Posted on 03/03/2018 5:05:33 AM PST by Kaslin
Last year, the 89th Academy Awards was to be an affirmation of American institutions, a night of speeches and sermons culminating in the selection of the Best Picture. President Trump, and his associated rapscallions and usurpers, would give way once again to those who knew best.
Millions would watch as their moral betters projected superior political sensibilities to salve a national wound. Their glamour and insight would be attractive alternatives to the crudities and chaos that had descended since Trump’s election.
All they had to do is what they had done for 88 years: correctly stuff the envelope and read the result.
It was fitting that the task fell to Warren Beatty. He is so vain, he probably thought the award was about him. He hesitated. In the great battle between improvisation and script, his face tightened. Faye Dunaway snatched the envelope. Bonnie to his Clyde, caught again in an ambush.
With the utterance of the words “La La Land” – you can’t make this stuff up – the once glorious Hollywood establishment proved hapless. Not merely by its inability to compete with anything on Netflix, but by the failure to complete the evening’s dramatic arc by delivering the climatic line on cue. The very thing, in other words, that filmmaking is supposed to do well.
It was a major screw up, coming as it did at the precise moment when establishments had suffered in the common man’s estimation for their failure to accomplish the ordinary.
It was ironic, too. The Oscars were sponsored by the New York Times’ unprecedented marketing campaign that employed the catchy slogan, “The Truth Is Hard to Find.”
Picking up on the sponsor’s theme, Beatty’s words immediately before they bestowed the Best Picture award upon the wrong movie were: “Our goal in politics is the same as our goal in art, and that’s to get to the truth.” Except when the truth is not in the envelope where you expect it to be.
With that, Hollywood hung itself on the gallows it had prepared for Trump. And, in the process, accidentally vindicated Trump voters.
Trump was elected because the great institutions, whether government or religious or financial, and even the licensed professionals Pricewaterhouse Coopers employs to tally Oscar votes, have grown ossified and sclerotic when it comes to doing what they are supposed to do.
People were essentially saying that the Washington establishment is fired, and we’re sending a New York real estate mogul to fix it. There was a similar sentiment on the Democratic side which, absent shenanigans by Hillary Clinton and the DNC, may have sent Bernie Sanders into the general election.
Voters saw Trump as a stubborn project manager, in Hollywood parlance a Goldwyn, a Mayer, a Zanuck. Someone who would look up from his plate of eggs at the complaining director and say, “The kid stays in the picture.” Someone whose insolence could be broken only by finding his favorite horse’s head severed and in his bed.
Someone who would put the right card in the right envelope.
Not that Hollywood will learn the lesson. This year’s awards will once again be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, whom the Washington Post has ordained “America’s Conscience.” Yes, that guy.
Those in attendance will speak truth to power by talking about guns, hypocritically garnering applause while safely ensconced behind their wealth and armed bodyguards. They will refuse to consider that the Parkland shooting is fundamentally about the failure of institutions. You know, the very problem that got Trump elected in the first place.
The FBI missed dire warnings about the Parkland shooter like a star struck accountant tweeting his association with celebrity backstage. Instead of creating strict policies and protocols to deal with threats of mass killing in the wake of 9-11, which was their job, the last two FBI directors have conjured a whole lot of ridiculousness about Russian interference.
It’s not only the FBI. Police officers on the scene did not enter the building to stop the carnage. Their Sheriff immediately went on TV to blame guns, without addressing the institutional failures of his own department.
There are credible reports that this shooter may have escaped criminal prosecution in the past by an invention of the Obama Administration called The Promise Program, a complete abdication of Broward County authorities at the behest of the federal government to burnish crime statistics.
If so, that is the greatest failure of American institutions yet. Nikolas Cruz had a gun because laws on the books were purposely not being enforced. You’re telling me the remedy here is more laws?
At last year’s Academy Awards, an accountant’s mistake rendered farcical Hollywood’s gigantic pose that it courageously embraces the truth, while the deplorables – all 62 million (and counting) of them – reside in a deliberate falsehood.
The people who voted for Trump see the same facts as the reigning cultural elite but favor different policies, as happens in democracies. It is childish to the point of rude to commandeer the resources of popular culture to say political opponents are stupid or blind or both.
That’s not going to stop them this year, unfortunately. Those in attendance will be accepting adulation as the best actors of our time even though it was learned this year that parts have been distributed in Hollywood based on a willingness to play along with systematic abuse.
Meaning, by principles of subtraction, that better actors may still be slinging hash in Ohio because they refused to play along, on principle. Which, you would think, should stop self-righteous preening, at least for this year. Don’t count on it.
The awards will always go to the gals and fem-boys with the smallest gag reflex.
Dude looks like Fatt Damon.
Haman wasn’t an uncle. He was a highly ranked political bureaucrat. Mordecai was the uncle.
“Oh, yeah; I remember that. I think it was Cruz’ number, but am not sure.”
I’m pretty sure it was Lindsey Grahams phone number that was given out.
He isn't. When will FReepers learn to watch what Trump does, not what he says? So in a public meeting Trump says some very non-conservative things about the 2nd Amendment, guns, the NRA, etc. But what he did afterwards was to meet with the NRA, giving them the opportunity to say THEY "talked some sense into Trump" about gun control. What does this little drama do? It strengthens the NRA when they were under assault from many quarters and were a bit rocked back on their heels.
I thought the same thing when I saw that pic. What’s happened to Damon? Dude must have done some serious binge eating since his ordeal on Mars.
Wait, that wasn’t real? It wasn’t a documentary? They didn’t shoot on location?
Isn’t Best Picture the last envelope opened? So how did they make that mistake with two unopened envelopes.
OOPS ... YER RIGHT ... mind fart.
The Oscars ceremony is when Hollywood liberals arrive in limousines 30 feet long, step out in $50,000 dresses wearing $1,000,000 worth of jewelry, then go inside and lecture that conservatives are using more than their fair share of the earth’s recourses. All this from people who don’t know the difference between a boy and a girl.
Right. Graham.
4 hours of krying Kimmel but Hollywood knows best...
Yes, great article, and every comment worth forwarding to everyone I know :)
I use to watch back when real men were in Hollywood, John Wayne, Jimmy Stuart. Now, the only humans with male appendages who will be watching the awards are homos, and men who are P-whipped.
Escalator?
“I was more outraged that a fairly decent movie (La La Land), which had a traditional heterosexual love story, good music, and very good choreography lost out to a political piece of garbage (Moonlight) because it had black LGBT characters and themes.”
It is interesting that the “Best Picture” grossed only $65M worldwide. Compared to La La Land grossing nearly $450M worldwide. Both had comparable multiples of production costs to revenue, so even with the award it wasn’t seen by theo world as in the same class.
I point this out as the comparison to Trump and his election is thus even more stark. The presenters should probably have accepted they really read the right name and been done with it - but unlike the electoral process where the real winner could not be easily overturned, they were able to “correct” their mistake and read the winner only the left would choose.
Not just a Escalator, a Golden Escalator.
I believe it was Lindsey Grahams number.
I kinda recall that the enraged queer boy destroyed his/her phone.
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