Can the Oscars Survive the Imminent Death of Hollywood?

The Oscars are barreling toward their 97th year, and will turn 100 not too long from now. Yet, the industry and the Oscars, are facing a reckoning — an existential crisis that could topple the empire. Not that you’d ever hear much about this. With Jay Penske having a monopoly on coverage you can pretty much be assured it will be strictly party-line. But Houston, we have a problem.

Not to alarm you all, but there are signs everywhere that something is happening here. There is a major shift happening, not to mention an enduring ghost town at the box office. Ordinarily, I would not be compelled to run around like Chicken Little, were it not for a piece that made the rounds a few days ago, ominously called The Life and Death of Hollywood:

This column in Harper’s is a deep dive into what happened to Hollywood from the perspective of writers. It tells a sordid tale of deregulation and monopolies buying up all entertainment, specifically how streamers counted on Wall Street to keep them with the perception of success but eventually ran out of steam and could no longer pay writers. I recommend reading the entire piece to understand what creative people are up against.

It didn’t exactly cause a fuss around town, at least not that I heard. But the bubble is so well-insulated that almost nothing gets through. Call it top-down control over all American culture. As you go up the food chain, power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Whatever those people at the top want is what trickles down to everything else.

From the Harper’s piece:

Over the next decade, three asset-management companies—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—would take over American business, becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500, the roughly five hundred biggest public U.S. companies. Private-equity firms—distinguished by their intent to sell the properties they acquire—would eventually be the backing for at least 7 percent of American jobs.

And with this:

Today the Big Three asset-management firms hold the largest stakes in most rival companies in media and entertainment. As of the end of last year, Vanguard, for example, owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery. It holds a substantial share of Amazon and Paramount Global. By 2010, private-equity companies had acquired MGM, Miramax, and AMC Theatres, and had scooped up portions of Hulu and DreamWorks. Private equity now has its hands in Univision, Lionsgate, Skydance, and more.

The business has changed to such a dramatic degree that what was once a creative renaissance on streaming and in movies has now been so narrowly focused (IPs and the niche market) that it has created the same kind of inequality among the very rich at the top and the struggling working class who no longer have much of a future in Hollywood.

On the other hand, the religion or ideology that infected the Left right around 2011 and 2012 translated to the need to be “Good People Doing Good Things.” Call it “do-gooders,” “woke-ism,” or “Puritanism” – all of us who lived through it know what it was.  And even if we all started out with the best of intentions, I know I did, we have ended up as an invasive species killing our host.

In the years I’ve been covering the Oscars, we watched how Hollywood fractured into two main pathways – one went to the billion dollar superhero industry and the other became like the Bates Motel of movie going, the Oscar race. It became such a niche market with publicists, critics and bloggers all but deciding the entire race with the audience entirely left out of it.

Meanwhile, the superhero movies were huge for Hollywood. They were making more money than they could have in their wildest dreams. But as we know, social justice began hitting culture on the Left, and eventually swallowed up Hollywood and the Oscars. Their brand became “too woke…” With the exception of a handful of movies, this is where we are now. No one wants to “eat their vegetables” so they aren’t going to shell out lots of money only to get “woked” after they’ve sat down with their popcorn.

Even if no one wants to admit it, it has hurt Hollywood. It has completely eroded the good will Hollywood built up over decades. They will now, if they care, attempt to dig themselves out of that hole. The problem? Most people in media won’t talk about the elephant in the room.

Most of those who cover media do not talk about any of this. But a great piece of journalism appeared in The Ankler, a story detailing the rise and fall of a studio that seemed to be designed perfectly for what the Oscars had become in the past twenty years.

Uri Berliner, an editor at NPR, went public with what everyone outside the bubble already knows, that NPR became its own little bubble covering stories tailored for those “true believers” up the food chain whose lives are lived almost entirely inside an aristocratic bubble.

He writes:

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.  

As of today, Berliner has resigned from NPR after being suspended for a week without pay. And the employees did what all fanatics all of these well-meaning people hire would do:

The CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, whose background is in government (for the Democrats), is straight out of central casting for the exact demographic that NPR aims to please. Their efforts to represent diverse voices don’t mean their audience is diverse. They aren’t. They’re people like Maher – wealthy, enlightened, woke do-gooders. They care more about signaling their virtue (what they would call “making the world a better place”) than about fairness, balance or even the truth.

Here is Matt Taibbi:

So why would Maher throw Berliner under the bus rather than NPR attempting to confront what happened to the newsroom? Well, it’s the same reason Hollywood and the Oscars can’t really fix their problem either. The higher up the food chain you go, where Maher resides, the more likely you are to need to please the people even higher up the food chain than you – the donors, the power, the money.

Now, you can put it all together. The Harper’s piece about the oligopoly that has Hollywood by the balls, and the do-gooders at the top that control everything. There is a name for it. It’s called ESG Capitalism.

