In almost every industry but the Oscars, there is a sense of building up from scratch. It’s a new dawn and a new day, not for those still heartbroken over the election, and there are many of those, but everywhere else. Why? Because they remembered what this country was invented for. Opportunity and merit. Nothing has hit Hollywood harder than those who run it on a quest for absolution, to be seen as “good people doing good things” rather than simply giving audiences what they want.
Film awards are the one place where people should earn them based on excellence and not the hunger for absolution, a need for a greater sense of purpose. Might as well abandon them and turn them into something else. They’re either a competition for best or they’re not. A competition for best means there is a high bar everyone must meet and if they can get there, great movies are left in their wake. But that driving force is long gone.
It was a well-intentioned disaster that has alienated millions in this country who simply do not watch movies anymore, let alone the Oscars. It isn’t enough to write it off and think, “Oh, they’re just ignorant racists,” as Sharon Stone recently said.
She is looking more like the card players in Sunset Boulevard than someone anyone in Hollywood should listen to. Hollywood hasn’t quite gotten how the internet has changed how we see celebrities, have conversations about them, and how little they matter. In the old days, they gave back more than they took. Now, it seems like they want everything from us and give us so little back — they want to fix, change, and tell us how to think. Why would that fly in 2024? It doesn’t.
But here’s the good news. There is a slight re-adjustment happening throughout the country now. It hasn’t hit Hollywood yet, but it’s on its way. It goes something like this: our utopia was a good effort to make things better. we gave it a good go but then it became dystopian and paralyzing. Now, it’s time to start over.
It was a good sign, I thought, that Deadline posted this on Twitter:
Not only did they announce Matt Walsh would be interviewed, presumably by Pete Hammond, but they posted it on Twitter/X, where it was ratio’d by people who are angry that they would betray the rules of utopia by talking to a guy who made a documentary that made $12 million and is eligible for the Oscars. If the Academy nominated Am I Racist, which they won’t, that would do for them what this will do for Deadline. It’s a thawing out, a door slowly opening, an invitation to the millions who have been cast out.
I bring this to you on the eve of Thanksgiving to tell you that all is not lost. What I mean by that is they recognize that things are changing and they’re changing fast. Clinging to a utopian vision of what life should be like, locking yourselves away from the broader conversations happening outside the bubble is industry suicide, even for Penske’s empire.
I can guarantee you that more people will tune in to watch Matt on this series than all of the contenders ever. Here is the lineup and, as you might imagine, it’s 99% in compliance with the dictates of utopia – the right people, the right ideas, etc. Except one. And that one person will be responsible for bringing in thousands of viewers — and not a single other one could. That’s the truth.
Once Matt Walsh submitted Am I Racist to the Oscars, a Clayton Davis piece appeared to call him a hypocrite for wanting to be accepted by Liberal Hollywood.
With due respect to my friend Clayton, who has every right to write whatever he wants, I think he misjudged Matt Walsh’s intentions. He doesn’t need validation by Hollywood so much as he wants people to see the film and have a conversation about things no one else on the Left would dare talk about. Matt hit Clayton back in a daily cancelation piece:
Both Variety and Deadline fall under Penske ownership and are now in direct conflict with each other about this movie. I give them props for adding the only documentary most people have even heard about this year.
It might not seem like a big deal to you. In fact, it might seem like the end of the world. And in some ways it is. It’s the end of an old world and is a reset for what will be the new world, and hopefully, out of that transformation, there can be merit returned to Hollywood, where the best directors compete to make the best films that audiences want to pay to see. Just when I thought it was hopeless and no one would muster the courage to stare down the praetorian guard, the Penske empire surprised me.
That’s not the only sign that things are thawing out. Disney and other corporations recently announced they’d gotten over themselves and would advertise on Twitter/X. Why that matters: we are a better country when we can share stories, and many of those stories are delivered to us via advertising. If you navigate the two Americas you’ll quickly see how we’ve been separated and divided into groups. One group has all of the big, important companies with their “woke” advertising, and the other group has companies you’ve never heard of. They attempt to reflect on what they think their buyers want, but all that does is remind us how separate we have become.
The Conservative site, the Daily Wire, has presented a direct challenge to Hollywood’s studio system. They’re making their own feature films and now, have produced their first theatrical release with Am I Racist. It’s a beginning. And perhaps other new studios will follow in their footsteps to build outside a system that has become crippled by its own dogma.
Will other documentarians pull their movies to avoid appearing alongside Matt Walsh? I hope not. I would not put it past the strident activists with clipboards who are angry at Matt Walsh not because of DEI but because of his opinion on transgender people, but especially children.
So maybe that will happen. Maybe the whole event will be canceled, and Deadline will issue an apology with a commitment to protect the fragile sensibilities of their shrinking readership. One thing that won’t happen is studios won’t pull their ads from Penske as they did with my site because of one stupid story in The Holllywood Reporter. Either way, no matter what happens to this site or Deadline’s event, this is a brave step in the right direction and I’m thankful for it.
Ordinarily I would not want to promote this and not because of Matt Walsh — we all have to get to a place where we can breathe and have conversations. Words are not harm. Ideas can be batted around. We’re all adults here. No, it’s that Clarence Moye built his site and named it The-Contenders. Then, Penske corp threatened to sue, claiming they had the right to the name, that the word “contenders” belonged to them, which is insane.
Clarence then changed the site’s name to The Contending, which is harder to remember. So I don’t want to give the Contender series any publicity, but in this case, because they are taking what I believe is a brave stand in our punitive, uptight, puritanical climate of fear, then it’s worth talking about.
The two industries that need to be free to be truthful and honest are journalism and filmmaking. I continue to hope that things will start to change. This is, to me, a good first step. We’ll see where it goes from here.
