Sunday, March 3, 2019

And The Oscar No Longer Goes To ...

I wanted to comment on this article when it was published last month.

Now's my chance to give some of my views on the Oscar Flop that is Tinsel Town's biggest awards ceremony to congratulate ... themselves.

On Sunday night, millions of viewers around the world will finally find out who the big winners are in this year’s Academy Awards. But, after an unusually tumultuous and controversy-filled Oscar season, some would argue that one of the big losers has already been revealed before a single envelope has been opened.

Million? The ratings were slightly higher compared to last year, but that's a pretty low standard to achieve. The fact is that fewer people every year are watching the Academy Awards. The movies are crap, filled with social justice yawns or they push some sloppy left-wing tripe shaming the rest of the country which wants to have nothing to do with the liberal progressive hate coming out of Hollywood.

Unfortunately, it’s the motion picture academy itself.



The venerable institution, which prides itself on representing Hollywood’s best and brightest, is heading into its most important and most glamorous night looking somewhat rudderless and half-dressed. For the first time in 30 years, the Oscars will have no formal host after Kevin Hart dropped out in December amid a firestorm over past homophobic tweets and jokes, leaving empty a gig that was once coveted but is now widely considered thankless.

The social justice warriors are eating themselves out. Such is what happens with all revolutions. Like the God Janus (or Chronos, or whatever), the revolution begins to eat its own children.

Who will stand up to this craven abuse?

As embarrassing as the Hart debacle was for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, though, it was just one of a number of black eyes the organization sustained in the run-up to this year’s Oscars, nearly all of them self-inflicted.

Yes, indeed. The Hollywood Hatemongers find themselves without justification, without hope, without any recourse since Middle America and Middle Class California (what's left of it), no longer has to put up with being snubbed and shamed for their values.

As the academy has stumbled through a string of public-relations crises — from a scrapped proposal to create a “best popular film” award that was widely criticized as pandering to a much-maligned and ultimately abandoned plan to move the presentation of several awards to commercial breaks — questions have been raised about how the organization is being run under President John Bailey and Chief Executive Dawn Hudson, as well as its 54-member board of governors.

The problem is more than the CEO, more than the Board of Directors. The whole industry is collasping. The social, societal, and even sexual anarchy has caught up with the entire industry. People are tired of the arrogant, left-wing elites acting like they are better than everyone else, when in fact they are the biggest pigs, thugs, and snobs out there.

Harvey Weinstein was just the tip of the iceberg.

“Not quite sure why the Academy Awards seems to hate the Academy Awards this year,” actor Josh Gad pointedly wrote on Twitter last week, joining hundreds of industry professionals protesting what they saw as a misguided plan to snub some of filmmaking’s most important crafts simply to shave a few minutes off the often-bloated telecast.

"The often-bloated", the reporter writes. The whole thing has become even more bloated than ever.

Who wants to watch a bunch of self-serving celluloid sycophants pat themselves on the back, when even they themselves know that they are not that great to begin with? After all, they stood with perverts like Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski for decades. They even awarded him a best director Oscar in 2002, and Polanski couldn't even enter the country to claim the award since he is still on the run from justice for raping a minor!

To many, the recent missteps and reversals reveal an institution at a crossroads, pulled in one direction by the need to adapt to a rapidly changing entertainment landscape and in the opposite direction by nearly a century of proudly held traditions.

The traditions have been abandoned, and perversion has become center stage in Hollywood--and yes, the pun is quite intended.

And as the academy looks ahead to further challenges, including the opening of a long-delayed, highly anticipated $388-million museum scheduled for late this year, the group’s leadership — which will undergo a transition later this year with elections to replace Bailey as well as some board members — is likely to continue to draw scrutiny.

It should. Why should anyone go to a Museum where people see the dying embers of a once proud institution? The sexual exploitation, the moral degradation, who wants to learn more about all of that?

With the ratings for the Oscars steadily sliding in recent years, maintaining the show’s relevance is a top priority for the academy, which derives the bulk of its revenue from the show. (According to the group’s most recent annual report, despite last year’s lowest-ever ratings, returns from the Oscars were nearly $131.8 million, up more than 7% from 2017.)

The Academy exists to raise money to demonstrate that the Academy has a right to exist. Someone please explain to me why this makes sense. This is another example of self-perpetuating agit-prop. The Academy was supposed to showcase the best talent, the best pictures, the best actors, etc. so that more people could learn from the styles and substance and promote the same. Now, it's all about pleasing a bunch of directors and voters whom no one cares about to showcase to an audience that no longer exists.

But as this year’s turbulent awards season has proven — with controversies that at times pitted the academy’s leadership against some of its most esteemed members — getting everyone on the same page about how to do that is no easy feat.

What page?

“People in the academy have different views,” said producer and former studio executive Bill Mechanic, who served on the academy’s board before resigning in protest last year over what he saw as poor management of the organization. “You have the purists who don’t want any change. But you’ve got to come to some kind of solutions. … Or you just keep losing audience.”

They won't talk about the Jackass in the Middle of the Room, which is the quality of the films has declined considerably. The political posturing, the anti-Trumpism has turned off lots of people, even liberals who normally enjoy going to the movies and have no problem disparaging the President.

