> To bypass travel restrictions, nominees and their guests have been designated “essential workers”.
I don't even know what to say to this. Designated by whom? The whole expansion of essential work from medicine and food and literal essentials all the way to, well, the oscars has been a joke. We're in this awful middle ground of half-assed extreme measures. They're watered down enough to not stamp things out, but still followed enough to make us all miserable. It's the perfect anti-sweet-spot that maximizes the combination of virus spread and misery. Instead, we get this never-ending bucket of misery because everyone thinks they're an exception or just an insignificant single drop in the ocean.
I’m sure I’d never agree with everything an elected leader does, but I’ll have a lot more respect for the choices if they’re enforced uniformly and, in particular, if they apply them to their own lives.
"...if they’re enforced uniformly and, in particular, if they apply them to their own lives."
Yet prosecutorial discretion ensures that the people in the system all look out for each other by only applying the laws to those who 'deserve' it. Welcome to the oligarchy that has been disguised as democracy.
I'm applying for US naturalization and studying for the civics test. #12 in the question pool seems particularly relevant right now:
Question: What is the "rule of law"?
Suggested answers:
Everyone must follow the law |
Leaders must obey the law |
Government must obey the law |
No one is above the law
We had many similar double standards in Berlin. At the height of the Super Serious Measures, flower shops remain open. Then it's Christmas tree kiosks or bookstores. Churches were hardly ever affected. In any case, enforcement is nearly non-existent.
It makes you feel like a chump for following the rules. It cheapens the sense of emergency they try to communicate.
By LA county. Not joking – they were essential workers because they were deemed essential for the production of the Oscars TV show. Everyone in attendance had some role to play and was shown on camera at least once.
God that's infuriating. If they're going to define essential that circularly, then it's meaningless. It reminds me of the uber/lyft AB5 laws, where they designed a test for independent contractor vs employee, and then exempted basically every industry from the test, one by one. Here, they defined essential workers vs unessential workers, and then exempted more and more industries, one by one, until it's meaningless.
The biggest marketing department in the world - Hollywood. It's an enormous profit generating machine and won't let silly travel restrictions get in the way.
Nobody wants to tune in and get lectured by a giant group of multimillionaires who have declared themselves as “essential” so they could bypass the rules which are bankrupting millions of people across the country and throw themselves a party congratulating themselves.
After seeing that woman in LA who had her restaurant shut down while there was a giant tent being erected across the street for Hollywood elites to eat in my disgust for the entire industry has increased ten fold.
These people have too much power in our society. The gall of them to get up and lecture us....
> Even more heartwrenching when you find out that the governor of California got to keep his own personal family winery open.
I realize the rampant hypocrisy of politicians and other elites isn't new or even surprising anymore but when the governor's non-essential business gets to stay open and the school his kids go to magically stays open for in-classroom learning, it's clear the "rules" were crafted with arbitrary loopholes for the convenience of elites while retail, food service and other lower-wage jobs were decimated and the vast majority of California's kids are still only receiving a couple hours a day of remote "Video Daycare" via Zoom that now passes for 'education' here.
California now has the lowest percentage of kids in-classrooms of any state in the country.
Well yes he/the government deserves a lot of the blame but he's bowing to an industry with so much wealth and power that they have more sway over politics than the average citizen.
The obvious fix is to not vote these people in to office but I realize that's not so easy as it sounds.
They get to bypass laws or get exceptions while the average citizen does not. This is mostly due to the massive amount of wealth they inject into the political system.
Small business owners in that area didn't get the privileges they did and many were forced to close.
I kinda agree... but to be fair, her business customers are random people from a huge reservoir of untested individuals who will come and go as they please, while the production business is a smaller group of regularly (daily) tested individuals who will be yelled at and possibly delay production, if any of them test positive.
I wish that LA/CA/USA had bothered to actually mandate contact tracing, and that "outdoor" dining had been given more priority. LA at the time was suffering a huge wave of infections that literally overwhelmed their hospitals, although most of them were from more densely housed "essential" workers (factories, farm, cleaning).
Also, Americans suck at masking... pretty much all them, maybe because culturally they are taught to only care about themselves and not anyone else.
> maybe because culturally they are taught to only care about themselves and not anyone else.
This is an enormous crock of bullshit.
Americans are some of the most generous people in the world, regularly giving more to charity than most of the entire world, and not just in a pure dollar amount, but as a percentage of their income.
And as you can tell by the headline of the second link, not only are Americans the most generous people in the world, they would give more money away if they could afford to.
> 31% of all donations, or $127.37 billion, went to Religious organizations. Much of these contributions can be attributed to people giving to their local place of worship.
aka club memberships, and advertising spend to push their preferences on other people.
If you think that this is common, or generally what sort of things that churches do with the money that is donated to them, then I think that you have a very distorted view of American society and should probably work to educate yourself before commenting on this further.
The reason something like that makes the news is because it's not the norm. The Christian charities and missions going on worldwide far outweigh any other organization and regardless of your opinion it's far more than most people do to help anyone in 3rd world countries.
Buy expensive sneakers for their preachers, fly them in private jets, build huge mega-churches, entertain the masses, or pay off child molestation suits?
Even the catholic church doesn't have a great record here, and many churches are worse.
While that might be true, from an outsiders perspective looking at things like: the anti-immigration agenda, the death penalty, and the almost willful refusal by a large minority to wear masks (to name a few) - you can see how somebody might draw the conclusion that for a country whose population strongly identifies as Christian, it seems to be lacking in basic Christian ideals such as compassion and empathy.
I think you're mistaken about what empathy entails. It's not empathetic to let illegal immigrants in with no plan on how they're going to be taken care of and spit in the face of people who are legally in this country. Americans aren't anti-immigration they're anti illegal immigration and there's a massive difference.
It's also not empathetic to give people life sentences over the death penalty. If you want to discuss wrongly convicted people and the death penalty that's a good argument but the idea that it's better for society and the justly convicted individual to remain alive in prison for life is asinine.
What do masks have to do with empathy? I think that's just being used as a bludgeon to force people into wearing them because they're "bad" people if they don't. I don't find it empathetic to tell people they're required to put a face covering on or they're an awful person who wants to kill people. In fact, forcing your beliefs on other people is one of the most UN-empathetic things I can think of.
