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 spread of either pathogen but did happen to make an awful lot of money for those at the heart of both movements.
It's an appalling document. It’s in the realm of the social engineers of the Soviet Union. It’s a cousin of the political and racial skullduggery of the Middle East. It's woke to its fingertips, even using the word 'Latinx' which no one except a handful of members of the Democratic Party uses in real life. It threatens artistic freedom and the workings of commerce. It will cause all sorts of unpleasant and awkward social interactions, feeding an already thriving grievance culture. It may well lead to a diminishment in quality of filmmaking. It's terrifying, and it's coming soon.
The disfigurement of the art of film it will unleash will be unprecedented. Never before in 120 years of motion pictures have such demands been put on artists. What films might not be made because of this dark, oppressive cloud hanging over the studios? Looking at last year’s Best Picture nominees, there’s The Banshees Of Inisherin, set on an island off Ireland in 1923, so everyone’s white in it and it’s mostly about men. All Quiet On The Western Front is almost entirely about white men because, duh, it’s about German soldiers in the First World War. I don’t know the exact race and sex composition of the crew that worked on these pictures (and I don’t care), but I’ll wager they were chosen for their talent as opposed to their immutable characteristics. Would these films be eligible for Oscars if they’d been released in 2023?
In the next few years it'd be a beautiful thing to have a non-woke Hollywood whistleblower revealing how some are getting round these deranged rules (the Left loves rules). You can imagine the horse-trading that will go on, the underhand deals – “I’ll swap you two deaf women for one Latinx, and then we’ll both hit our quotas” – to navigate the tangled bureaucracy of the modern-day communists, whose only interest is in a fairer society, don’t you know. Possibly some employees will uncover some diverse family background they previously neglected, or develop some sort of medical condition.
If there’s anyone left in Hollywood who has gumption, who has common sense, who has wisdom, and who is a person who wants to continue producing great art then they should tell the Academy to take a running jump. Can you imagine that someone like Stanley Kubrick, who was so meticulous he did things like spending a whole six months touring castles to find one suitable for his historical film Barry Lyndon, would put up with this interference?
The only way to get rid of bullies is to stand up to them: if, say, Christopher Nolan just said, sorry, no, I’m going to make my films the way I always have done and if that means that your Marxist madams and madmen don’t like it, then tough, the whole edifice could collapse. The wokerati might then come for Nolan – would he have JK Rowling reserves of courage and cash to see off the hornets? That’d be the test, and the entertainment business is, of course, riddled with social justice warriors – but failure to do so would be to the detriment of both the film industry and wider society.
The same lunacy seems to be mandated for cinema's little brother advertising. In my country (Australia) there is a longstanding insurance advert. For the last couple of years, the ad has finished with a long lingering shot of an African. Just recently, the shot has been ditched in favour of a white blind girl, complete with seeing-eye dog. Apparently (right now) disability trumps race in the woke stakes. No doubt in the future, the blind girl will be ditched in turn in favour of whatever is next on the woke agenda.
ReplyDeleteOne goal the Oscars are certain to reach is a new record low for viewership. It has already dropped by 80% since 1998. If the Academy seeks to make itself even more irrelevant, it's on the right track. The next logical step is to restrict Oscar voting to Academy members who belong to "under represented" groups. If those members can both agree, it'll make everything easier.
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