Oscar Who?

By Bruce Bawer

It started, as ever, with the red carpet. Since I live in Norway, I watched it on TV2 Denmark. Asked by the Danish reporter why so many of the nominated movies this year are about politics — Trump, transgenderism, etc. – Whoopie Goldberg replied: “Movies give you an insight into what people are thinking.” Yep — people who live in Bel Air, Beverly Hills, and Brentwood.

On the other hand, Conan O’Brien’s opening monologue was funnier than one had any right to expect. And he seemed to strike the right note when he said that despite current political divisions, this “seemingly absurd” annual ritual celebrates “an artform that can, at its very best, unite us.” True enough.

Indeed, the politics this year were, all in all, tamped down. Kieran Culkin, accepting the Best Supporting Actor award for A Real Pain, was charming, reminding his wife that she’d promised him two more children if he won an Oscar. (Are such gestures toward traditional family values allowed anymore?) And the In Memoriam sequence was the classiest I’ve ever seen.

On the other hand, there was the usual PC silliness — and worse. Conan joked about Trump not standing up to Putin. Introducing Linda Muir, nominated for costume design for Nosferatu, Lily-Rose Depp (Johnny’s daughter) praised her for capturing in her garments “the restrictions holding women down” in the Victorian era.

Perhaps the political low point of the evening was the Best Documentary Feature award to No Other Land, a piece of agitprop described by its producers as a film about “the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.” As Daniel Greenfield noted a couple of weeks ago, none of the films about Hamas’s October 7 atrocities was nominated for this prize. But this one was nominated — and, predictably enough, won. And the audience, in this heavily Jewish community, applauded lustily.

Then there was Daniel Blumberg, who, winning the award for Best Music (Original Score) for The Brutalist, praised his “radical musicians” for playing “uncompromising music.” What on earth can that mean? Was it atonal? And let’s not forget the recently deceased genius Quincy Jones, whose musical legacy was absolutely extraordinary — but the tribute to whom consisted of some inane blather from Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey plus Queen Latifah singing one of the more insipid items in his catalog, “Ease on Down the Road.” Lame. Sad. This was a case in which somebody’s obsession with race plainly blinded him or her to the fact that Quincy Jones’s remarkable and multifaceted contributions transcended race.

Perhaps the big surprise of the evening was that Anora won several major awards — Best Picture, Best Directing, Best Writing (Original Screenplay), Best Actress, and Best Film Editing. The movie is about the marriage between “the son of a Russian oligarch” and a “sex worker.” When Mikey Madison picked up her award for Best Actress, she thanked the “sex worker community,” to which she promised to be an “ally.” Meaning precisely what? I guess it’s like vowing to support Ukraine forever and ever while never leaving your desk.

Oh, well. When they gave out the Oscars last year, I had seen only three of the movies that were nominated for awards: Oppenheimer, Maestro, and Napoleon. This year, I’d finally worked my way down to a perfect record: when the Oscars for 2024 were awarded last night, I had not seen any of the nominated films, at least not in their entirety. (A few weeks ago, I paid to watch The Substance online — Demi Moore’s performance was nominated — but I bailed halfway through, and now I remember nothing about it.) (RELATED: Watching the Oscars: Silly, Obscene, Irrelevant, and Artificial)

Nor do I feel an urge to see any of them. The closest I’ve come is Timothée Chalamet’s picture, Aging Twink — I mean, A Complete Unknown. I was tempted to see it; it’s playing in the town where I live. Although I despise the way Timothée threw Woody Allen under the bus when the latter was MeToo’d over Mia Farrow’s old, vengeful charges, I like the kid’s acting. But I hate Bob Dylan, the subject of this thing. So I’m good. (RELATED: Bob Dylan Is My Hero)

Sigh. It’s a different time for movies — very different. To see how different, you only need to take a quick detour into the past. Take the 1950 ceremony — 75 years ago. Boy, were there giants on the earth in those days. The movies nominated for Best Picture included The Heiress, a masterpiece — directed by William Wyler and based on Henry James’s Washington Square — that I must have seen at least a dozen times, and the terrific, endlessly rewatchable A Letter to Three Wives, written and directed by the masterly Joseph Mankewicz. Both films lost to the powerful All the King’s Men.

Back then, the Best Picture category had room for only five nominees. So the poignant My Foolish Heart showed up only in other categories — a Best Actress nomination for Susan Hayward and a Best Song nod for the extraordinarily tender title song, one of my own half-dozen favorite songs of all time. Also nominated in that category was “Through a Long and Sleepless Night,” a sweet ballad from the warmhearted comedy Come to the Stable, starring Loretta Young and Celeste Holm as nuns — another picture I’ve seen multiple times. But both of these worthy nominees for Best Song lost to the immortal tune “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” What a year!

It was the year of the beautiful Italian classic Bicycle Thieves, of the estimable Fred Astaire musical The Barkleys of Broadway, of the Elizabeth Taylor version of Little Women, and of the pathbreaking Pinky, in which Jeanne Crain plays a black woman passing for white. It was the year of the gripping Edward, My Son, in which Spencer Tracy and Deborah Kerr battle across the years about their spoiled son, who is never seen on screen. It was the year of Kirk Douglas in Champion and John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima.

