This year’s Academy Awards Ceremony might be called the “Screw You, America! Oscars.” Films no one saw about issues no one cares about were celebrated at the level of popular works of cinematic genius like 1942’s Casablanca and 1972’s The Godfather. Commentators noted the lack of political messages in the acceptance speeches, but it was all one big political message: “We enlightened creatures of Hollywood are not here to entertain you. We’re here to shove our own high virtue in the face of your low values like marriage, prosperity and love of country.”
Among the nominees? A musical about transgenderism, the delusion that has become the left’s latest sexual fetish. An epic about the carbuncles of brutalism, a film that made it impossible not to stay home and watch Turner Classics. And the winner, Anora, that could not bear to show a woman’s desire to marry a man who would cherish and protect her without first putting us through forty minutes of degrading pornography. (But that was the point! I hear you say — like an adolescent who writes a boring story because Don’t you see? Life is boring!)
Even the one nominated film that scored with the public, the glitzy, mediocre Wicked, was an irritating cultural lecture. “Oh, you thought the classic film Wizard of Oz was about a girl coming of age, choosing between her inner witches to become the sort of woman who inspires men with intelligence, courage and heart? How sexist! No! It’s about racial bigotry! Because everything’s about racial bigotry.”
Hollywood isn’t even a corpse of a once-great industry. It’s a ragdoll of a corpse.
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Don’t get me wrong. This has nothing to do with lack of talent. Every single person who was nominated or won has been gifted by God beyond anyone’s deserving. This is about a community trapped within the mental prison of a small-minded, arrogant, censorious and self-celebratory culture that has cut its artists off from any true perception of the human condition — which is, after all, the central subject of art.
It’s not strictly about politics either. A city that burns to the ground because of Democrat mismanagement but continues to elect Democrats is certainly a city of political idiots. But its politics is merely a side effect of a deeper cultural cancer: a philosophical zombie-ism that has transformed an entire artistic community into brain-dead materialists devouring the wisdom of the ages. “If we not gooder than Jesus, how come we so rich and pretty?” Hollywood is a city of beautiful buffoons.
Art doesn’t have to be like this. In 1987, two fine works satirized the culture of the day, the film Wall Street by leftist director Oliver Stone, and the novel Bonfire of the Vanities, by right-leaning author Tom Wolfe. The conservative president Ronald Reagan had rescued the country from weakness and stagnation and ignited a quarter century of prosperity and peace. Part of that prosperity was a stock market boom that encouraged a trader culture summed up by the line in Wall Street, “Greed is good.”
Why did two artists with two different political outlooks both excoriate a culture that healed our economy and gave us the strength to win a cold war against the socialist slave state of the USSR?
Because life is complex. Capitalism is the greatest economic engine ever invented. Cures poverty, inspires creativity, and creates wealth. It also ruins everything. It strips us of our nobility and turns us into consumers and scrooges. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” as the poet William Wordsworth said. Socialism, meanwhile, which kills societies like a plague, nonetheless lures us through an elevated yearning toward justice.
These are deep paradoxes of life in our time. They call for complex visions from free-thinking artists like Stone and Wolfe.
But our ideas now? Men can become women? Free sex is liberating? Evil can be cured with tolerance? These are the childish notions of moral troglodytes. They turn artists into dopes.
The arts will return in one form or another, because they are the spirit working through man, and that spirit never dies. Let this insipid Oscar ceremony be the last gasp of a bad idea, and the epitaph of an artistic community that can say in the immortal words of Universal Pictures’ Frankenstein: “We belong dead.”
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Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. His new book, “The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness,” will be published in May. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan
The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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