QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Who Killed the Oscars?
In the 1990s, there was a failed experiment in the Arizona desert called Biosphere 2. The idea was to create a self-sustaining orb where pretend astronauts of the future could live without contact with the real world for at least a year. They would grow their food, slaughter their own animals, and breathe their own air. If they were successful, they might be able to plop the orb on Mars to ensure the future of humanity after climate change destroyed the planet.
It turned out to be a disaster. They ran out of food. They ran out of oxygen and almost suffocated. They starved. There was tribal warfare, and eventually, Steve Bannon (yes, the same one) was brought in to fire the scientists and salvage the project for investors.
I often think of Biosphere 2 when I think of what happened to the Oscars. They, we, built a self-sustaining bubble cut off from real life. At first, we celebrated the artificiality of this construct with names like “Hollywood” or “Tinseltown.” But as the Oscars approach their 97th year, with the threat of ending their long reign on network television for the luxury of streaming, it seems clear that our artificial dream factory is now suffering the same fate as Biosphere 2, minus the intervention of Steve Bannon.
A massive creative bottleneck has choked the life out of Hollywood, but I don’t have to tell you that. You already know. Movies simply aren’t as good as they used to be. The spark of urgency and originality that galvanized movies as a must-see activity from city theaters to rural drive-ins is gone. For every well-marketed sequel in a decades-old franchise like Top Gun: Maverick, there are hundreds of films no one wants to see—and almost nothing in-between.
What becomes of this vast production of dreck is hardly inspiring. Sometimes, they hit theaters and play to empty houses for a week or two. Otherwise, they are dumped into the giant Sahara Desert of the streaming services. There, maybe someone clicks on it; maybe they scroll on by. Every so often—which, to be honest, means not very often—a movie surprises, and actually connects with an audience.
And:
If you can’t even name the problem, you certainly can’t solve it. Luckily, my 25-year career as an Oscar blogger went up in flames this past summer after a journalist named Rebecca Keegan wrote an investigative report on my decision to vote for Donald Trump—a decision that it turned out was shared, for whatever large combination of reasons, by a majority of citizens of this country, including Hispanic voters, married voters, male voters, and other demographic categories that included all races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences. That, and a joke mocking “White Dudes for Harris” saying “white power” was back in style that was clearly meant as sarcasm but was quickly taken as “evidence” that I was now a “white supremacist” (I’m a middle-aged Jewish woman in the business of reviewing movies, specifically for the Oscars). What seems more relevant is that I’d been standing against “cancel culture” for almost 10 years, and now it was my turn to be canceled. Everything I’d built was gone the minute the story landed in The Hollywood Reporter.
I could have groveled and apologized, as one does, but I didn’t think I did anything wrong. I didn’t want to confess to being a witch in order to live. So down came the consequences. I lost almost everything: my income, staff, and some good friends. But it was also a gift because now I can talk about what no one else can.
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