Hollywood movies have become so formulaic, so degenerate, or so tediously woke that I’ve gone from seeing a movie a week and devotedly watching the Oscars to utter contempt.
I want nothing to do with any of it. Don’t watch. Make a point of not watching. And I’m not alone, as Oscar ratings have plummeted to barely more than 10% of their heights in the glorious 1990s.
Now even spectacularly well-made movies leave you unmoved. You may as well have played a video game.
No movie can win a prestigious Oscar unless it satisfies a set of racial and sexual diversity quotas, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2020 decree, so the agitprop farce is by design.
Box office receipts last summer were a bust, some 20% lower than they had been the previous decade.
Hollywood has lost interest in attracting an American audience — and it’s only going to get worse.
Judging by the latest offerings from the Sundance Film Festival, which will be showing up on your streaming service soon, there’s no depth to which filmmakers will not go to turn off paying customers.
Hideous Hollywood fare
The latest movie reviews out of Sundance (now pretty much a subsidiary of corporate Hollywood) were curated this week on Twitter by author Peachy Keenan: grannies celebrating their healthy vaginas, a sex scene that ends with the girl covered in blood, penises galore, a lingering closeup of a woman pleasuring a man as he urinates behind a tree, “stomach-churning Satanic rituals,” the obligatory nymphomaniac masturbator trapped in a repressive Christian fundamentalist community in rural Kentucky, Anne Hathaway as a lesbian predator, and a “bisexual love triangle that delivers graphic straight and gay sex scenes.”
Hollywood is dead.
And then along comes a stunning gem of a movie, “To Leslie,” that renews your faith in human nature. A microbudget indie, shot in 19 days, all on film, for less than $1 million, it is the first feature film by director Michael Morris and a breakthrough triumph for little-known screenwriter Ryan Binaco, who loosely based the story on his own alcoholic mother.
The “Leslie” of the title is a single mother from small-town Texas whose life spirals into addiction after she wins the lottery and squanders the money on drugs and alcohol. The film begins as she is being evicted from a cheap motel and decides to move in with her now-20-year-old son, six years after she abandoned him.
It’s a familiar theme, but the acting is so superb, the script has such subtlety and insight, and the film is directed with such restraint and gentle optimism that it takes your breath away. It is as close to perfect a movie as I’ve seen in a long time. It never wallows in the squalor of addiction or soft-soaps Leslie’s selfishness or pretends that her demons will magically disappear.
British actress Andrea Riseborough manages to bring Leslie to life without histrionics or oversharing. She is so real that one online reviewer said: “I thought they’d found a drunk Texan girl, not a classically trained British actress to inhabit the role.”
I don’t want to ruin the movie for you by overhyping it. It may not be to everyone’s taste. Suffice to say, after all the bad movies I’ve sat through the past few years, it came as a blessed relief.
Cultural hijackers
But of course, a work of art so beautiful just has to be destroyed by the ogres who have hijacked our culture. They hate beauty so much, they have to root out any last tiny shreds that manage to hold on. They can’t let it be because when people see beauty again, they will be reminded of how alive it made them feel and how there used to be a lot more of it.
“To Leslie,” with its tiny budget and modest ambitions, shows up Hollywood movies for the banal, anti-human, soul-crushing, decadently expensive, China-pandering excrescences they are.
So someone cooked up a scandal.
When the movie was released late last year, it was ignored and earned just $27,000 at the box office.
But although it didn’t have the marketing budget to compete with the megabucks studios, astonishingly enough, it earned a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Riseborough with a low-key, word of mouth campaign.
The director’s wife, Mary McCormack, whipped up enough buzz with emails and small screenings at their home to get noticed by the right people. She knew that once they watched it, they would love it.
“Other than how proud I am of my husband Michael, we feel so strongly about beautiful films being seen, whether or not they have millions and millions to spend on publicity,” she wrote in impassioned emails to friends, obtained by Vanity Fair. “Now, movies like ‘To Leslie’ are an endangered species . . . close to extinction. I worry that unless we all support small independent filmmaking it’ll just get eaten up by Marvel Movies and go away forever.”
Everybody who saw it did love it, because how could you not? Suddenly big stars like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Charlize Theron, Edward Norton and Jennifer Aniston were gushing about it on social media and hosting screenings. Riseborough deserves “to win every award there is and all the ones that haven’t been invented yet,” Paltrow posted on Instagram.
Cue accusations of racism.
You see, this year was supposed to be “the most diverse Oscars ever,” as Hollywood podcasters Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez summed up.
Instead of a feel-good story about an underdog movie-done-good, the media narrative became “this white actress with all her white actress friends pushed out two highly celebrated highly buzzed and expected black actress nominees . . . It was a massive campaign to nominate a white person.”
Riseborough, who is white, stands accused of stealing the place of a black woman, namely Viola Davis in “The Woman King” and Danielle Deadwyler in “Till.”
‘Misogyny’ excuse
“Till” director Chinonye Chukwu complained the process was “upholding whiteness and perpetuating an unabashed misogyny towards black women.”
LA Times film critic Robert Daniels wailed, “What does it say that the Black women who did everything the institution asks of them — luxury dinners, private Academy screenings, meet-and-greets, splashy television spots and magazine profiles — are ignored when someone who did everything outside of the system is rewarded?”
All the usual suspects got to work to crush the joy out of Riseborough’s success, and bullied the Academy into conducting a “review” to see if “To Leslie” had breached any rules with its “social media and outreach campaigning tactics that caused concern.” After a week of agonizing, on Tuesday they decided not to strip Riseborough of her nomination.
But the damage has been done. One anonymous Academy member was quoted in Variety saying: “No matter what happens, her reputation is being tarnished, whether her campaign did something or not.”
The only way to beat the bullies is to go watch the movie. You will love it.