The reason Average Joes and Janes are “meh” or largely uninterested in the Oscar telecast and, indeed, will often sidestep or even ignore award-season movies until they hit streaming…the reason Joe and Jane have tuned out (i.e., slept through) woke-infected Hollywood fare for the last 10 years…the reason is because they realize that Hollywood is, as Bill Maher said last night, “a secret cabal of people terrified of looking like racists”. Or homophobes. Or transphobes. Even in a historical, centuries-old context, POCs magically appear.
Idea: Let’s remake Becket with Michael B. Jordan as King Henry II and, if you insist on bending over backwards, Paul Mescal at Thomas a’Becket.
Loud and proud: HE was one of the prominent horsemen who led San Juan Hill charge against the Lily Gladstone identity campaign for Best Actress, and when she lost to Emma Stone there was a great cry of relief across the land….a joyful wailing that said “the identity crazies are no longer dictating the terms.”
“Lily Gladstone Is Walking Into The Future” (3.11.24 — two years ago) by Jeffrey Wells
“Everyone in the blogosphere (critics, columnists, YouTubers, TikTokers, Instagramers) was too chicken to say what I began saying early last fall — that Lily Gladstone was out of her depth as a Best Actress contender, and that she was relying entirely on an identity campaign. Nobody else had HE’s cast-iron cojones in this regard.
“The Apple geniuses decided to ignore the reality of Gladstone’s respectable-but-not-great performance and play the political-cultural orchestra by running an identity campaign.
“If they really wanted a gold-dipped statuette they would have run her in supporting, but Lily wanted the emphasis to be on celebrating Native American culture and offering voters a potential history-making Best Actress win.
“Alas, it was a campaign that was almost all wokey-wokey as her Mollie Burkhart character was obviously not a lead (roughly 50-something minutes out of a 206 minute length) and she wasn’t allowed to bring much in the way of exceptional craft and passion (she mainly glared at the ugly white baddies and lay poisoned in bed during the film’s second half).
“But Lily enjoyed a huge promotional ride for herself and boosted Native American profiles in the bargain — a ride that lasted for many, many months. Her life and career were transformed, reaching all the way back to the KOTFM debut in Cannes in May 2023.”