It's not empathetic to take the easy route and just give people material things, assuming that'll make them happier or better people. This is the entire problem with the left wing mantra. I would argue the idea that dumping welfare checks in minority communities so they'll learn to be reliant on a system of handouts, while simultaneously telling them the system is against them is the opposite of empathetic. Especially, when it's not followed up with other forms of help. Sometimes being empathetic means you need to harsh up front in order to improve things in the long run. Teaching people to be self reliant is one of the most empathetic things you can do.
Do you have any documentation that shows these production people were tested regularly?
Mandated tracing of individuals gets a big no from me, it opens the door for too much abuse. I dislike that sort of authoritarianism and I think the proof that it would actually be helpful to stopping the spread of COVID is pretty minimal. The type of person that'll be into paying attention to that in the first place is less likely to put themselves in a position of getting infected anyway.
Additionally, I'm not sure masking in a place where you're eating/drinking is really useful anyway. Masking was initially only for places indoors where you couldn't separate more than 6ft. Transmission outdoors is extremely rare. I think its less about caring only for themselves and more about distrust in officials to be putting these rules in place for altruistic reasons. Americans in general don't automatically trust their government to do what's best for them and for good reason.
"LA at the time was suffering a huge wave of infections that literally overwhelmed their hospitals, although most of them were from more densely housed "essential" workers (factories, farm, cleaning)."
I feel like if that's truly the case then Hollywood should have been given an exception no matter what.
I understand the overwhelmed hospital argument but aside from that I have the opinion that people should get to make their own decisions on going out and being exposed.
It was all over the news at the time... and when production in LA restarted (it was closed for months) all of them were rapid tested with nasal swabs daily. I think County mandate was 48-72hrs for full PCR, but once you buy the $10k machine you just run it constantly to get results every 4 hours. The cost of having to shut down over a single case is too high not to. Tom Cruise's crazy rant was partly show, but a LOT of people would be out of work, if anyone tested positive.
Are the servers or the kitchen staff (essential employees) going to do that? Nope, too expensive for a low margin kitchen. They're the ones really at risk. The outdoor part (in the sun particularly) really reduces risk, while fully enclosed tents greatly raise it.
The problem is the "people should get to make their own decisions" to bring it back to their entire extended family. Will they take responsibility for the death of their family or room mates? "No way man... it wasn't me I just had a cold and a headache". Sorry, you're just another likely carrier of a potentially deadly disease. It's not better than sleeping with your unsuspecting wife after going bareback to glory holes on Mission in 1982 when AIDS was killing.
"Are the servers or the kitchen staff (essential employees) going to do that? Nope, too expensive for a low margin kitchen. They're the ones really at risk. The outdoor part (in the sun particularly) really reduces risk, while fully enclosed tents greatly raise it."
Ok.. then they can quit. Their business will close anyway if the restrictions stay in place. I think they get to make the decision whether they want to work and not forced out of a job due to questionable "scientific" regulations the government has put into place.
Just to expand on some of my points someone posted this article recently. In a perfect society where no one abuses power your ideas seem fine but we know that's not how it works.
An award show that goes hard core on insulting half the country in every speech while winning awards for movies that often have a very limited audience and they wonder why people don't watch. They mystique is gone, we see these folks every day in aspects of our lives not limited to entertainment. What's special about this ceremony anyway?
Assuming you are asking in good faith: I am guessing they are referring to Hollywood generally having a liberal political mindset and many things the left has been championing lately have been upsetting the right. Basically more evidence of our society being hyper-politicized or perceiving it that way.
Sometimes it feels like everyone in the past five years have forgotten about the Bush years. The political polarization in pop culture was just as pronounced then, with Fox News attacking Hollywood as antiwar traitors, Hollywood films skewering Evangelicals as fanatics, etc. The culture wars then were just as bitter and seemingly unbridgeable it they are now, we just didn't see it unfolding in realtime yet. Usually you'd have to wait for a pingback from your Blogspot articles first.
Mostly true. I remember the Bush years well. I agree the instantaneous feedback of social media was in its infancy or non-existent so there was a modicum of civility to people's arguments/disagreements. The talk radio pundits and cable tv people were probably 1 or 2 level shy of 'extreme' whereas we're 1 or 2 levels _over_ extreme these day--on both sides. I could be misremembering though.
I remember flipping between Free Republic/Pajamas Media and Democratic Underground/DailyKos and just seeing two irrevocably irreconcilable echo chambers.
But those forums and blogs were populated by smaller numbers of diehards. Now we’re all in our own echo chambers, it would seem.
It is tiring to watch a show that is supposed to be about entertainment but rather is a 2 hour lecture ( often demeaning ) on liberal politics from a bunch of millionaires patting each other on the back.
It bears no distinct difference from turning on say CNN or MSNBC which you can watch any day of the week. Not to mention the shear amount of hypocrisy ( if anyone cares about that ).
My not so humble opinion, awards shows have always been unwatchable rubbish about people I don't care about. Worse, I've listened to authors, actors, and artists talking about their art... god damn I have never been so bored. John Cleese is funny, right? Monty Python is funny, right? John Cleese talking about the making of Monty Python is the most boring, un-funny shit I've ever seen.
Why do people watch this drek? No idea. Maybe if it's too politicized for people who are easily offended, its ratings will tank and it will drop off the air, and nothing of value is lost. Just like sports
Please don't take from my previous comment that I am offended by their political lectures. I just find it tiring and hypocritical.
There was a time I was interested in watching these shows to see the individuals who experience breakout success and are very thankful for those who made it possible.
This just does not seem to be the case in the present era.
As you can probably guess, I didn't watch it myself, but multiple news feeds have informed me of a quirky acceptance speech where an actor thanked this parents for having sex... I guess that doesn't do it for you?
Often. Speech, art, and culture do typically encompass politics, because politics are a social activity and therefore a primary concern of the humanities. But the argument that these things are therefore inherently political is specious, and (in my opinion) a product of the increasingly facile approach to the interpretation of art and culture in education that focuses exclusively on the teasing-out of supposed hidden messages and ideologies. (Twitter doesn't help, either.)
