FIVE REASONS NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE OSCARS: In addition to the politics and sermons on race, gender, gun control, environmentalism, and whatever is that year’s leftwing cause of the century, Megan Fox (not the actress, alas) notes, “Kids have no idea what the Oscars are:”
When I was a kid there wasn’t much to watch on TV since we only had about six channels, so when the Oscars came on it was a big deal and we all crowded around our remoteless television to watch it. For days afterward, we would practice our acceptance speeches holding hairbrushes or piano trophies in the mirror. Nowadays, kids have unlimited entertainment choices, from iPad games to 400 cable or streaming channels. The Oscars isn’t going to draw the youngsters who will grow up with little to no concept of what an “Oscar” is. Further, any Hollywood star or starlet the kids want to see can be contacted on Twitter or Instagram and they even write back sometimes. The mystery of the Hollywood “star” is really gone.
In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond famously shouted “I am big – it’s the pictures that got small!” But today’s actors have become much smaller than their predecessors, thanks to their obsession with social media in which all of their anger, foibles, and lack of impulse control are on full display. (Two words: Alec Baldwin.) But what are the Oscars?
It helped enormously that for years, the awards presentations were hosted by Bob Hope and later Johnny Carson, so you knew you were in for an evening of swank and fun, no matter how good or bad that year’s crop of movies were. But if kids have no idea what the Oscars are, few adults probably remember why the award was created.
In the 1998 A&E documentary version of Neal Gabler’s excellent 1989 book, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, the narrator (actor R.H. Thomson) notes that after being unable to break the monopoly that east coast-based Thomas Edison had on moviemaking at the start of the 20th century, the largely Jewish immigrants who created what we now call Hollywood went west, both for the excellent weather that allowed them to film outdoors throughout most of the year, and for the freedom to build, as Gabler dubbed it in his title, “An Empire of their Own,” far from Edison’s (often anti-Semitic) control. Eventually, with 75 percent of the public going to the movies at least once a week between the wars, “actors became the gods and goddesses of the new American religion. And where there are new gods, there must be new idols. So the studio heads began a movie guild with the lofty title of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It was [MGM’s Louis B.] Mayer’s brilliant idea [in 1929] to create the Oscars, where the movie moguls could honor themselves by giving each other awards. In this way, they went from being a group of immigrant Jews, to award-winning American producers.”
Not to mention, as one biographer quoted Mayer, “I found that the best way to handle [filmmakers] was to hang medals all over them. […] If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”
As Gabler notes, the original Hollywood moguls were to a man extremely pro-American, unlike today’s reactionary punitive leftists. All of which is a far cry from today’s hyper-politicized far left Academy Awards. But then, as Fox notes, so are the pictures they celebrate today. “Except for the few blockbusters that people love and the Oscars shun, I can’t say for sure that I’ve seen any movie nominated for best film in the last ten years. Whatever committee nominates the films doesn’t seem to care what people actually like.”