The merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. has uncorked mass hysteria reminiscent of 2016. The deal has been approved. At the moment, the “Resistance” is out in force trying to stop it for only one reason: Trump.

Probably nothing has killed Hollywood more than its ten-year war on Trump and anyone who voted for him. They destroyed themselves trying to destroy him, and they’ve not given up the fight. I say “they” because I parted ways with them about six years ago, after I saw the wreckage that became of American culture at the hands of the “resistance.”

Even now, they’re not telling the truth to themselves or to anyone else. They pretend its an ideological monopoly or some kind of 1984-like takeover. The truth is that it’s exactly the opposite. It’s a challenge to their power, their monopolistic control over Hollywood and all culture for the last 15-20 years. The film industry became a desert, with many of its creatives locked away in a utopian paradise without box office or ratings pressure, thinking everything was going fine.

Well, everything was not going fine. It took Elon Musk buying Twitter for $45 billion, Paramount taking over CBS, and now, this merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. which will now be in the hands of people who, at the very least, have one foot in the real world. Remember when movies were for everyone? When were movies really great? We all just accept the fact that they suck now, but for a few exceptions.

Hollywood doesn’t have to care because streaming has given it the option to never have to stress about the numbers. They can hide away and trip the light fantastic for themselves, and they like it that way. What they’re fighting against now is the loss of their monopolistic hold on film and television. They liked having a full-time propaganda machine to drive the messages they wanted to sell to the public.

They said nothing about the $71 billion merger between Fox and Disney, which was just $10 billion less than this one, if you count pure equity. They said nothing about Barack and Michelle Obama becoming a part of Netflix, blurring the lines between power and art because the truth is that line doesn’t exist on the Left. Hollywood and the Democrats are one and the same.

The ideological capture of Hollywood and all American culture by the Democrats created a bottleneck, rendering movies and television unwatchable slop, with very few exceptions. They couldn’t tell the truth about any of what we just lived through, not in any critical way. Not Me Too, not 2020, not the Biden debacle. Every so often, a piece of dissent might slip through, as with Eddington, but it is rare.

They claim Trump is an authoritarian, and now they have to fear speech, but of course, that’s been the status quo in Hollywood for over a decade. Blacklists are here. Most actors know they are one comment away from career ruination, and for some of them, there is no coming back.

Look at how Trevor Noah treated Nicki Minaj at the Grammys, celebrating the fact that she wasn’t there. So yes, women of color matter unless they step out of line.

We know the game.

Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center hired me to write their annual Oscars report. I was good at it, and I did it on the cheap. When the Hollywood Reporter story broke that I was no longer on Team Blue and outside the utopian bubble, that was it for me. They didn’t want me working for them anymore.

These folks are afraid of losing their power. That is why they care about this one merger, this one monopoly. They are used to getting what they want as members of the ruling class. They are used to special treatment, and they can’t believe this is happening to them. Except that it’s not happening to them. It is a survival move in hopes of salvaging something out of the wreckage that Hollywood has become.

Trust me, they don’t care about monopolies.

They didn’t care when Jay Penske bought the Golden Globes, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Rolling Stone, and Gold Derby. This monopoly now decides much of the awards race. There is no audience anymore—not for the shows, not for the movies. They are satisfied with their tiny utopian bubble, which has become a dystopian doomsday cult. They have no problem with late-night comedy—Kimmel, Colbert, Oliver, SNL—playing only to a shrinking minority of the wealthy ruling class. They don’t care that almost no one can stand to watch their movies or shows anymore because they detest the majority of the public that voted for Trump.

They don’t care because they don’t have to. Everywhere they look is a flattering mirror telling them they are the greatest. Jane Fonda, Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, and the 4,000 Hollywood types who signed that petition do not care about you or me. No one calls them out for their shit, not even Jon Stewart. Occasionally, Bill Maher will hit back at them, but it’s rare.

The public looks at this, and unless they are No Kings protesters and Blue Sky users, they understand that it’s been a very long time before any of these people thought about them, made movies for them, made TV shows for them. They’ve just been marinating in their own precious messaging, and it’s turned the public off. We don’t care. We want great movies back.

Ben Stiller and Robert De Niro have a movie coming out soon. They expect half the country to buy tickets to see it? Why would they when they can detect their open disdain?

What delusional fantasy is Jim Acosta living in? Seen the news lately, pal? What it doesn’t have is ideological diversity. That is why you are all in this mess. Someone had to rise up and challenge you, and thank god for that.

You can’t even tell the difference anymore between art and politics. They have merged under the Left’s ideological monopoly. Things can’t possibly get any worse. The only reason these folks care now is that they think Trump is involved. That’s it. They have said not a word for years while power has been concentrated at the top.

Even their favorite Democratic Socialist is in on it, like he’s become some kind of de facto imaginary president for the side that lost.

We are desperate for great movies, great comedies, and real art. We are sick of consuming what amounts to propaganda for the progressive Left day in and day out. The Paramount/WB merger offers some hope that power and money might once again be directed not at celebrities and the Democrats, but at us—the audiences.

Hollywood used to care about people because it had to. Box office mattered, so the people mattered. Ratings mattered, so the people mattered. But something shifted in the past 15 years. Hollywood walled itself off and began to feel like politics and ideology, identity-first dogma had to be more important than just about anything else.

In 2016, the Democrats waged a “hearts and minds” campaign on the American public. It was their own “color revolution”—a “whole of society” effort to block Donald Trump from serving after his shock election victory, which they deemed illegitimate. Hollywood was just one of the tentacles that pumped out propaganda for the Left, legacy media being the other.

We called it “The Resistance,” but really, we were always The Empire. We held all the power. When we drew a line saying that voting for Trump meant you were out, we had the power to destroy careers, status, friendships, and relationships. In other words, it was soft totalitarianism: do what we want, or else. All rules had to be followed, or you were an “ist” or a “phobe.” Only one message could be delivered, so we had to see the same story playing out over and over again.

That story will never be told unless the empire collapses, which it already has, or at least it’s getting there. I don’t know whether the merger will be good or bad, but I do know the industry needs a dramatic shake-up so we can bring back great movies, and we have to at least try to save it. We so badly need that as a country, too.

We need a shared culture. Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, and Mark Ruffalo do not have the right to claim American culture for themselves, just as they don’t have a right to claim American democracy for themselves. Trump is in power because the people voted for him. Again.

So yes, the merger will consolidate power just as all of the media companies have been consolidating power for years now. Things are changing fast. The one thing we desperately need is for writers and thinkers to be free without worrying about destroying their careers because they aren’t politically correct enough.

I’m not happy about monopolies in Hollywood. I saw what happened to me and how swiftly I was cut off by Netflix, Disney, Fox, and Apple—all of them —because I was no longer ideologically compliant. I worried about the future if nothing changed. It turns out it takes a lot of money just to free speech and ideas. It took $45 billion to buy Twitter and now, $81 billion to buy WB. Will it live up to my hopes? I have no idea, but I do know that whatever we have now has to change.

A recent comment by Andy Weir, the writer of Project Hail Mary, has gone viral. There were a few loudmouths who objected, but for the most part, no one can read his common-sense opinion and see it as anything other than a lifeline for writers and directors in Hollywood. There is a reason so many people from all walks of life can watch Project Hail Mary: there is no whiff of “my side is better than your side,” there is no judgment placed on the “lesser” half of America. It’s just that rare breed of a universal story, well told.

I am not entirely sure where the quote comes from to give proper sourcing, but here is how I saw it:

Thank you. From the deepest place in my heart, thank you. THANK YOU.

I read this piece in the New York Times that ruminates on whether wokeness has left “us” better off. It is shockingly one-sided, as though nearly 100 million people in America just didn’t exist and weren’t invited in. I find it astonishing they would write and speak this way, and it reminded me of a conversation they might have inside a cult. These are “our” rules. Have they led us toward success or failure? Well, how can you ever know that if you have become so insulated from the rest of us?

To them, the big crime is that Trump won again. And while it’s true that wokeness has made the Left toxic (just because you scare people into silence doesn’t mean they agree with you), that isn’t the real crime. It is the “us vs. them” and “follow our rules or else” that has really collapsed the Left, and it isn’t going away any time soon. Just look at the stars of the party, Zohran Mamdani and AOC, who blend Democratic Socialism with Wokeness to create a hybrid movement that will swallow up the Democratic Party even if they pretend to be moderate with people like Gavin Newsom.

I used to love reading Stephen King and listening to Bruce Springsteen. I grew up on them. I learned so much about life from both of them. Maybe if I were still someone who existed inside the bubble that the Left has become, I might still be listening to them. I might cheer them on as they trash half the country and Donald Trump. But, to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, I ain’t like that no more. I have been cast out and now exist among the Proles, per Orwell’s 1984. If you know, you know. To quote Bob Dylan, I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now. Meaning, I’m constantly seeing a bigger picture and a bigger world, and I chafed against the confined world of what culture on the Left became.

If you really want to know what destroyed American culture, read Jacob Siegel’s new book, The Information State. It describes it all, how culture was sucked into the same machine that built a utopian worldview and sought to bring everyone together as one whole, thus driving the same message everywhere, in books and movies, in schools, and in politics. It was a “whole of society” effort to build a better America. For a while, America was pretty great, but at some point, it felt suffocating and conformist. Even now, the Left is under a climate of fear and a culture of silence.

It reminds me a little of the movie The Stepford Wives, not the new one, but the original. Even though it was about feminism and how The Patriarchy wanted to turn free-thinking women into robots, it fits with what happened to the Left. There was and remains only one way to be, to think, to speak. That killed art. There’s just no two ways about it. It became dull, boring, predictable, and unwatchable. Gone were the daring filmmaking and free-thinking writers. In their place came an obedient class of robots who did everything they were supposed to do.

Or that great Twilight Zone episode, Number 12 Looks Just Like You, where everyone is expected to look, speak, and act the same.

I understand the whole point of the woke Left is to celebrate diversity and uniqueness, which is why it’s ironic that the ideology and allowable thought and speech are so uniform. But the better stories are the ones that will never be told because there is no system that will support subversive storytelling, because those who control culture are untouchable. In this world, for instance, Anna Wintour is a hero - a wealthy ruling class aristocrat, but because she appropriately genuflects and virtue signals, she is left alone.

This is why there is very little chance that The Devil Wears Prada, as The Studio, The Pitt, or any late-night show, will ever be honest enough to be truly great. They are aimed at one mindset, and if you are of that mindset, you will feel seen. If you are not, you will be bored and annoyed.

Anyway, now we know why Project Hail Mary is so good and why it’s made so much money. It’s universal. It’s a story that cares more about its audience than it does about driving THE MESSAGE. Hats off to you, Mr. Weir.

The Trump era is almost over. The “witchcraft” in Salem will be gone soon. Then what? Are we going to be a polarized and divided society unless the other half is strong-armed into compliance, 1984 style? If you can’t come back to the real world and make movies for everyone, then at least do what Andy Weir suggests. Keep your politics to yourself if you want to make movies. That is the best way not just to bring the country together, but to remind us that we have more in common than we realize. We are all still human beings capable of kindness and decency.

Paramount wins bid for WB

I am not really smart enough to write about this story except from the perspective of someone who wanted Warner Bros. not to go to Netflix. The main reason is that monopolies are killing Hollywood just as much as everything else. I know from personal experience. If Disney decides I am not an appropriate site to advertise on, then so does Fox, since it is owned by Disney. Netflix decided not to advertise, not to mention to exclude me from special screenings and access; the more market share they have, the more power they have to control what people think. I prefer more competition and less monopoly control.

Paramount, by contrast, has made an effort to challenge the status quo, and that thought has made the Left angry and in attack mode; it is healthier overall for creative output and free thought.

The conformists and monopolists have translated to ignoring what audiences actually love, choosing their compliant content instead. For instance, Landman is easily one of the best shows on TV now and yet, despite a fiery, brilliant performance by Billy Bob Thornton, it was completely shut out of the 2025 Emmys. Of course it was. We know how this game is played by now. If they decide you are on the wrong side, they won’t include you in your insulated world. And that is to their detriment, just as it is to their detriment that they keep giving awards to sycophants to the Democratic Party on late-night shows - John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert, for instance. At least Bill Maher is trying to do something different.

The Paramount/WB deal, along with the kinds of movies and shows they are putting out, along with Andy Weir’s comments, give me hope for the future and I never thought I would ever feel that.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Oscar ratings were down. They dropped about 2 million on network television (and streaming combined), landing around 18 million this year after hovering near 20 million last year. But the real story isn’t ratings vs. streaming. It’s much bigger and deeper than that.

The decline has less to do with the fall of network TV and the rise of streaming than with a widespread lack of interest in films and Hollywood itself. Celebrities were invented to sell movie tickets—so were the Oscars. The public likes celebrities less and less, finds most movies unwatchable, and doesn’t think they’re worth the time. The Academy didn’t create this problem, and it can’t fix it. Hollywood is an empire in collapse. Unless it pivots dramatically—or until it collapses entirely—it will stay on life support.

Most people who cover Hollywood can’t speak the truth, even if they see it. They’re forbidden from doing so, and they know it. Look at me: a cautionary tale. I can’t tell you how many friends I have who support me in secret, living quiet lives of desperation, terrified to speak their minds. They’ve simply accepted this as reality—never challenging it, fighting back, or trying to change it.

Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Sean Penn, Adam McKay, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and all the self-serving celebrities who pretend to be outspoken and brave are just pushing the same deceptive lies the Left has told itself for years. If you shun half the country—if every joke, movie, and TV show reflects only one way of thinking—your industry will collapse. It’s only a matter of time. They can’t see it because of their shared enemy, their mass delusion: Donald Trump.

Hollywood lost its mind over Trump’s 2016 win and destroyed itself in the process. I hope to write a book about it someday, because I lived through it. Nothing like this has ever happened in America before, largely because we’ve never lived through the internet era as we are now. The rise of Barack Obama and social media let us all build an insular bubble that many on the Left still mistake for reality. It wasn’t.

Trump’s win hit like the Devil riding into Salem for a people without religion, having escaped it during the 1960s counterculture. After decades of filling that void with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, cults, and self-help, politics became the substitute. Obama became a god-like figure, making the Left desperate not just to be good but to be seen as Good People Doing Good Things. That required casting Trump as the ultimate bad guy, with his supporters as sworn enemies threatening our utopia.

As you can see, ratings started dipping in 2016. Hollywood aligned itself with Obama as one massive cult-like religion, encompassing major cultural institutions, corporations, and media. They declared themselves the “resistance”: you’re with us or against us.

It got worse—mass hysteria swept the online Left over racism and sexual assault, with Trump tried and convicted in the court of public opinion, yet still winning by a slim Electoral College margin. Everything that happened to the Left echoed Salem in 1692 for the same reasons: no ridding the village of witchcraft once the belief takes hold. It became impossible to see Trump as the guy everyone knew for decades. Now he was Voldemort—the living embodiment of evil to the Left: heterosexual, masculine, white, male, saying whatever he wants, making offensive jokes, representing the world before Woketopia.

“Goodness” became the foundational religion. Hollywood movies had to reflect it. Filmmakers and actors had to be good and signal virtue on social media. But goodness requires a named bad—and that bad became average working-class Americans who remember the good old days of Animal House, Mad Magazine, and The Godfather. To be good, you point the finger at those people over there.

If you’re a business relying on ticket sales or ratings, how do you appeal to people you’ve demonized and shunned for a decade? You can’t. You don’t even know them anymore.

Woody Allen’s Sleeper captures the utopian Left better than almost anything—even though his “resistance” is Communist. It shows two realities: Diane Keaton’s brave new world, cut off from reality and controlled by propaganda, a ruling class pampered but stripped of the foundational freedom art requires. It’s clearly riffing on 1984, which also templates what happened when we built a Shining Woketopia online.

Those two minutes of hate are obviously Trump and MAGA—for the same reasons. Hate them, fear becoming one of them. To humanize the millions who voted for Trump (twice) means surrendering that GOODNESS—the Left’s religion. They’re not willing to give it up. They still want to be seen as Good People Doing Good Things. That’s why no one watches the Oscars anymore and why movies feel unbearable. They don’t reflect reality; they’re a flattering mirror for the people who make, produce, star in, and award them.

And I speak the language of the Left, so I know they see the migrants and trans people as the ones being hated, and there is some truth to that, but 1984 and Sleeper are about the dominant media and culture that controls society. That hasn’t been the Right since the 1950s. It’s the Left that has been in control of it ever since. When the box office mattered, when ratings mattered, the people had to matter, but the new model for streaming is to forget about them and double down on utopia via streaming sites like Netflix, which will eliminate box-office pressure and allow utopia to flourish.

I don’t think Hollywood wants to fix the problem. What they want is utopia back. Guys like Adam McKay don’t want to make art for everyone. They only want the right people to consume their films. Same with Jimmy Kimmel and anyone else on the Left. That is why there is so much outsider media on podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok. Culture is being reinvented by necessity.

Fixing it won’t mean appealing to MAGA. Hollywood would not know how to do that even if they wanted to. The idea is to stop demonizing, dehumanizing, and shunning half the country, making them the named evil that if only they would treat Trump like the Devil incarnate, all would be forgiven. That’s why it’s an impossible goal because it not only means giving up on the mass delusion of Trump as a named evil, but it also means giving up on Obama as the named God. Can the Left do that? I do not think so, personally. I think culture will have to be built outside of them, and that with enough competition, they will be forced out of their insulated bubble.

The Academy, however, can fix the problem pretty quickly with the Oscar race, and that is to do the following:

1. Shrink Best Picture down to five. Expand International Feature and give the Oscar to the director, not the country. That will improve the Oscars tremendously and make people excited about the movies -- it’s a first step. We’ll also get big Oscar sweeps again, which we never do anymore, thanks to the expanded ballot.

2. Many will pressure the Academy to shorten the season. They like the “wham bam thank you ma’am” of it because bloggers and critics now control the Oscars. Why were they so predictable? That’s why.

3. Abandon the DEI mandate now that Sinners didn’t win Best Picture. The mandate failed, and the ruling class will have to live with the consequences.