In mirroring our lives, art and culture encompass layers of complex action and symbols that cannot be reduced to a singular message or call for political action. They are the process by which we sift through an opaque mixture of confusion and contradiction every day, searching for meaning.
However, if you wanted to argue that award shows are inherently political, I'd probably agree.
Very well stated. The art should stand by itself for what it is intended and if it, as it should, provides some commentary or some testing of ideas, that is what art has always done and is expected.
My argument is specifically regarding the award show and how it has simply turned into a political vehicle for many often with little or no mention of the art by the individual/group which is being awarded.
When does an acceptance speech have nothing to do with the award you are receiving?
To say everything is political is an easy out. The point is the awards show is supposed to be about the films and to acknowledge those who made it possible not political speeches given in the guise of an acceptance speech.
I think the growing sentiment is that these "famous" people are becoming increasingly belittled in the age of the internet. Why care about the Oscars when you could hop on Snapchat and see what your friends are up to, or go take a warm candlelit bath. The market for this sort of entertainment is waning, and even the millennial watchers are mostly there to make fun of it. In many ways, this was always the expected outcome for democratizing art.
It was not possible to suit everyone's taste in a TV, after all you had a limited amount of airtime and you needed a few figures. It would help that these figures are brainless and sexy so that you can get everyone on board.
Youtube changed that. Now you can watch what you are interested in, instead of that single thing being fed on TV. You like a particular animal? (Otters), there is a person in Japan dedicated to his otter and makes frequent high-quality videos about it.
Hollywood lost control of the narrative, but not because of their sloppy work. Internet and high-bandwidth changed the game and they are unable to adapt.
"You like a particular animal? (Otters), there is a person in Japan dedicated to his otter and makes frequent high-quality videos about it."
Ah, so you've fallen down the Aty rabbit-hole as well eh? Stuff like that makes me wonder though: everyone has this assumption that their experience on the web, and Youtube especially, is highly specific to them and what they watch, ie the "Filter Bubbles" concept. And yet over the past couple years, on and offline, I keep hearing that other people are ending up on the same videos and channels I am. Aty is a good example: everyone seems to have seen a HUGE surge in cute animal videos being recommended over the past few months.
It seems highly likely that Youtube isn't as organic as it seems, and that those running it are deliberately tilting the recommendation algo in favor of certain kinds of videos at certain times. This has some pretty insidious implications, as it's a kind of influence so subtle as to be almost imperceptible.
Yea, I do agree that that access to your friends has replaced some of the celebrity worship.
However, some have always taken celebrity concept and equate it to having “a friend“, an emotional attachment to the concept of a person. Fantasy that “if we ever met in real life we’d probably be great friends”. Ignoring ”never meet your heroes”, and that these people pay $2500 a night at places to specifically never come in contact with you.
To me, one of the best things that have come out of Covid has been that celebrities are not essential.
Perhaps we can also contribute the shift to other things? Woke Politics, Oppression Olympics, and generally divisive things now talked about openly in favor of silence with a concern of not knowing who you will offend? Surely some celebrity fans have been put off by statements they can’t agree with? As media, and politics become more divisive, so have opinions put out by businesses which include celebrity identities. We used to not talk about religion or politics because “you didn’t know who you would offend“.
Maybe it’s just that Hollywood has become ”too much“, and this an expected implosion where people just don’t care about the people that clearly wall themselves away and employ armed body guards (while arguing against both those things for lesser people)? Disparity in legal, tax, whatever effects. Lobbying groups that protect them. In people who care about equality, perhaps celebrities are too obviously classes of nobility?
IDK. Just happy to see agreement with my long held apathy.
Hmmm... idk about Snapchat, it doesn’t seem all that big around here, but Instagram use main focus seems still to be celebrities, just not distant Hollywood celebrities, but local, more ephemeral, themed, niched celebrities that we call _”influencers”_.
I know these influencers do not cater to me (and maybe to HN too) but a friend that sells apparel do use them. When I asked him about it, he confirmed that they do bring sales and more than pay for their advertising. So fair is fair.
It does help that they are very local. A local store will not profit from advertising on TV, he needs word of mouth and these influencers are practically that.
The magnitude of how nobody cares about Oscars and soccer ball-kickers in the last 12 months is astonishing. It's my dream come true but I had been aware how little possible it was. I don't know their surnames, don't know the movie titles, also have no idea what Ronaldo and Messi are up to. Let's keep it this way in the New World Order?
They just chose new vapid distraction instead of the old vapid distractions. I’d rather have them watching sports, at least it can unite people in camaraderie.
I see about 5 movies a year in the theaters; maybe 1 if you don't count children's movies.
I listen to a lot of music, but almost none if it is music represented by the Grammy's. Of the Record/Song of the Year nominees, I was only familiar with one.
Bottom line for me is that the content being put out by Hollywood and the big music labels is just not compelling enough for me to spend my attention on. Why, then, would I care what is the "best" of a bunch of art that is irrelevant to me?
Can you blame the public? The Grammy's have always been years behind the listening audience. I have no idea why the Tony awards are even televised given that the show is tailor made for rich folks in New York. The Emmys will continue to lose relevance as the television landscape continues to fragment under the leadership of corporations hellbent on creating little streaming kingdoms.
Even the Oscars... every year we get presented with 4 or 5 movies that are tailor-made for winning awards, not for being good movies. It's like watching a dog show: the dog that wins is winning because he's got all the characteristics that judges have deemed to be perfect for that breed of dogs, not because the dog is actually good at doing anything. If the average person doesn't even care about your nominees, then why the hell would they care about watching a show giving them awards?
I can tell you why the ratings for award shows is failing. And nobody that can change it is going to listen, and nobody that would listen is in a position to change it.
I am going to be a little crude with this one, which I refrain from doing on this site, because it is the proper linguistic tool to adequately articulate what is going on here.
People don't want to be lectured about climate change by someone right before they hop on a private jet to Belize to fuck underage hookers of various genders. We don't want holier than thou bullshit from someone who sucked every dick they had to to get onto that stage. We don't care what they all think of each other's substance devoid, propaganda infested mediocre productions. People don't want to watch a bunch of worthless scum in ten thousand dollar dresses circle jerk each other and pat each other on the back in between raping each other. I don't need a fucking juggling monkey telling me the proper way to wipe my god damn ass.
