The Weekend of Foolish Attention
DATELINE: Saturday, March 26, 2022
Hey, gang!
It’s been quite a week in the world. The GOP Senators aired their greivances about culture war issues and their last two SCOTUS confirmations while the Dems held a ticker-tape parade for her while SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson seemed to be the only adult in the room. Putin continues his failing invasion and Biden wants Russia out of the G-20. Trump is suing Hillary for the whole RussiaGate thing. Arizona lawmakers just passed a 15-week abortion ban, to prohibit gender reassignment surgery for minors, and ban transgender athletes from playing on girls sports teams. Still no reparations for black Americans suffering from a century of Jim Crow and while the Right complains about ‘cancel culture,’ the Left gaslights them by claiming it doesn’t exist.
Oh, yeah. The Oscars.
Is it just me or does the whole Oscar thing seem sort of sad. I love the movies—theaters, streaming, DVD, whatever I can get—but haven’t watched the Academy Awards in years. Like so many, I feel like the premiere awards show has lost something along the way. Maybe it was the expansion from five best picture nominees to fucking TEN. Maybe the decisions about putting on TV stars instead of legacy movie stars as hosts.
Maybe it’s that the movie business has changed so much that watching them pat each other on the back for films that no one bothered to see in the first place is a drag.
No, I’m not advocating for the profit-busting movies be the focus. Spider-Man: No Way Home made a shit-ton of money. Those cats don’t need any more exposure. I’m advocating that awards and cash are different categories and the push to make as much money on the awards show while laudable in that capitalist greed sort of Reaganesque view of the planet, it should be completely beside the point.
Of the ten best pics, I saw The Power of the Dog, Nightmare Alley, King Richard, and Don’t Look Up on my iPad. I saw Dune and West Side Story in movie theaters. That’s a dismal ratio given my decidedly retro upbringing when going to the movies was an event. A date night. A break from reality. I dig the streaming thing a lot but it’s difficult to fully engage in a film when a text can interrupt it or I can pause the story to look up an actor I recognize yet cannot name or just hop up to go piss.
Over at the New Yawk Tymes, Ross Douthat has an opinion.
We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies.
Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There’s no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences.
The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined.
The movie business just fell too much in love with the dumb money. They sold their collective soul to the delicious yen as well as allowed a Communist Regime to begin dictating artistic choices. The theater owners allowed our only option for viewing movies to decline in quality while raising prices. Netflix came along and said “Fuck you guys. We can do this and not require people to feel the sticky floors and listen to that asshole on his smartphone.” HBO brought the production values and top talent to the small screen.
Then COVID hit and it was like the movies suddenly abandoned the theaters altogether.
The Oscars have always been an opportunity for artists to get up onstage and shame the rest of us for our political flaws but when the movies aren’t cultural events anymore, the only thing to see is a bunch of virtue signaling Hollywood types who would sell their soul to Putin if he paid them enough lecturing us all about DEI initiatives.
I’ll pass.
Time for Clarence to Retire, Yes?
In 2020, conservative activist Ginni Thomas—who happens to be Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife—apparently texted then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows asking him to help overturn the election. In evidence Meadows has turned over to the Jan 6 Select Committee and which has of course leaked to the Washington Post, Ginni Thomas texted him: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!! . . . You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Let’s hope that her husband decides to retire from SCOTUS then Biden can nominate an Asian woman to the court. Eventually, Judge Roberts will be presiding over a very smart version of The Real Housewives of D.C. who drink wine, cat fight, and decide legal precedent.
And the Oscar SHOULD Go To…
Nicolas Cage Paid Off Debts With VOD Films, but He Stands by Every Role: 'I Never Phoned It In'
Cage said that he refused to get to the point where he would have to file for bankruptcy, even if people in his life were telling him he should. That’s where the endless string of Cage-starring VOD movies came in handy, although the Oscar winner stressed that he never took on a role he didn’t believe in — even if the role was helping him avoid bankruptcy.
“When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all,” Cage said. “They didn’t work, all of them. Some of them were terrific, like ‘Mandy,’ but some of them didn’t work. But I never phoned it in. So if there was a misconception, it was that. That I was just doing it and not caring. I was caring.”
I mean Pig was better than at least five of those ten best pic nominees. Don’t Look Up is the Crash of today. Jarringly one-note, filled with charismatic performances used to hammer a virtuous message that it’s everyone not watching who is at fault.
