I said it last year, but I was wrong: this was the worst Oscars ever!
Just when you thought Hollywood couldn’t get more pretentious, out-of-touch and in love with itself, the Sunday’s show somehow surmounted the odds.
So movies and movie stars shrink further and further into oblivion, killed by DEI mandates — Best Picture nominees have to now hit two of four requirements — wokeism, and insufferable self-regard.
It’s been decades since the Oscars rewarded well-made crowd pleasers such as Superman, Rocky, E.T., or Saturday Night Fever.
Now to get nominated, a film has to be about the ultra-niche: Sex workers, an intersex pope, a trans Mexican drug cartel boss.
Who among us can’t relate?
By the way: there was one genuine movie star among those nominated on Sunday night — Demi Moore and her comeback story for the ages — and boy did the Academy punish her.
Popularity is, apparently, a bad thing.
If the great unwashed are rooting for you — you know, those dolts who put Trump in the White House again — you will be denied, publicly and painfully.
As for the presenters — again, the few movie stars we have left were absent.
Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, George Clooney all nowhere to be found. Harrison Ford was sidelined by a shingles diagnosis.
The best we could get was Ozempic’d Oprah and Whoopi, physical manifestations of the shrinking Hollywood age.
Oprah, last seen shilling for Kamala Harris. How’d that work out?
Meanwhile, actors and actresses who are hardly household names were venerated to obscene degrees, resulting in self-aggrandizing statements such as this, from Best Supporting Actress winner Zoe Saldana on the red carpet.
‘My art was hurting,’ she said, ‘because I wasn’t really giving fully of myself.’
Yes, Saldana (wearing a multi-million dollar diamond and emerald Cartier necklace that took 34 months to make) griped about not getting to show off her singing and dancing abilities all this time — until that is, Emilia Perez, the much-nominated musical about a Mexican drug lord who has a sex-change operation.
‘La Vaginoplastia,’ Saldana sings in the movie. ‘Man to woman, woman to man, penis to vaginaaaaa.’
Joan Rivers would have known exactly what to say to someone like Saldana. Oh, how she is missed.
Emilia Perez, if it wasn’t already clear, is a disaster.
It takes the morally barbaric stance that if a drug lord had to murder innocents on his ‘journey’ to life as a trans woman — well, sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right?
Despite almost no one having seen it, Emilia Perez was poised to sweep the Oscars until old ‘offensive’ tweets by star Karla Sofia Gascon resurfaced.
And here we see Hollywood in all its hypocrisy. Suddenly, it no longer mattered that Gascon was the first openly trans actress to be nominated for Best Actress. (Not that there was any discussion about one of only five slots for the award being taken by a biological male. That would be impolitic!)
You see, Gascon had, years ago, committed the unpardonable sins of criticizing Islam for its brutal treatment of women (true), of noting that George Floyd was a criminal (also true), and that the Oscars have been done in by pedantic virtue signaling — true, true, true!
Hope Gascon enjoyed her time at the ceremony, because being trans clearly no longer gives you a free pass.
Actor Jeremy Strong, who starred in The Apprentice, that so-called biopic of Donald Trump: ‘I think you move toward the danger as an actor.’
He said that moments before an on-stage salute to members of the Los Angeles Fire Department for their actual heroism.
Talk about a sense of proportion.
Meanwhile, host Conan O’Brien, bland as milquetoast, superciliously explained why it was okay for Hollywood to celebrate itself after LA was nearly razed by those apocalyptic wildfires.
In short: It’s all for the little people.
‘Any award show can seem self-indulgent and superfluous,’ O’Brien lectured, ‘Yes, we will honor many beautiful and talented A-list stars, but the Oscars also shines a light on an incredible community of people you will never see: craftspeople, artisans, technicians, costumers. Hardworking men and women behind the camera.
‘For almost a century, we have paused every spring to elevate and celebrate an art form that has the power […] to unite us. So yes, even in the face of terrible wildfires and divisive politics’ – of course we had to have a Trump-coded slight in there – ‘the work continues.’
Yes, ‘the work’.
Is that why they gave all the awards to thoroughly mediocre movies that half the country haven’t even seen?
Not even Wicked, the only crowd-pleaser in the bunch, won big.
Saldana, Strong, Oprah and their insufferable ilk are the same people who love to tell us how to vote, what to think, and that everything famous people stand for is good and pure.
Except when it comes to Israel, the hostages that remain, and the barbarous return of two babies, slaughtered by Hamas with bare hands, just weeks ago.
Instead, they gave the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature to No Other Land, a pro-Palestinian piece of propaganda.
‘Resist,’ one of the directors said on stage. ‘The atrocious destruction of Gaza must end.’
That got a standing ovation. Then again, so did Will Smith after smacking Chris Rock in the face at the 2022 Oscars, so that tells you everything.
Best Actor winner Adrien Brody allowed Halle Berry to kiss him on the mouth in front of his longtime girlfriend Georgina Chapman — Harvey Weinstein’s ex.
Brody then went on to bore us with a windy acceptance speech about what a great guy he is.
‘I have to thank my mom and dad,’ he said. ‘They’ve just created such a strong foundation of respect and of kindness’.
That was just after Brody had tossed the chewing gum in his mouth to Chapman as he made his way to the stage – a moment that seemed to say it all about how Hollywood still views women.
After all, the biggest winner of the night was Anora, a movie about a young prostitute who gets kidnapped by the Russian mob — a terrifying scene played for laughs — and winds up having sex with one of her abductors.
It was a terrible movie: saggy, aimless, exploitative — young star Mikey Madison is often nude and engaged in demeaning sex — so of course it won Best Picture and a slew of other undeserved awards.
By the way, Anora is director Sean Baker’s fourth film about prostitution. He seems to have quite the fetish — or, in Hollywood-speak, a vision.
‘I want to thank the sex worker community,’ he said in one speech. ‘My deepest respect.’
STOP. Just stop. Sex work is the most desperate, demeaning thing a woman can do. These are people who have often been abused themselves, or who wind up in human trafficking, or are drug addicts or otherwise so severely compromised that they have to sell themselves to strangers.
So let’s not valorize this ‘community’, let alone patronize them.
Finally, to the night’s cruelest cut:
Demi Moore seemed to be on a glide path to winning her first Oscar — for her role in The Substance as an aging actress who resorts to a lethal jab that makes her young and beautiful again, for a time. She was seated front and center, in the literal winner’s circle, only to be humiliated as Anora starlet Madison, 25, won for playing a prostitute.
Moore’s was the one true, feel-good story of the whole night, so how fitting that this entertainment-free show had to deny her.
And Hollywood wonders why we all have ceased to care.
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