4. Movies should be shown in movie theaters to be considered. There should be a separate category for streaming-only. I realize Netflix has a huge investment in the Academy and is as much of an insider now as anyone ever has been. But Netflix and all streaming, along with AI and online content, should be a separate thing from movies in movie theaters. There is no reason for these industries to overlap.

5. Get a host who is not afraid of insulting the ruling class of Hollywood. Ricky Gervais is a start. When the complaints come in, tell them to pound sand.

Those will fix some of the problems. But they won’t fix all of the problems. People like me invented this game of Oscar watching. It was supposed to predict the Oscars, but now it’s to shape and define them, and it’s been this way for a long time. No one wants to rock the boat because they’re all getting paid. Erik Anderson of AwardsWatch, Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture, little sites, and the biggest sites like Penske Media are making insane amounts of money to shape the race.

But they are PR for the publicists. That is what they are, and it is what I used to be. I still am happy to push Focus Features because they had the balls to advertise on this site when every other studio ran screaming. So I get it. And there is no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. There is nothing the Academy can do about this except for one thing. They can start inviting in and including the other half of the country for commentary. Meaning, invite the Daily Wire or other conservatives to cover and attend the Oscars. Don’t just invite those who are obedient to the Left’s dictates.

Finally, it’s time to give up the Woketopian ideal after this year’s Oscars. Sinners was the film that should have won, even if lots of people don’t agree. They say “these aren’t Oscar-worthy movies,” but they don’t know what “Oscar-worthy” means. All it should mean is high achievement in film, with specific measures of success. Those measures should not just be made by bloggers but also by the public. That is why Sinners should have won. As long as movies have to make money, movies will have to be better. If movies are better, people will be more interested in the Oscars.

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And of course, everyone threw a fit because everyone gets offended over every little thing. But Chalamet is 100% right. He means he doesn’t want to see movies become a niche cultural event. Hey, it’s great that there are people who appreciate ballet and opera but who are we kidding? They are a luxury few can afford. They are most appreciated by the upper class and always have been. Only recently has the upper class decided they should be diverse and inclusive and they tinkered with them to make them so. These are lovely, beautiful art forms but movies are meant to serve a different purpose, which was his point.

Where the Oscars are concerned, I’ve always worried they would become the Tony Awards. They’re not quite there yet, and one reason they aren’t is that both Chalamet and Michael B. Jordan, two very popular actors, are in the running.

The problem with the Oscars is that the public has, for the most part, been left out, even though everyone seems to be trying to fix it. They go from film festivals, private screenings for Film Twitter (aka “critics”), and then are placed in categories by the Oscar bloggers, and then those are the templates used by the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review, the Critics' Choice, and then placed for the Oscars. It is mostly a rigged game, soup to nuts, because the public is no longer involved.

Sinners should win for that reason alone. If it doesn’t, many people who have just become interested in the Oscars will find a reason not to care about them. I was watching The Silence of the Lambs last night and thinking about how good it was. That we get through the whole movie of fantastic scenes between Clarice and Hannibal, then we get the whole last third, which includes one last scene between the two of them, Hannibal’s escape, and Clarice facing off the killer. That is what Sinners reminds me of - a full meal at the movies and something we don’t see often enough.

And we never will, at least not at that level, unless the Oscars can somehow include the public and Hollywood can try to make great movies not for critics, not for the arthouse crowd, but for the public. One of the things that irritates me about the so-called “feminist horror movies” is that these movies are made for the filmmakers to express themselves, like they’re in primal therapy or something. The aim of making films can be to make art. But they can also make MOVIES for audiences. THAT is the point Chalamet is making, and it’s a good one.

Nothing about our modern age is more annoying than people getting upset about something someone said, especially when it’s their chosen interpretation rather than the truth. If someone makes a joke, for instance, as I did on X, which gets the attention of so many on the app and then leads to an “investigative report about what I think” by Rebecca Keegan, that is a modern-day witch hunt, a swarm, and ultimately a lie.

I was being accused and convicted of racism because people did not get my joke, and I didn’t try to help explain it to them (why bother?). I was right to mock “white dudes for Harris” for suddenly deciding a white identity group was okay. And yes, I know they make the rules, and we have to suffer our punishments regardless, but I refuse to play that game, and here we are.

So now, the hive mind has decided Timothée Chalamet must be turned into a character that doesn’t actually exist in real life to satisfy their need to throw people into the public arena for shaming. Hey, it worked for the Romans. They got to feel better about themselves while watching other people suffer.

But one thing to note is that everyone has decided his “bad behavior” cost him the Oscar, and that’s why Michael B. Jordan is winning—if he wins. We still don’t know who will win the Oscar. It still might be Chalamet.

I hope Chalamet takes a page from his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, and just lets it roll off his back. When they decide to come for you, when you are “it,” there is no fixing that. Don’t apologize. Be yourself. Be unique. Don’t become a Stepford Wife for the modern age and behave like everyone else.

We don’t actually know how Best Actor will turn out, but in general, the Oscars don’t tend to go for younger “pretty boys.” Michael B. Jordan is almost 40, and Chalamet is 30. They’re both young. They’re both pretty, but Jordan plays two different characters in Sinners and has some incredibly emotional scenes toward the end. Chalamet was great in Marty Supreme. If anything hurt the movie, it was the many fake scandals hurled at them early on. Other stories were, to my mind, a whole lotta nothing.

It’s possible all of these things cast a stench upon the movie - and then again, maybe not. But this group that seeks to destroy Chalamet, or anyone else, is what is wrong with our culture now. It’s repulsive, and we should reject it.

The side-by-side of Film Twitter simultaneously trying to crash Scream 7 while also having one massive, loud temper tantrum about Netflix backing out of the deal to buy Warner Bros. is one for the ages. On the one hand, they were BIG MAD about the politics of Scream 7 and many of them review-bombed it. You can read about that here.

Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture joins the pile-on:

And Erik Anderson has now vowed to boycott all Paramount films for review on AwardsWatch.

Here is Linda Marric pretending to be a film critic:

On the other hand, it was the Doomsday Clock’s alarm that made Paramount consider buying Warner Bros. instead. For the life of movies, for movie theaters, and for ideological liberation from the clutches of fanaticism, this is a good day. For the survival of utopia, or Woketopia, it is a very, very bad, no good day.

Film criticism as a hive mind should have become yet another way to stick it to the enemies of film critics. Since everyone has a social media platform, they care about their online reputations, lest all their good fortune and subscriber base vanish in an instant if they break the rules.

Not all of them participate. Not all of them are ideologically compliant. But in general, if you want to play ball, you have to go along with whatever the current thing is.

The worst and most obvious partisan warfare was the Melania documentary. Nothing showcases what happened to film coverage more than this. The scary part is they all feel satisfied with how this went down. They are rewarded for it. There was no turning this thing around. It had to be wrestled from their grasp.

Now, they want to call upon the Democrats to rise up and stop the deal. And then what? Sell it to Netflix anyway? Is that the only thing that will make them happy? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be bossed around by people who get to see movies for free and whose only real problem in life is anger at Trump.

The side you want to win this stupid war is not the side that believes cancel culture is justified, demands ideological compliance in art, films, award shows, advertising, TikTok videos, influencer culture, etc. It is not the side that will throw massive temper tantrums if the porridge is not just right. It is not the side that would review bomb a movie as “justice for Palestine” or because WAAAA Trump. No. The side you want to win is the side that still believes in free speech and tolerance of our differences.

I know on the Left, they think the Trump side is the “fascist” side, but that’s only because they don’t know what fascism actually means. Fascism is “conform or else.” It is about all sticks of wood bound together as one, a “fasci.” That is what the Left became with the rise of the internet, and they amassed more power than any movement or political party in American history. I was part of it. I was then a victim of it when I was booted out of Utopia for wrongthink.

The level of mass psychosis on the Left is what killed Hollywood. The totalitarian impulses are what turned a once-thriving industry that used to have one foot in the real world - where box office mattered -- into a fetid Doomsday Cult where every day is the end of the world if they can’t purge utopia of the bad people. They kill movies that aren’t 100% in compliance. They cancel people who dare to step out of line or hold the wrong opinion. Just look at what happened to me.

I’ve watched it over the past ten years with so much under the complete control of what they called “the resistance.” Except it never was. It was always the empire. Trump’s side was the side of abandoned and discarded Americans who were not only left behind but were then further demonized by the Good People of the Left. It was all done to save face after the mighty Democrats, the Obama Coalition, lost to Trump in 2016. To cover up their failures to address the people’s needs, they went to war against the people, saying, “You’re with us, or you’re against us.”

The alignment of politics and culture fused under Barack Obama as he had his fingers in multiple pies - and why he now has a deal on Netflix. For Netflix to buy Warner Bros., as it’s a major donor for one political party (who also gets glazed by them at every turn), is to create an ideological monopoly that might as well be a dome out in the Arizona desert called Biosphere 2. Power and control are one thing. It’s what they did with that power that brought us to this moment. It was ideological capture at its very worst.

This “conform or else” idea we see among Oscar bloggers like Erik Anderson and Matt Neglia is terrifying. There is no way for any kind of honest expression of art to survive that. They are only playing the game. They didn’t make the rules. But the rules must be dismantled if Hollywood is to survive, to help bring it back to its former glory, before it becomes just one more tool of political influence, aka propaganda.

It should not have had to come to this. It should not have been left up to the former host of Celebrity Apprentice to challenge that massive oligopoly, but here we are. To the Left, Trump represents all of their named evils contained in one man. They’ve finally worked their way around to “pedophile” after they chewed up and spit out other words that used to have meaning, like “dictator,” “fascist,” “racist,” and “rapist.” They have to find the next worst word, and they adopt it casually and comfortably to dehumanize him and his supporters. Nothing has led to the demise of the Left’s Empire more than that.

Look at where it ended up:

Hollywood, the legacy media, and most of our culture cannot survive that level of delusion. Trump is not Hitler. That anyone ever thought he was, and that mandated everyone else to agree with that, was the beginning of the end. The Gold Medal-winning Hockey team had every right to celebrate with America at the State of the Union. That they were commanded and demanded not to tell you everything about what the Left has become. Is that what we’re all expected to vote for? Do what we want, or we’ll destroy you? That’s the alternative?

There is very little courage in Hollywood. Guys like Mark Ruffalo, Robert De Niro, and Adam McKay speak out against only safe targets. Guys like Jimmy Kimmel play the martyr for free speech, but all that happened to him is that he got a tiny taste of his own medicine. You will hear them all out there barking about “authoritarianism” this and “tyranny” that. But you will never hear them talk about what has happened to the industry. You will never hear them challenge the real oppressive forces that led to its demise.

I’ll never forget these past ten years of what I helped build, then what I am hoping to help destroy. At the root of it for me was the destruction of the culture I so dearly loved. And all for what? To force America to escape into the insulated, isolated utopia we all built online all those years ago? There is a real world out there. Yes, much of it is part of the insanity that has overtaken the Left, but not all of it. It is a story for the ages, and I hope there will be brave writers to tell it. Someday.

The worst thing that happened to Hollywood was getting into bed with the Democratic Party. There is a problem with a company like Netflix that not only has a deal with the Obamas, but also pushes Democratic Party propaganda, and not only heavily donates to the party, but also attempts to help them win. That kind of monopoly would not be so bad if they did not see millions of Americans as Nazis. You can’t be the side with all of the power and then throw away the less powerful half like human garbage, no matter what you think of them.

So now, the Left is having fits of hysteria, thinking the Paramount deal is a win for Trump. And to them, the side that has all of the power and has no problem being in bed with the Democrats, that is tantamount to the bombing of Hiroshima. That’s how disconnected from reality they have become. They only know that power has been taken from them, and they aren’t handling it well.

And anyway, the Doomsday Cult has 90% of the culture. Maybe Paramount will give the other half of America the other 10%. Even that is better than a fascist-like ideological alignment that has turned the film business into skit night at the Scientology Center.

As I’ve been saying for a while now, the only way through this is all the way through. It’s the Truman Show. Come out of the simulation and join the rest of us in the real world. Power is intoxicating, I know.

The hive mind mass hysteria mob on the Left has done everything they could to destroy me and this website, yet here it still stands, thanks to the bravery and kindness of one studio, Focus Features, whose ads you see displayed on this website. They never bought into the cancel culture madness and mass psychosis. They did the much harder thing. When the worm turns, and it will because it always does, they will be among those who resisted and will be remembered well. The rest will have to take their place alongside those who went along with blacklists and McCarthyism.

Power means you can order people to do what you want and have your world ordered and defined exactly the way you want it. It feels great to have it. It feels terrible to lose it. But if you want movies and storytelling to survive, you have to leave it up to people who are comfortable moving fast and breaking things.

The news broke over the weekend thanks to the Penske media’s favorite brand of clickbait, sending out “something someone said” into the churn. I ignored it at first. So what, someone said something. But then the story got bigger.

Silence of the Lambs surprised the industry as an Oscar-winning, generation-defining smash. But over the years, the characterization of Buffalo Bill (whose sexual orientation is not explicitly stated) has been viewed as gender nonconforming and identifying as trans. For his part, Ted Levine — having played the character who is also known as Jame Gumb — has conflicting feelings about the movie, despite its success.

“There are certain aspects of the movie that don’t hold up too well,” Levine, who has never previously addressed pushback surrounding Buffalo Bill, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We all know more, and I’m a lot wiser about transgender issues. There are some lines in that script and movie that are unfortunate.”

This sentence, “has been viewed as gender nonconforming and identifying as trans.” Anyone who sees it that way did not watch the movie. The lines are very specific that Billy isn’t trans, but he wants to be, he’s pretending to be. Laid out right here:

The LGBTQIA+ community is so overly sensitive that no one is even allowed to pretend to be. Of course, we know that isn’t exclusively true. As long as the character is portrayed in a slightly good light -- as in Charlie Hunnam playing Ed Gein in that god-awful Netflix series -- no one will complain.

There was a time when I was deathly afraid of offending any of them. After almost ten years of unending and intensifying attacks by them, however, I don’t feel that way anymore. That doesn’t mean I think anyone should be bullied or mocked or dehumanized either. But acting as though it’s blasphemy is one of the most bizarre adaptations to life on the internet I can think of, especially when it comes to characters in movies. Expecting Hollywood to set the standard for human behavior has ruined Hollywood.

Apparently, this is a scene that many have found offensive. Why would the great Jonathan Demme have filmed it this way? Because it’s preposterously funny and everyone knows it, which is why it lives on in infamy.

And anyway, it was slightly ahead of its time, as we’ve now had three would-be transgender people go on shooting sprees before killing themselves. Probably, they weren’t really transgender (you’d never know that from the way the media covers the story), but they turned to that form of identity as a way out of bigger issues they were struggling with, and somehow, that led them to violence. And that is closer to what Jame Gumb really was -- trying to be something but not addressing his “deeper issues.”

Ed Gein remains a mystery, though he did seem to want to become a woman as he stole body parts from corpses and placed them on his body. He was so screwed up in every possible way that it’s hard to diagnose him and draw any conclusions. He was the model for both Norman Bates in Psycho and Jame Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs, though with the sexual component removed. In Psycho, Norman is punished by his “mother” for having unclean thoughts about Marion Crane. In The Silence of the Lambs, Jame Gumb simply wants a “great big fat person” for their skin.

And if anything rang false to me in the film, that was it. Serial Killers almost always seek some sort of sexual gratification from the type of person they kill. Even in Ed Gein’s case. But in The Silence of the Lambs, the victim is not a part of his fantasy beyond starving and skinning them.

Ted Levine probably feels bad that he’s met with scorn by many of the strident scolds who control the Left now, and wants to be absolved of these sins. Or perhaps he wishes his entire career wasn’t marked by this one role. It happens sometimes. Steve Railsback will always be the guy who played Charles Manson really well. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. But Levine should be proud to be part of such a great movie, one of the best films to win Best Picture in the history of the Oscars.

Producer Edward Saxon says, “There’s regret, but it didn’t come from any place of malice. It actually came from a place of seeing this guy. We all had dear friends and family who were gay. We thought it would just be very clear that Buffalo Bill adapts different things from society, from a place of an incredibly sick pathology.”

And of course, because this is Hollywood and everyone in Hollywood wants to make sure the other half of the country does not feel welcome in THEIR utopia anymore, they had to bring up Trump. Credit to the Hollywood Reporter for realizing the better clickbait was to draw anger from fans of the film rather than Trump haters -- maybe that’s a bit played out.

Here, you can see how the media strips everything Trump says of context and repurposes it for whatever point they wish to make without having any idea whatsoever about what he actually said or how he said it (you have to watch his entire rally to hear for yourself because the media never gets it right):

Silence of the Lambs has continued to be a steady part of popular culture throughout the decades, with AFI naming Hannibal Lecter as its top screen villain. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump brought up Hannibal Lecter in reference to migrants, while also having used the phrase “a wonderful man” to describe the character.

“To compare people who are looking for a better life coming over the border to Hannibal Lecter is about as perverse as anything we were able to come up with in the film,” says Saxon. As for Trump’s fascination with the character, the producer adds, “It’s a fascination with power and an elevated sense of self. Our president is stuck in a period: the Village People, Hannibal Lecter. I don’t think he stays up late watching new movies.”

They need their easy villains and their permanent heroes, which explains why storytelling has shit the bed in Hollywood. They can only tell one story because their power hierarchy is so specific, so rooted in identity, they start with the idea “who can we not offend?” And in so doing, the good guys are always the same and the bad guys are always the same -- just look at the film that is about to win Best Picture. There has never been a movie that better captures this moment of the Left’s insular bubble and its view of the other half of the country than One Battle After Another.

When The Silence of the Lambs first opened, I saw it three times in the movie theater on the same day, bringing different friends each time. “You have to see this movie,” I told them. What a thrill to bring people in to see a movie I knew delivered 100%.

