There was a time, a very long time ago, when there was a disconnect between the critics and the industry. Why didn’t Citizen Kane beat How Green Was My Valley? People like Bill Maher want to know. That’s why I started my website back in 1999. I wanted to know why, too. Well, now I know why. It’s not rocket science. The critics didn’t matter as much as the ticket-buying public,
In fact, the whole reason there were movie stars at all was to drive ticket sales. When Hollywood had to please the public and sometimes the critics, movies were better. There was a reason for gold statues. Now, they are but a period on the end of a long, agonizing sentence where everyone thinks exactly the same way, in perfect alignment, in mass formation.
There is a beautiful scene at the end of Ryan Coogler’s misunderstood Film, Sinners, where Sammy asks the vampires if they looked back on that day just before the vampires came and felt free? They did, they said.
Most people didn’t get Sinners. But even those who didn’t understand what it was really about were still entertained by it. People on the Right saw Sinners as a DEI thing, which it never was. It earned its place the good old-fashioned way, by being a hit and bringing in audiences all over the country. Does that seem Oscar-worthy? Many would say no. I say yes.
And just as this film remembers that one brief moment, I will remember the brief moment when it looked like Sinners might actually win, that the Academy would reward success, not to virtue signal or to do a favor to a minority group to feel better about themselves, but because the film deserved it. We measure its worth not by THE MESSAGE but by the box office, the reviews, the audience reviews – where Sinners soared way past One Battle After Another.
So some of us dared to dream, and of course, our dreams were cut short by mass formation psychosis. A group of voters who think alike, read the same news, and exist in the same utopian bubble that tells them they are the underclass, when in reality, they are the ruling class that loves a movie that calls the other half of the country racist NOW, as opposed to one that called them racist back during the Jim Crow South.
So here we are now.
Take a good long look at that sign. Those proportions are correct, and the Academy will never live it down. Not after their 2024 DEI mandate all but ruined movies forever, or the 3,000 new members mostly “of color”, not after the Golden Globes were canceled and sold to Jay Penske, and they brought in voters “of color,” not after the select juries at the BAFTA, they still walked away from the chance to award a film by a black director that was successful in its own right, power that didn’t need to be given, but power that was earned. Shame on all of them.
With their snide shaming of Timothée Chalamet, they brought out a ballet dancer during I Lied to You (which then did not even win Best Song), and they even cut short Michael B. Jordan’s deserved win by making it look like Chalamet blew his chances to win by dunking on ballet and opera. That isn’t true. Whatever lost Chalamet the Oscar, that story didn’t go viral until after voting closed. It was just yet another example of the industry needing to pat itself on the back and posture moral superiority. They can fool themselves. They can’t fool me.
How Green Was My Valley was in the top five at the box office in 1941, and Citizen Kane was not. True, William Randolph Hearst set about ruining the reputation and career of Orson Welles and scared off movie theaters from showing the film, and true that it is one of the greatest films ever made, but it would never have won Best Picture because the best movies almost never do.
Best is often something we judge over time, not in the moment. Most of the films that have won Best Picture over the past 15 years, no one would remember and probably never see, with one or two or three notable exceptions.
Lucky for Sinners it didn’t win. It will be remembered better for not having won. One Battle After Another, which won more awards than any film in awards history, taking the Gotham, the National Board of Review, both LA and New York Film Critics, the Golden Globes, the DGA, the PGA and the BAFTA, is a reflection of a group of people trapped inside a Doomsday Cult that lives out their fantasy every day that they are living under a “fascist dictator” and share this country with “racists.” No movie has ever captured that fleeting moment in the collapsing empire like One Battle After Another.
PTA might have satirized the revolutionaries, but he was dead serious about the revolution. It could have been so much better, but at the end of the day, he had to reflect the reality he knows. The awards race has exposed just how insular and out of touch they are, like Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, John Olive,r and all of the other bunker dwellers who routinely win awards.
What used to be different is that Hollywood didn’t tell stories for itself. The people had to matter, so the box office had to matter. Until that changes how the Academy votes, these voters — whether “of color” or not — along with the critics and pundits who brought this outcome about — will be trapped like a mosquito in amber, preserved as something that died long ago.
As for Oscar predicting, don’t go patting yourselves on the back for your high score. I’m not sure there has ever been a more predictable Oscars. All you had to do was follow the consensus, and you would have done fine. Clayton Davis will take a hit for going all in for Sinners, but he should not be punished for thinking better of the Academy and holding onto the hope that maybe this time they would do the right thing.
The Academy has done everything it can to push the voters out of their protective bubble. They have gone above and beyond the call of duty to salvage their reputation, only to find that, in 2026, a whole new generation will see the Oscars as not reflective of the reality they know. And the beat goes on.
In his acceptance speech, the ever-gracious Paul Thomas Anderson shouted out the movies that didn’t win in 1975 and how great they were. He’s right about that. The best movies rarely win. The Oscars are not about the best. They are about power. They are about status. That’s why they didn’t give it to Ryan Coogler. That’s not PTA’s fault. It is just the way it goes. Nobody gives up power willingly. The film has to flatter the right people and make them feel good about themselves, whether it’s How Green Was My Valley or One Battle After Another.