Indeed, both within the academy’s leadership and its membership, which has grown by 30% in three years — in large part to diversify the disproportionately white, male ranks — there is a degree of division over what the Academy Awards, now in their 91st year, mean in today’s world.

That issue of diversity is a perfect signal for what has befallen the Academy Awards. They want to virtue-signal, they want to appear politically correct. They are not interested in talent, just diversity. They are pandering to 

Some regard the Oscars as a glitzy, star-studded entertainment show that needs to change with the times to attract an increasingly distracted and fragmented audience. Others see it as a hallowed celebration of the finest in filmmaking whose traditions should be upheld at all costs, even if it means a potentially wearying running time and lower ratings.

The same elitism shines through in this paragraphy. Instead of looking at their content and their character, the news and entertainment industry blames the stupid, insipid "audience." "If they weren't so distracted, if they weren't so busy living their lives with moral vigor and purpose, if they spent more time giving into our lies, our demands, we would be so much better off, and the Acadamy Awards would be a rousing ratings success again."

This kind of narrow-minded arrogance is precisely why they are crashing and burning. I wonder how long it will before major broadcasting stations stopping programming the Academy Awards. That will be a great day to celebrate, the downfall of Hollywood and all the damage they have done in our modern culture.

“I think the show has made many mistakes,” producer and director Judd Apatow told The Times last week, pointing, among other things, to an apparent early plan, also reversed, to cut performances of some of the best-song nominees from the telecast. “I understand the demands of time, but I think people would rather have a great show than a rushed show with less awards and less entertainment.”

A great show, certainly, but why would they ask Professional Creep Judd Apatow for his point of view on the matter?

Even as the academy has sought ways to remake the Oscars, the institution has been remaking itself from the inside out over the past several years. In response to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, the organization has taken bold steps to diversify and expand its historically white male-dominated membership, steps for which it has been widely applauded. Last summer, the academy invited a record-setting 928 new members, 49% of them female and 38% of them people of color.

The racist virtue-signalling turned off lots of people. This is reverse discrimination, and it is wrong!

But at the same time, fissures have sometimes opened up in the group’s leadership structure — which many consider unwieldy, with ill-defined divisions of responsibilities — over key issues such as the museum, which has gone over budget and over schedule, and how best to respond to the #MeToo movement.

They have to respond to the same natural forces of supply and demand, just like everyone else. It's wrong for the Academy to ignore the demands of reality and then expect then expect everyone else to go along with their delusion.

Heightening the uncertainty, changes are set to come to that leadership soon. Annual elections for the board of governors will be held this summer. Bailey’s run as president will conclude in August due to term limits, while Hudson’s contract runs through 2020.



OUCH! Looks like more trouble ahead. Who wants to be captain of the Titanic at this point?

Bailey and Hudson declined to comment for this story. But, speaking to the Times in September, Bailey acknowledged that, when it comes to how to revitalize the Oscars, there are varying opinions among the academy’s board, which includes such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Laura Dern, Whoopi Goldberg, and Paramount Pictures chairman and CEO Jim Gianopulos.

“You’ve got 54 alpha-type people that are highly creative, highly motivated — I mean, it would be absurd to say it was unanimous,” Bailey said of the “best popular film” proposal. “We are just trying to address what we see as an existential problem that has been there for a number of years and is not going to go away in terms of where films seem to be headed.”

Maybe because it's becoming more difficult to find popular films? Perhaps the real problem is that popular films do not fit the progressive narrative forced by the Hollywood Academy. They know better, and they believe in fairness at all costs, even though they are the most unfair, elitist, illegal, lawless bunch out there.

Still, Bailey brushed aside the criticism that the academy lacked a coherent vision for how to deal with that existential problem, making decisions in a knee-jerk fashion.

“Look, for an organization that some people like to say is irrelevant and is out of touch with the times, there always seems to be a tremendous amount of interest in what is going on inside the academy,” he said. “My own feeling is, no matter what the academy does or says or determines as a course of action, there are going to be naysayers. It’s just the nature of it.”

Bailey gets it right this one time. The Academy is very much out of touch. So out of touch, that the movies are bombing at the box office, that the private perversions of these public entertainers have sickened so many, that their preachings of tolerance and respect have fallen on deaf ears since they do not live up to their own standards!

Hudson, who has served as CEO since 2011, has at times been a polarizing leader. While many within the organization credit her with helping spearhead the academy’s push toward diversity and the building of an ambitious museum, others feel that under her leadership the academy has moved too quickly in too many new directions, drifting from some of its core missions and alienating some members.

"Alienating some members" is not the biggest problem. The fact that she has alienated the wider audience of movie-goers, that's the problem.



Final Reflection

The Arts and Entertainment world has been corrupted by secular, leftist, atheistic elements for the last three decades. Should anyone be surprised that the Hollywood Academy Awards turned into an absolute dud that no one wants to watch anymore?

The ceremony couldn't even get a host, since anti-social injustice warriors went to great lengths to shame and diminish anyone--and ultimately everyone--who does not measure to their ever-changing, increasingly onerous demands.

The demands for cultural destruction and economic stagnation will never end with the Left. They have now pretty much destroyed the Hollywood/Movie industry, and they institution which used to recognize the best films, The Academy Awards, has taken a full-on dive.

The Oscar No Longer Goes to ...

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