Only Ricky Gervais can save the oscars now. But seriously, hollywood had a brilliant idea to throw themselves an awesome annual party and make fans pays for it. Worked for a while but oh well
Ricky Gervais' critiques and jokes about Hollywood and celebrity culture are really on point. Which is why I rarely pay attention to most things coming out of Hollywood. Their disdain for ordinary people is matched by mine for the wealthy and celebrities.
Part of the problem for the Oscars is there really aren't that many good movies now. The best writers and actors are mostly working in TV. If you're not into Alejandro González Iñárritu, Christopher Nolan, or Quentin Tarantino there really aren't a ton of options for you.
When it comes to stars, here are the top 20 up and comers: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/next-gen-talent-2020... almost all of them come from the small screen. I don't see any Cary Grants, Brad Pitts, or Reese Witherspoons in this group. People who could carry a film with just their charisma.
That's an interesting list you posted, but I'd take it with a grain of salt as some form of an ad that those peoples' agents elbowed their way into. The only person on that list I recognize is the last woman, who plays one of the most boring characters on The Walking Dead.
Completely agree. It's just a natural transition to where the best place to tell a story is at the moment. It was in movies, since that was the best way to tell an entire story and have someone watch the whole thing and get the character developments and story. But now, TV captures people much more deeply, especially with binging. On top of that, you have much more time to put in a more interesting story and fully developed characters, instead of rushing to fill everything into 2.5 hours (Justice League, anyone?). It's a trend we're going to keep seeing, and I for one love it!
I'd love to see another list of up and coming actors and actresses that are making names for themselves. The pipeline seems pretty empty. Where is the next Leonardo DiCaprio or Jack Nicholson?
Maybe the Oscars should just become a proper film festival. They're definitely starting to align with the major festivals, Parasite having won the Palm d'Or and Nomadland the Golden Lion. Maybe they should just go that route. It will be admitting defeat in some ways.
Alternatively...stream the damn event on platforms people actually use. I don't want to sign into ABC one time every year to watch the stupid event. And I especially don't want to sit through regular commercial breaks. Transition to a different revenue model and have YouTube/Netflix/Facebook host it. Ffs you could make it a Twitch stream and it'd do better.
The Oscars exist to burnish the Hollywood machine against film festivals. They only recognize small/niche films has needed to maintain a veneer of integrity.
THey shoud just call it the grannies instead, to show how out-dated and out of touch it is. MIddle-aged and young people have long stopped caring about it.
To be fair, the amount of people in my country that cared about the Oscars this year beats the previous 10 or so combined.
Only because we hoped that a local film would be our second winner of the foreign language award. I just looked it up and haven't heard of a single best picture nominee.
I also happen to know Aida the movie is loosely based on and have been on the set on one occasion. Didn't even imagine it would be an Oscar nominee in a few years.
I know the feeling about being excited about the foreign language oscar. It happens in my country too if we get a nomination. I'll be sure to check out Aida!
Nowadays you have: superhero movies, sequels, remakes, empowerment of certain groups that aren't me, movies with a political message, or some sad dour art house movie that makes you walk out feeling bummed out about life.
Compare 1994 or 1999 movie releases to 2021.
Fight club, the matrix, forrest gump, Magnolia, office space, sixth sense, american beauty, clerks, etc.
Nowadays: the father?, Mank?, black messiah, , chicago 7?
It's not about creating magical new worlds with thought provoking ideas anymore.
Maybe I'm explaining it poorly but film seems to have gone the way of the music industry.
There’s a HN rule against complaining that HN is becoming like Reddit. This comment is in the same genre - it was better in the good ole days.
Spoiler alert - it wasn’t. You’ve cherry picked 5 movies from each era out of thousands. There’s no reason to choose these movies instead of others. While the biggest blockbusters are more likely to be remakes or sequels, there’s no shortage of interesting movies.
Just from last year, original films that weren’t remakes or sequels and blew my mind - Parasite, Knives Out, Soul, The Father, Hamilton, White Tiger.
Best part is, we’re living in a time when you have practically unlimited entertainment a few clicks away at absurdly low prices. It’s easy to find something that suits your particular niche if you just look. That wasn’t the case in previous eras where studios had to pander to the largest audience possible.
This is why everything seems calculated & homogenic. There is very little room for "happy accidents" today, because the data analysts will tell you how to make the biggest ROI with a given set of circumstances.
None of Office Space, Clerks, or Magnolia were enjoyed by masses upon initial release. And some that got acclaim on your list have faded a lot since then (e.g. American Beauty).
You know what was enjoyed by masses from 1999 that you left out? Star Wars Episode 1.
Check back in twenty years to see what movies from the recent past hold up, and how many of them aren't from Marvel...
You've picked two of the greatest years in history for mass-market cinema, and compared it to the year of Covid19....
I think the main difference has been that films that used to be almost universally relegated to B movie category - action sci-fi - have become very much mainstream, especially thanks to Marvel. The quality improved dramatically compared to 80s and 90s and 00s B movies (though of course they are far below actual good movies in terms of complexity, emotional maturity etc), and they are a sure fire way of getting good revenue. As people get tired of them, we will likely start seeing more interesting experiments
The most unfortunate direction though is that there is massive hostility in the popular culture against complexity and symbolism that is more than skin deep,for which I mostly blame the heavy handed way literature is studied in school. This is often repeated as the joke 'what the author said: the curtains were blue; what the teacher says the author meant: [long lyrical explanation of blue=sad]; what the author meant: the curtains were blue'. This obstinate refusal to look past the surface of a piece of art is a very hostile environment for mass market high art.
>> The most unfortunate direction though is that there is massive hostility in the popular culture against complexity and symbolism that is more than skin deep,for which I mostly blame the heavy handed way literature is studied in school.
As usual with art, this is a cultural thing. For example, I visit Bologna, in Italy, every summer and in the central square of the old city there's an open-air film festival where they show a different movie for free every night, I think for all three months of summer. I've sat through a couple of them and there's always a lengthy introduction to the movie by some kind of artsy person who gets up on the stage and speaks for half an hour analysing the movie's significance and going into depth in the symbolism of scenes, like the "blue=sad" thing in the joke you quote. I mean, I like artsy fartsy movies (the stuff Hollywood usually tags as "world cinema"... yeah, guess what, the rest of the world also makes movies) but the analysis can get a bit boring and I resent the attempt to direct me to look at particular details that the speaker wants me to pay attention to. I want to notice the details I notice. So much analysis just spoils the movie for me - and the same goes for any work of art. It's not that I can't find something deep in art, but I want to understand what is in my head and in my heart and not be spoon-fed whatever the artistic establishment has chosen I have to notice.
