And the task of somehow marshalling, organizing and leading a successful “Stop One Battle After Another” campaign — the Oscar-season equivalent of a June 1944 D-Day invasion — has become your responsibility.
A tall order, a steep uphill slog, and — be honest — almost sure to fail. But if you don’t man up and rise to this herculean challenge, the next three months will be a Bataan death march.
So you have no choice, Ike. The burden may break you, but you must become Fidel Castro in 1958 Cuba. Convince the citizenry that celebrating a leftist POC girlboss agitprop fable about a stoner stepdad trying to rescue his Zoomer stepdaughter from the clutches of her deranged biological beau pere boner pants will be against their economic interests. Warner Bros. has already eaten the bitter herbs. Let it end there.
Raise high the roof beam, carpenters! Persuade your flock that it has to be the last 25 minutes of Hamnet or the entirety of the obviously superior Sentimental Value. Save yourselves!
Painful as it may be, split your soul into two halves and become Ralph Meeker and Timothy Carey in Act Three of Paths of Glory. Meeker: “See that cockroach? Tomorrow I’ll be dead and it’ll be alive, and will therefore have more contact with my wife and child than I will.” Without a moment’s hesitation Carey squashes the bug with his right fist, and replies sardonically and sotto-voiced “now you’ve got the edge on him.”
Is it possible to flatten OBAA with the same take-it-or-leave-it decisiveness? Probably not, but as Richard Kiley’s Don Quixote once sang…