Lessons for Hollywood and the Oscars Heading into 2024

Attempting to fix what’s wrong with Hollywood and the Oscars now requires believing something is wrong in the first place.  From my perspective, there is something very wrong. There is a creative bottleneck of people who are too afraid of being called out, exiled, attacked or shunned to tell good stories authentically. They must constantly prove they’re not “one of them,” the baddies. And in so doing, they’ve very nearly destroyed themselves.

They also see their role as fixing what’s wrong with society instead of providing great stories that move us in ways that movies, and books and art and comedy used to. The end result is that people just aren’t showing up at the movies anymore. Why should they? They have enough content at home to fill up their time. They can watch old movies from back when Hollywood still cared about telling good stories. Or they can use TikTok or watch YouTube.  What could be so important to motivate them to get out of their houses and pay money to sit there for two hours and be told everything that’s wrong with how they see the world?

For one brief moment there was one such movie – Barbenheimer – a made up combination of two films that drew different audiences. Weirdly, the two of them together made what audiences seem to be craving lately — good old fashioned Hollywood movies. It’s hard not to look at the Barbenheimer meme and not see the gender binary – very femme and very masculine – a man and a woman from a time very long ago.

The Barbenheimer meme tells a story, though not the one either Oppenheimer or Barbie told. It is of a couple on the brink of the apocalypse. But what it was more than anything was a chance for all of us to unite. We saw this same phenom play out at Taylor Swift concerts. We all crave to be whole again, not divided, not judged, not hating each other, not adhering to one standard of behavior…but allowed to be ourselves again.

There is a more cynical way of judging this moment, one that would make anyone run for cover, hide, lie, or do anything they could not to have to talk about it, and that’s to confront the simple majority: white people. Between the years of 2016 to 2023, we could say white American culture has been on trial, all of this because Trump unexpectedly won. It started a virtual, cold Civil War that has upended Hollywood and made them self-conscious such that every movie has to dot the i’s and cross the t’s to ensure no one is accused of being a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, etc. The end result is unwatchable movies. We might as well come out and say it.

That’s not the fault of the actors who have been placed in front of the white people who still run everything, but at some point, we have to find a way to make art again, to tell stories again, to stop counting heads and types of people — or not. The alternative is to make Hollywood movies a religion with requirements. Sounds like a lot of fun, huh?

Hollywood and the Oscars no longer trust the market to guide them. Instead, They are guided by high-minded columns in high-minded outlets praising or condemning them as good puritans or heretics. If they break a rule in the social code, they will be dragged into the public arena for shaming.  What we seem to want from our art now is to reflect how life should be once we “correct” it. But that’s not the truth. It’s not interesting, and Hollywood can’t survive it.

It reminds me of a story. Way back in the late 80s I was working as a cocktail waitress at a jazz club in Greenwich Village. I attended NYU for just one semester before being forced to drop out because of student loans. During that time, I worked in one of the greatest places ever. A Jazz club run by immigrants from Trinidad. It was a run-down hole in the wall but attracted the most famous names in Jazz. I loved everyone there. We were like one big family. But the place was a complete disaster behind the scenes. They were so broke, the money so mismanaged, that at dinner time, they would cook one meal and serve it to everyone as though that was what they ordered.

This went over without comment most nights. The wealthy (white) patrons were just happy to be there. My friend, a waiter, and I would wait for someone to say something, but no one ever did until one night. One customer, a young man in a suit, stood up and said, “I can’t believe we’re all pretending like what’s happening here isn’t happening here.”

I looked at my friend, and we were both worried, but what could we do? The owner ordered us to lock the door and only allow people to leave once they paid. I was too young to understand what was going on.

The restaurant closed soon after that. I only thought about it in the past few years, as I’ve watched so many people do precisely the same thing. Those who stand up and say, “I can’t believe what we’re all pretending like what’s happening here isn’t here,” will be tossed from Utopia. It is verboten to blurt out the truth about almost anything. And so here we are.

So I am about to advise Hollywood and the Oscars, to be taken with a grain of salt. I come to this industry as an observer, not an insider or professional. Everything I know comes from my own love of movies — lifelong — and my knowledge as a person covering the Oscars for around 25 years now. Too long, too long.

Make movies for Americans again

When Oscar movies drop, no one sees them or talks about them until they hit streaming. Once they do, they become part of the shared conversations about film. Movies like Saltburn, The Holdovers, and others are out of reach for most Americans, who are slowly conditioned to stay in their homes to go to the movies. Going out is a major inconvenience.

That’s likely our future as week after week, we get nothing but bad news. The Oscars and Hollywood want to abandon much of the country and aim for a global market. After all, if the SAG Awards are on Netflix, then a global community can watch them. Entertainment, like social media, isn’t specific to the United States.

The only problem is that the domestic box office makes movie theaters a central part of our culture. Once they start disappearing, and once they are a thing of the past, we will all look back on right now and see that there was a path forward, and Hollywood chose to abandon America the same way the manufacturing jobs did — cheaper labor, more global market.

That means goodbye to movie theaters and movies in general as a cultural driver in our country. We’re almost there now. Once Hollywood opted for the international market, their movies became more fantasy-based, more “universal” in their subject matter. This meant they could earn ridiculous amounts of money without ever stepping foot in, say, North Dakota.

But we’ve paid a high price for their collective greed. We paid the price as a country. As a people. Hollywood can’t tell stories for Americans because they don’t know them anymore. They have become completely disconnected from the reality of everyday life – but every writer will tell you that’s where the best stories are. There are so many of them that could be told but in the current state of paralysis in Hollywood we know they won’t be.

Maybe you think it doesn’t matter. This is the future. You can just get on board or be left behind. Maybe culture will just be limited to the “few” and not the “many.”  But maybe we need to get over ourselves a little bit and stop behaving like the New Puritans.

Either way, the stagnation of Hollywood means there are vulnerabilities in their monopoly that will invite competition. That’s good news. That’s what we need.

The Counter Culture is Coming

This past year, we watched Hollywood and the film coverage industry attempt to discredit, attack, and destroy various pop culture success stories that came from outside the bubble of the Left. Whether it’s a red-headed folk singer, a wildly popular youtuber, an entire media empire called the Daily Wire, or the film Sound of Freedom, we saw an overt challenge to the ruling class. That chasm will only get wider as the new counterculture gets rolling.

That means this is actually an exciting time to be a writer, a filmmaker, a comedian or an artist. You are free once you escape the bubble of the Left where people can’t tell you what kinds of stories you can tell. You just have to find a way to access audiences. I think there is a renaissance waiting at the other end of this, just as there was coming out of the 1950s and into the 1960s.

The success of Sound of Freedom should have been a bigger deal. Instead, journalists attacked the success story like an unwanted invader into THEIR culture. It was yet another example of “us against them”  that only hurt Hollywood. It made more money than Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, Taylor Swift’s movie, Elemental, Transformers, Hunger Games, etc.

I look at this box office chart and I feel sad about what has happened to Hollywood, despite the best of intentions. It’s even worse than among those who cover the industry they’re not even allowed to talk about failure if the intentions were correct. They have become aspirational and, as such, have abandoned their entire purpose — to entertain us. All of us.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t dazzling films produced this year, there were. David Fincher’s The Killer is among the best of them, along with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and plenty of other movies. We did the best we could as Oscar watchers. We found the best movies to honor.

Happy New Year, Oscar watchers. See you in 2024.