The Oscars are in search of a host now that Jimmy Kimmel and the better option, John Mulaney, have both opted out. Who can blame them? It is not an easy gig. The bad ratings are blamed on you and any even mildly offensive joke could end your career. When I heard Mulaney dropped out I thought, there goes that dream.
Pictured here in this Vanity Fair column with Jimmy Kimmel and John Mulaney alongside the headline that they both are passing on the Oscars.
The ideal host for the Oscars remains Ricky Gervais. They do not dare to go there, not a chance. But it is what Hollywood deserves by now, and it would drive ratings sky high. Ricky Gervais is a truth-telling legend, which is the only thing comedy is really good for – ripping off the layer of artifice and getting at the truth.
They won’t choose Gervais; he might not even want to do it. Next in line would be another person who would not want to do it, and that’s Chris Rock. He is just as good at truth-telling, even when it is offensive.
But let’s look at it a different way. If you are new here, and you do not know me, know this: I do not write about the Oscars like your average film critic or blogger does. I write about them more from a critical perspective. I am not tribal on the Left, I have humanized Trump and his supporters. I do not draw that line. I try to speak in terms that are macro, rather than micro.
To that end, here is how I see Hollywood right now. They have built for themselves an insular bubble. That bubble reaches across all institutions of culture, education, publishing, and news media. They all have a shared reality because they follow the same news. Their friends all think the same thing. What they think is what Jamie Lee Curtis, Demi Moore, Jeff Bridges, Barbra Streisand, Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver all think. There are some who are attempting to break out of the bubble, Truman Show style, or if you will, taking the red pill from the Matrix. Bill Maher is one of those. He’s so open-minded he hosted both the Hawk Tuah girl and Armie Hammer on his podcast.
The reason George Orwell, the genius that he was, wrote 1984 was because he found that the Communist ideal he once believed in was just as bad as the fascism he opposed. He fought Hitler’s fascism on the side of the Communists (like J. Robert Oppenheimer did once upon a time and was later punished for that by our government). But Orwell, like Oppenheimer, became disillusioned with Communism when they saw what Stalin did after the revolution. They saw it as authoritarian as fascism but almost worse because it claimed to be helping “the people.”
Everything we are living through now is in Orwell’s 1984. It kind of amazing how right he was. We even have our Goldstein figure in Trump and the two minutes of hate….for almost ten years by now.
Goldstein is obviously “The Jew” per Hitler, but it also works as any kind of propaganda to keep people scared and compliant. But the Trump figure the Left believes exists doesn’t. He speaks in a language we all used to speak before we changed our language to make it less offensive. He says things no one on the Left would ever say and that is terrifying. But it’s really more about “something Trump said” than anything he did.
So why does this matter? Because Hollywood has built something that looks a lot like Oceana in 1984. It isn’t just Hollywood. It is “the Left.” It is the utopia, or Woketopia, built by people like me way back in 2008. The smartphone, social media, and Barack Obama all hit at the same time. That allowed us to build a more perfect world, mostly driven by a strong coalition of like-minded people online.
As that grew, we kind of forgot that there was such a thing as real life. I didn’t realize it until I drove across the country in 2020, amid the chaos on the streets. I drove through blue states, red states. I saw how Americans really live. I saw the poverty and the wealth. I saw the churches and the stripper joints. I saw the big cities and the abandoned towns. I saw the Trump signs festooned on trailers and in fields. I saw farms, I saw mansions. I saw it all and I thought — this is a very big country. It’s full of so many different kinds of people. At the same time, I began to see how insulated all of us had become, especially creative people who run Hollywood.
Since then, I’ve noticed that storytelling has gotten weaker as Hollywood became less connected to the everyday reality of Americans. Jokes got less funny. All that seemed to matter was that we were all dedicated to the ideals of the utopia we built. And that, sorry to say, is BORING.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that in choosing a host it’s necessary to understand what Hollywood and the Oscars have become. There is an “inside” and there is an “outside.” Ideally, the host can straddle both. But the Academy has chosen and will likely choose someone that people on the “inside” approve of. That means there will be a cap on their ratings. They won’t go any higher because we’re still with the powerful minority as opposed to the less powerful, disinterested majority.
You with me so far?
So people who cover film, Film Twitter, are throwing around names like John Oliver and Tom Hanks. That’s fine, but these are people who will do nothing for ratings if ratings are your goal. If ratings aren’t your goal, then it doesn’t matter. The Oscars have two paths forward – one path leads to streaming where there are no market pressures like ratings and everyone can enjoy life on the “inside.” The other path is to open the gates to the castle walls and let the unwashed masses inside, the Trump voters, even Trump himself. If they could do that, ratings would be solved overnight.
But we know they can’t do that. They (most of you) live in an “us vs. them” mindset. You want to keep them out of your utopia. Or your “inside.” So they are forced now to build outside of it, what Milan Kundera called a gulag on the other side of eden:
“Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way, and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.”
We’re already seeing that all over TikTok and Youtube. What I love about human beings is that art finds a way. When a system bottlenecks and free expression is no longer welcome, people simply start creating it anyway.
So, here are some names that I think would solve the problems for the Oscars, depending on their ultimate goals.
To maintain status on the “inside” and avoid the agonizing think pieces in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, these are the acceptable names:
Jon Stewart
Tom Hanks
David Letterman
Whoopi Goldberg
Ru Paul
Kirsten Wiig and Will Ferrell as co-hosts
Jim Carey (he probably would not do it)
Larry David
If the goal is to boost ratings and bring in people from the outside:
Ricky Gervais
Chris Rock
Jerry Seinfeld
Joe Rogan
Tim Dillon
Shane Gillis
Dave Chapelle
Kevin Hart
Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell
Tom Cruise (he would never do it)
Of the two groups, it’s a no-brainer of which of them I would watch. Do I think the Academy is going to be the one major award show to escape the bubble? I do not. I think they will pick someone acceptable, like Jimmy Kimmel, to the kinds of people who were just on the “White Women for Kamala Harris” or “White Men for Kamala Harris” fundraising phone calls.
So, to my mind, they will never boost their ratings beyond that one small segment of people who are still interested. That’s also true of box office numbers, cable news ratings, etc. American culture is controlled by and aimed at a powerful minority and that ain’t gonna bring in the eyeballs.
If I were the Academy and wanted to be bigger rather than go to pasture on streaming, I’d invite Julian Sewell and other TikTok comedians to show up and do a bit. Sewell, in particular, is a viral moment waiting to happen, one of the funniest people on TikTok, but also in this really specific way that awards people would appreciate.
Ultimately, the Oscars should aim to at least maintaining their ratings, if nothing else. We’re in the middle of a massive transformation across all industries now. We don’t know where it is going to end up, but I do know how people “out there” feel about Hollywood and the Oscars. They are disinterested at best. Can that be fixed? I don’t know. I do not feel hopeful about that. I feel like it’s an empire that is in collapse and that once it does come down, the rebuild will be spectacular and will include everyone, not just the special people.
That’s all I got for now.