Oh, absolutely - seeing commentary before the movie seems a sure fire way to destroy the authentic emotional experience of the art. And there is absolutely also a tendency to stretch art analysis way past breaking in some academic circles, seeing symbolism in everything, psychoanalyzing the author's choices etc (Michel Foucault had a joke from one of his characters - 'read Freud enough and you'll end up believing that a penis is nothing more than a phallic symbol').
Still, in pop culture and the mass market, I think the scales are tipped well to the side I'm mentioning. One interesting case study has been the movie Annihilation - a very obviously symbollic film, but one which has often been reviewed almost exclusively in terms of it's world (what were the alien's plans? Was that the real Lena at the end?), especially if you look at places like YouTube.
I think it has more to do with the audience’s propensity to be more interested in investing long term into world and relationship building.
People want more than a 2 hour connection with a story it seems like. They’d prefer to know Jon Snow for 5 years than for 3 hours.
So it isn’t that the audience is unwilling to invest into deeper stories, it’s just they don’t feel like doing it via short term relationships anymore. I’m sure Nomad Land has a point, but I think audiences are kind of over that now days.
Serial drama is the powerhouse now days, not the epic movie.
Or better older days that oscar nominated films came straight out of state propaganda offices, eg.
Days of Glory, starring Gregory Peck https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036748/ that whitewashes Stalinism because we had to win the war and the Soviets were allies.
I honestly don't understand this current hang up on things being 'political'. The movies are largely going to be a reflection of the world we live in at that point in time, tapping into the collective consciousness of the moment.
Things feel more turbulent now, for many people, than in the 90s. Therefore we don't have 90's or early 2000s style movies about boring life or other inane things. Office Space would be a different film if it was written now, and Dude Where's My Car probably wouldn't even exist.
Lots of films were political about Vietnam during that period of time.
Lots of films were political about the war in Iraq, arguably too heavily in the US' favour to keep that support drummed up, after 9/11 happened.
Now it's about things like representation of minorities, nationalism, right wing threats, and so on, and I suppose "it's political" is another way of saying you're against the politics the movie chooses to explore, or represent.
To that end, it's only political if you disagree with it, and that lines up with me feeling that 'political' is being used as a pejorative.
(you as in anyone, not specifically you, the parent)
There were always political messages, but difference is that in the past emphasis was on story with little political message sprinkled on top. Nowadays story is just a vehicle for the politics.
Some would say a movie with a hero named Captain America who is literally wearing a flag is clearly political - even if in terms of plot and message the film is disneyfied and chinese-film-censor-approved.
Lots of iceberg above the water, very little below.
In comparison, Full Metal Jacket doesn't have a hero dressed in a flag - but oooooh boy does it have a message about the experience and nature of war.
There was an early superhero who became popular by halting an execution, beating up a man who was disciplining his wife, and terrorizing a corrupt US Senator. In the next few books, he would force an arms dealer to visit a warzone endangered by his weapons and force a mine operator who operated a mine without proper safety precautions to be subjected to a mine collapse. Hell, he even fought against gentrification, which gets him hunted by the military and the police.
The superhero in question?
Superman.
Some people might call it "political."
Others might call it "life."
Siegel and Schuster created a character to fight for the common man, and they used fantastic life experiences in the beginning instead of creating monsters and ghouls to fight. The first super-villain in the book didn't get introduced until year 2.
Little Nemo might have been an acid trip, but Superman at his start was a political power fantasy about helping the little guy.
Captain America is generally about the conflict between patriotism and government loyalty. For a superhero movie, I'd say it's more thematically interesting than most. Government != political though.
You're 100% right. The only thing I'll say is that there are still movies made worth seeing, but you have to look more carefully for them. Without a doubt, most of the box office hits and many of the award winners are overhyped, bland and not worth seeing.
Yeah, movies nowadays largely belong to two groups, with not much in between: (1) the brainless mass-market type (comic/video game adaptation, remake etc.) which (hopefully) make money, but don't stand a chance at the Oscars (except for rare exceptions like 2019's "Joker"), and (2) the "arthouse" type, which feel like an application for an Oscar nomination, but are not really commercially successful.
If you went back twenty years one could also compile a similar list (not necessarily remakes, but something of a similarly low quality). Pretty clear you just have an axe to grind.
Go look through a catalog of movies from the 90s and even late 80s, particularly 1999 which was the best year for movies by far in the history of Hollywood.
Between The King and I (Disney animated), Baby Geniuses, Doug's 1st Movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Wing Commander, The Rage: Carrie 2, My Favorite Martian, and Office Space, I see plenty of sequels, low-effort trash, and remakes. And that's just stuff that came out in the first three months of the year.
edit: We got a remake of Wild Wild West, a remake of Tarzan, a sequel to Austin Powers, a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a prequel to Star Wars, and our second Shakespear adapation of the year in months 4-6.
double edit: In 7-9, we got another Muppet movie, an Inspector Gadget remake, The Haunting and The Thomas Crown Affair were both remakes, a Universal Soldier sequel, and a Dudley Do-Right remake.
I have no interest in continuing to analyze this list, thing were just as bad twenty years ago
I appreciate you looking into this and maybe I stand corrected.
This deserves further discussion for sure.
I'll do it at some point in the future on a blog post and will link it here.
Another interesting measure is studio funding of remakes and sequels (adjusted for inflation or as a percentage of total Hollywood's production spending)
but that starts getting into blog post territory.
Up until the past decade or so there was always something that was interesting at the movies.
The original "Wild Wild West" was a TV show; there was a 1980 TV movie, but the 1999 film is neither a remake nor a sequel to that 1980 movie. I'm using pretty expansive/liberal definitions of the terms here, I admit, but I think broadly my point stands just fine.
I agree that your overall point is broadly correct, but I think that a good principle in internet discussion is to be "liberal in the evidence you accept, and conservative in the evidence you 'send'".