Everything about this film is perfect. The writing, the directing, the acting. I know it so well I can’t even watch it anymore because I’ve seen it too many times. And if that means, as Saxon says, that I am stuck in the past, well, he’s wrong. It isn’t because I (or Trump) don’t watch movies anymore, it’s that movies aren’t this good anymore, and everyone knows it.

In Saxon’s worldview, and in the worldview of the Left, all humans are not to be viewed equally. He sees migrants as all good, noble, and virtuous, just as anyone in the designated marginalized groups is viewed. He does this without realizing that to do so robs them of their complexity and unintentionally elevates their only available target for evil: heterosexual white men (sometimes women), always Trump supporters.

How boring to have everything fixed in a permanent power hierarchy, making all art nothing more than dogma - a way to affirm the rules of the new utopia. It’s kind of like how only one story can be told with Christian movies or Scientology movies or movies made in China. Hollywood arrived there all on its own, as the ruling class sought absolution after attaining so much of the country’s cultural power and wealth. As long as they virtue signal, the mob won’t come for them.

But where does that leave us? Bereft without great stories from brave storytellers who know our world and feel free to write about it, not just to tell one story (”see how good we are and how bad all of those people over there are?”) but to tell a variety of stories, one where a creepy villain in a movie dared to say into the camera as he painted his lips, “would you fuck me? I’d fuck me.” Or a movie with a great protagonist in Jodie Foster who stares straight into the camera and gives Hannibal Lecter everything he wants just to break the case.

“Brave Clarice. You let me know when the lambs stop screaming.” Oh, no, we’ll never ever get a movie that good. Everyone knows it because everyone knows Hollywood must play by the rules of Woketopia. They know that they can’t even get to the line, let alone cross it. They know the Democrats are their overlords, and they can’t make a movie about, oh, say, the coup that George Clooney inspired with an op-ed that pushed out Joe Biden and installed Kamala Harris -- a terrible candidate -- without a single vote. Oh, but hey, Netflix donated to her campaign, so we’re not allowed to criticize.

The real stories all around us Hollywood is afraid to tell. I know it. You know it. They know it. Back in 1991, they were not afraid. The only thing they worried about was people not showing up to see the movie. They wanted it to be good enough to draw a crowd, not just a blue-state/Whole Foods crowd, but a real crowd from all over the country. That is why everyone knows and remembers Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, and it’s why I quote that movie to this day, as does everyone else.

The irony of the rise of AI is that they aren’t worried about offending. AI artists on YouTube make what people want to see without the clutches of the puritans tugging at them, forcing them into compliance to right the wrongs of society. AI is a free industry to do what Hollywood used to do - push the boundaries, test the limits.

The internet is moving faster than Hollywood because Hollywood is crippled by fear. They are the ruling class, and they’re desperate to hold power and status. The bigger the monopoly, the more worried they will be about their status, which is why Netflix’s buying Warner Bros. is such a dangerous move.

In AI, no one has to worry that every single marginalized group is represented or if it sends the “right message” - so why not AI? At least they can entertain everyone, as opposed to passing the test of everything always being “correct.”

Saxon doesn’t need to apologize for one of the greatest films of all time. If they had a chance to do it over again, it would suck, and everyone knows it. He also doesn’t need to separate himself from Trump - not necessary. The art speaks for itself. Boy, does it ever.

Paul Thomas Anderson and One Battle After Another are about to steamroll awards season in what I can only call a “death march.” It just won the Directors Guild, and it will likely win the Producers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild, along with the BAFTA and every other award just before sweeping the Oscars.

This isn’t a direct shot at the movie or PTA’s well-earned moment in the spotlight. Every filmmaker deserves their time to shine eventually, especially one who’s delivered so many daring, original films. I have no beef with that. It’s just that when one movie wins everything under the sun, there isn’t much else to write about. There is nothing that can take this thing down; it is exactly the right movie at exactly the right time.

My problem is with Hollywood itself, the film’s message, and what this whole spectacle is about to scream over the next month. Grab your barf bag.

Once the Oscars wrap, I already know what I’ll see on TikTok: dozens—hundreds—of Black influencers calling the Academy and Hollywood “racist.” They’ll be heartbroken, and the One Battle fans won’t hear a word of it or care. They want what they want, and they want it now. Kyle Buchanan at The New York Times crowned it the frontrunner before most people had even seen it. It was written, so it was done.

The movie bombed domestically, scraping together just $71–72 million against a bloated budget rumored at $130–175 million (we all know Hollywood doesn’t sweat costs when it’s delivering The Correct Message). It made most of its money overseas, where audiences showed up for Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance—so maybe he earned that $20 million payday. Why did it cost so much? Who knows. No one will say it out loud, certainly not at Penske-owned outlets like Variety or Rolling Stone. They won’t risk pissing off Warner Bros. and losing the ad dollars. Things ain’t what they used to be.

Hollywood’s tinkering with its utopian diorama—what Laurie Anderson once called a “perfect little world that doesn’t really need you”—has opened doors for more women and Black filmmakers. Chloé Zhao won an Oscar. Ryan Coogler will probably snag Original Screenplay for Sinners if the plan holds.

But they draw the line at giving Coogler Best Director or Sinners Best Picture. They’ve got their messaging locked in with One Battle After Another, which directs its anger in exactly the approved direction. Sinners, by contrast, is messier—it asks us to accept Coogler’s vision as an artist: that music was a refuge for the truly oppressed, and no, crossing the border illegally into a country that now wants to deport you isn’t oppression in itself. Exploiting those migrants as cheap labor without ever granting full status—like they do in my tiny, wealthy, white town—that’s a lot closer to the real thing.

I can roll with most of it. I can accept that no one wants to be told how to vote, that ballots don’t erase past wrongs. I can buy that people just prefer One Battle After Another because they see themselves in it, regardless of gender or skin color (its intersectional bona fides are part of what lights Film Twitter on fire). Fine. Let it win everything under the sun—even Adapted Screenplay (though Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell actually deserve that one, IMO).

What I can’t stomach is the chorus calling everyone else “racist”—especially after Trump accidentally posted that offensive Obama meme. Yes, it was horrible; yes, good he took it down; yes, everyone should be offended. Calling everyone and everything “racist” started a long time ago, take it from me, one of the OG “woke” bloggers who did nothing but write about race and gender only to wake up inside the mass hysteria Doomsday Cult and be called a “racist,” a “white supremacist,” and a “bigot.” My daughter, my mom, my friends - they all see these monsters crawling out from under rotted logs to hurl insults.

Hollywood has spent a decade casting itself as the virtuous non-racists—the Leonardo DiCaprio of One Battle After Another—while pointing fingers everywhere else. La La Land, Three Billboards, Green Book were treated like apocalyptic racism scandals. That triggered 3,000 new Academy members to “even out” the demographics. The Golden Globes got canceled for being “racist,” then rebuilt with Penske money (yes, the same) and global voters to be more intersectional. The BAFTAs scrapped voting privileges and installed committees to pick the “correct” winners. They all high-fived themselves for fixing the problem as the empire crumbled.

And what got solved? Nothing. Except now they’ve engineered a system where they decide who’s racist and who isn’t, pointing fingers at will—just like One Battle After Another depicts modern America: still racist after all these years.

Well, will the real racists please stand up? Why isn’t Ryan Coogler and Sinners sweeping everything? Why did Penske-owned Rolling Stone and Variety snub Sinners from their top 20 films of the year? Would you like me to call you racists, you critics with such impeccable taste? I’m not going to—because, to quote Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, “I ain’t like that no more.”

Mass hysteria over racism, over sexual assault began with Trump’s win. You can start there if you want, or you can start earlier, as we on the Left colonized the internet and built a Shining Woketopia on the Hill with our beloved, fearless leader, the nation’s First Black President, Barack Obama. It was not just pure love. He became a religious figure to us, and by then, we needed religion.

We’d been spit out of the 1960s counterculture without religion. We chased sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, cults, self-help, and therapy. And eventually, we built an inside online that could lock those we didn’t like outside. That made it very easy to remake the rules of thought and speech. We reinvented language because what was the internet but a world built on words. Every word now has been completely transformed to not mean what it used to mean. Words are weapons, and that’s how we fight our Virtual Civil War, with words.

Hollywood and the ruling class love this New Woke Order because it casts them as the puritans, the Good People of the Left, while they have the easy convenience of pointing their fingers at the Bad People on the Right, the RACISTS.

This is a group of people who clapped when Trevor Noah said Nicki Minaj is not at the Grammys. They can break their rules of not trashing women of color. Go along with us or else. And they call Trump a Fascist? They get to be both rich and stand in judgment. See how convenient that is? The mob will never come for them as long as they genuflect in the right direction.

It could never be that Nicki Minaj knows her own mind and made her own decisions, no. That will be especially true after Memegate. They will punish her for forsaking their One True God, where religion is politics and ideology. Minaj doesn’t see it that way. When you see how they’re treating her, you’ll know what has become of today’s Left with politics as their religion.

Every religion needs a Devil, and that’s what they have in Trump and anyone who votes for him or supports him. Never mind that most of them are working-class, average Americans. To Hollywood, they are human garbage. I know, I’ve walked in their shoes. But Christians know we are all sinners.

For Hollywood, this has been catastrophic. The Grammys ratings plummeted, and the Oscars can only hope people watch, even knowing that the film that’s about to win will be one almost no one saw, and the celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn will be in full bloviation mode, judging half the country, lecturing them, and yes, calling them “racists.”

But here’s the thing. If you’re going to call everyone a racist and feel emboldened to do that, whether at the mic at an award show, on social media, or anywhere else, and you’re about to hand Best Picture and Best Director to the less successful film over the more successful film by a Black filmmaker, you can shut the fuck up about racism. Just shut the hell up until you can look in the mirror and see who and what you really are. Then maybe—just maybe—you’ll be in a position to judge the rest of us.

That’s all.

You might recall but it was Hanania’s tweet that got me into a trouble in 2024 because he was commenting on White Dudes for Harris. I replied to it and made the very sarcastic joke that “white power was back.” That, to the Left, was a crime punishable by the end of a 26-year career. It’s not that bad for me ultimately. I didn’t really lose everything. I was just punished by them as harshly as a person can be punished. They’re trying to find ways out of this mess of being intolerant, intolerable scolds. Dark Woke is that way out, or so Hanania seems to be believe. He himself has been squeezed out by them and seems to want back in. Maybe he’ll get there now, who knows.

Either way, his piece on One Battle After Another explains the phenom of the non-polite Leftist who uses trolling to win points with their followers. It’s how, for example, they whip around and call Conservatives “snowflakes” for mocking Billie Eilish’s “No human is illegal on stolen land” while she herself owns property on stolen land.

Hanania writes:

One Battle After Another captures Dark Woke psychology. The protagonists are left-wing terrorists who free illegal immigrants, rob banks, and engage in property destruction in defense of abortion rights. But Bob Ferguson, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, gets into a fight on the phone with a member of his resistance group who accuses the middle-aged former revolutionary of being too aggressive and triggering his noise sensitivity.

Ferguson respects everyone’s sexual orientation and gender identity but is befuddled by rules surrounding pronouns, which is forgivable, if not endearing. White people with the wrong political views are portrayed as irredeemable and worthy of destruction, but those who genuinely want to help marginalized groups do not need to be constantly walking on eggshells lest they say the wrong thing. If they want to be part of the revolution, no one is going to demand that they take a step back and let women of color lead the way. One Battle After Another portrays the far left end of the Dark Woke spectrum, but there’s a more moderate version, which you might see in the campaign of Gavin Newsom and his online supporters.

To Hanania, this is a positive development. He likes the Dark Woke Gavin Newsom who is no longer trying to play the boy scout and is willing to be dark and dirty like the MAGA side. But the problem is they’re bad at it. It isn’t funny because it isn’t true. Here are two clear cut examples of the difference.

Scott Bessent recently tagged Newsome with a nickname, “Sparklebeach Ken.” It’s funny because it’s true.

I’ll give it to you with Baby AI for added value:

And Sparkle Beach Ken then tried to hit back with the knee pads joke about Trump.

The problem is, as least from my perspective and why One Battle After Another feels so cut off from reality and exists inside the bubble of the Left, is that Newsome is making fun of their version of Trump, a joke we’ve all heard a million times already for ten years by every late-night comedian and SNL. It’s not funny.

Here is Conan O’Brien (future Oscar host) explaining exactly why Gavin’s joke is less funny. There is no straight line with Trump.

One Battle After Another, as Hanania rightly points out, absolves the “good white people” from the other bad racists over there. Hanania himself is one such person. He’s a “good white person” who has been condemned as a “racist” and now makes a point of separating himself, or trying to. The jury is still out as to whether or not he will be accepted back into the Woketopia. It is like Salem, accuse lest ye be accused. As long as you are calling other people racist, no one will turn around and call you racist.

Woke is, to me, how white people attempt to absolve themselves at a time when an entire movement has been focused on centering marginalized groups. If you wish to belong, you either must be marginalized or you must be one of the white people who elevates marginalized groups. You attempt to de-center yourself from the narrative, as the Leo character does in the film, allowing the marginalized to rise. This woman is the perfect embodiment of what we call “woke.”

Dark Woke is, to me, like Coke Zero. It might look the same but it isn’t the same. It’ll do if you want to drink it and not feel the negative effects of sugar but ultimately, it’s not authentic to what Coke is supposed to be, and Dark Woke might make some of the men on the Left feel masculine and cool again. It might, as Hanania suggests, bring back the dudebros who have alienated by the virtue signaling puritanical Great Feminization-indoctrinated Left. All you have to do is throw your fellow Americans under the bus by calling them racists, those bad people over there, which is what One Battle After Another does.

All of this madness is self-defeating in the end because you do see marginalized people as victims who need you to be elevated, you are giving them temporary power that will only last as long as we can keep the game going. It is not real power. It is never real power because it is assumed that these groups -- be they filmmakers, politicians, writers or actors -- can’t get there on their own. They need help. Thus, women directors need help to be elevated.

Once you do that, however, merit is instantly revoked and there is no rewarding them for any other reason except to do what Paul Thomas Anderson does in One Battle After Another, manufacture a reality where they are the heroes in an imaginary fairy tale about an American that does not exist in reality.

Like all of those on the Left, Paul Thomas Anderson is well-intentioned. His film isnt’ satire and can’t ever be because he can’t take the next step of satirizing the minorities. They are to be protected because to satirize them is to mock them and in the newfound religion of the Left, that is blasphemy. The “they/them” joke is on Leo, in other words, because he just doesn’t get it. He is the odd man out, trying to do his best to save the oppressed from the oppressors.

PTA is a perfectly nice guy and a very talented filmmaker. It isn’t really his fault that his movie has become the anthem of the Woke Left. It just turned out that way. The funny part is that they are still pretending it isn’t true. They say “oh it’s not political” or “oh, it mocks both sides” or “oh it’s satire.” But it would not be winning one award after another if any of that were true.

The funny part about it is that ultimately the song remains the same. As Laura Dern says in Jurassic Park, it’s still the flea circus. It’s all an illusion. “You’ve never had control, that’s the illusion.”

And she’s right. Hollywood has tried to make Jurassic Park, to turn a fantasy into reality but that fantasy has now resulted in one of the most bizarre moments in Oscar history where one movie directed by a Black man, which made more and cost less, was better reviewed, more widely seen, and coming in with 16 Oscar nominations can’t beat the one that the Woketopians like better because it reflects how they want to be seen and how they see themselves.

Best Picture of the Year should stand for more than just yet another anti-Trump message. There is a whole country out there that doesn’t just revolve around one side of the aisle. AndeEven if many on that side of the aisle think Sinners is a movie that is about bad white people, at least it’s historically accurate. It isn’t about the fantasy that America is still like that. It might not be a movie for everyone, but it is a work of art that will stand the test of time because it is a story that could be told at any time.

I don’t think Sinners should win because it makes history for the Academy or the DGA, should it come to that, but because Best Picture (and Best Director) have to be about something more than holding up a flattering reflecting pool to the shrinking demographic that makes movies now. It should win because that measure should include the public. That is still the best one the industry has. The industry has lost touch with the people. It’s time they started winning them back by making movies for audiences, not for themselves.

It is probably futile to say anything. We all know how the next month will go, and we all know why. The smarter among us understand that there are two Americas with two competing worldviews -- or two completely separate realities. One of the reasons that happened is Hollywood and culture took a side in 2016 against the other side of the country, something that’s never happened in my lifetime and probably never in Hollywood history. The idea was always that box office mattered, so the people had to matter. You’d hear sneering jokes in movies and TV shows, like “but will it play in the flyover states?”

Now, Hollywood hates the other half of the country. They don’t just exist in a separate reality; they actively hate them, as we saw last night at the Grammys. Billie Eilish, whose own home is on “stolen land,” decided to virtue signal, as one does, by saying “no human is illegal on stolen land.” The Democrats, therefore, must sell open borders because they support this. They pretend it’s about ICE, but is it really? I don’t think Americans are so sure. For instance, here is a compilation video of how Democrats used to talk.

Billie Eilish likely owns a home on “stolen land.” Perhaps we should start a petition to have her give it back. That would be quite the award show. Everyone on the Left should give back their mansions, their ranches, their Aspen getaways.

American culture united with the ruling class over the past 15 years, thanks to the rise of the internet, the iPhone, and Barack Obama. A new “Camelot” was built largely online, and thus, the Left has a distorted perception of its own popularity and power. They measure that with likes and views. But there are 350 million people here. We generally decide things by elections, but the ruling class doesn’t believe the people should have a voice in how their country is run, so instead they use their fame and their power to alienate them and treat them like human garbage: do what we want or else.

I am ashamed, frankly, to have ever been part of a group that has now become, at best, a totalitarian bubble that demands compliance or, at worst, a fascist-like dystopia. Culture can’t survive that. All of it must feed the beast, as it would under any totalitarian regime - send the same message, say the same thing, never push the envelope.

I don’t know what the ratings for the Grammys will be. I also know that the Oscars have decided to make the jump to YouTube because they know the ratings will be a problem for them. The Grammys, however, showed much of America that they weren’t welcome. Trevor Noah even led a round of applause that Nicki Minaj wasn’t there, and they somehow think that will make the public like them more, or maybe they don’t care anymore.

