Employment Counselor: Can I help you, sir?
Sonny Corleone: Yeah, I’m here for…I wanna job for the summer.
Employment Counselor: How old are you?
Sonny Corleone: Sixteen.
Employment Counselor: Do you have any work experience?
Sonny Corleone: I’ve done stuff for my family, but…uh, I wanna work somewhere else.
Employment Counselor: A family business?
Sonny Corleone: I worked for my father.
Employment Counselor: And what did you do for him?
Sonny Corleone: Aaahh…stuff. Boring stuff.
Employment Counselor: Okay, no problem. But before we get started, I’d like you to fill out this form. It’s about gender preference.
Sonny Corleone: About what?
Employment Counselor: About your gender identity.
Sonny Corleone: My what?
Employment Counselor: It’s not a big deal. Just fill it out and we’ll go from there.
Sonny Corleone (readying the form): Fuck is this?
Employment Counselor: Just mark the appropriate term.
Sonny Corleone: This…WHAT THE FUCK?
Employment Counselor: It’s just a form. If you’re straight, just check cisgender.

From “All Sizzle, No Steak” comment thread, posted this morning:

Yeah, that’s me — a Japanese soldier living in a jungle cave and refusing to give up the faith.

Within their own realm and their own conversations and celebrations, the promotional Oscar machine gang still delivers or represents a climactic “thing” — it’s just a much smaller and more secular thing, numbers-wise, than ever before in their over-90-year history.

The numbers are much smaller because over the last five or six years because the Oscar-focused community (filmmakers, producers, distributors) has more or less cut itself off from the middle-class mainstream by woke–ing itself to death — by largely blowing off the realm of sensible middle-class dramas and comedies and knockout spectacles (which were semi-dependable brands throughout the 20th Century and during the aughts and mid-teens, until ‘16 or thereabouts) by turning films into vehicles intended to reflect progressive values and bring about social change.

Movies that try to touch people’s souls in a gripping, accessible, non-political way (films like Manchester by the Sea) are no longer happening, and films like Spider–Man: No Way Home are considered irrelevant. In their place the industry-reflecting Oscars have become a show about elite progressive values — #MeToo, LGBTQIA, multiculturalism, identity politics & the general worldview of Rosanna Arquette.

“The erratic pursuit of sweeping, penetrating, soul-touching cinema (a rare achievement but one that has occasionally manifested over the decades) has been more or less called off, it seems, because such films or aspirations, in the view of certain #MeToo and POC progressives, don’t serve the current woke-political narrative.” — from “Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats,” posted on 3.22.21.

When the sociopathic Donald Trump was elected and the deplorable Harvey Weinstein was gored by #MeToo, The NY Times and Ronan Farrow, the Oscar-aspiring community committed itself to an “older white guys and the movies they used to make are bad news” theology. They decided to redefine Hollywood product by way of inclusion, equity, more #MeToo, more strong women, a greater variety of ethnicities, more gay, more trans, etc.

And by apologizing for almost everything that Hollywood represented and/or tried to create from 1915 until 2015, pretty much. Pay a visit to the Academy Museum (i.e., “Woke House”) and tell me I’m wrong.

The problem with all that, numerically speaking, is that 60% of the population doesn’t necessarily hold with the idea of de-platforming middle-class, high-craft films produced by older white guys. You could argue, in fact, that a much-larger portion (80% or 85%?) of the movie-loving public is on the normcore side of the cultural divide. You could argue, in fact, that the wokester-progressive community represents a relatively narrow slice of the overall pie.

Last April’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar telecast from Union Station was essentially a declaration of large-scale ritual seppuku. The Soderbergh show basically said “these awards are about us…about our narrow little community of wealthy elites. Joe and Jane Popcorn can watch or not watch…we don’t really care one way or the other.”

Six episodes of that good David Simon Baltimore hardcore ghoulash that so many HE loyalists swore by in the form of The Wire. Plus come classic Serpico slash Prince of the City soul-searching action. Jon Bernthal (much slimmer), Treat Williams, Wunmi Mosaku, Jamie Hector, McKinley Belcher III, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Josh Charles, Dagmara Domińczyk, etc. Directed by King Richard‘s Reinaldo Marcus Green. Launches on 4.25.

Daniel Craig‘s James Bond doesn’t really defeat Dave Bautista‘s Mr. Hinx — he gets some much-needed help from Léa Seydoux‘s pistol-packing Madeleine Swann, and then Hinx is accidentally yanked out of the train by a rope and some barrels.

Sean Connery gets some assistance from an exploding talcum-powder briefcase and a small knife, but otherwise decisively defeats Robert Shaw‘s “Red” Grant.

The From Russia With Love battle lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds, and yet it seems shorter than Spectre’s train fight, which lasts roughly two minutes and 45 seconds.

A friend who attended last weekend’s Critics Choice awards says no one seemed to take special notice
of Jane Campion’s faux pas about Venus and Serena Williams. No one gasped or shrieked either, and no one discussed it during the after-party.

But your Film Twitter wokey-wokes went ballistic.

Campion’s apology happened Monday morning (3.14). Shortly after The Daily Beast‘s Kyndall Cunningham, a Baltimore–based freelancer, claimed that the damage had been done and the bed irrevocably shat upon.

Maybe among your hair-trigger wackos but my guess — call it a hunch — is that Los Angeles- and New York-based industry voters secretly despise Woke Twitter, and may give their Best Picture vote to The Power of the Dog out of sympathy for Campion. Maybe.

Nonetheless the CODA ads appearing directly above Cunningham’s story were quite the visual accompaniment.

90 minutes ago I was pedaling south on La Cienega (I have a nice bicycle) when I noticed a block-long line of mostly teenage girls. Okay, 20somethings.

I pulled over, walked up to a 50ish dude standing by one of the girls (a dad, I presumed) and said, “May I ask what this is?” He gestured to his daughter and she said “oh, it’s for hair styles.”

“Hair styles?” I said. “People are having their hair done?”

“Hairy Styles,” she repeated, a little more clearly this time.

“Oh, Harry Styles…sure!” I quickly replied. “Dunkirk, dresses and pearl necklaces.”

It was the young girl’s fault. You don’t pronounce Styles’ first name so it rhymes with “hairy.” You pronounce it Hahrry. Like Harry Truman or Harry and the Hendersons or “a little touch of Harry in the night.” But she could have been thinking of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. Not that she was.