The overall thrust of the "there's too many sequels and remakes" argument is that recent cinema shows a staleness/creative exhaustion in the industry, which is relying on brand recognition to cover for its failings. One creator expanding on their animated shorts to make a feature film out of them (Office Space) or a filmmaker making a (relatively creative, I think) adaptation of Shakespeare (10 Things I Hate About You), doesn't really demonstrate that, IMO. Many of the other examples you cite do. Certainly people have been complaining about sequelitis in movies for as long as I can remember (30+ years).
My own impression of a big trend in film over recent decades is the decline of comedies, especially in the family comedy/romantic comedy sub-genres. But I don't have hard data on that either.
While everything you say is valid, even subtracting those two examples, that's still a hefty list of films from 1999 that fall into sequel/remake territory, much like the modern day movies that the ancestral post is complaining about.
My favorite original movies of 2019:
Parasite, 1917, Once upon a time in hollywood, midsommar, uncut gems, ford v. ferrari, the lighthouse, knives out, jojo rabbit, us, a number of shows that have shifted towards a streamed series format vs. traditional film
I think the film industry is alive and well.
I'd also say that dr. sleep only barely qualifies as a sequel if we're in the mood to complain about hollywood cliches.
Forrest Gump and Fight Club were deeply political. The former is deeply rooted in humanist left-wing ideology, and the latter in exploring the alienation of masculine identity in modern society.
Also, you're listing empowerment of groups other than yourself as a negative?
I must be misinterpreting that because the implication seems to be that you actually don't want to watch movies where anyone but your own demographic (I assume white male) are portrayed in a positive or empowering light. Or maybe you simply don't care for or can't empathize with such portrayals. If so fair enough, but that's your personal taste, not a failure of the movie industry as a whole.
screen writers have apparently forgotten how to write and read, so they must derive inspiration from picture books instead. I look forward to someone making a movie based on board games soon..oh wait, that was done
Movies were never about meritocracy, but somehow every now and then through competition or the stars aligning, something good came out of it.
The formula was changed, forcefully. It's very openly not about 'good' anymore, since that would be oppressive, racist and sexist. 'good' is also expensive.
Enjoy the culture that was. We will never reach the same heights. It will all die off now, deservedly. The people responsible will blame the originators of 'good', turning their shame of the comparison not into growth, as mentally well people would, but digging their heels in even further, as they have always done since, oh, let's say 1867.
Many good films don't need to be as expensive as blockbusters because they focus on story and acting rather than explosions, special effects, and established A-list actors.
Every time you complain about something not being a meritocracy, you should remember the word was invented for a book about how it’s a dumb idea that won’t work.
As Billy Crystal once said when he hosted: “Nothing can take the sting out of the world’s problems like watching millionaires present gold statues to each other.”
Don't widely-recognized awards tend to lead to greater pay and power in one's career? I'd much rather be awarded an Oscar than a spot on my employer's "Actor of the Month" plaque...
A Nobel Prize, as an example, is not significant because it comes with an earth-shattering amount of money or power. But the prestige associated with it can certainly help one's career, which often comes with more pay and power.
For Oscars, probably yes. For Nobel Prizes, not so necessarily. The Physics one tends to be awarded for stuff done one or more decades ago. E.g. Peter Higgs got his after retirement.
Unlike the Turing award and at least some Nobel prizes, Oscars are awarded for one performance, within one year of the performance.
The only thing more consistent than the annual entertainment industry award shows is the barrage of "no one cares about the Oscars/Emmys/Grammys/XYZ anymore" articles right after.
These awards have only ever had one purpose – for the industry establishment to pat each other on the back and gatekeep outsiders, and that is as relevant today as it was 20 or 50 years ago. They have never been about evaluating quality of content.
And there's no point showing the same graphs of falling ratings, because, like all other forms of entertainment nowadays, more and more people are streaming these shows and/or watching parts of it later on their own schedule.
What broke my spirit as a young kid getting into animation was the discovery that nobody at the Oscars basically gives a shit about animation. Flat out. 'Judges' willingly admit they don't see cartoons as anything but for kids and will regularly not even watch all of the nominees...aside from the Disney cartoons with their kids in theaters. Hence why Disney always wins animation awards. So imagine my disillusion when discovering the great stuff that came out from Japan or France, to lose to the crap by-the-numbers musical cartoons churned out by Disney for the last ~30 years.
This does create a problem though, because while nobody gives a shit about industry awards, they do generate hype and interest (and sales). And these sales generate future projects. Nobody is going to basically attempt an animation project aimed at adults when they know they can't get it marketed as anything but for kids, and even then, always play second fiddle to Disney.
And hence, animation is effectively all but dead in America. You have your Rick and Mortys and Frozens and not much else.
The Oscars are just a reflection of American culture and the Hollywood film industry. And that's just fine. They don't have to be attuned to the entire world.
Sure, but that's just because niches are usually ignored by the mainstream. Sci-fi novels are rarely recognized as great works of literature, but I adore them for the ideas they bring up and the worlds they build. So I go look at the Nebula and Hugo awards, not at the Pulitzer for fiction.
Exhalation and Stories of your Life are two collections of short stories that I think should rank among the top few such anthologies. The fact that they're sci-fi doesn't reduce them, but they're unlikely to be really recognized because of the genre.
Yeah, it's sad – Wolfwalkers was a beautiful, innovative film. While you could argue Soul is better, no one even bothered to look into that category much because the winner was inevitable.
The Oscars have a category for best animated short, and best animated feature. Given the relatively tiny number of films produced in these categories, animation awards are disproportionately overrepresented.
These shows are to sell movies / videos / CDs / subscriptions. They are hours-long infomercials wrapped up in gowns and tuxedoes telling you what you should watch and listen to and buy if you haven't already.
Parasite is a perfect example. The last subtitled movie Americans sat through with any sort of audience capacity was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Without the Oscar hype, that movie is a flop in the US. But because it got that hype, people were trying to watch it any way they could, even if that meant spending extra on a streaming service to watch it from home.
Political in what sense? In the mid-90's the Best Picture was won, successively, by Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, and Braveheart.
Each of those had a pretty solid political viewpoint, and I'd imagine the ratings were pretty high for those Oscar ceremonies.
