It is probably futile to say anything. We all know how the next month will go, and we all know why. The smarter among us understand that there are two Americas with two competing worldviews — or two completely separate realities. One reason this happened is that Hollywood and culture took a side against the other side of the country in 2016, something that’s never happened in my lifetime and probably never in Hollywood history. The idea was always that box office mattered, so the people had to matter. You’d hear sneering jokes in movies and TV shows, like “but will it play in the flyover states?”
Now, Hollywood hates the other half of the country. They don’t just exist in a separate reality; they actively hate them, as we saw last night at the Grammys. Billie Eilish, whose own home is on “stolen land,” decided to virtue signal, as one does, by saying “no human is illegal on stolen land.” The Democrats, therefore, must sell open borders because they support this. They pretend it’s about ICE, but is it really? I don’t think Americans are so sure. For instance, here is a compilation video of how Democrats used to talk.
Billie Eilish likely owns a home on “stolen land.” Perhaps we should start a petition to have her give it back. That would be quite the award show. Everyone on the Left should give back their mansions, their ranches, their Aspen getaways.
American culture united with the ruling class over the past 15 years, thanks to the rise of the internet, the iPhone, and Barack Obama. A new “Camelot” was built largely online, and thus, the Left has a distorted perception of its own popularity and power. They measure that with likes and views. But there are 350 million people here. We generally decide things by elections, but the ruling class doesn’t believe the people should have a voice in how their country is run, so instead they use their fame and their power to alienate them and treat them like human garbage: do what we want or else.
I am ashamed, frankly, to have ever been part of a group that has now become, at best, a totalitarian bubble that demands compliance or, at worst, a fascist-like dystopia. Culture can’t survive that. All of it must feed the beast, as it would under any totalitarian regime – send the same message, say the same thing, never push the envelope.
I don’t know what the ratings for the Grammys will be. I also know the Oscars have decided to move to YouTube because they know ratings will be a problem for them. The Grammys, however, showed much of America that they weren’t welcome. Trevor Noah even led a round of applause that Nicki Minaj wasn’t there and they somehow think that will make the public like them more, or maybe they don’t care anymore.
These award shows, like movies, like television shows, like late-night comedy, used to bring us together under one big tent with a shared story. That’s not true anymore, and everyone knows it. That is why Melania made more films than many in the Oscar race, and it’s why One Battle After Another will never feel like a failure, becoming the most expensive Best Picture winner since Titanic. The economics of Hollywood mean nothing to a ruling class that no longer needs audiences or viewers or ticket buyers.
The Academy will do its best to keep the show non-political. But they also know who will be in that audience and what they need to feel valid and worthy. They know they have to find that balance between appeasing these pampered, insulated aristocrats and also somehow getting decent ratings. The romance between Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner, along with the popularity of Marty Supreme, might bring in viewers.
But all of that work will prove fatal for the Academy if the celebrities decide, as they did at the Grammys, that this should be their pulpit to preach to the choir for the applause, for the approval, for the likes. I guess it’s unavoidable since they found their exact perfect virtue signal in One Battle After Another, which gives them everything they want and need in one movie. It will be trapped in time and the perfect symbol for today’s Left, which, admittedly, is a weird place for Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon to sit, but here we are.
As I’ve been saying for years, there is no saving any of this. If they had critical thinkers among them who could set them straight, like Ricky Gervais, for instance, they might be able to pivot. But they don’t. They have a magic mirror in the press – entertainment and hard news – to tell them always who is the fairest of them all: YOU ARE.
There is no saving, there is only building outside of, building anew. No one gives up power willingly, and one side of the political divide amassed too much of it, so much that even democracy and the free market could not shake them out of it.
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