These award shows, like movies, like television shows, like late-night comedy, used to bring us together under one big tent with a shared story. That’s not true anymore, and everyone knows it. That is why Melania made more than many films in the Oscar race, and it’s why One Battle After Another will never feel its own failure, becoming the most expensive Best Picture winner since Titanic. The economics of Hollywood mean nothing to a ruling class that no longer needs audiences or viewers or ticket buyers.

The Academy will do its best to try to make the show non-political. But they also know who will be sitting in that audience and what they need to make themselves feel valid and worthy. They know they have to find that balance between appeasing these pampered, insulated aristocrats and also somehow getting decent ratings. The romance between Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner and the popularity of Marty Supreme might bring in viewers.

But all of that work will prove fatal for the Academy if the celebrities decide, as they did at the Grammys, that this should be their pulpit to preach to the choir for the applause, for the approval, for the likes. I guess it’s unavoidable since they found their exact perfect virtue signal in One Battle After Another, which gives them everything they want and need in one movie. It will be trapped in time and the perfect symbol for today’s Left, which, admittedly, is a weird place for Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon to sit, but here we are.

As I’ve been saying for years, there is no saving any of this. If they had critical thinkers among them who could set them straight, like Ricky Gervais, for instance, they might be able to pivot. But they don’t. They have a magic mirror in the press - entertainment and hard news - to tell them always who is the fairest of them all: YOU ARE.

There is no saving, there is only building outside of, building anew. No one gives up power willingly, and one side of the political divide amassed too much of it, so much that even democracy and the free market could not shake them out of it.

That put power in the hands of the zealots who liked pushing that little red button and watching the chickens scatter. Ugly stuff and not sustainable. The zealots like the power, however, and they will put it out to punish the art, as they’re attempting to do now with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, punishing her for not casting Heathcliff as a person of color. Poor us, we have to watch the hottest man alive, Jacob Elordi, having all kinds of dirty sex with Margo Robbie. How will we ever survive it?

Odessa A’Zion was forced to drop out of the film Deep Cuts because she is not “Half-Mexican.”

But to quote Louise in Thelma and Louise, “we don’t live in that kind of world anymore, Thelma!”

The Oscars used to be a game of perception and smears. But the hive mind has mostly taken control of the awards race. They decide what films and contenders “deserve it.” For the most part, the voters obey. Or at least color within the lines. That means that publicists don’t play the same kinds of dirty tricks they used to. They don’t have to. The online mob will do it for them. They just have to figure out how to navigate those unpredictable waters.

The mob claimed a scalp with Odessa A’zion, who will no longer star in the film Deep Cuts. She might be perfect for the role, fun to watch on screen, hotter than hot, but sorry, folks. You won’t be able to see her in that movie. You’ll have to watch an actress who is half Mexican and half Jewish take the role. And so here we are, living in a world meant to be “correct” all of the time, and if it isn’t, watch out.

Making art “fair” has ruined art. There is no point in sugar coating it. It was never meant to be fair. We need as much complexity in art as exists in the human experience. What killed Hollywood — or is fast strangling the life out of it — is trying to please or appeal to the zealots by backing down.

Was this a real backlash, or was it just a curious online trend to suddenly go after Marty Supreme? And why is there so much of it lately, hitting the film from all sides? It’s beginning to feel a little too familiar. Of course, there are many supporters and defenders of the film, and many who love it. But it does seem to have a target on its back for unknown reasons.

There have already been multiple attacks on him. There was that thing where he was too arrogant in videos. Then it was he culturally appropriated rappers. He’s given the side-eye because he’s in love with Kylie Jenner and not afraid to show it in public. That makes him a courageous bad-ass in my book, fearless and gutsy, like the character he plays. Why should he hide it?

TikTok went a few rounds on whether it was “toxic masculinity” or he was not “likable.”

And then, the latest, a story about Josh and Benny Safdie and why they broke up as a team. A lurid tale involving a young girl, carelessness on the set, etc. So, of course, those addicted to drama and hating this movie especially would indulge in that kind of scandal and controversy. But who was behind it? Why has it come out now? Probably nothing more than a juicy gossip piece during Oscar season.

The second question is, does it hurt the film? Does it hurt Timothée Chalamet? I don’t think so, personally. It won’t be Emilia Perez, no matter how much its enemies seem to be out for blood.

The attacks on Emilia Perez were coming fast and furiously from all sides, too many of them from Brazil, hoping to boost the chances of I’m Still Here (it would win in the end). Ultimately, it didn’t seem to matter. The voters loved the movie, and that was that. The forces didn’t stop, however, and finally someone uncovered the tweets by Karla Sofia Gascon, and THAT embarrassed the industry. But remember, it still won Oscars. Zoe Saldana still won, so the idea that [insert scandal here] would bring down Timothée’s win seems overblown, at least to me.

True, Brazil is once again a force in the Oscar race, and it’s possible they could be working as a hive mind to take down the rival of Wagner Moura, but that seems like a stretch. The truth is that the beast is hungry and the beast must be fed. There aren’t many movies that fit the bill for the hungry mob. This one has Mr. Wonderful in it, Kevin O’Leary, is not “woke” by any stretch and features a confident white leading man. It’s the kind of movie Hollywood used to make oh so long ago, before they fell under the control of the scolds.

I think people like Marty Supreme enough that almost nothing can take down the Best Actor win.

I’ve seen very few locks removed because of controversy, but they do happen. Take, for instance, Russell Crowe, who would have won Best Actor for A Beautiful Mind, his second win in a row, but he got into a public spat at the BAFTA awards, which derailed his win, handing the Oscar instead to Denzel Washington for Training Day. Here is what that looked like:

We’ll never know about the whisper campaigns that go on behind the scenes, just as we can’t know what kinds of grassroots efforts are going on behind the scenes, like Andrea Riseborough’s surprising nomination, or when Academy members took to social media to push Moonlight toward the win and sink La La Land. The “racist” narrative made people feel uncomfortable ahead of the Oscars. The same thing happened to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Green Book would still win because of the backlash to the backlash.

The big question is who will win the SAG if not Chalamet, and if he does win it, he’ll be the first ever to win back-to-back prizes. Wagner Moura, the other Globe winner, is not nominated at the SAG. So whomever wins there, if it isn’t Chalamet, might be the number 2.

Last year, Chalamet won SAG, but Adrien Brody won the Oscar. My guess is that if it isn’t Chalamet making SAG history, which it might be (SAG isn’t really SAG anymore. It’s SAG/AFTRA, and that means it can be unpredictable). I would guess the winner would either be Michael B. Jordan for Sinners or Leonardo DiCaprio for One Battle After Another.

What helps Timothée Chalamet is that Marty Supreme is nominated in almost every category and by almost every guild. This is a movie they love, so you’d have to have something on par with Gascon’s tweets to derail his win.

Here are my predictions for this week:

Best Picture
1. One Battle after Another (Warner Bros.)
2. Sinners (Warner Bros.)
3. Hamnet (Focus Features)
4. Marty Supreme (A24)
5. Frankenstein (Netflix)
6. Bugonia (Focus Features)
7. F1 (Apple)
8. The Secret Agent (Neon)
9. Sentimental Value (Neon)
10. Train Dreams (Netflix)

Best Director
1. One Battle after Another, Paul Thomas Anderson
2. Sinners, Ryan Coogler
3. Hamnet, Chloé Zhao
4. Marty Supreme, Josh Safdie
5. Sentimental Value, Joachim Trier

Best Actor
1. Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme
2. Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle after Another
3. Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent
4. Michael B. Jordan in Sinners
5. Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Best Actress
1. Jessie Buckley in Hamnet
2. Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
3. Kate Hudson in Song Sung Blue
4. Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value
5. Emma Stone in Bugonia

Best Supporting Actor
1. Stellan Skarsgård in Sentimental Value
2. Benicio Del Toro in One Battle after Another
3. Jacob Elordi in Frankenstein
4. Delroy Lindo in Sinners
5. Sean Penn in One Battle after Another

Best Supporting Actress
1. Teyana Taylor in One Battle after Another
2. Amy Madigan in Weapons
3. Wunmi Mosaku in Sinners
4. Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas in Sentimental Value
5. Elle Fanning in Sentimental Value

Best Adapted Screenplay
1. One Battle after Another
2. Hamnet
3. Train Dreams
4. Bugonia
5. Frankenstein

Best Original Screenplay
1. Sinners
2. Marty Supreme
3. Sentimental Value
4. It Was Just an Accident
5. Blue Moon

Best Editing
1. F1
2. One Battle after Another
3. Sinners
4. Marty Supreme
5. Sentimental Value

Best International Feature
1. Sentimental Value
2. The Secret Agent
3. It Was Just an Accident
4. Sirāt
5. The Voice of Hind Rajab

Animated Feature
1. KPop Demon Hunters
2. Arco
3. Elio
4. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
5. Zootopia 2

Best Animated Short Film
1. The Girl Who Cried Pearls
2. Retirement Plan
3. Forevergreen
4. Butterfly
5. The Three Sisters

Best Casting
1. Sinners
2. One Battle after Another
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. The Secret Agent

Best Cinematography
1. Sinners
2. Frankenstein
3. Marty Supreme
4. One Battle after Another
5. Train Dreams

Best Costume Design
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. Avatar: Fire and Ash

Best Documentary Feature
1. The Perfect Neighbor
2. The Alabama Solution
3. Come See Me in the Good Light
4. Cutting through Rocks
5. Mr. Nobody against Putin

Best Documentary Short
1. All the Empty Rooms
2. Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud
3. Children No More: Were and Are Gone
4. The Devil Is Busy
5. Perfectly a Strangeness

Best Live Action Short
1. Butcher’s Stain
2. The Singers
3. A Friend of Dorothy
4. Jane Austen’s Period Drama
5. Two People Exchanging Saliva

Best Makeup and Hairstyling
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Kokuho
4. The Smashing Machine
5. The Ugly Stepsister

Original Score
Sinners Ludwig Goransso
One Battle after Another Jonny Greenwood
Bugonia Jerskin Fendrix
Frankenstein Alexandre Desplat
Hamnet Max Richter

Best Original Song
1. I Lied To You from Sinners
2. Golden from KPop Demon Hunters
3. Train Dreams from Train Dreams
4. Dear Me from Diane Warren: Relentless
5. Sweet Dreams Of Joy from Viva Verdi!

Best Production Design
1. Frankenstein
2. Sinners
3. Hamnet
4. Marty Supreme
5. One Battle after Another

Original Sound
1. F1
2. Sirāt
3. One Battle after Another
4. Sinners
5. Frankenstein

Best Visual Effects
1. Avatar: Fire and Ash
2. Sinners
3. F1
4. Jurassic World Rebirth
5. The Lost Bus

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Netflix released the news this morning, an $82 billion sale that will make people at both companies a lot of money:

“Our mission has always been to entertain the world,” said Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix. “By combining Warner Bros.’ incredible library of shows and movies—from timeless classics like Casablanca and Citizen Kane to modern favorites like Harry Potter and Friends—with our culture-defining titles like Stranger Things, KPop Demon Hunters and Squid Game, we’ll be able to do that even better. Together, we can give audiences more of what they love and help define the next century of storytelling.”

On Twitter, things are looking grim:

At a time when three Warner Brothers movies made the list at Sight and Sound and heading into the Oscars, this couldn’t come at a worse time for the studio. Warner Bros. had a banner year with Sinners, Weapons, F1, and One Battle After Another. Now, all of that goodwill is likely squandered. Then again, does anyone think they care about the Oscars when you’re talking about that kind of money? Who cares about the Oscars? Netflix. But they ain’t gonna win this year, that’s for sure, and now, we have to wonder if Warner Bros. can still pull it out now that they’ve sold the brand to Costco of content.

The Oscars have stopped caring about Hollywood's economics. That happened at least ten years ago as the two Hollywoods went their separate ways. The studios made ungodly sums with IPs and franchise movies. The prestige niche industry just awarded films that made voters feel good, but almost no one saw them. They existed, more or less, as the salad option at McDonald’s. A costly game to satisfy egos, but beyond that, they didn’t make the studios any money because the Oscar game exists outside the reality of Hollywood. These two Hollywoods existed like an airplane -- First Class and Coach until 2020 when the plane crashed, and that was that.

The Great Awokening would ultimately mean Big Hollywood, like niche Hollywood, would destroy its brand by blaming its fans. Now, Hollywood is aligned so deeply with politics that there is no difference between them and the Democratic Party. They see half the country as racists, homophobes, fascists, Nazis -- see One Battle After Another for confirmation of this. So why would anyone bother to show up? It all came at the worst possible time, as Gen Z found its entertainment on smaller screens.

As for Netflix, they did seem to care about winning Oscars as a Gatsby-like play for respectability. But they have so much money that they can buy their way into respectability. Their mission has been to win Oscars, at least since Lisa Taback, formerly of the Weinstein Co., joined the team and has been pushing their prestige films into the race. But the Netflix stigma among Oscar voters has been tainted because they see it as a threat to their industry, and they should.

The problem with all of this, as I’ve been saying like a broken record, without audience pressure, there is no effective quality control. The best movies don’t always need big crowds, but the film industry does. Hollywood has alienated most of the moviegoing public and directed its profits overseas. Big mistake.

The bigger issue, at least to me, is that this is not an industry that rewards success. It rewards the films that speak to the tiny hive mind that still cares about film awards, an ever-shrinking demographic of people who essentially don’t have to pay to see movies. What is more insidious this year is how the most successful Warner Bros. film, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, isn’t winning everything, and their least successful, the one that cost the most money and can be considered more or less a box office failure, at least here in the US, is the odds-on favorite to sweep.

If you reward failure, as they are obviously planning to do, or at least were planning to do, how can you make the argument that theatrical even matters at all?

The reason One Battle After Another resonates so profoundly with critics and might with the industry is that it reflects how they see themselves: as the one nice white guy in a sea of white supremacists and racists who want to kill Black and Brown people. They see themselves in Leonardo DiCaprio, who epitomizes the modern-day Leftist man - feminized, the mother figure -- but also, someone who elevates marginalized groups, especially people of color, especially Black women. If the film were a satire, it would have satirized them, but they can’t, because in this worldview, that would be blasphemy.

It’s an entertaining movie in some ways, and probably a semi-biographical film for Paul Thomas Anderson, raising mixed-race children in a country he views as oppressive and racist. I can assure him that his kids will do just fine. They’re part of the ruling class, after all, which those the movie condemns are not.

It isn’t the women, but Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance that carries this movie. His $20 million salary drove the film way over-budget, but it reflects who they are, so they don’t care about the economics of Hollywood, so why would any of this matter?

The truth? These virtue-signaling hypocrites should hang their heads in shame that they aren’t throwing Oscars at Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Why aren’t they? Because there isn’t a good white guy in the movie, and they can’t relate. They don’t want to feel like the bad guy. Where is the reward in that?

They’ve designated his award as “Original Screenplay,” as they did for Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman and Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. They stop short of anointing them as the real power. None of the changes they’ve made - the mandates, the rules, the virtue signaling - ever meant real power. It meant generosity bestowed by the powerful.

Sinners is the most successful of the WB slate, and these voters are planning to award the movie that, to date, has only made $70 million here in the US. Fine if it only costs $35 million, but it costs upwards of $140 million. If that doesn’t make an argument for the WB being swallowed up by Netflix, I don’t know what does. Netflix is designed for movies like One Battle, or any other, where creativity and critical reception are the only things that matter. That’s the whole brand.

Call it “managed decline,” where the critics and the voters can exist in the rarified air of their pristine bubble while the dirty job of making money and bringing people out of movie theaters isn’t their problem anymore, and why should it be? It’s just that Ryan Coogler wanted to do just that, and he succeeded. He should be celebrated for it and not with a Screenplay prize, but by becoming the first Black director to win in 98 years of Oscar history. What’s it gonna take, people?

Sinners does deserve to win, but not because Ryan Coogler would make history as the first Black director to win in --say it with me now -- 98 years of Oscar history. But because it is good for Hollywood to pick a successful movie. I said the same thing about Top Gun: Maverick, though they went with a movie no one will ever remember, Everything Everywhere All At Once. They did not reward success, and they should have. That started in 2009 when The Hurt Locker beat Avatar, and the Academy has never recovered.

Sinners, unlike One Battle After Another, became a “must-see” movie because of Ryan Coogler’s imagination and his creative spirit. He made it something people could not ignore, and everyone went, no matter the cost. It was a viral sensation on TikTok, with people acting out scenes from the movie. Weapons did almost as well, though not quite. Weapons didn’t reach the full spectrum of movie fans like Sinners did. So what does award season do? It gives the accolades to the movie that makes voters feel good about themselves, and not to the movie that makes the best argument for theatrical. For shame.

This is an industry that sits in judgment of half the country, casually and routinely calling them “racists.” This is an industry that treats people like me like toxic waste simply for disagreeing with and voting against the Democrats. They pretend to be something they are not. They genuflect and virtue signal how great they are. We’ll see One Self-Righteous Speech after another as they make themselves feel good about themselves in awarding One Battle, but they can’t do the harder thing -- ever -- and reward success.

I have spent many years as what one might call a “woke” blogger. I stopped after 2020, and I saw what happened to the industry as it clawed its way out of its guilt and shame. The BAFTAs removed voting for their members and brought in a “select” committee of people whose choices would not embarrass them, so they wouldn’t be called “racists.” Though the jury has disbanded, they are still bragging about the changes:

La La Land was called “racist,” so Moonlight won to make the voters LOOK GOOD. Then, it was Three Billboards and finally Green Book. By this time, I was now being called a “racist” and a “white supremacist” and still am by the Good People of the Left.

The Golden Globes were canceled for being “racist” and were then purchased by Penske Media, and now have about 300 members who also have very little investment in the film industry here. The same goes for the 3,000 new members at the Academy -- ushered in because of the color of their skin and their gender, and yet, even they can’t reward Ryan Coogler and Sinners because, oh, I don’t know, it isn’t the darling of the film critic elite?

