Ask anyone in any shopping mall in this country what the main problem with the Oscars is, and you’ll get the same answer: Oscar voters are virtue-signalling elitists who live in their own separate, politically-correct corner of the culture, and so they often nominate movies or performances that don’t mean that much to those who live in non-industry regions.
Sure, Average Joes will tune in when a really good film that they’ve paid to see is nominated for Best Picture, but how often does that happen?
I’ve said over the years that you can’t make the Oscars too populist — that would mean the death of a true quality metric because people out there…I wouldn’t say they have no taste but they’re certainly lacking in that regard. Certainly by the standards of the great Francois Truffaut — “Taste is a result of a thousand distastes.”
But you also can’t make the Oscars too woke or average Americans will tune out. Because wokesters and cancel-culturalists are despised by something like two-thirds of the American public.
Said it before, saying it again: If I was emperor I would put wokesters in pillories and encourage passersby to pelt them with vegetables.
It falls right into line, therefore, that a new poll from Guts + Data (and passed along by Variety‘s William Earl) says that most of the public hasn’t heard of (probably because they don’t want to hear about) the current Best Picture nominees.
Among 1500 persons polled, none of the Best Picture nominees were recognized by more than 50%. Only 18% know or care about Mank, despite the easy Netflix access. Only 23% are aware of Sound of Metal. Only 24% have heard of The Father and Minari — less than as quarter of the population! A bit more than a third have heard of Promising Young Woman (34%) and Nomadland (35%).
The Best Picture nominees with the highest awareness are The Trial of the Chicago 7 (39%) and Judas and the Black Messiah (46%).
In other words, in case you haven’t heard, the current Oscar contenders and forthcoming Oscar telecast will go down in history as the dud Oscars, the nobody-gives-a-shit Oscars, the asterisk Oscars, the pandemic Oscars.
A few months ago Bill Maher explained why the Oscar brand means as little as it does these days out in Joe & Jane Popcorn-land — wokesterism, virtue signalling, snowflake concerns, Twitter plague, etc.
Here he is again:
