There have been two great political wars this Oscar season, and both have involved American liberals’ complex relationship with the movies. What makes this relationship complicated is that liberals have a natural sense of ownership over Hollywood — natural because, as you may have heard, the people who work in Hollywood are generally quite liberal — combined with an anxiety about the various forces (from corporate ownership to the masses’ right-wing tastes) that prevent that ownership from always delivering the goods.
This anxiety is often justified: The movies do have a liberal bias, but they have less of one than you might expect from simply polling screenwriters, directors, and studio executives about their views on abortion, foreign policy, and the minimum wage. Political correctness is powerful in the industry, but reactionary ideas keep slipping in — sometimes because genre conventions or just basic storytelling make them unavoidable; sometimes because great artists, regardless of how they vote, can’t help grasping reality in full; and sometimes just because studios are interested in making money and there’s a pretty big audience out there for movies that don’t just toe a Left Coast line.
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