This is an industry that puts Black people front and center, always, in their casting and advertising. At their award shows. The Golden Globes just announced two people to host their nominations on Monday:

• All categories will be unveiled at 8:15 a.m. ET/5:15 a.m. PT on CBSNews.com, the CBS News Mobile App, and streamed live on the CBS News YouTube and TikTok channels, with 11 exclusive categories revealed at 8:30 a.m. ET/5:30 a.m. PT only on “CBS Mornings” on CBS.

And, indeed, you can’t force people to vote for what they like, and no amount of virtue signaling can change that. I keep hoping Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, her best film to date, might win, but what matters is that voters feel good about themselves, and unless that movie can do that, they won’t choose it.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be the industry that pretends to be diverse and intersectional and shield yourselves with Black and Brown people to make yourselves look good, and also turn around and ignore the most successful and critically acclaimed film of the year. Or, as our friend Jeremy Jentzen has said, hand Best Director to the white guy making a movie about racism and not the Black guy making a movie about racism -- the more actual story, by the way, and the much better movie.

In some ways, this whole mess has been a full-circle moment for me. In 2013, I was in Cannes, invited by Harvey Weinstein to screen Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station. It was good, I said, and it should get nominated, I pleaded. But it didn’t. Instead, 12 Years a Slave won that year. I didn’t argue that Fruitvale Station should get in because Ryan Coogler was a Black filmmaker. I argued that the same opportunities are not given to Black filmmakers, and that was true.

But guess what? Coogler became a success anyway, turning out one box-office hit after another. He didn’t make little experimental indies that the critics like. Instead, he made the studios a lot of money. He is your success story this year. He is your best argument to keep theatrical. He did it without the help of the snooty, self-righteous, virtue-signaling, back-patting critics or the indifferent Oscar voters who are now so international that they do not care about Hollywood.

Yes, all true, except that Sinners defies these arguments because it did bring people to the movies, and it did, for one shining moment, make it seem like Hollywood was as alive as ever. Not awarding the film will show everyone that the Oscars and the industry are full of shit. They will be called out on it, and they should be.

I would say this might mean One Battle After Another won’t win, but one thing I’ve learned in the last five years, never get in between people on the Left and their virtue signal. So probably, none of it will matter. But if it’s prestige Netflix is after, I’m afraid they just set themselves back...to the tune of $82 billion. I guess the future won’t care. This is No Country for Old Oscar Bloggers, and I’m on the way out. I leave this as a record, among the few who still tell the truth.

Dear Molly McNearey,

In a recent clip, you explain that you grew up in a Conservative home: “I bought my dad a Rush Limbaugh tie!” And how, over the years, you became a hardcore partisan leftist. You said, “My husband is out there every day fighting Trump...”

How in the world did you ever arrive at the place where you think his job is to “fight Trump every day”? What happens when Trump is gone? Then what? Does the fight continue? Is this your forever hatred? And how did you, a millionaire in the ruling class of America, find yourself somehow on the oppressed side?

And yet, I find in your words some hope. You do seem to understand that you are being poisoned by something that is making you “angry all the time.” Yes, that is a manipulative media narrative fed to you every single day and told to you in such a way as to obliterate critical thought or fair analysis.

I, a formerly lifelong Democrat, left the Left in 2020 because I could not be a part of one group dehumanizing another. I was on lockdown. My two great friends had died. One from an overdose of heroin and another from a sudden heart attack. My daughter moved to New York with her boyfriend, and one of my cats died. I was all alone. I would sign on to Twitter, and it was wall-to-wall hate and dehumanization, the most unfiltered, bottom rage I had ever seen in my life.

I participated in it, but at some point, I thought, This isn’t right. It can’t be that this many millions of people are worthy of being treated like human garbage. Is Trump really Hitler? Are his rallies really like Nazi rallies? Thank god for me, I care about the truth.

Although ignorance is bliss. If I’d stayed on your side, Molly, my entire career would not have been destroyed because I decided to vote for Trump in 2024. You’d probably agree with that - obviously you would. If you are willing to give up your family members over politics, then sure, what’s the 26-year career of a “woman-owned” business to you? I’m sure you and your husband would applaud the effort. That’ll teach me, eh? Do not go up against totalitarians or you WILL PAY!

But by 2020, I had already been the subject of that level of hatred and harassment just for speaking my mind and standing out from the crowd, going against “cancel culture,” and standing up for people being bullied. So I did begin to think, if they treated me this way, calling me a racist, a “white supremacist” and a bigot, maybe they’re wrong about Trump and his supporters.

Though it would take me a while to break free from the manipulative media narratives and come out of the bubble and into the real world where I could see people as people, eventually, I would find my humanity. And my empathy. Not empathy for those you believe deserve it, but for all.

I made a conscious effort to deprogram myself. I stopped watching the news on the Left. I stopped reading the New York Times. I didn’t read my own social media feed. This is a feedback loop where the same opinions are enforced, and the same hatred is pushed to like-minded people. Then, I tried to consume only news from the Right. I wanted to see things from their perspective and understand where they’re coming from.

I wanted to see if the feedback loop on the Right would make me feel the same way, and of course, it did. Then, I realized I needed to find a way to navigate between the two worlds. But all I could see on the Left was that same hatred. It never ended, not even when Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck. That’s why your husband was so quick to blame the other side for his death and could not absorb that your side is the side that believes what the assassin believed, that Kirk “spread too much hate.”

I was able to see the cartoon version of the Democrats by the Right when I was on the Left. I could see how they dehumanized Obama and Hillary Clinton. But I couldn’t see that we’d done the same thing to Donald Trump and his supporters, not until I left and I began to see who they really were and not the version we all invented, including and especially your husband, Jimmy Kimmel who lies about Trump every single night, feeding his viewers more “two minutes of hate,” Orwell style.

To see the human being behind the cartoon isn’t ever easy. But it isn’t impossible either. Trump is a troll. He says things that upset people. But he isn’t what we all pretend he is. He isn’t the supervillain, Hitler, or Voldemort. It is a mass delusion that has been cycled and perpetuated by the media and social media. But more importantly, the people who vote for him have their “values” too. They might not align with yours, but that doesn’t make them bad people.

The truth is that none of this has ever been about Trump. It’s been a ten-year refusal by the people with all of the power to relinquish that power. It is about a working class that has been abandoned by all of you. And your answer to that, your husband’s answer, Hollywood’s answer was to raise the drawbridge and say, “You are not welcome here.” How disgusting. Somewhere down deep, I know you agree.

Don’t you ever wonder why he won again? After the Democrats had four years to prove to the abandoned America that they were the better side? Why did he win the popular vote? You think all of his supporters are just mindless drones brainwashed by Fox News? The opposite is true, I’m afraid. The drones are on your side. You’ve gotten all the way to the point where you call anyone a Nazi and thus justify their assassination.

The media on the Left is of one mind. They push the same ideas into the churn because dissent is not allowed. It is 1984, although your side has decided even Orwell should be sucked into the propaganda campaign to dehumanize the other half of America. He’s turning in his grave right now, by the way. Dissent is not allowed, nor is critical thought. It is the fascist credo: conform or else. That’s your side, Molly, not the Right.

What you are is a totalitarian. You want everyone to bow to your own way of life, your “values,” to believe what you believe, to want what you want. But what if people don’t? You shun them? You cancel them? You shoot them? You attack them? I am opposed to biological men competing in women’s sports. Your side insists I go along with that OR ELSE. I am opposed to feeding children cross sex hormones and amputating their body parts without their consent (because they can’t consent), and your side tells me I can’t vote for the guy who will end that OR ELSE.

What bothers me is that the media pushes false narratives that travel halfway around the world before anyone gets the story straight. There is never any benefit of the doubt. The lies are pushed out anyway, and people like your husband, Jimmy Kimmel, are first in line to push those lies.

As the ruling elite, you need a fresh crop of oppressed people -- like those ICE captures and detains. You know that your side calls “disappearing American citizens off the streets and putting them in concentration camps.”

Obama deported 3 million of them, but there were never cameras around catching those arrests and then pushing them out to everyone and calling ICE the Gestapo. And yet, because you and your husband are wealthy beyond belief, this ideology absolves you of your wealth and privilege. You have the luxury of wanting all that cheap labor, while the working class doesn’t have your millions, and maybe they do care about an open border. That doesn’t make them bad people.

You guys have everything. You have Hollywood. You have the universities. You have the institutions and you have the money. And yet, you cosplay that you are the oppressed side because you stand up for what you believe are oppressed groups. Fine, great, have at it. But the people of this country have a right to representation. They have a right to fight for what they want. Look at yourselves. Look at how you are behaving toward them. It is disgraceful, and one day, you’ll realize that.

Jimmy Kimmel said he spewed unending hatred against Trump every day because he saw Trump as the 1980s high school movie bully. That was rich, I thought. That was exactly what I saw the Left become in their fight against Trump and MAGA. I saw that we weren’t the good guys anymore. We were the bullies. The side with all of the power dehumanizes and attempts to destroy the side with less power.

I know. I lived it. I see how one story on the Left is amplified, and by the end of the day, yet another character smear has taken root. It happens on the Right, too, but they aren’t the side with all of the power, not even with Trump in office. None of you ever accepted him as your president anyway.

So you should deprogram yourself. You should understand this is a big country, and just because people believe things different from you doesn’t make them human garbage. Shame on you and your husband for ever thinking you were superior to millions of Americans who are just struggling to get through the day after people like your husband threw them away like human garbage and chose only to focus on the people he believes matter, those who agree with him.

Someday, when you’re old and you are heading toward the end, you will look back on this time, and you will try hard to justify how it is you could have ever gotten to a point where you shun your own family over politics. You’ll get there, I know you will. Maybe you’ll remember that there was one person out there, whose entire career was destroyed for standing up for what she believed in, who told you the truth.

Or, you could let Dr. Seuss tell it. You know, the guy you all canceled?

I have hope for you, Molly. I think you will find your humanity. I do.

One Battle After Another is limping along, heading toward a haul of around $200 million worldwide. The critics and industry will spin this as a success, or at least not a failure. Why the movie cost $140 million or so is not relevant to the broader objective: Does the movie accurately reflect today’s industry? Yes, it does.

Its success reflects an industry that is cut off from the rest of the country but considers international markets just as good, if not better. All of that suits them well because they want nothing to do with the rest of America. Take it from me.

If they can treat me like that — someone who has been in the business, covering the Oscars, helping bring in nominees and winners — imagine what they think of you, the movie-going public. I wouldn’t have believed they could or would behave this way if I hadn’t seen it firsthand. There is no saving Hollywood if they have decided half of this country is human garbage not worthy of their time unless it’s to school them or lecture them on how to behave.

Hollywood, like much of the culture on the Left, reflects a society that has migrated to virtual spaces, so there is an “inside” and an “outside.” For movies to do well, they have to appeal to the outside. For movies to be praised and elevated among the bloggers and critics, they have to do well on the inside. That explains why movies feel like they exist almost on another planet now.

When the public sees ads for them or hears about them, they see the same kind of insular, isolated utopian existence we see online, not just from social media users but also from watching celebrities parade their lives for all of us to see. That has meant the public isn’t as interested in movies that seem to reflect that distant planet but don’t reflect their lives or even the reality they know. That’s what has led to a box office disaster, I think, along with all of the usual reasons, like changing technology, etc.

Finally, the trades have found their courage to at least name the problem. Or at least admit things are going badly.

America’s demographics look like this, as best as I could find:

Unfortunately, now, without the free market to pressure Hollywood into opening its doors to the people they can’t stand or see as “ists” or “phobes”, we might be living through the end of what we once knew as movies in movie theaters. For instance, the demographics in this country might be changing, but they haven’t changed that much yet. White people, treated like they aren’t the majority in movies, are still 60%.

The idea that there are racists, racists everywhere, is what caused the current scare in Hollywood and why everything looks the way it does.

Think about the 1950s amid the Red Scare and the blacklists. Just swap out “fear of Communists” for “fear of racists.” The idea that America is infested with them and that they have to be rooted out and exterminated has meant that Hollywood has to reflect what they think is ideal Americana now, just as movies in the 1950s did the same thing. Did they reflect reality? No, of course not. They reflected an idealized reality. All white people, nuclear family, parents don’t ever kiss or sleep in the same bed.

Simmering just beneath the surface was the counterculture, which would explode in the 1960s and 1970s and produce some of the best films ever made. The groups that had been shut out of the Americana idealism began to fight for their rights and before long, movies became avenues for activism. But by the late 70s, artists were getting sick of it. That’s why you see movies like Network, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Manhattan mocking activism, but especially feminism.

What does idealized Americana look like now? Take a look at the photo below. It’s just one example among many. Future observers of history might look at this photo and see “wokeness” personified with every group represented. Or they might look at it and think nothing of it. Personally, I think it will be a time capsule for 2025 Hollywood.

That’s not to say that all movies should feature only white people or Make Hollywood White Again or any such nonsense, but just that this kind of casting is storytelling too. It is telling the story of the industry and the people who make movies more than it is telling a story for us, the ticket buyers. Women directors just because they’re women is storytelling, but not for us, for Hollywood, for the bloggers and influencers to feel like they’ve changed things.

Take Richard Rushfield in The Ankler, whose latest round of columns seems to suggest -- or just says outright -- that there should be more women directors, and today’s column:

Here’s the truth: Women should direct if they are good enough, and that is all there is to it. Otherwise, they are making movies for themselves and not for the rest of us. The idea that you can just put a woman behind the camera and expect great work is a fast road to the collapse of the industry. If the aim is to make things more equal, then you are making movies for yourselves, not for audiences.

But Rushfield and The Ankler are well funded by Hollywood, as you can see by the ads blanketing his latest column. If you want to make money, you have to pay the piper, or better yet, be a true believer. Then you will do well in today’s Hollywood. If you are like me—and you miss art and are no longer a zealot—you will have to suffer on the outside and hope that one day art, or at least good movies, returns.

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Education was one of the few films I’ve seen that is a meaningful story told about real people. It is authentic to time and place. There are no casting choices that pull you out of it and make you think about Hollywood’s fear of offending.

That movie, along with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Ari Aster’s Eddington, are the kind of movies free artists make, not artists with a gun to their head. I assume the same is true of Hamnet, Bugonia, Marty Supreme, and a few other films I haven’t yet seen.

I can usually tell within the first fifteen minutes whether the film comes from a place of cautiousness and fear. With all three of these movies, you are put in capable hands and given a story about characters you believe because they are authentically themselves.

Wicked: For Good is among the films everyone hopes will make a lot of money. Avatar: Fire and Ash is another, as is The Housemaid with Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney. These last months might revive the corpse. I hope so.

On the upside, Hollywood’s stagnation could mean an explosion of alternative media, somehow, some way. I do think better books are at least coming. Maybe they can find a publisher. Maybe they can find their way out. If those books are good enough, sooner or later, there will be filmmakers brave enough to make those movies. I just hope I live long enough to see it.

Finally, someone at Penske Media addressed the box-office catastrophe of 2025. Naturally, it’s Anthony D’Alessandro. To his credit, the original title of the piece was “Box Office Bombs,” though it was changed when the piece was posted.

How do I know that? Because we can see it in the original title, https://deadline.com/2025/10/box-office-bombs-springsteen-smashing-machine-1236598171/

He doesn’t count One Battle After Another as a bomb, however.

He writes:

However, the lackluster audience scores on these movies say it all. None of these films lassoed any word of mouth, so don’t write the obituary on auteurist cinema just yet. Under the hood, each of these titles had its own handicaps, whether it was the marketing campaign, release date, feathered fish cross-genres (Smashing Machine, an arthouse movie about addiction geared at the MMA crowd), conceit, unfilled endings or simply a grand ol’ division among critics and crowds.

This is a bad batch of titles at the box office, not a new norm.

What’s the proof of that? Why, Warner Bros’ One Battle After Another, which is the one-eyed giant among the blind with a $23 million domestic opening and equally great critical and audience exits with 95% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, an A CinemaScore and a great 74% definite recommend on PostTrak. At $180.1M worldwide, no one can deny it’s Paul Thomas Anderson’s highest-grossing movie ever. “But that costs $140M! How can you say that?” exclaim myriad pearl-clutchers in town. Sorry, but on a pure gross level, this movie is doing what it’s supposed to do and it’s working where these sophisticated adult titles typically work: on the coasts. Rival studio executives know it but prefer not to admit it: One Battle After Another is continued proof that original auteur-driven films can still find a semblance of an audience.

You hear a lot of excuses for why movies are bombing. No one has adequately expressed what has really happened. The biggest problem is that Hollywood doesn’t make movies for everyone, not anymore.

Their movies -- all of them without exception -- exist inside the dogmatic new code -- call it what you want. The “woke code” or the “social justice” code. Whatever it is, all must adhere to it. Either they do it organically, like Sinners, or they manufacture it, like One Battle After Another. Either way, they all send the same message to viewers: they are in the position to school them, to fix them, to preach to them about how wrong or bad they are. Start there.

Then you can get through to the other part of the story, which is significant. Streaming, cost of ticket sales, competition on TikTok and YouTube, and of course, the game-changer, AI that is breathing down their necks. But great storytelling — real storytelling — will bring people out to movie theaters. You just have to make movies people must go to see, not want to see, HAVE to see. Not what Film Twitter or sophisticates on the coast want to see, but everyone wants to see.

If One Battle After Another had only cost $50 million, which is about what it looks like on screen, rather than $130-$150 million, this could be spun as a success. Anthony and everyone else default to international, always, when a movie fails here.

But take Sinners vs. One Battle After Another, which has stalled at $66 million here in the United States, where Sinners made over $200 million. One film bombed in America. The other was a major hit. And yet, all are poised to award the one that bombed and ignore the hit. That no one will call this out as a sign of a dying film industry is astonishing to me.

From Box Office Mojo:

If the competition is International, America is losing there, too. Unless Jim Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash can top $2 billion worldwide, China wins the international box office this year, not this country.

It’s true that One Battle’s higher overseas profits are a testament to Leonardo DiCaprio as a worldwide star. So that’s why he got $20 million. Without him, the film would have made half as much. But without him, it also wouldn’t have cost as much. However, One Battle isn’t exactly thriving overseas; it’s just that, overall, it’s helped the studio give the impression of breaking even, which helps justify the award wins to come.

Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire and Ash are still to come. They also might make money, along with The Housemaid. Maybe Marty Supreme will do well. The idea is always to keep costs low and profits high, or at least it used to be.

This is an industry that wants to give One Battle all of the Oscars. They just need a narrative to make that okay, considering they aren’t in the habit, usually, of doing so, back in the days when there was a free-market reality to Hollywood. But this is the movie they want to represent them in all ways. They care less about the success of Warner Bros.’ other two films, Sinners and Weapons. This is the “important” one —it is their anthem—the “who they are” movie.

It’s true that once One Battle starts winning awards, it might start to crawl upwards. But it won’t get anywhere near where Sinners is. And people will say that’s pretty good for an “art movie” or a “prestige pic.” That’s the story they’ll tell, and they’ll never absorb the truth because they don’t have to. Just as John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert keep winning awards because they affirm the Left’s worldview, so too will One Battle win awards for exactly the same reason.

What counts as daring inside the bubble is the lightest touch that barely scratches the surface, which is what you must do if you expect to make money from the studios. You don’t see them advertising on sites that discuss hard truths or are otherwise controversial. A Penske ownership of so many of the trades—Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, Indiewire, Gold Derby, Rolling Stone—demands uniformity, and thus they are not free to really discuss things as they are.

People inside the bubble believe that their conversation is the only conversation and that those outside the bubble who discuss what they consider controversial are dismissible. Reality never enters the chat. Manufactured reality, soft reality, comforting reality is what you get. Think: Brave New World meets 1984.

Anthony’s piece sounds to me like he’s making excuses for an industry that can’t face the truth about what Hollywood has become and why people aren’t showing up to movies anymore. If you talk to anyone outside the tiny bubble of film festivals and Film Twitter, you will hear what they think of Hollywood and why they don’t bother going to the movies anymore.

It is a miracle that there were big-studio movies this year that brought people back to movie theaters. But that doesn’t solve Hollywood’s core problem. I fear that the problem may never be solved. They can’t solve it because they can’t even name it.

When I was attending NYU for the brief time I was there, some time in the late 80s, I worked as a waitress in a cocktail bar (that much is true). It was a jazz club owned by a family from Trinidad. They were hilarious and really kind to me. The spot picked up the most renowned jazz players. I only knew that because my dad was a jazz drummer and he told me who all of them are.

The staff (except for me and one other guy) were all non-white or mixed-race, I guess you could say. The clientele was probably 99% wealthy white elite New Yorkers. The funny thing was, the whole enterprise was held together by a thread. They were always running over budget and never had enough money to buy the food they promised on the menu.

At some point, they just started serving one dish to everyone, no matter what they ordered. I don’t know if people knew what was happening. Maybe they just figured, the music is great, why complain? ” Except that one night someone did complain. He was a Gavin Newsom-looking guy with slicked back hair and a suit, and he stood up and said loudly, to the packed room, “I can’t believe we’re all pretending like what is happening isn’t really happening!”

He was furious. The owner ordered the doors to be locked until every customer paid. I ended up quitting some time later, as I recall, because I was dropping out of school and moving home, and I think it closed shortly thereafter. I always think about that when I look at how the trades cover Hollywood. “I can’t believe we’re all pretending like what is happening isn’t really happening.”

What is happening? Movies are bombing at the box office at an alarming rate, with very few exceptions. No one on Film Twitter will talk about it. The trades won’t write about it. The reason is that most of them are owned by Jay Pensk,e and pissing off the studios means no filthy lucre. That goes double for the independent sites that make money off the Oscar game. I wish I still did. It’s good money. But what matters more than money? The truth. The truth matters more. The truth is the same thing I’ve been saying forever, that Hollywood lost its audience and destroyed its brand when they went “woke.”

A word on the work “woke.” I use it not as its original intended usage, which means something very different. It also means the newfound religion of the mostly white elite ruling class, who still run everything but use designated marginalized groups as protective shields. It means the new rules put in place, like the Hays Code. Everyone knows what it means, yet all are forbidden to use it because it’s cultural appropriation. I use it because it is commonly used to describe the upending of Hollywood and other industries.

I am so tired of having to explain it. It is frustrating beyond belief to have so many people gaslight me on it. If you read Film Twitter on the box office for One Battle After Another, which is on track to lose around $100 million for the studio, you’ll hear the same thing on repeat:

No one wants to see these movies fail. No one wants to shame artists for making films at all. They are major investments of their time, their blood, sweat, and tears. It is not their fault that Hollywood has destroyed its brand. But I know we can solve this problem. I just know it.

But if no one talks about it, how can Hollywood course correct? Lucky for us, a man named Marc Andreessen exists. If you don’t know who he is, Google him. He was on a podcast called a16z talking about Hollywood. He says the “woke” fever has broken and that everyone in Hollywood knows it, even if they don’t yet feel brave enough to say so out loud.

The whole podcast is here, but I have clipped important bits. On the podcast, Andreesen has hope that we are moving through a phase that is almost over but that the movies we’ll be seeing now come out of that phase and it will take some time for them to work through the system, which is why it’s all the more remarkable that Ari Aster was intelligent enough to make Eddington which is a look at everything we just lived through from a non-dogmatic point of view. It is, I think, the polar opposite of One Battle. Here is Andreessen on both movies:

And here he is about film critics and the “reign of terror” that made them unable to really speak the truth or be honest about anything. He also says One Battle will probably sweep the Oscars.

So, why am I quoting Marc Andreessen? Because he’s one of the few people who is uncancellable, smart enough to see what is happening, and brave enough to talk about it.

It is, of course, all the other problems hitting Hollywood —like COVID, like streaming, like changing times, like competition with TikTok and YouTube. Hollywood moves slowly. Culture is moving fast, too fast to keep up with. Movies feel almost out of date by now — just the whole idea of driving to the movie theater, parking, going to your seat, watching a film on the screen, then driving all the way home, where you have a flat-screen TV and a big bang of content to watch on it.

Not to mention, AI is here. It works hard. It works for free. It’s incredibly easy, and it never complains, sues, or demands a higher salary. It can work all hours and faster than humans. There is only one way for humans to compete with AI, and that is what I’ve been saying for years now. Let writers out of their cage. Buy edgy, provocative, daring NON-WOKE screenplays.

I just asked AI to draw me a picture of Hollywood as an empire in collapse, with AI taking over. It drew me four images:

If you don’t think Hollywood is going to be all over this shit, you have another think coming. What AI does for me is it saves me time. It gives me images that are not copyrighted, so I won’t get sued, and it mostly gives me what I need to make my job move faster. It will do that for everyone, and there is no going back.

The best thing writers can do is what AI can’t. I just read George Orwell’s Animal Farm, one of the absolute greatest books ever written. Clean prose, brilliant allegory to Stalin’s Soviet Union. AI can’t do that. It can’t even get close to that. They are still robots that need people. But if Hollywood insists on pumping out movies that really are THE MESSAGE, AI can do that. You bet they can. It’s one or the other. Deal with the screeching mob that will come for you and save your industry, or not.

It isn’t just social justice fundamentalism that has strangled the life out of Hollywood. It is also the bland, safe writing across all the movies, for fear of offending, even in the blockbusters and superhero movies.

The problem is the Left doesn’t want to give it up. It is a method of societal control and, frankly, it serves them well. Critics see movies for free, so they don’t care about the economic realities. The whole thing is moving to streaming, where the box office won’t matter anyway, so why not AI? If it does “woke” as good as or better than Hollywood, why not?

Sinners was a success story

If the Oscar voters wanted to award the film that best represents their industry, they would pick one of the biggest successes of the year, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. While it is about the history of blues in the Jim Crow South, it is also one of the highest bars reached not just for a Black filmmaker, but for a rated-R film that is not a sequel or an IP. Weapons and F1 are also shining examples of Hollywood success stories that deserve recognition.

This scene is one of the best ever put to film this year. Coogler should win for this scene alone.

If they cared about rewarding success, that is the movie that should win all of the Oscars, at least right now, before we see Wicked For Good and Avatar Fire and Ash. And I haven’t seen many other films like Hamnet, for instance.

But for now, Sinners is easily the best of the bunch that have been released to audiences. Shouldn’t that matter? Shouldn’t its effect on audiences matter? Shouldn’t this extraordinary success of Ryan Coogler matter? Why shouldn’t he be the first Black director in 98 years to win? Tell me, oh Woketopians, why not?

But if they choose One Battle After Another, it will be the most expensive film since Titanic to win Best Picture. I’m not sure how the industry survives that kind of catastrophe. They are rewarding failure. It might be a well-intended failure. It might not have been PTA’s fault, what with the costly California regulations, the union fees, etc. But that money is not on screen. It isn’t a big effects movie. So where did the money go? And why would the industry feel that is what deserves to win Best Picture of the Year when Sinners is sitting right there?

What is another success this year? Zach Creggor’s Weapons. You want to save the industry? Reward movies that brought people to theaters, not movies that make Film Twitter spiral into euphoric circles. Weapons and Sinners are two movies that made their mark, and both should be nominated for Best Picture.

Amy Madigan is one of the strongest performances of the year, without a doubt. Everyone knows who she is, and everyone will be dressing up as Gladys for Halloween. Sinners and One Battle, too, will make some costumes.

Don’t give up on America, Hollywood. Don’t abandon movies that everyone can share under the same roof. We need that as a country more than we need just about anything else. Movies used to have to cast as wide a net as possible, and that meant they had to be good. If you go back in time and look at the movies of the past, you’ll see that these were films anyone could watch on either side of the political aisle. Why did that have to change? Why did Hollywood pick a side? And no, making movies for the Proles doesn’t mean only faith-based or patriotic movies. It just means good movies. Like, look at 1982:

E.T.
Blade Runner
Poltergeist
The Thing
Tootsie
First Blood
An Officer and a Gentleman
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
48 Hrs
My Favorite Year
Diner
The Verdict
The World According to Garp
The Executioner’s Song
Frances The Year of Living Dangerously
Sophie’s Choice
Gandhi

The only people who would have a problem with these movies are the Woketopians who would find thoughtcrimes in all of them and demand they be changed to adhere to the new code. But Hollywood, you know how to do it. You do.

One of the few writers in the business who has even the tiniest bit of courage to tell the truth about anything is Anthony D’Alessandro, who covers box office for Deadline. He knows the limits of what he can and can’t say, which is why he’s never come out and said that One Battle After Another has bombed in the United States, which it has. They will make up some of the loss with international sales, especially in China, and it may edge up to $150-200 million. Maybe.

But, as Steven Gaydos points out, One Battle After Another was not made for profit. It was made to win Oscars and to showcase the new objective of WB to offer original movies with big stars. That worked out well for Sinners, Weapons, and F1, just not so much for One Battle After Another.

Anthony D’Alessandro attempts to explain why Tron Ares “opened soft,” as so many movies do now (except Sinners and Weapons). He writes:

SATURDAY AM: The long-term lasting impact from Covid thwarting moviegoing is easily felt this weekend as two movies, one a $180M sci-fi franchise reboot in Tron: Ares, and the other a star-studded caper with a hunky leading man, Roofman, are coming in under their estimates respectively with $35M-$37M and $8M.

You see plenty of voices inside the bubble who will tell you not to worry about the money or that there is no problem with Hollywood (Richard Rushfield, David Poland, all of the trades) - blame everything but Hollywood. I don’t know, man. I feel like we’re missing the story here. Something is happening. Movie theaters are empty across most of America, even for highly buzzed movies. Tron: Ares only had 30% under 25 showing up to see it.

True, that means they aren’t the type to open on weekends and will get around to seeing it eventually. Not to mention, they watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it — that is true and it won’t change back — but still. Let’s try to go a little deeper.

First off, it’s silly for someone like me to think I can solve the problem. I can’t. However, I can at least identify the problem, and perhaps that can eventually guide people in a better direction. Or maybe not. And honestly, why should I care? This is a business that, after investing 26 years of my life in it, helping studios get nominated and even win Oscars, chewed me up and spit me out. So on the one hand, maybe I should want to see and cheer on its demise, but I don’t for the simple reason that I got to live through an era of Hollywood where movies really did leave a mark.

Probably it’s over. Netflix is the future. People don’t watch movies. They watch Netflix. Or Hulu. Or YouTube or TikTok. It is likely inevitable that movies have become like Bates Motel. They built streaming services, and after 2020, they began to prefer watching things on their own time. The problem, as I see it, is that people don’t watch things much, and if they do, it’s not movies. They’re watching a long-form series on a streaming.

What I see is that culture has accelerated, while Hollywood has remained stagnant. Hollywood has always been ruled by fear, but it’s never been quite this bad. The reason is that those in power prioritized the bottom line. They cared about profit. They sought the most appealing stars and the best writers and directors to create movies that people wanted to see. That is what defines the industry now. They can’t afford to care about profit, the free market, or the bottom line, because then they’d have to care about the people they detest.

The death of Diane Keaton should remind everyone how great it is to have a celebrity whose entire identity wasn’t wrapped up in how much she hates Trump, how political she was, and that she took a side in a pointless tribal war. No, Diane Keaton invited everyone in. That’s what Hollywood used to be like. And it’s why Hollywood used to drive culture, rather than avoiding it, as they do now.

I was watching Crimes of the Heart last night and was reminded that there is no way this film would have been made today and not just because Sissy Spacek’s white Southern lady has an affair with a 15 year-old Black kid, but because there is a line in the movie where Jessica Lange’s character says something funny like “I didn’t even know you were a liberal.” That meant they were perhaps all Republicans, and it didn’t matter because they were trying to stay true to the time and place rather than “correct” the time and the place to make the filmmakers, the stars, and the studio look good.

The Blind Side has been rejected as “racist,” though it is a good and watchable movie. Even now, it has a scene where Sandra Bullock openly admits to hating Democrats, and yet somehow that movie got made, and somehow it made a lot of money.

That was 2009. Then, we had the Obama era that fundamentally transformed Hollywood and the Trump era, which meant Hollywood decided it would no longer care about the rest of America that voted for Trump, because it was too dangerous to care. If you care, you lose your job. That meant Hollywood cut itself off from the middle and working classes, which is nuts. This was always an industry that understood it should entertain all people.

Now, they have decided they are “good” and can therefore stand in judgment of everyone else. It feels out of step and outdated. It is like Bret Easton Ellis said in commenting on One Battle After Another, “There is something stale about it, like a time we left behind, “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing that everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point. And that’s unfortunate, but that’s where we are now.”

That is what I thought when I looked at these two social media posts about Saturday Night Live.

I don’t watch SNL anymore, and haven’t for a very long time, but I wondered if they made fun of Katie Porter, who has been in the news this past week. Of course not. I wonder if any of the Left comedians will. It’s all over the internet and the funniest viral clip of the week, and yet, it remains untouched by SNL.

Videos of Katie Porter have gone viral, and there was news that she was abusive to her ex-husband; she dumped a pot of hot mashed potatoes on his head (allegedly). All of this is funny.

The Saturday Night Live of old would have opened with this. It would have been hilarious, and everyone would have shared it all over the internet. So why didn’t they? Because they are all working for the Democrats to some extent, and thus, they won’t target a Democrat in a way that might harm them.

So instead, people on social media used AI to create the parody that SNL was too afraid to do:

The entire independent ecosystem that has blossomed in the way of Hollywood cutting itself off and sanitizing its output was talking about Katie Porter. This is why culture has moved on.

What they care about isn’t ratings or box office. They care about whether or not they look good. They have a media mirror that flatters and praises them when they align with the doctrine, but also harshly criticizes them when they don’t. It’s always surprising when they do come out and admit a movie did poorly:

They’re comfortable being honest about Tron: Ares because there is nothing to lose in criticizing a movie with Jared Leto as the star. For one thing, he’s not had the best press of late, but for another thing -- he’s a white guy.

This movie can fail, and that isn’t a problem for Hollywood. If One Battle After Another failed, that would be a catastrophe of epic proportions, so it can’t fail; no one can say it failed; no one is allowed to call it a failure; it must win Oscars; it must be spun as a positive. That’s the game.

What everyone wants to see is a culture that aligns with reality, not one that reflects their own perception of life from within their own bubble. This guy puts it pretty well in this video:

I don’t agree that they pretend to care. I think they really do care, but I think their sphere of perception is greatly limited by the tiny sliver of information they get every day. Where Diane Keaton seemed to understand her role as an entertainer because she knew that politics could be alienating to some people, Jane Fonda, Angelina Jolie, Rosie O’Donnell, and others find it necessary to broadcast just how out of touch they are.

I understand that many people reading this site, and those who exist inside the bubble, probably agree with them, but I can promise you that there is an entire sphere of reality outside of this where someone like Jane Fonda sounds like a Doomsday prepper.

What they don’t seem to understand is that they are not the oppressed side. They are the side that still has much of the power in this country. If they don’t like what Trump is doing, then the way out of that is to boost better candidates and make a pitch to the people.

However, that isn’t how it has gone. It’s been the “let them eat cake” for 15, 20 years, and then call them “racists” for voting them out, for not watching their movies and TV shows. Talk to anyone out there in the world about Hollywood, and they will tell you exactly the same thing.

Back in 2019, look at how many movies Hollywood made and how much money they made:

2020 was a disaster for Hollywood. It wasn’t just COVID; it was the Great Awokening that destroyed Big Hollywood’s brand. They blamed the fans, and they wokified their movies to make themselves seem like better people. They’ve never returned to the 2019 levels, and if the trend continues, they never will.

A soft opening for Tron: Ares is not that surprising to me, as -- no offense -- I don’t see how anyone expects the people they cast to draw in audiences. Again, no offense, but you can’t go wrong with hot movie stars, and not to put too fine a point on it, but this movie’s advertising doesn’t exactly scream hot movie stars.

