Episode Details

This Sunday, the beleaguered Oscars will hold their 94th Academy Awards ceremony. I will be attending, as I have for the last several years. I get my one ticket that is usually on the highest tier. I put on a fancy dress. I drive myself to the ceremony, park in the garage, and take the escalator to the Dolby Theater, which is located in the same mall as the Mann’s Chinese, where I used to visit as a kid to look at the footprints and handprints of all of the stars.

I love going to the Oscars, even if the only people I have to talk to are the wait staff and bartenders. Each floor has two full bars outside each of the tiers of the theater. You are allowed to go in and out of the theater as long as you do it during the commercial breaks. One of the most thrilling things about attending the live show is listening to the waves of applause that ripple through the room when an award is announced, or a film clip is shown.

It looks very different on TV than it does live. I am usually way way up in the nosebleeds so I can’t see much of what is going on unless I look at the flat screens provided for us. I can go out and have a drink and watch the show on the TV monitor. Then you can see it better. But it is still fun to go. I feel really lucky to be invited every year as a member of the press.

How did I ever get here?

I have been blogging about the Oscars for 22 years. It never occurred to me in all of that time that the Oscars could go extinct. Now I think there is a good chance they probably will. Sooner rather than later.

The Oscars, like the Democratic Party, have created a fantasy world for themselves, an insulated, isolated utopia. It plays out in everything they do. They believe they solved the problem of racism that erupted in 2020 with Biden’s directive, and by forcing everyone who wasn’t a willing participant, across the country and in every institution to go along with their “antiracism” policies. They are now trying to make sure this ideology is taught in schools because it isn’t some obscure scripture studied in law school. It is the entire world view of the Left, and that includes the Oscars.

I used to be a true believer. Back when Critical Theory in race and gender was being taught at my daughter’s high school, I was spending my days on my website advocating for people of color and women to be nominated and to win. I was like every social justice scold you see on Twitter now. I believed I was doing the right thing. I believed that there was no purpose to the Oscars if they couldn’t change their history of awarding all white men all of the time.

My perspective would start to shift in the last few years as I watched the accusations of racism and the push for equity to be ultimately detrimental to the goal of what the Oscars are supposed to be about. It isn’t that I still don’t feel that the awards should be open to everyone, not just white men, it’s that I can’t go along with using the awards as a way to pat ourselves on the back and fake-pretend we’ve changed anything. Have we? Or is it all a show?

Film critics and Oscar voters seem to be okay pretending they are awarding on merit. But it doesn’t seem that way to anyone not inside their utopian bubble. They want to be rewarded for having made change - with their museum, with their casting choices, with the films they award, with how they staff their awards shows. They give the impression that things have changed. But they haven’t really. The Academy, and most institutions in this country, remain mostly white. The Academy is still 80% white, above the nation’s white majority, which is in the high 60s at the moment.

Watch any film or television ad produced by Hollywood and you would imagine that we live in a country that has an equal share of people of color and white people. But we don’t. Whites are still the majority. But on the Left, they feel bad about this and thus, they must prove their worth every time they