More likely, as the article says, we're living in a multi-channel world now where people have the choice to tune in, or not, to these monolithic cultural touchstones.
Can you elaborate what you mean by political? I've seen this term used as a criticism in media when the focus is put on a non-white, non-male or somehow "othered" person.
To me, I read this as people seeing the accomplishments of white men as legitimate and anything else purely as optics.
I do think there is probably an element of pandering to an audience that goes on, but I'd love to see some evidence or just hear some more of your thoughts on this one.
If you have a sizable populace willing to garrote you if your award nominations do not include a large enough representation of minority populaces, regardless of how movies, actors, directors, screenwriters, and anyone else actually performs in any given category (which, I believe, is the main point of an award), the incentive for including an equalized representation across all award categories far outweighs the benefit of awarding based on merit.
That is the evidence you asked for, you're welcome. It's not a white / non-white question at all, as you can see.
I wouldn't call that evidence, but I can see how the pressure of political activism could challenge the idea that awards are merit based.
But I don't think I've ever seen any actual evidence that the merits of non-white, non-male people are any less than their counterparts. Most responses I see are talking more broadly about "PC culture".
I think this could also be a case of
a) More non-white, non-male, "othered" people working in media
b) More of an audience for that content than ever, enabling people that fit different profiles to make movies
Tthe opposite of not wanting selection via cowardice isn't "select more white people", as many seem to misunderstand. It's simply wanting selection based on the criteria at hand.
As long as a mob force exists that alters that equation, you'll have at least minor distortion.
It could well be that without the mob the award candidates would've been exactly the same, but we won't know.
It sort of sucks how opaque awards/speaker nominations/prize selection can be at times. It does create an environment where things can not be 100% "fair" and there's no way of knowing. It would be interesting to see what a truly fair process would look like!
I think with something like The Oscars, the fact that the film/TV industry take it seriously is merit enough to pay attention to who wins awards.
Does that mean lack of interest because of politics, or the same problem the Oscars have had since perhaps back when Jaws/Star Wars invented blockbuster movies: the Academy Awards aren't going to award the big budget crowd-pleasers (like superhero films), so most audiences are uninterested. That's a high art vs. low art issue, not a political one.
Well, that and the political forces at work are boring. The cultural creators are excessively partisan, and excessive partisanship is the death of interesting nuance.
Interesting politics in a story is politics that challenges the orthodoxy and explores topics delicately. Partisans don't do that. They are the orthodoxy, and they can't handle nuance.
Yup, pretty much. I am a progressive. I am deeply committed to it. And yet, I have been watching the death of art at the hands of the partisans. The depictions must be purely on message, whichever side you're on. The art's only function is to mouthpiece the values of the faction it belongs to. There's nothing interesting to say in mainstream art anymore because there's no room to say it.
That's true in a sense, but there have been times when the popular culture was more relaxed, and was a closer fit to the median of the country.
Part of the problem of course is that there is not really a common, popular culture any longer. And so it's much easier for most people to feel estranged from Hollywood. Everyone's estranged, and no one has much in common.
But, it's also the case that the modern moralism that's permeating everything is particularly catastrophic and melodramatic. For sure, there have been times in history when things were worse, but that's hardly cause to celebrate.
Media can certainly become "less political" in a normal sense that anyone would recognize without making your comment untrue at all.
If people are suddenly taking offense to it that means the culture has shifted so far in one direction it's no longer relatable to the average person. The idea that people suddenly started being offended easier seems less likely than the industry falling off the political spectrum to the point people are sick of it.
I disagree, I wasn't stating it to be reductive, I was claiming that you can't find an IMDB top 250/Criterion collection/whatever fancy list of movies you prefer that doesn't have political statements. It makes them daring, the opposite of background noise.
That depends on how pedant you want to be about things being political. Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.
Also since you said culture, and not FILMS.
Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong.
Well. What is the politics of Thing again? Paranoia can be worse than the virus? That's not what is in the movie. Most people if not all are killed by the Thing.
Also that's not political, that's common sense.
Terminator came to Cameron in a dream, and the rationalization was it is caused by possible nuclear crisis?
The obscured threat doesn't have to be worse than the overt one for a parable to be applicable.
In fact, almost any allegory deliberately uses fantastical imagery to illustrate a point, because it's easier to point to something when the contrasts are higher.
Are you suggesting that Godzilla can't be a stand-in for Hiroshima simply because a literal Godzilla would be worse?
The commentary on erosion of trust was political then and would be now, even if the backdrop has changed.
> It has to be, if the message is that obscured threat is worse than the overt.
The ranking doesn't matter. One is a fictional alien, the other is human interaction. If the alien virus is worse, does that negate any and all (lesser bad) commentary?
Likewise, I don't bother comparing which is worse of humans or zombies in Walking Dead. The zombies are an exciting (debatable now) fictional backdrop to the anthropological exploration.
> the only thing that's changed is people taking offense at it.
So what you're saying is the the oscars have always been offending people, they're just offending different people now? If you're right, then the article still has an interesting point and it's something they should pay attention to: they used to have a big audience, and now they don't, so they must be offending the people that they used to be relying on.
But that doesn't seem likely - the people most likely to actually be offended by the political tone of the oscars are the right-wing, traditional conservative types who ridiculed awards shows anyway. They've gone hard into the most extreme politics of the people who were tuning in to begin with and even they have gotten tired of the constant barrage of lecturing.
People taking offense at politics hasn't changed either. George Carlin was doing bits on cancel culture (what used to be called "political correctness") forty years ago.
Cancel culture is political correctness, but applied to a person's entire history, always.
Being angry at something someone just did is not cancel culture. But when you look at something someone did 20 years ago and they've already apologized and learned from it, but then still insist they not have a job because of it, that's cancel culture.
Cancel Culture is the opposite of "the right to be forgotten".
But you're correct that people have always taken offense at politics. I can't imagine that ever wasn't the case.
I generally agree with you, but I would say that something like "donglegate" also fits in the cancel culture spectrum. Would you agree? Should there be a different term for it? (maybe just twitter shaming, followed by the modern rule that if you get too much attention on twitter you will be fired?)