What does any of this have to do with the Oscars and Hollywood? Because per the Harper’s column, if all they care about is pleasing their investors and their wealthy donors – and wealth is now concentrated on the Left – what incentive do they even have to turn out great movies to all of us out here in the dark?

Movies as Propaganda

Movies have always been propaganda of one kind or another. From the FDR administration before WWII to the Eisenhower administration after WWII, the government and the military infused much of Hollywood with pro-America and pro-military propaganda.

This was especially a problem in the 1950s, when studios also promoted propaganda and became stagnant in their storytelling (despite some great movies from that era). The studio system also more or less collapsed. But out of that came a great era for movies because independent studios could make low-budget but very entertaining movies in the 1970s. Audiences were sick of the stagnate storytelling under the Hays Code and a counterculture was on the rise.

That trajectory is laid out in this video:

This video, along with many voices on Youtube, have called out Disney’s Bob Iger for consolidating wealth and power into the hands of one campany than “wokeifying” their content. People stopped showing up for Disney movies, or any of the major IPs that went “woke.” The entire industry that covers movies and the Oscars will not talk about any of this because they worry that if they make Disney mad, then they can’t get any ad money from Disney (which also includes Fox and Searchlight by now).

And they’re right. The studios control the bloggers and journalists with money. Most bloggers — and all of Penske media for instance — will hold their tongue if it will upset a studio. They could be looking at a loss of millions. The easiest way to do that is to become someone like me, for instance, or Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere — those of us who are willing to speak out, to call out the hypocrisy of the “woketopians” destroying not just Hollywood, but all of American culture.

The people who benefit are those up the food chain. Those who are sacrificed are audiences.

The Movie Studio

One way for Hollywood and the Oscars dig themselves out of the mess they’re in would be to hire consultants to help them “de-woke” their content. Think about hiring Warren Smith from Youtube:

Or Chris Gore, for that matter. Hire me or Jeff Wells. Hire anyone willing to deliver hard truths and straight talk. Do I think they’ll do it? No. First, like Katherine Maher can’t un-woke herself because it is the core of her being, most people in Hollywood don’t even see the problem, let alone know how to fix it. They’re also scared. It’s like that scene in Jaws when no one will go in the water but if one person does, then they all will follow.

Probably there is no changing this any time soon. There is the mistaken belief that Gen-Z likes things “woke” but they don’t. Write good stories, make good movies and people will come. At the moment, the studios have become captured by both Big Finance and ideology.

I have been saying for several years now that there is no saving the Left. They have to collapse fully and only then can they learn their necessary lessons and rebuild. That includes Big Hollywood and niche Hollywood.  Can they kick the can down the road and do okay? Sure. Like the Democrats, like NPR, like the New York Times – they have their core audience of true believers and if they like existing inside that bubble, fine. The Oscars can retire onto a streaming platform and live out their days happily and quietly without ever having to worry about the rabble that can no longer stand them.

But movies were better when they had to be for everybody. Stories were better when they were told for a wide majority. Comedy was better, journalism was more honest, and the Oscars were more interesting when they still had one foot in the reality of everyday people and weren’t so eager to please only those at the top.

The only way to ever get back any greatness now is to build outside the system. We can take a lesson from what happened to Bari Weiss at the New York Times. After the “Tom Cotton Affair,” she famously resigned. She then built The Free Press on Substack, the outlet Uri Berliner chose to publish his honest piece about the tragic state of NPR. You see what can happen when you escape the bubble? You’re free.

Think about this: a new company called The Movie Studio. Its job would be to make great movies full stop. Those movies would be free from “do-gooderism” and the clutches of the conglomerates and would exist purely to attract great writers, directors and actors to tell great stories. The Movie Studio would be funded by “heterodox” billionaires. Yes, they do exist. They might be people who are interested in bringing back great movies. They are not those who are dipping their toe into Hollywood now.

My “movie studio” would run a contest for great screenplays. I would find smart, heterodox minds to read those screenplays, pull from Gen-Z and every other generation. Then find ten scripts worth producing. The movies would be low-budget, use practical effects and be a kind of nuts-and-bolts filmmaking.  Think: The French Connection. Think: The Exorcist. Think: Three Days of the Condor. Think: Do the Right Thing. Think: The Godfather. MOVIES.

I look around every day at the great stories that could be told about the moment we’re living through, yet I know they never will be. The power is on the Left now, and they’re unwilling to mock or criticize themselves. Uri Berliner is a hero, even though he only said what we already knew. I stopped listening to NPR a long time ago. I don’t read the New York Times. I don’t watch CNN or MSNBC. I barely watch anything on streaming now. There are a few signs of life here or there. Ripley on Netflix is brilliant. The Curse on Paramount Plus is one of the best I’ve ever seen on streaming. But how do you speak truth to power when you are the power?

Well, you hold your breath and jump.