Or go back fifty years, to 1975. In the Best Picture race, Godfather II beat Chinatown and Coppola’s magnificent The Conversation — what an embarrassment of riches! Nominated for Best Director were François Truffaut for Day for Night and John Cassavetes for A Woman Under the Influence. Other movies that picked up nominations that year were Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Young Frankenstein.

No, it’s not quite as stellar a list as in 1950 — but it’s damn close. To be sure, the day when movies routinely introduced fantastic songs had passed: the most memorable nominee for Best Song was Mel Brooks’s spoof “Blazing Saddles.” It was the year of the unfortunate but gorgeously photographed Robert Redford version of The Great Gatsby. The nominees included schlock — but entertaining schlock — like Towering Inferno and Murder on the Orient Express. But one thing was sure: it was still a year when most of the people watching the Oscars had seen at least a few of the nominated films.

What’s shocking is to look back just a quarter of a century, to the year 2000. Get a load of this lineup: American Beauty, The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Sixth Sense, Being John Malkovich, Sweet and Lowdown, Sleepy Hollow, Magnolia, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Matrix. Not too shabby. A mere 25 years ago, in short, the industry was still going pretty strong. Once again, admittedly, the song nominees were nothing to write home about: the only one for which I can recall the melody is the facetious “Blame Canada” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.

But 2025? Forget it. None of the pictures nominated for major awards looked remotely tempting. (I reserve the right to check out one or two of the animated and foreign-language nominees if the opportunity arises.) In recent years, the Oscars have made headlines not for celebrating artistic greatness but for giving the first award ever in Category A to a member of Identity Group B. So it was that last night, 85 years after Hattie McDaniel won an acting Oscar, Paul Dazewell told a hysterically cheering audience last night at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood: “I’m the first black man to receive a costume design award.” And Zoe Saldaña, tapped for Best Supporting Actress in Emilia Pérez, announced: “I am the first American of Dominican origin to win an Academy Award!” I guessed correctly that the award for Best Documentary Short Film would go to The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which is about the first female member of the New York Philharmonic. (One of the two winners boasted of their “all-woman crew.”)

Then there’s the Best Actress nomination for Karla Sofía Gascón — born Carlos Gascón — in Emilia Pérez. This means that this year, 11 men were nominated for acting, as compared to nine women. Whatever. All I know is that the widely circulated clip of that movie, which was widely touted as the front-runner for Best Picture, is breathtakingly awful — a duet in which a surgeon and his prospective patient sing about sex-change surgery. (Simply put, it ain’t exactly “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”)

And so on. Somebody named Sebastian Stan playing Donald Trump in something called The Apprentice — which, by all appearances, is the hatchet job from hell but which, given the depths to which Hollywood has sunk, is a project that could hardly not have been green-lit? Check, please. (Reportedly, The Apprentice received an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Surprise!) The 215-minute The Brutalist, which John Podhoretz has convincingly pegged as a brilliantly helmed but, in the end, profoundly ugly portrait of postwar America, which it dishonestly depicts as having appalled Jewish refugees as much, in its own way, as Hitler’s Germany did? No, thank you. And the more I read about Conclave, this year’s movie about Catholic Church intrigue, the less I care to see it.

The conclusion is inescapable: as a consequence of political correctness gone mad, the increasing distance between Hollywood and middle America, and a film community all too many of whose members exhibit a bizarre combination of pretentiousness and puerility, something calamitous has happened to the cinema during the first quarter of the 21st century. Hollywood, which once had its finger on the pulse of the American public — not to mention a big chunk of the international public — has all but completely lost touch.

It’s no tragedy, I guess. Over the centuries, other art forms have come and gone: the epic poem, the sonnet, the operetta. The golden age of opera lasted a century or so. So, now, has the era of talkies.

Yes, there’s still tons of content on Netflix, but what on earth is drearier than scrolling through that seemingly endless menu in search of something that might be borderline watchable? How often do you give up looking after five or 10 minutes? How many times have you put something on only to realize that you’ve seen it before — that it’s that forgettable? How many offerings can seem interchangeable?

Granted, fine films are being made outside the system. The best new movie I saw in 2024 was Reagan, which was based on a biography by The American Spectator’s Paul Kengor, and which, as the New York Post reminded us in an article on Oscar Day, did not even qualify for the Best Picture Oscar “because it failed to meet the judges’ DEI requirements.” Enough said. (RELATED: Hollywoke: The Motion Picture Academy of Bigotry)

Technologically, it’s cheaper and easier than ever to make a movie. But the typical script these days is mind-bogglingly jejune — a contrived mishmash of recycled plot ideas, shallow characters, vapid dialogue, and fashionable political messages. Screenwriters used to have some life experience; now they seem to go straight from some Ivy League college to film school to Tinseltown, often knowing nothing about life other than the identity-group categories that their professors obsessed over and nothing even about movies that were made before they were born. Honestly, when was the last time you saw a new picture that was inspiring, heartwarming, heartbreaking?

It’s sad to say, but as the Oscars approach their centenary — three years from now — it’s looking as if the once-glorious film business has had its day.

First published in The American Spectator