I might watch it when it’s available on streaming, and I’m sure many people feel the same way. However, the trailer lacks any interesting, sexy, or fun elements. It looks like a grim and scoldy slog.

Let’s check in with Nerdrotic to see what he thought (Disney stopped advertising on this site a long time ago, so I am allowed to criticize them):

This is your warning, Hollywood. It’s time to join the real world and remember that your job is to entertain, not fix or lecture, nor defend your status inside utopia, but simply to try to entertain. You have to get rid of your mandates, your sensitivity readers, your intimacy coordinators, and your activists, and just try to make great stuff because if you don’t, AI really will swallow you whole.

The year is not over yet. We still have Avatar: Fire and Ash and The Housemaid, not to mention Wicked for Good, so maybe it won’t end in total disaster. Perhaps it will be a better year than it appears to be at the moment. Money isn’t everything, but it is necessary if you want to be the driver of culture. Money means people are paying attention, and people are tuning in.

Jane Fonda and The Ankler have decided to cosplay oppression and fear of “authoritarianism” and free speech. Neither of them had spoken a single word in the past ten years, as Hollywood brought back the blacklists and silenced speech, forbade dissent, and transformed the industry into a dogma delivery device. Gone was real creative expression, gone was the truth, any kind of truth. Only one message was allowed -- and still is allowed.

They said nothing when Graham Linehan was arrested in the UK for offensive speech that they deemed dangerous. They said nothing when Gina Carano was fired for a tweet (later uncanceled by Disney, who settled), or when the FBI worked with the Democrats to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop by pressuring Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube ahead of the 2020 election, lying to the public that it was “Russian disinformation.”

They said nothing when the Biden administration censored speech on social media with a direct line to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. That is a violation of the First Amendment, but saying so would be a thought crime. You see, it isn’t free speech they care about. It’s power. They feel theirs slipping away.

If Jimmy Kimmel is tossed off the air for two seconds because he lied to the American people about the Charlie Kirk shooter, he could have easily set up shop somewhere else, as those of us who have been purged from utopia had to do. That doesn’t mean authoritarianism is here -- if he had been shot on the spot or thrown in jail, then you could make that argument.

The side where people are afraid to express their thoughts is the side that doesn’t value free speech. That’s not the Right, that’s the Left. In fact, no one can shut the Left up. They have a 100% share of voice, morning, noon, and night. Trump’s FCC was concerned that the public airwaves not be used as a platform for pure propaganda for one political party at the taxpayers’ expense. Never in my lifetime has television been this partisan, but all media, comedy and Hollywood took a side in 2016.

The Democrats claimed all of American culture for themselves and told the other half of the country they were not allowed in because they did not believe or comply with the curated language and strident doctrine of the Left. The Democrats and the Left took ownership of public television, public radio, and the airwaves -- but these were not theirs to take. Theoretically, they belong to all of us. They don’t get to decide what ideology must be forced down America’s throat. That isn’t democracy. It’s totalitarianism.

I find it ironic that Jane Fonda is out front pretending to care about McCarthyism, knowing full well that the blacklists are already here. They’ve been here for ten years. If you are “canceled,” you are blacklisted. Take it from me.

Jane Fonda’s Women’s Media Center dropped me as a freelance writer for their annual Oscars report, which I’d been writing, for low pay, mind you, for many years. Why? Because of thought crimes. The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Keegan believed those thought crimes warranted a spotlight, so she approached Academy voters and industry professionals to ask them about their thoughts on my thought crimes, and lo and behold, they did not like them. They were punishable with blacklisting.

The problem for Hollywood is that they have built an insular feedback loop of confirmation bias. They want you in the AM with NPR, then in the afternoon with an insular media feedback loop of confirmation bias and mass hysteria, then the MS-NOW power lineup before finishing the night with Kimmel, Colbert, Oliver. Can you imagine being able to escape that? It’s Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate all day, every day.

Those who dissent are blacklisted, while those who pander and conform are rewarded. Then, everyone pats themselves on the back and pretends they’re the free speech side. Jeff Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere is read by many Academy members, including JJ Abrams, Cameron Crowe, Warren Beatty, and Luca Guadagnino, among others. His site is a must-read. But he, too, has been blacklisted. Why? Because he posted something as distasteful as Jimmy Kimmel’s joke, he was immediately deleted, but it didn’t matter. The mob came for him.

Jeff Wells was booted out of Gold Derby, the Critics’ Choice, and now is lucky if one studio advertises on his site, and we’re all supposed to take them seriously when they pretend to care about free speech?

Inside utopia, the wealthy have everything they could ever want. They have their massive homes in Malibu. They have their Oscars. They have their extreme wealth. They have award shows. They have their lovely serene photos on Instagram where they are celebrated by the media. We’re meant to envy them, to want to be like them, even as they point their finger and tell half of America that they’re human garbage.

By now, much of the public has turned away, which is why independent media and a counterculture are experiencing a surge. This is a truth no one on the Left wants to face, even with box office failures, or declining ratings, or disappearing voters. They demand people love them, or at least are too afraid to speak out against them.

That was the key difference between Hitler and Stalin, and why George Orwell wrote 1984. Hitler didn’t care. Fascism meant it doesn’t matter what people think. If you go against the state, you are not canceled from your low-rated late-night TV show, but thrown in jail or shot on the spot.

The fear in this country is not on the Right, it’s on the Left. Look around. Ask yourselves, are you afraid to say what you really think? Do you think the writers in the trades feel comfortable speaking the truth about anything? Do screenwriters feel free to write the truth every time they sit down to write a screenplay? Do producers and directors feel free from activists with clipboards policing their hearts and minds?

Let’s not pretend for one second that this is a side that cares about free speech. They care about “correct” speech. If you obey, as Jimmy Kimmel, Jane Fonda, and everyone who covers film and television in Hollywood now, you are handsomely rewarded. If you do not obey, if you dissent, you are severely punished. Kimmel finally got a tiny taste of what everyone else has been dealing with forever.

True, the government wasn’t always involved, but they didn’t have to be. And sometimes they were. Chuck Schumer demanded that Rupert Murdoch rein in Tucker Carlson just before the network fired him. But in general, the mob tends to do the bidding of politicians on both sides. The Right is attempting to “cancel” Netflix because of its ubiquitous queer programming. The Left just tried to cancel a TikTok influencer named Hannah Brown for attending Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.

You won’t hear in your circles any defense of JK Rowling, who is too rich to touch. But recently, Emma Watson backed off from the trend to condemn, cancel, demonize, threaten, bully, and harass JK Rowling for her thought crimes on gender ideology. It did not go well for Emma, I’m afraid.

The worm has turned. The majority is tired of being bossed around and scolded for thought crimes. The reason Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X was that the Democrats had taken complete control of the platform, and censorship was routine. You could be banned for using the wrong pronoun, for instance. The price to pay for that is offensive speech, which is all over the platform, though I suppose it depends on how you define the word “offensive.”

Elon Musk spent $45 billion to free the bird. That is how much he cares about free speech and how little the Left or the Democrats do. It isn’t speech they want freed -- it’s their power to drive their own singular message to the people. That is why Richard Rushfield openly wept, he said, when Kimmel was put back on the air, a decision the network could have made at any time.

The lawsuits by Trump, the defunding of NPR and PBS are ways the discarded half of America is choosing to fight back. The Democrats have known for my entire lifetime that the Republicans wanted to defund NPR and PBS. So why were they so careless with that? Why were they careless with Roe v. Wade and the border? They’ve had decades to deal with these conflicts; they could see coming from a mile away. They just never factored in a guy like Trump, who would fight back.

Kimmel, Colbert, and others on the Left celebrated when people on the Right were banned from social media or when they were fired for thought crimes. It’s okay when it happens to other people, their sworn enemies. But if you stand up for free speech, you have to fight for all free speech, even speech you detest. Why didn’t any of them say a word about Graham Linehan? Because to do so would be a thought crime. Just admit it. Admit you are too afraid to say anything. At least then you won’t be lying to yourselves.

Kimmel’s firing was not a free speech issue, no matter how much people want it to be. Sooner or later, the networks will have to confront the issue of fairness and themselves, considering that ABC, CBS, and NBC are often accused of being pure propaganda for one political party. I can tell you, if the Right had that kind of totalitarian control, the Left would never stand for it.

Whether One Battle After Another wins Best Picture or not will depend on how many in the industry believe in the Left's increasingly paranoid version of reality. And by the looks of it, all of them do. The euphoric reviews for the film all say the same thing: this is our worldview finally put in a movie, and for that, it's hard to have any faith that Hollywood will ever normalize out of its oppressor/oppressed mindset, which is why a counterculture will have to be built around them. That's been true for a long time.

Jimmy Kimmel is now one of the martyrs of the Left. He'll fail upwards as they all do. There will be Emmys, million-dollar deals, and standing ovations. He'll never have to absorb the failure his show was, in reality. The ratings were a disaster, and there was no coming back from that. The country has moved on from the "resistance" everywhere except inside the bubble of the Left. They are like preppers by now, trapped inside a Doomsday Bunker and led by the. Unreliable narrator, the legacy media has become.

From Late Nighter:

According to Nielsen Live+7 data, all three network 11:35pm shows—CBS’s The Late Show, NBC’s The Tonight Show, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!—have seen declines of 70–80% in the key 18–49 demographic since 2015. That year marked the beginning of a new era: Colbert took over from David Letterman, Fallon had just succeeded Jay Leno, and Kimmel had moved up to 11:35pm.

By 2018 the writing was on the wall that the time period that was once a cash cow was in free fall. According to one frequently cited report from the advertising data firm Guideline, brands spent $439 million advertising on network late-night television that year. By 2024, that number had been cut in half.

Unfortunately for Trump, as usual, he overplayed his hand. Power does strange things to people, no matter their politics. Most people can't help but flip the switch. But in this case, he stepped on a rake because he saved Jimmy Kimmel and the network from the embarrassment of failure. Now they get to cosplay fascism yet again. The truth? They could have fought for Kimmel if he had been profitable for them.

The market never enters the chat. Profits are never discussed. Box office is excused away. Ratings? What are those? Jimmy Kimmel is a Good Soldier for the Democrats. That's all that matters here. Yeah, I know.

Box office will once again become a factor when Paul Thomas Anderson's Leftist dystopian fantasy One Battle After Another opens. Word has it that the budget is high -- between $120 and $150 million. There's always the chance that international will make up the difference, and that if it doesn't make money here, it won't matter. The other question is, since the film is pure propaganda for the Left's worldview, will the box office even matter anyway?

My guess is that it won't. Does that mean I think it can win Best Picture? The legacy media's narrative that America is a fascist state reaches broadly across the globe. It includes all of those in the UK and elsewhere who are sympathetic to Palestine and mass migration. With the new voters, will they go along with the phantasmagoria that the film perpetuates? Maybe.

I heard someone compare it to Dr. Strangelove. If only. That movie, like Network, was satire. Even though Trump is in power now and they've cast him as their eternal oppressor, the Left still has all of the cultural power and is dictating the dogmatic, obedient films they churn out. It is a miracle if one can escape the DEI mandates, the sensitivity readers, and the intimacy coordinators.

Dr. Strangelove was a film made in the 1960s, when the government and the establishment went one way, and culture went the other. But over the last 15 years, the Democrats and the Left were the government and the establishment. The only great satire, therefore, would be satire that mocks them, and almost none of them do because none of them can. Who are the real totalitarians?

Somehow, BJ Novak was among the very few artists willing to tell the truth about these times in his brilliant (but ignored) film Vengeance. In this scene, he shows how the big city podcast bro was kind of a dick and how those who have been abandoned by culture have decided to believe in conspiracy theories because of it.

It's great writing, but this was never an industry that would get anywhere near it. Why, because it has been and remains a climate of fear and a culture of silence.

Network is such a brilliant, timeless film because it had the courage to criticize the real power of its time. Like other films of the era, it targeted not the Republicans but the radical Left.

By then, rational and reasonable people were tired of it. Feminism had become toxic and stale, as depicted in films like Kramer vs. Kramer, Network, and Annie Hall, not to mention Manhattan. After the Manson murders, the hippies freaked out America enough that society began shifting rightward. That is what the death of Charlie Kirk has done.

It has caused many Americans to wake up and see who and what the Left has become. It isn't just that they throw around the word "fascist," and the shooter believed he was shooting a fascist. It is their reaction to his death. They celebrated it. They justified it. They ignored it. They excused it. If they ever did condemn, it was always "I don't condone violence but..."

The difference between Dr. Strangelove, Network, and One Battle After Another is profound. Universal stories are different from stories that push an ideology. One Battle reflects the Left's view that the majority in this country that voted for Trump are "racists" and "fascists." People with money and status often believe that about those who struggle to put food on the table and afford their mortgage.

I'll dive into political movies more tomorrow, but I am wondering whether voters will opt out of political conflict and reach for a film like Hamnet that enriches their hearts. I guess we'll see.

I agree with Mattias Desmet on his Substack when he condemns the Trump administration for punishing people for celebrating Charlie Kirk's death. I understand how hurt he is. Millions all over the globe are also in mourning. But just because he has the power does not mean he should use it. All it will do is perpetuate the mass delusion on the Left, the side that made this bed for the past ten years.

The current reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder confirms how hard it is to reverse a trend toward totalitarianism. The only thing that can get the job done is a group of leaders and part of the population that gives ethical principles radical priority over every personal narcissistic injury and the gratification of revenge.

I cut Trump some slack because of what the Democrats and the Left did to him and his supporters for ten years. It was not just totalitarian, but far worse. They lied about him and still do. They lied about his supporters and continue to do so. They have perpetuated a mental health crisis in this country that has destroyed Hollywood's ability to make art or comedy or anything else. What we get instead is obedience.

So I get why Trump would want revenge and would use his power to punish people. But it's wrong. Not only will they never give him credit if he backs off, but in behaving exactly like they do, he loses one of his most powerful cards he has to play: that he does value free speech and free expression, and they don't. Why give that to them? They don't deserve it because they don't believe it. They just want to win their war against Trump by any means necessary.

Trump should back all the way off and let the empire collapse on its own. Who knows, maybe they will learn the lesson that free speech should be for everyone, not just them.

Oscar Bloggers Find Their Courage Only Now

None of them will face any consequences for this because it only moves in one direction, which is why Trump and others are fighting back. But in this case, it is not Trump's job -- just as it wasn't Biden's job when his administration was censoring speech on social media -- to police speech. Leave them to succeed or fail on their own.

Clayton Davis saying MAGA stands for racism is funny, considering how diverse the Trump coalition is, not to mention those who are fans and advocates of Charlie Kirk. Here is just a sampling.

If you really believe that the half of this country that voted for Trump are "racists," then you can't ever write anything for them, make any movies for them, publish any books for them, or have anything to say to them -- which is how the Left was lost. Will they recover is the only question.

It seems to me that there is a permanent hierarchy in place on the Left that demands people play their roles. The oppressed must always be oppressed, the oppressors must always be cast as the oppressors. Is there ever any way out of it? Seems to me that what resonated in so many people deemed "oppressed" by the Left was that Charlie Kirk attempted to find a different way. Agree or disagree, fine, but don't lie.

Not all of them are pandering to groupthink, as usual, fiercely independent and not bought off Jeff Sneider sees it as it really is:

Thinking for yourself over the past ten years has meant being cast as a witch, exiled, marginalized, attacked, and shunned. But it is those who have the courage to speak up when it is not popular, even if it costs them greatly, that Hollywood, journalism, and art have been made on. They were not made on silence, fear, and cowardice.

What I learned in 2020 is that much of what I was told about Trump and MAGA was false. It was driven by a weaponized legacy press that created a media feedback loop, one in which these bloggers are deeply involved. They believe what they are saying here, just as I once did. But it's not the truth. Bill Maher proves that you can sit down and talk to anyone as long as you see them as fellow human beings and not monsters.

It's easy to speak out now when you have the backing of the status quo. Having courage requires you to do it when you don't, as Bill Maher has done above.

Hollywood movies taught me that. I grew up in movie theaters. I learned all of my lessons about speaking out, about journalism, about the truth from them. Whatever that thing was that once motivated them to stand up and speak the truth is gone.

What I've learned in the past ten years is that if you can't tell the truth, if you can't speak up for what you really think and believe, you will go insane. I think that's what has happened to everyone on the Left, from the legacy media to the Democrats to Hollywood.

Their war on Trump destroyed them because they couldn't see anything except the mass delusion of their own making. Trump is just a man. He's not a supervillain. They could have beaten him, just as their movies could still be big hits and their shows still highly rated. All they had to do was come out of their bubble and join the rest of us in the real world.

As prominent Democrats like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were offering condolences and grace in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday, the usual ugly side of the modern-day Left emerged quickly behind. I wasn't all of them. Plenty remained silent. They said nothing. They hate Charlie Kirk with every fiber of their being, but somewhere deep down there is still a tiny kernel of humanity left that made them think, maybe I will just say nothing.

Far too many of them, however, were out in force, surfing the algorithm for likes, driving the hate tsunami characteristic of the side with all of the power that is now losing that power as their empire slowly collapses. It's a hard thing to watch, but you can't stop what's coming.

I first detected the hate back in 2020. It felt like thick, oily sludge in my veins. It made me almost sick. What am I doing, I thought. What am I participating in? What is this? It was unlike anything I'd ever experienced in all of the 30 years I've been online. It was sustained, unending, bottomless hate and rage all aimed at one man and his supporters.

It was unusual to me because so much of it revolved around his hands, his dick size, his weight, his hair, his skin, his family, his words, his jokes, his music choices, and his taste. It was "Two Minutes of Hate" Orwell style every second of every day.

Orwell had it so right. He predicted what would become of our utopia, one we didn't even realize we were building. Once that utopia was threatened, as it was in 2016, that was the moment our movement began to collapse.

Like everyone else in 2020, I was emotionally bereft. I only had social media because we were locked down, and yet every time I logged on, it was that tsunami of hate. At some point, I could take it, and I began to pull away. I'd already been the target of hate for years by then. At some point, right around the time Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was called "racist," and then later, with Green Book, I began speaking out. That made me a target. As the hive mind on Twitter became more fascist (yes, fascist) and mandated everyone use the "correct" language and have the "correct" thoughts, I began to push back.

