Is this the death of cinema?
2023’s Oscars ceremony was significant, as it may well have been the last time we see its kind. Because like the terrible idea to expand the football World Cup to 48 teams next time round, the rules are being changed by the Academy. See the press release here , which presents the most serious assault ever seen on the workings of the film industry. Read it? Then I’ll continue. (Do please read it. It's horrifying. Yes, the Academy has been dodgy and corrupt for years, but this is a new frontier of awfulness.) It was of course a plan conceived in one of the worst years the civilised world has ever seen, 2020, when not only did the compassion fascists fulfil their dream of controlling people’s behaviour to the Nth degree (because of a disease akin to the seasonal flu), but the race obsessives/warriors/grifters fulfilled their dream of making people bend the knee to the great god of anti-racism (because of the death of a black recidivist), actions which did very little to halt the...