I think there's definitely something there worth talking about, but trying to broaden a term to mean more will actually just make the term less useful, and it'll be harder to talk about both things instead.
I'm not sure what I'd call "donglegate" other than "internet justice", but it wouldn't be "cancel culture".
You might not be aware, but the core of this mentality is “you’re either with us or against us”; and is one of the most toxic mantras that those who seek to enact change engage in.
I conduct many actions a day which do not make me complicit in the status quo. The mere act of throwing an item away is not political unto itself, the item in question may be. But we really must find better ways not to ascribe malice when some unknown group of people does something ordinary without consideration of politics.
First: no its not "core", it is sometime a byproduct. In my opinion you have that reversed.
The "everything is political" mean "every action or non-action any human take is political". Gravity is not political. How you describe gravitation to an audience is.
The issue of this saying is that it make false equivalence. Everything might be political, but the degree differs, and not everything have to do with a "side". The way math is usually taught (poorly imho) have nothing to do with right or left, but with the culture and how we treat children, how we grade them and what we expect from them.[0]
The "everything is equally political" that some people seems to be saying can and will become "you’re either with us or against us"
[0] writing this i understand this is a poor example since in my country this criticism is politically charger when extrapolated.
>I conduct many actions a day which do not make me complicit in the status quo.
This is very true, but there's also an argument to be made that our everyday life and almost all the actions we take count as 'reproduction' of the system - whether that's reproduction of religion, the economy, the state, or whatever else.
Althusser picked up on this a while back. Not only does the economy need to reproduce itself using inputs from other production processes, but everyday life and society needs to reproduce itself too. This happens at the most basic level with the accumulation of thousands of small decisions, combined with particular ideologies (e.g. the religious person sees a particular action as rational or irrational in accordance with their ideology; the economic actor sees an action as rational or irrational on the ideology of the market; the state sees a certain action as rational or irrational on the ideology of control and parameters set by budget).
That's not to say reproduction is bad, or individually morally blameworthy in most circumstances - but it is there. When you work, you reproduce the economy. When you sing in church, you reproduce religion. When you pay taxes or vote, you reproduce the state. When you send your kids to school you reproduce the education system. There is very little room to be 'revolutionary' about these things, and that's a shame.
"you either are part of the solution of [X] or you are part of the problem" is an oversimplification and it's probably not meant to be taken literally.
First, nobody can have the knowledge, time and resources to work on each and every problem in the world.
Second, people can be overwhelmed by problems in their own lives and focused on getting to the end of the month. And there's no shame in that.
> we really must find better ways not to ascribe malice when some unknown group of people does something ordinary without consideration of politics
Yet we have to realize that there are hundreds of millions of people in developed countries that have access to information (e.g. Internet, documentaries...) and have enough spare time to learn and take a position.
And yet they choose not to.
Without ascribing malice, it can be uncomfortable and even painful to look at many problems in the world and admit that our lives could have been 100x times worse if we were to be born in the wrong place.
It could just be that actively choosing to be ignorant is in itself a form of malice if that ignorance harms others. I say this as someone who you feel lacks awareness, after all. Maybe I'm just too dumb to pretend that the obvious is actually nuanced.
The 20th Century brought broadcast media and mass-market advertising any publishing, which promoted a "single-stream" model of mass culture. With the internet, these technological limitations have been overcome.
Never understood why anyone cared even before COVID. I like movies and such. I recommend the ones I like to people. Popular actors make decent money. Why should I care beyond that?
I see no other reason. All pointers ought to have to do something with the screen time of the average phone user.
Gone are the days where people schedule for a tv show or an award show.
They know that the highlights, bites and funny clips will be on Youtube in a few days or even the same day.
Going forward, we could see tremendous loss of global productivity, just because young go-getters are wasting their time on phones.
Every activity of a mobile phone users life is swinging around phone usage. Traveling to work, better take bus and watch a video on the way. Free time at work, catch up on facebook. Sitting on the toilet, what is an hour or so of browsing Reddit even after bowels are empty.
I don’t know. I agree that people are addicted to their phones. But if people still remotely cared about these sorts of things, they would watch and live tweet about it on their phone like they do for everything else. This show was on a Sunday evening when most people are home and relaxing. I think it’s more that Hollywood is not hiding it’s partisanship at all and is instead pushing their partisanship to the forefront which turns off half the country. As such, viewership has declined by roughly 50%.
It definitely used to be easier to schedule around big shows and sports games. (That is, schedule a trip to the store or nice dinner somewhere while so many other people were watching TV.)
I think some people just hate phones, and some of it may well be justified, but I don't see what's so unproductive about using your phone on the bus instead of just staring off into space like we used to. I used to stay up late to sit on the couch and watch SNL, now I can watch clips while doing dishes during the week and go to bed at a normal time. It's by definition a more productive use of my time, unless I allow myself to spend too much time scrolling looking for a video.
>but I don't see what's so unproductive about using your phone on the bus instead of just staring off into space like we used to
Personally, staring off into space allows the mind to wander into all sorts of thoughts and ideas. I personally feel that using a phone in this time is less productive than simply not doing anything, primarily because, the phone draws our mind into the contents of the phone. Sure, one can always argue that one can read or learn productive stuff on the phone, but it is more probable that the average joe spends time on FB or YT, more likely on useless entertainment.
Such complaining disregards the fact that most humans are strongly driven to procreate, and thus present themselves as fit mates with jobs, status, income, and prestige. Humans are also driven to create, and will create beautiful art in the medium that best presents that art. We are also driven to explore, love, and experience life. These things are all alive and well in people who otherwise have and use a mobile phone daily. The empty mental calories of yesteryear were: gossip, tavern attendance, radio, fighting, plays, etc. Those weren't any "better" than mobile phones are today. Assuming that civilization is going to collapse because the empty mental calories are a little more accessible is a tad extreme.
I don't even know what to say to this. Designated by whom? The whole expansion of essential work from medicine and food and literal essentials all the way to, well, the oscars has been a joke. We're in this awful middle ground of half-assed extreme measures. They're watered down enough to not stamp things out, but still followed enough to make us all miserable. It's the perfect anti-sweet-spot that maximizes the combination of virus spread and misery. Instead, we get this never-ending bucket of misery because everyone thinks they're an exception or just an insignificant single drop in the ocean.