We already know who is winning Best Picture, Best Director, and a whole bunch of other Oscars, which makes the season over before it just began. I don’t know if there will be pundits who try to pretend it isn’t over, to inject some drama into the race, but take a lesson from last year and realize what all of this has become. It isn’t that only Peak Woke movies win, but it is that the Oscars, like everything else in Hollywood, are still locked inside a bubble.
It is especially hard to watch how the documentary category has become so political, even in the shorts. There is no difference anymore between politics and art. It is all the same organism. That’s why there is no difference between the Gothams and the Oscars now, The Odyssey notwithstanding. Last year’s Mass Formation Psychosis around One Battle After Another revealed the alignment like no other. They said, “This is what we believe; we don’t care what anyone thinks.” And that, to me, was hard to watch.
The attempt by Paramount Skydance to buy Warner Bros. has divided Hollywood, at least according to The Hollywood Reporter. Gee, ya think? The “resistance” wants to keep Hollywood all to itself and can’t stand the idea of not having complete and total control over THE MESSAGE. But Hollywood is still a business and the DGA, Christopher Nolan included, wants the merger to settle or speed up the trial. It’s the last thing Hollywood needs right now:
As I’ve said many times, breaking up Hollywood’s ideological monopoly would be the best thing to happen to Hollywood. I know they mean well. I know they want to make the world a better place one climate change movie at a time, but that is mainly due to the shift of wealth from Right to Left over the past 20 years with the rise of Silicon Valley. True, that is shifting now a bit at Big Tech escapes the bubble because of resistance to AI, but Hollywood got “woke” because their problems became existential, not practical.
If your problems are practical, you’re more likely to want to generate a hit factory. You will want to bring in as many eyeballs as possible. If you become disconnected from the “real world,” then you will not be able to understand practical problems, and your problems will become ideological. And so they have. All the isms and the phobes are what troubles the insular aristocracy now, and the people – those poor, sad slob they detest – are left twisting in the wind. It is what it is.
The Paramount Merger would be, in my mind, like Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into X. It would be a disaster for the “blue checks” as they were once called. Their power has been cut in half as they’ve split off into other areas where they can control their experience, like Blue Sky or Facebook. I don’t know if the merger would be good or bad, but I know it’s necessary to break the dam. Hollywood can’t go on like this. America can’t go on like this, and the blame can’t always fall on Trump and his supporters, whom Hollywood has treated like second-class citizens who are a threat to their way of life.
The people who are used to getting the best seats in restaurants are not accustomed to having to share anything with the rabble, let alone culture. But the problem is that they have reached a creative bottleneck. I’ve been writing about this for ten years, and nothing has changed. Not even the free market could loosen the screws. The Odyssey and One Battle After Another only shine the path for a “woke” Hollywood that can win awards and maybe make money, but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem.
As we can see by how Emmy voters shut out Paramount’s highly successful shows like Landman and The Madison, they are living in their own bubble and exerting their power, but I didn’t need that as proof. I am living proof, as are all of the people they have exiled from utopia over the past 10 years.
The pressure campaign on Paramount has now been met with a threat that they’ll take the studio out of California if they can’t reach a deal, which then has the trades in their usual biased support mode by painting it as a catastrophe for creatives. Brother, that ship has sailed. This merger is the Carpathia making its way toward your sinking ship.
I always knew that sooner or later, there would come a time when they would all just pretend like it was over. No apologies, no atonement. They’d all just shrug it off. That is exactly what’s happening on the Socialist Left right now. Its leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has called it “Woke 1.0.” This is obviously an effort to pivot to the middle and bring some of those voters they’ve alienated with all the “woke shit.”
Even if people want it to be over, it is not over. It will never be over, as I’ve said countless times, if those who run Hollywood can GROW A PAIR and tell the children spies and fundamentalist fanatics to POUND SAND. As long as they still care what those freaks think, they will be captured and thus, “woke.” When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow, as the saying goes.
Woke 1.0 and The Oscars
I helped kick-start Woke 1 and the Oscars. I would not get credit for it, of course, once things began to get really crazy, but readers of this site remember how hard I pushed for so many women and black artists to get recognized. This went on for years because I believed in the cause of changing the world one history-making nomination at a time. After Trump won, mass hysteria crippled the Left and Hollywood. That was when I started to pull back, once I saw them accuse movies of being racist, especially Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Green Book.
The Golden Globes were canceled, and the Oscars implemented their DEI mandate, which has probably done more to tarnish their brand among the public than anything else, because it means every time people see a movie with an intersectional cast, like The Odyssey, they think it’s being done to meet the mandate. I think it was done because Christopher Nolan did not want bitch bites up and down his back and to be seen as a good person.
But is it real power if it’s power bestowed by the still-in-power white patriarchy? No, but it’s a hell of a virtue signal.
Woke 1.0 began with the election of Barack Obama, though truth be told, I was screaming about the lack of black actresses winning the Best Actress Oscar way back in 2001. To date, only one still has, Halle Berry for Monster’s Ball, going on Oscar’s 100th year. No black director has ever won. Making history didn’t do as much for the people who won the Oscars as it did for the people voting on the Oscars. They liked that feeling we all had when Obama made history, and we set out repeating it again and again at the Oscars.