I remember organizing a podcast with Oscar bloggers at some point. But I was the target of a bullying swarm, and almost all of them backed off because they were afraid of the Eye of Sauron (or Big Brother) falling upon them. It was sticking up for someone accused of assault, or JK Rowling or whatever it was -- all of it under the category of "thought crimes." Orwell, again.

For me, I had to know how much of what I was being told to believe was actually true. Did I really share this country with that many "Nazis" and "racists"? If they were calling me a racist, a white supremacist, and a transphobe, among the usual slurs -- ugly, old, fat, etc -- then maybe what they said about the rest of America wasn't true either. What I found was that we'd built a 1984-like "inside" that abandoned most of the America "outside."

Trump supporters and many on the Right are what America used to look like before the internet, before the Obama coalition, before utopia. We just forgot that it exists, but it does exist. Our utopia, we believed, was America. But it wasn't. They might be Christians. They might not have gone to universities, and they've long since stopped watching movies and television shows pushed out by Hollywood. But that doesn't make them evil.

Once I knew this, that we were awash in madness and delusion on the "inside," I didn't know what to do with that information. Speak out, speak honestly, and risk career annihilation, or suffer in silence. Say nothing. I decided that I didn't want to live in a country where one group told me what I had to believe, what I had to say, what I had to think, OR ELSE. That is fascism.

Fascism is a system of power that demands conformity and compliance. Sound familiar? Can you imagine what would happen if people just started saying what they really thought, even if it might offend some people? Remember Black Mirror before the Great Awokening? Remember Nose Dive? It was the right message at the wrong time. It is the formula for how to survive right now. A world where people are free to say offensive things, and may the best argument win, is better than a world trapped inside some kind of social credit system, where you can be locked out.

I love Nose Dive and I wish Black Mirror -- and Netflix writ large - and Hollywood write large -- were still able to scratch at the surface and get to the truth. THE TRUTH, not the manufactured delusion everyone wants to be true.

The people with the power have the power to destroy. That doesn't mean Trump's administration is not overreaching or that there aren't free speech issues, but no one's career will be destroyed overnight for criticizing Trump. Neither side is perfect or even "good." Each party, like each person, is a combination of good and bad. We wrestle with our better angels every day.

But totalitarianism is dangerous. It has destroyed American culture, which is trying to pull itself out now. The reason it isn't happening faster is that the hive mind online still has them -- the people at the top -- by the balls. And as the famous line goes, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

The death of Charlie Kirk has reminded me of where the Left has arrived with ten years of mass hysteria, a ten-year dehumanization campaign against half the country, ten years of having a movement largely rooted in online spaces, ten years of algorithms, platforms, and likes has gotten them. It's taken them to a similar place we arrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

If you live through assassinations and then the Manson murders, you start to change your mind. It's not as catastrophic as a world war to bring a society to its knees, but it's close enough to red pill a country, which is what is already happening.

The Right doesn't have ongoing fantasies about anyone on the Left dying. Here is a video of people on TikTok fantasizing about what they would do "when it happens," aka when Trump dies.

And here is a video of people urging someone to "just do it," which means Trump being killed. So, needless to say, in a fascist country, such speech would not be allowed. They have nothing to worry about, of course, because our culture supports their ongoing hatred and dehumanization.

Here is a video of that weekend when so many of them falsely believed Trump had died.

It was like a fantasy that reached levels of euphoria that were almost sexual.

What would drive them to this point? They're probably decent people, right? You could blame the algorithms. You could blame social media. You could blame the media for their constant cycle of sending out the worst about the other side (both sides do that). But ultimately, it comes down to your own common decency. You heart. Do you still have one? Do you have your humanity intact? Here are some people who do.

What would drive young college-aged women to creepy through the Hollywood Hills and butcher the rich, then draw words on the walls to start an imaginary race war? What would cause Susan Atkins to stare down Sharon Tate and stab her in her pregnant stomach? Dehumanization, self-pity, and sociopathy. A toxic combo, to be sure. We're almost there now.

The Left can't absorb it because for ten years, they're used to demonizing the Right as the extremists. They caught a lucky break with January 6th to provide them with the perfect piece of propaganda. But the truth is more complicated, as the brilliant Niall Ferguson talks about in this interview with Charlie Rose (yes, the man is still alive):

All that's required is a tiny bit of critical thinking and a willingness to escape the mass delusion of this supervillain the Left invented. It is entirely their fault, the Democrats, that they could not and did not defeat Trump. They had four years under Biden to show the American people they could lead this country. They failed. The election was a disaster for them. But just as they, we, did not learn the lessons of 2016, they did not learn the lesson of 2024.

It isn't that the Left or the Democrats are responsible for Charlie Kirk's death. I don't know who is. But I do know their response to it will red-pill a lot of people because it will be easier and easier to see who they have become in their ten-year odyssey to stop a person who doesn't exist except in their collective imaginations.

How do you reward this, support it, justify it, then turn around and pretend you're the good guys? The worst thing you can say about Donald Trump or Charlie Kirk must be followed with "and they deserve to be shot and killed for that."

To justify their dehumanization, they do what they always do. They imagine things and then convict people in their minds. Because the legacy media rarely challenge them on any of it or call them out on any of it, they are never motivated to try to change. That gives people like me no choice but to run screaming away from them. I am not alone in this.

They repeat all of their beliefs like a mantra handed down from a cult, and they force everyone to follow those rules, and if you break even one of them, out you go. The crazy reality is that they've been misusing the word fascism to describe, say, Charlie Kirk when their behavior towards Charlie Kirk or anyone who doesn't obey their doctrine looks a lot more like fascism.

One Battle After Another, Sinners and the Best Picture Race

Political violence is the kind of thing that sometimes sits well and sometimes doesn't. Around the time that Joker was released, there was a mass shooting. I remember when Django Unchained was released, there was another mass shooting. So many of them have inspired the Left to blame only guns -- but they've also blamed movies, Joker being one of them. What they will never address, none of us will, is why there are so many lonely, isolated men who feel the need to kill so many people -- children -- just to have someone see them, notice them, give their lives purpose. It's a horrifying state of affairs, and taking away guns won't solve the problem. A woman was just murdered on a train with a knife, for instance.

That said, both of these films are films that feature some kind of spray of gunfire or vigilantism, which is kind of funny when you juxtapose it against the gun debate, but I digress. Both of them fulfill the needs of the left's collective rage and aim their rage at the right targets -- Sean Penn as a white supremacist in One Battle, and Southern crackers in Sinners.

Both of these archetypes are rooted in reality, especially Sinners. It takes a page from the life of Robert Johnson, whose stepfather was a successful farmer and was chased off his land and forced to change his name and live in the city. There is no question that there has been a history of racism in this country.

The problem is that Hollywood and the Left believe half the country is racists and white supremacists, so when someone they view that way, Charlie Kirk, is assassinated, it will make them feel a certain way. That means it might disrupt the Oscar race in unintended ways. For instance, in 1968 Oliver! won. It seems an odd winner to have won that year. But if you look at that era, you'll see how things calmed down after 1968 dramatically:

I mean, it almost seems like a totally different country, doesn't it? Hello, Dolly? By the 1970s, the rage dampened into hopelessness and despair, making for some of the greatest films ever made and the best era for the Oscars.

With dogma and doctrine blanketing Hollywood now, leaving little wiggle room for truth-telling, you are stuck in a binary of "those people over there are bad and we are good." I've even seen people try to stuff Weapons into this category -making Trump a Gladys-like figure. He is the sum total of their collective sins. He's been everything else, so why not make him a witch too? Seems fitting.

There is no way out of this mess. The Left isn't going to fix itself. They believe their very existence is at stake now, just because the pendulum is swinging away from them, and America wants to change. Whether or not Hollywood can keep up with that change is the real question. They don't really have to change because they'll always have streaming to fall back on.

All I can hope is that One Battle and Sinners and Weapons can exist on their own without becoming "weapons" for the Left. I won't hold my breath. Don't be surprised if the movie that wins, though, is Hamnet. Just saying.

Five years ago, I was scrolling Twitter (X) as I always do. It was in the middle of Summer, during lockdowns. Everyone was isolated, separated, and online. At least, they were until millions poured into the streets to protest the death of George Floyd. My daughter had to skip the last months of her senior year at college and had her graduation on my balcony in Burbank. We were sewing our own masks, making our own hand sanitizer, and standing six feet apart outside the markets. And then, on Memorial Day Weekend, the whole thing abruptly ended, or so we thought.

Every night there were protests - the largest, or one of the largest, in American history. Did it make sense that so many were protesting, barely wearing masks, flinging their bodies together amid a global pandemic? No. It didn't. But if you said anything, your career would be over. If you dared complain or talk about any of it, your career would be over.

Jacob Blake was said to have been "unarmed and there to break up a fight" in Kenosha, Wisconsin, before being shot repeatedly by police. It was a false narrative, but one that ripped around the internet. The narrative would not be corrected for months. He was armed with a knife. The violence, the destruction, the loss of businesses, many of them minority-owned, was also a subject no one could talk about or you'd lose your career overnight.

Bari Weiss, hired by the New York Times to diversify a cripplingly biased newsroom, enlisted Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed called "Send in the Troops." A poll had been released showing Americans, by a large majority, supported sending in the military if the protests could not be controlled. And obviously, they could not.

After Cotton's piece was published, Twitter lost its mind. The staff at the New York Times said they felt "unsafe." The op-ed, supposedly, "put Black bodies at risk." The complaints snowballed into a mob swarming Bari Weiss and James Bennett at the Times. The demand was to remove the op-ed. Every person I know on Film Twitter (I won't name names) was supportive of this absurd witch hunt.

I did what I always do. I stood up for Bari Weiss because she was on the right side of history -- publishing an op-ed that reflected the views of the majority of Americans -- and the screeching mob was not. The ugly truth was that in what our culture became in 2016 -- a fake "resistance," we were always the empire -- meant that a Tom Cotton op-ed was "not allowed." He was a Republican, and he was not allowed. Over time, the list of people who were not allowed grew longer. It included anyone who committed any sin or thought crime.

It was probably the worst it would ever be in 2020. These people who went along with it want us all to forget it happened, but I'll never forget it. That year changed my life because the side I was on wasn't the side that believed in things like free speech or why it's wrong to dehumanize whole groups of people. I was attacked every time I tried to speak out on anything, but especially the violence in the Summer of 2020. You couldn't even defend police officers without being called a "racist."

Everyone I knew on Twitter was cycling the same lies, "it was sloppy reporting," etc. The truth? They were all buckling under fear and going along with the status quo. But not Bari Weiss and James Bennett. Here is what the Times still has affixed to its op-ed -- which is hilarious. May it stay there forever to remind people of their cowardice and what we've all just lived through.

The most respectable outlet in the land, so-called, should not have blinked. They should never have coddled their readers. That their readers demanded coddling is largely what has collapsed the empire, from the New York Times to Hollywood.

That night, as Bari Weiss was savaged on Twitter, something in my perception of how things worked was dislodged. It was like the lantern dropping out of the sky in The Truman Show:

It was that moment in Notorious where Ingrid Bergman realizes she's being poisoned.

And it's that scene in The Age of Innocence where Daniel Day-Lewis realizes all of New York believes he's having an affair with Michelle Pfeiffer.

So, the news is being bossed around by a screeching mob on Twitter, and they're apologizing to their readers for posting an op-ed? None of it felt real. None of it was true. It was what I came to see as the negotiated truth on the Left that was widespread after 2016, perhaps even before. We made reality into what we needed it to be, rather than what it was. We could all see with our own eyes what was happening on the streets and yet, we were being told- amid a global pandemic, because "experts" told us so- that all of this violence and mayhem was necessary because systemic racism was worse. Really? Worse than a pandemic that is hitting Black people especially hard?

So then, suddenly, everything we knew had to be re-ordered -- now it was okay to be outside because being outside was suddenly okay, though everyone had to wear masks. The lies kept mounting by the day, and it only got worse heading into the election, and that was when I realized what it had all been for. It was done as political theater, amplified and funded by a "secret cabal" that bragged about it in TIME.

Everything was Newspeak. "Saving democracy" meant killing democracy because the wrong people were voting. The lawn signs that were supposedly against hate were, in fact, about hating anyone who disagreed with the doctrine. After Biden won, all of that madness was institutionalized. After 2020, everything changed. In culture and in government.

We saw them merge in ways we hadn't seen since the 1950s. Blacklists made a comeback as everyone was supposedly a "racist" or an "election denier" or a "fascist." Many of the large corporate monopolies that control movie studios were one with the Democratic Party. Even now, Netflix has a deal with the Obamas and donates heavily to the Democrats. It is almost mandated that all be propaganda for one side of the country -- the ruling aristocracy.

But none of this was allowed to be said, and still isn't. At least, inside the bubble. Bari Weiss was not cowed so easily. She wrote a scathing letter of resignation that shall live on in infamy:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

She started a Substack revolution and encouraged others to speak up and speak out, so I started my own five years ago, in an effort to speak my mind in ways I couldn't on this site or on Facebook or on Twitter without being mobbed by scolds and viciously attacked day in and day out. But they were always nipping at my heels, spying on me, screenshotting things I said, and tossing them into the churn for more bullying. But the more I'm told to shut up and sit down, the less I want to shut up and sit down. So it went on.

My story won't have a happy ending, I'm guessing, but Bari Weiss sure has. Her life has been coming up roses ever since she left the Times. She married the brilliant Nellie Bowles, who wrote a must-read book:

They now have two kids together. Her humble Substack became a well-funded enterprise called The Free Press, which is the number one most-read Substack. And it appears as if she is about to become the leading force at CBS News.

From Puck News:

And from The Wrap:

$200 million and control of CBS News is about the best victory lap anyone could take. What a story. What a happy ending.

There are plenty of other titans who have made ground, in my view, and deserve to be elevated and to help shape what has become a collapsed empire in mainstream media.

Some of those who have built independent platforms are Megyn Kelly's MK Media, Matt Taibbi's Racket News, Michael Shellenberger's Public, Walter Kirn (and others') County Highway, Mark Halperin's 2-Way. These are thriving media sites that people like me trust far more than we've ever trusted CBS, NBC, ABC, or CNN.

What we lived through in the last ten years is unlike anything I've ever seen in my lifetime. The worst part about it was that the people ordinarily tasked with speaking out shrank back in fear, like comedians and filmmakers. Only Ari Aster has been willing to come out from among them and attempt to scratch at the sticky layer of delusion and even begin to unpack 2020 and everything that came after.

Late Night Comics Silent on Arrest of Comedian for Tweets

Any word from Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver, or any of the late-night hosts that fellow comedian Graham Linehan? I imagine Bill Maher will say something because only he seems to have the stones to have any courage whatsoever in this environment. You won't find it anywhere else, not even a little bit. It should be in the series The Studio, but it isn't. It is as protective as everything else. If you coddle the American mind, the American mind expects to be coddled.

The great Lionel Shriver asks, will I be arrested next?

She writes:

In our persecutorial present, plenty of B-listers have fancied portraying themselves as potential targets of vicious left-wing activism. The subtext runs, ‘I’m so brave and controversial that the mob is sure to come for me’. Others claim to have been ‘cancelled’ when someone wrote something forgettably mean about them once – underappreciating the true horror of proper cancellation, such as the monstrous injustice of an accomplished comedy writer’s entire career being utterly savaged over views that ought to be common sense. I’ve sometimes joked – disingenuously, because I like still having a career – that never having been cancelled myself is insulting.

And:

But I also read reports of his arrest on alighting in Heathrow by five armed police officers as potentially ominous news for me personally. This anxiety is for once not the self-aggrandising and melodramatic sort – ‘vanity fear’, if you will – but rational, practical and genuine. If the Met is stalking airports for anyone who’s published a discouraging word about the, to me, deeply disturbing social obsession with transgenderism – even former UK residents who’ve fled Britain’s accelerating illiberalism, as both Linehan and I have – then I am at risk of arrest and detention if not imprisonment should I dare to hop another flight to Heathrow from my new home in Portugal.

Linehan lost everything standing up for kids, and for that, he will be my hero for all time. Most people in Hollywood pat themselves on the back and pretend to be brave, but they're not brave. There is nothing brave about being too afraid to stand up and speak out, no matter the cost.

Those who have fled to Europe because of Trump are mostly the wealthy who are part of the ruling class. They love a country that polices speech and has its class system largely intact. What killed the empire and put Trump back in power was that America was not built to be ruled over by an aristocracy, even if they covered it up with virtue signaling. A revolution was always the next step.

Defeating Trump would have been easy for the Democrats if they lived in the real world. They should have learned from their mistakes in 2016 and moved on. They just had to be a little less crazy, and they couldn't even do that. Now it's like a Ponzi Scheme that relies on everyone going along with the delusion to keep those plates spinning.

It might be true that there's "cancel culture" on "both sides," or that "both sides" are just as bad. However, only one side has complete control over culture, including Hollywood, and it isn't the Right.

Societies must be founded on strength, not weakness. On resilience, not fragility. The phantasmagoria invented on a day-to-day basis, amplified by the press, has robbed much of the Left of its perception of reality.

Bill Maher talks to Woody Allen

Speaking of courage, Bill Maher hosted Woody Allen for what I think is Allen's best interview ever, and I say this as a lifelong fan. The best line in it is about cancel culture, when Woody says, "If you're going to be canceled in any culture, it should be this one." Agreed. Losing everything to people like that is far less destructive than losing everything to fanaticism and fundamentalism.

The only solution, therefore, would have been gulags. Put all of the bad people far away and preserve utopia. That has been tried many times and failed. That brings us back to this beautiful quote by Milan Kundera that I have read like a mantra for the past ten years:

The problem for the news business and for Hollywood is the fear of telling the truth. I tip my hat to the brave storytellers out there, and those who were willing to risk everything and lose everything by speaking up and speaking out. Congratulations to Bari Weiss if the rumors are true.

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