TO HELL WITH THE OSCARS
Hart had said some putatively offensive things about LGBTQ issues, and within 72 hours of the celebratory announcement, Hart wisely vamoosed before he could get further chomped up in the social media maw. It seemed that the cultural elite had decided that not only was America rotten to its core, but so was the entire male gender and heterosexuality in general... and this general disposition needed to be reflected in the words spoken from the stage of the Kodak Theater. In such an atmosphere, comedians of any sort – people with genuine experience in generating enthusiastic up-to-the-moment responses from people in the seats in front of them, and therefore the perfect people to manage the show – were more likely to be lightning rods than the kinds of people who could catch lightning in a bottle. They were to be avoided rather than embraced. And the hunt for a few bad words spoken at any time in anyone’s career, which had become standard fare in Oscars coverage, ensured no sane person would be caught dead taking the gig. And so came the innovation of innovations... the show with no host! Let the movies be the stars, not the host! This preposterous avoidance of any conceivable controversy went hand in hand with the astounding incompetence that was, in hindsight, the moment at which the Oscars went into its final tailspin. I speak of the stunning moment of glaring, nightmarish amateurism that ended the 2017 show, perhaps the most cringe-inducing live moment in the history of television. Best Picture presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty – neither of whom seemed capable of
TV actor named Neil Patrick Harris, who had done a good job on the Tony Awards (whose audience is about a tenth the size of the Oscars), got the gig to little effect. The brilliant standup comedian Chris Rock followed him, but his brand of no-BS balloon puncturing seemed to unnerve the Academy rather than inspire it. And then, in 2017, Hollywood was torn apart by the “Me Too” movement. That watershed moment accelerated a trend toward humorless correctness that had already begun to take its laborious toll on the proceedings. How could an Oscars host even think of cracking wise at a time when the producer who invented the modern get-my-movie-an-Oscar campaign, Harvey Weinstein, had been exposed as a rapist – a rapist, moreover, whose evil conduct had been an open secret in Hollywood for two decades? Add to that the supposedly civilization- ending presidency of Donald Trump and how idiot Hollywood journalists sought to depict his rise to power as an expression of white supremacist tendencies even in the most avowedly Left-liberal industry in America. #OscarsSoWhite, as the Twitter hashtag went. The Oscars are the single greatest promotional tool any industry has ever had – a nearly four-hour ad for the centrality, power, and importance of a single medium. And suddenly, the motion-picture business had no idea how to promote itself effectively, or at all. Hollywood didn’t know what to do. In desperation, it turned to the hottest new star at the time, the hyperactive Black comedian Kevin Hart, to bring multicultural harmony and heat to the spheres. But it turned out
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May 2021
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