Woke 1.0 was a utopian vision for America that many of us lived out online, in the virtual world. It all began to seem real because everything that happened was not happening on local news or in the newspapers. It was happening online. It’s just that we all forgot there was a real world out there, too. Hollywood now depicts the real world as the utopia that once was. It never looks like any place any of us knows. It always has to meet all the requirements of intersectionality, which feels inauthentic.
No one would have really noticed until Trump won in 2016, which turned the utopia into a totalitarian dystopia. “It’s them or us,” Hollywood said. Two things happened at once. The cancel culture purges began, which transformed Hollywood into a climate of fear and a culture of silence. And they doubled down on “woke” movies and TV shows.
But just as life finds a way in Jurassic Park, art finds a way, and if Hollywood is holding it back, it will find a new life using AI, and that threatens Hollywood more than anything else. What really killed the business was fear. Fear of the truth. Fear of dissent. The counterculture will grow, as I predicted long ago, and Woke 1.0 will be left behind. It would be so great if there were films or TV shows that mocked or ridiculed the Left; this whole thing would be over. But fear prevents them from doing that, and so it continues.
We probably won’t see too much of “woke 1.0” at the Oscars since The Odyssey is winning, and it is progressive enough to leave all of those involved alone. Heck, Matt Damon could even win his Oscar finally. Hollywood now has a chance to pivot away from all of it and get back to the business of making great movies again. Or not. Or it’s Woke 2.0, and everything is about to get much worse.
How all of this might manifest this year is the dampening of feeling for films that everyone said were not “woke,” especially Project Hail Mary. Many in the pundit world are already throwing shade at the film because Conservatives liked it. That won’t hurt The Odyssey on account of Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong’o, even if Conservatives do like the movie. Fjord, on the other hand, might feel a little uncomfortable – are these people ready to shake it off? I doubt it.
It isn’t something that can be turned on and off like a light switch. It is a deeply held belief system that has been passed down from my generation of parents to millennials and Gen-Z. Most of them don’t even know what it’s like to watch movies that aren’t “woke.” That is how their entire worldview has been shaped, which could explain much of the widespread anxiety. After all, this is an ideology that ranks our worth by the color of our skin or our gender and mandates strident rules, lest the scolds come banging down the door.
But it has removed the element of surprise and the power of storytelling, which has a way of bringing us together when it’s done right (Project Hail Mary, Obsession).
Anyway, here are my predictions for this week, which aren’t that different from last week. We are getting to the end of August when all of the Oscar bloggers will head off to the festivals, where they will attempt to curate the Oscar race by placing all of the contenders in their necessary categories. Sounds fun!
Predictions
Best Picture
The Odyssey
Project Hail Mary
La Bola Negra
Wild Horse Nine
Obsession
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Fjord
Dune III
Digger
The Invite
Alt. Ink
Director
Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey
Los Jovis, La Bola Negra
David Fincher, Adventures of Cliff Booth
Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse Nine
Curry Barker, Obsession
Alt. Christian Mungiu, Fjord, Denis Villeneuve, Dune III, Olivia Wilde, The Invite, Danny Boyle, Ink
Actor
Matt Damon, The Odyssey
Tom Cruise, Digger
Brad Pitt, The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Ryan Gosling, Project Hail Mary
John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine
Alt. Andrew Scott, Elsinore, Guy Pearce, Ink
Actress
Ruth Madeley, Being Heumann
Inde Navarette, Obsession
Rosalind Eleazar, Misty Green
Julianne Moore, The Debut
Renate Reinsve, Fjord
Supporting Actor
Paul Giamatti, The Debut
Guitarricadelafuente, La Bola Negra
Sam Rockwell, Wild Horse Nine
Jeremy Strong, The Social Reckoning
Edward Norton, The Invite
Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, La Bola Negra
Anne Hathaway, The Odyssey
Samantha Morton, The Odyssey
Carla Gugino, The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Sandra Huller, Project Hail Mary
Original Screenplay
Wild Horse Nine
Misty Green
Fjord
Obsession
Ink
Adapted Screenplay
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
The Odyssey
Project Hail Mary
La Bola Negra
The Invite
Editing
Adventures of Cliff Booth
Wild Horse Nine
The Odyssey
Project Hail Mary
Dune III
Casting
The Odyssey
The Debut
Digger
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
La Bola Negra
Visual Effects
Dune: Part Three
The Odyssey
Project Hail Mary
Werwulf
Disclosure Day
Cinematography
Dune: Part Three
The Odyssey
Project Hail Mary
Werwulf
La Bolla Negra
Costumes
Werwulf
The Odyssey
Dune: Part Three
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Sense and Sensibility
Makeup and Hair
Digger
The Odyssey
Dune: Part Three
Wewulf
Adventures of Cliff Booth
Production Design
The Odyssey
Dune: Part Three
Project Hail Mary
Werwulf
Adventures of Cliff Booth
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