I could’ve posted the following yesterday: “In today’s Guardian (1.13) is a brilliant Jessa Crispin piece that said critics who think and write like Mark Harris have become so political-minded and have chugged so much virtue-signalling Kool-Aid that they’re not only opposed to telling the truth about films as a rule but are pretty much incapable of doing so.”

Journo pally #1: “The underlying wokester idea is basically ‘we are going to ferret out the monsters.’ It is Mark Harris’ job as high priest of Film Twitter to EXPOSE the evil that lurks beneath the Academy members. Expose their biases and old-fashioned views to shame them for their choices. Never coming into that conversation would ever be whether the performance or the film is good enough. We all just accept this reality because no one wants to be the next one to be called out, exiled, shamed.

“Ultimately the people who pay the price for this aren’t people like Mark Harris. He’ll be just fine. Eventually it will fall on the actors of color and women because sooner or later people are going to think “this has nothing to do with merit at all [for] there is something else at work, a kind of puritanical purge so that we can exist in a kind of utopian dream.” But that dream has been shattered by Trump. So what we’re doing is simply tinkering with a world that doesn’t really matter all that much anymore. Policing the Oscars? Really? It comes down to that.”

Journo pally #2: “Where the Oscar nominations revealed that white woke critics are living in a Twitter bubble, they reacted by burrowing deeper inside the bubble, doubling down on their ‘Joker is the Antichrist that must be stopped’ narrative. There’s no arguing with these people. They’ve become hectoring fanatics of art puritanism.”