; aren’t you eager to discover which progressive Hollywood niche political interest will win Best Picture? Will the triumph go to woke white people who patronizingly slobber all over mediocre “black art” (Sinners), or to woke white people who patronizingly slobber all over illegal immigrants in the age of ICE (One Battle After Another)?
Faithful readers of mine already know my opinion about tonight’s two leading contenders for Best Picture: Neither would have qualified for Best Picture in earlier, happier days. But since one of them has to win, my assumption is that it will be One Battle After Another, whose ideological incoherence and inability to morally center its narrative resulted in a shambles of a movie — albeit an entertaining (and oh so politically fashionable) one.
Sinners is diverting enough (once it gets past its interminable and heavy-handedly amateurish opening hour of “world-building”), but that flabby opening puts all of the film’s weaknesses on display: Ryan Coogler is so obsessed with portraying “black authenticity” — as understood by fashionable white discourse, mind you — that his movie doesn’t have the courage to embrace what it’s really about: bad hombres and tough dames fighting vampires while holed up inside a bar. (It’s a simple premise, really — only Coogler’s self-seriousness screws it up.)
Otherwise, the only Oscar narratives of any interest tonight are political, as befits an industry now choked into paralysis by politics. Voting ended on March 5 — will the February 28 start of the war in Iran have an effect on the vote? Which celebrity will throw down first with the sort of sputtering anti-Trump rhetoric everybody in the room is waiting for? (My theory is that they’re going to give Sean Penn the Best Supporting Actor Award this year for this specific purpose — to get it over with early in the night.) Either way, I’m probably done with the Academy Awards after this, and I wish it didn’t have to end in such anticlimax.