Nicolas Cage is the real National Treasure, kids.
Where Are the Jews?
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened last year to great fanfare. I mean, holy shit, a museum that holds Dorothy’s ruby slippers and a tribute to Spike Lee? Sounds like a destination spot in Los Angeles (which has become a dumpster fire of a city).
Except that in their rush to create a grand homage to all things Hollywood, they forgot to include the Jews who created the industry in the first place.
“ If you’re going to have a museum in Los Angeles tied to the Academy that celebrates arguably the most significant art form of the 20th century, how is it possible not to acknowledge the Jewish men who started it all?” asks Goldwyn, ticking off names like Universal’s Carl Laemmle, Columbia’s Harry Cohn, Paramount’s Adolph Zukor and the brothers Warner. “It’s an egregious oversight.”
Sure, the Jewish people, ostracized more than any single ethnicity in history (yeah, that includes black Americans descended from slaves) ended up being branded ‘white’ when the white people needed to add to their numbers, they still almost single-handedly invented Hollywood. Seems a bit shortsighted to erase them from the history of the place, right?
The Double Standard of Using Shame as a Societal Ruler
So, as a GenX dude, let me get this straight—you can’t use shame to get fatties to drop a pound or two but you can use it to intimidate implicitly biased white people (or white-adjacent brown people) into ‘doing the work?” Shame is bad when leveled at a black kid dressing like he’s been to prison but good when wielded against a woman who tweeted an unfunny Holocaust joke?
Digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them. In their massive research labs, mathematicians work closely with psychologists and anthropologists, using our behavioral data to train their machines. Their objective is to spur customer participation and to mine advertising gold. When it comes to this type of intense engagement, shame is one of the most potent motivators. It’s right up there with sex. So even if the data scientists and their bosses in the executive suites might not map out a strategy based on shaming, their automatic algorithms zero in on it. It spurs traffic and boosts revenue.
Ah. It’s about profit. Of course it is.
Introducing Slang That Will Become Irrelevant by the Time You Finish Reading This
Simp: "A man who is overly submissive to women"
Woke: "To be well-informed of and sensitive to cultural issues"
Sus: "Suspicious or suspect"
Bussin: "Really good, usually describes food"
FYP: "Abbreviation of 'For You Page,' part of the TikTok app"
GOAT: "Acronym for 'greatest of all time'"
No cap: "To say you're not lying or exaggerating"
Ratio: "When replies to a tweet vastly outnumber likes or retweets"
FOMO: "Abbreviation for 'fear of missing out'"
IYKYK: "Abbreviation for 'if you know, you know'"
Stan: "To be a very devoted fan"
Yeet: "Exclamation of excitement or approval"
YT: "White, as in skin color"
Bae: "Significant other"
Bet: "A term of agreement or approval"
TFW: "Abbreviation for 'that feeling when'"
OOTD: Abbreviation for "outfit of the day"
POS: "Abbreviation for 'piece of s***'"
AF: "Abbreviation for 'as f***,' used for emphasis"
Cheugy: "Uncool and untrendy"
Cringe: "Something that elicits embarrassment or disgust"
Boujee: "High-class and luxurious"
Karen: "Obnoxious, entitled white woman"
Drip: "Fashionable, stylish, or sexy"
Lowkey: "Quiet, discreet, or secret"
DC: "'Dance credit,' used to credit a person who came up with a dance"
Finna: "Getting ready to do something"
Savage: "Not caring about consequences"
Finesse: "To get away with something, to be manipulative"
Ghost: "Abruptly cut off contact with someone"
I mean, it’s nice to be in tune with the groovy cats of the Zoomer persuasion. It’s rad, even. I’ll not use most of these words because if there is nothing more cringe than an old white guy saying something is ‘on fleek’ I can’t think of any.
I think Mental Floss could do us all a service and include definitions of words that are currently plaguing our partisan divide: defund, equity, dismantle, systemic, and, of course, ‘woman.’
When asked if she could define ‘woman', SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson answered “I’m not a biologist.” Sounds a bit like a dodge but I defer to someone obviously smarter than I am. I’m not a biologist, either, but I’m pretty sure I can tell a woman from, say, a GOAT. It does ask the question—can a transgender woman be a ‘Karen?’
Have a great weekend and a better week.
Be good.