“We’re supposed to hate Jaws now?” He was responding to “Did These Chinatown Viewers Understand?” And I replied by summarizing Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as follows:

The huge primal successes of Jaws (6.20.75) and Star Wars (5.20.77) slowly bland-ified the moody, anti-establishment ‘70s thing that had permeated Hollywood…the New Experimental Anti-Conventional Hollywood Party Era that began with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and The President’s Analyst (all released in ‘67).

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the directing maestros behind Jaws and Star Wars, pretty much killed the cool kidz party by injecting (a) a win-really-big greed jackpot virus into the Hollywood bloodstream and (b) a strain of thematic infantilization into movies in general.

These guys didn’t didn’t suck the creative oxygen out of the room deliberately or maliciously, but the massive success of their historic blockbusters gradually introduced the idea of “high concept” and suppressed the commercial intrigue factor among industry folk and audiences alike for adult movies like Night Moves, The Conversation, The Outfit, The French Connection, Z, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, Scarecrow, Get Carter, The Day of the Jackal, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather I & II, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Chinatown, The Hospital, Network, Prince of the City, The Ruling Class, Quadrophenia, The Last American Hero, Performance, Don’t Look Now, etc.

During a brief interview on Kermode & Mayo’s Take, Till star Danielle Deadwyler said she agreed with Chinonye Chukwu, her director, that Till was shafted by the Academy due to “unabashed misogyny towards Black women.”

She also blamed the lack of nominations on “people who perhaps chose not to see the film. We’re talking about misogynoir. It comes in all kinds of ways. Whether it’s direct or indirect, it impacts who we are.”

Deadwyler: “The question is more intent on people who are living in whiteness, white people’s assessment of what the spaces they are privileged by are doing.”

Do actresses like Deadwyler and directors like Chukwu and Gina Prince-Blythwood have anything in their quiver besides guilt-tripping over white oblviousness?

Friendo Who’s Had It Up To Here With All This Sore Loser Stuff: “I’m so sick of this shit and so is everyone else. The problem is the media — all these woke cheerleaders. They have seriously damaged the discourse.”

HE to FWHIUTHWATSLS: “Of course, without a doubt…Deadwyler and her supporters firmly believe that Andrea Riseborough did it. But I have to admit that ‘misogynoir’ is a catchy-sounding term.”

FWHIUTHWATSLS: “The truth the media won’t say is [that] Deadwyler wasn’t THAT good in the movie. She was good, but the limitations of the movie didn’t allow her to be great.

HE to FWHIUTHWATSLS: “Her big Mamie Till scene was the emotional meltdown moment when she shudders and faints and rolls her eyes upward into her forehead.”

FWHIUTHWATSLS: “She was fine, but I found something a tad studied about her emotionalism. The whole movie was too studied. It was okay, but in a way it blew a great subject.”

BARRY DILLER: “Look, the woke thing swung too far. The beginning process of it, which is, we should be more aware and more sensitive, is rational and reasonable. But when you take it to the extremes that the woke community has taken it…that pendulum swung all the way up and to the side of the socket. And it’s now starting to come back.

“And part of its starting to come back is that there’s been opposition to it. Yes, it is a lot from the hard right, but it’s also from just ordinary, normal-thinking folk who say, ‘well, gee, that’s ridiculous.’ You know, it’s ridiculous to shut off speech because one person out of two thousand…it will be too sensitive for that person to hear that. I think that it’s just like many things, it just went too far.

Earlier in the conversation…

DILLER: “And then along comes the pandemic, and that increases the shift because people stay home more, etc., etc. So there are more subscriptions, etc. The entire movie business crashes because there’s no movie theaters, because people can’t go to the theaters. And that whole infrastructure of– the hegemony, let’s call it, of Hollywood, which had ruled for 75, 80 years, it only took three or four years for it to totally disappear. Totally disappear in the sense that it’s over. There is no hegemony anymore of those, let’s call it those major motion picture companies. It’s truly finished. It is never coming back.”

HOOVER: Is there a reform formula for the Oscars?

DILLER: “No — they are no longer a national audience worth its candle because that audience is really no longer interested.”

HOOVER: They’re not interested in the awards and the showmanship of the awards?

DILLER: “They’re not interested in the whole process of it. Just, by the way, the awards don’t reflect their interests either. It used to be that there was congruence between the movies that people went to see and the awards that were given to those movies that were most popular. Not that they were the most necessarily or the least artistic or whatever, but there was a real correlation between popular movies and the giving of blessings on those movies and the people in them. But that disappeared a while ago, and the awards went to movies that nobody watched, nobody went to see. And then no one went to see anything because the pandemic came. So the whole house has kind of collapsed upon itself. And what I think is, is that the awards ceremony should be for the industry and not for consumers. And that would change everything.”

HE to Diller: The Oscar audience has shrunk big-time, but a voice is telling me that it will hang on at the level it is now. It won’t drop any further.

In the latest episode of The Hot Mic (recorded on 2.9), the incisive Jeff Sneider and the blustery, gravel-voiced, Seth Rogen-aspiring John Rocha discuss anti-Black racism in the industry and particularly the sore-loser attitudes of Gina Prince-Bythewood, Danielle Deadwyler, Till dierctor Chinonye Chukwu and the Woman King allies (3:02).

They also discuss the Jeff Sneider-vs.-Don Murphy thing (39:45).

Rocha sounds to me like an insufferably woke accusational shrieker. Like he’s stuck in 2019 or ’20. Everyone’s sick of this schtick, and in a year or two wokesters (“white people are hopelessly bad!”) will be searching for tall grass. God….he sounds like a male gurgly “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo. Plus Rocha completely ignores the ELEPHANT IN THE “WOMAN KING” ROOM, which is that the African nation of Dahomey was a slave-trading nation….he ignores it!! And so does Sneider!

And what about proportionality? What does Rocha want, half of all nominees to be African American? The US population is 13% African American. What’s the percentage of African Americanas in the film/TV industry? An ASU study says that “recent studies show that Black actors comprise 12.9% of leading roles in cable-scripted shows (proportionately reflecting the overall Black population of 13.4%). The numbers behind the scenes aren’t as encouraging, though. Only 6% of the writers, directors and producers of U.S.-produced films are Black.”

But I’m not feeling or finding it, and I’m unhappy about this. I was dreaming about a fresh fix when I allowed myself to believe that a 2.15 Andrea Riseborough appearance at the Santa Barbara Film Festival was all but inevitable. But then, according to popular theory, Danielle Deadwyler’s reps put the kibbosh on that. I guess the DD juice is over. I should just accept it.