MICHAEL GRAHAM: OSCARS’ #METOO SHOW MIGHTY FISHY.
When the guy who hosted the breast-obsessed ‘Man Show’ appears onstage with an NBA player once accused of rape to give awards to people who spent decades doing business with Harvey Weinstein — you know Hollywood has gotten serious about sexual harassment.
I have no comment about the crop of overrated movies honored by the Academy Sunday night — other than to note that giving the Best Picture nod to ‘Handicapped Woman Has Sex With Fish Man, Is Saved By Communists’ may be the most #Oscars! moment ever. What is worthy of notice is the nonstop self-congratulations from society’s most notoriously corrupt class, the Hollywood Left.
Elsewhere, Jonah Goldberg writes:
[M]ost people don’t see the movies that the Oscars honor — only two of the nominees for Best Picture grossed more than $100 million — Jimmy Kimmel said that making money isn’t the point. ‘We don’t make films like Call Me By Your Name for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence.’
Hah hah and all that. But Kimmel’s right (though probably not literally). Hollywood does make a lot of movies to be transgressive. In one sense, that’s fine; self-styled artistes are allowed to make the movies they want. And as I said, some of them are great. But no one should be surprised when the ratings for the Oscars are lousy, given that they mostly celebrate movies that are hostile — or simply unappealing — to vast swathes of the movie-going and TV-watching audience. Particularly when those honored are so liable to preen about how clever and brave they are.
Speaking of Call Me By Your Name, over the weekend, the New York Times asked “How Do You Solve a Problem Like ‘Manhattan’?”, exploring how problematic Woody Allen’s 1979 film, once considered a stylish modern classic, has become post-Weinstein:
[As] Lisa Schwarzbaum, the former movie critic for Entertainment Weekly, pointed out in an email interview, ‘‘Manhattan’ was always about a middle-aged man with a high school girlfriend. Back then, ‘Manhattan’ was made by Woody the Lovable Neurotic Nebbish, and now it has been made by Allen the Monster. And it’s the same movie.”
Call Me By Your Name also concerns a relationship between a 17 year old and an adult, except this time around they’re both of the same gender. Other than to troll Mike Pence, why isn’t this film considered equally problematic among today’s allegedly reformed denizens of Hollywood?
Update: Post was slightly reformatted for ease of readability.