It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Oscar ratings were down. They dropped about 2 million on network television (and streaming combined), landing around 18 million this year after hovering near 20 million last year. But the real story isn’t ratings vs. streaming. It’s much bigger and deeper than that.
The decline has less to do with the fall of network TV and the rise of streaming than with a widespread lack of interest in films and Hollywood itself. Celebrities were invented to sell movie tickets—so were the Oscars. The public likes celebrities less and less, finds most movies unwatchable, and doesn’t think they’re worth the time. The Academy didn’t create this problem, and it can’t fix it. Hollywood is an empire in collapse. Unless it pivots dramatically—or until it collapses entirely—it will stay on life support.
Most people who cover Hollywood can’t speak the truth, even if they see it. They’re forbidden from doing so, and they know it. Look at me: a cautionary tale. I can’t tell you how many friends I have who support me in secret, living quiet lives of desperation, terrified to speak their minds. They’ve simply accepted this as reality—never challenging it, fighting back, or trying to change it.
Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Sean Penn, Adam McKay, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and all the self-serving celebrities who pretend to be outspoken and brave are just pushing the same deceptive lies the Left has told itself for years. If you shun half the country—if every joke, movie, and TV show reflects only one way of thinking—your industry will collapse. It’s only a matter of time. They can’t see it because of their shared enemy, their mass delusion: Donald Trump.
Hollywood lost its mind over Trump’s 2016 win and destroyed itself in the process. I hope to write a book about it someday, because I lived through it. Nothing like this has ever happened in America before, largely because we’ve never lived through the internet era as we are now. The rise of Barack Obama and social media let us all build an insular bubble that many on the Left still mistake for reality. It wasn’t.
Trump’s win hit like the Devil riding into Salem for a people without religion, having escaped it during the 1960s counterculture. After decades of filling that void with sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, cults, and self-help, politics became the substitute. Obama became a god-like figure, making the Left desperate not just to be good but to be seen as Good People Doing Good Things. That required casting Trump as the ultimate bad guy, with his supporters as sworn enemies threatening our utopia.
As you can see, ratings started dipping in 2016. Hollywood aligned itself with Obama as one massive cult-like religion, encompassing major cultural institutions, corporations, and media. They declared themselves the “resistance”: you’re with us or against us.
It got worse—mass hysteria swept the online Left over racism and sexual assault, with Trump tried and convicted in the court of public opinion, yet still winning by a slim Electoral College margin. Everything that happened to the Left echoed Salem in 1692 for the same reasons: no ridding the village of witchcraft once the belief takes hold. It became impossible to see Trump as the guy everyone knew for decades. Now he was Voldemort—the living embodiment of evil to the Left: heterosexual, masculine, white, male, saying whatever he wants, making offensive jokes, representing the world before Woketopia.
“Goodness” became the foundational religion. Hollywood movies had to reflect it. Filmmakers and actors had to be good and signal virtue on social media. But goodness requires a named bad—and that bad became average working-class Americans who remember the good old days of Animal House, Mad Magazine, and The Godfather. To be good, you point the finger at those people over there.
If you’re a business relying on ticket sales or ratings, how do you appeal to people you’ve demonized and shunned for a decade? You can’t. You don’t even know them anymore.
Woody Allen’s Sleeper captures the utopian Left better than almost anything—even though his “resistance” is Communist. It shows two realities: Diane Keaton’s brave new world, cut off from reality and controlled by propaganda, a ruling class pampered but stripped of the foundational freedom art requires. It’s clearly riffing on 1984, which also templates what happened when we built a Shining Woketopia online.
Those two minutes of hate are obviously Trump and MAGA—for the same reasons. Hate them, fear becoming one of them. To humanize the millions who voted for Trump (twice) means surrendering that GOODNESS—the Left’s religion. They’re not willing to give it up. They still want to be seen as Good People Doing Good Things. That’s why no one watches the Oscars anymore and why movies feel unbearable. They don’t reflect reality; they’re a flattering mirror for the people who make, produce, star in, and award them.
And I speak the language of the Left, so I know they see the migrants and trans people as the ones being hated, and there is some truth to that, but 1984 and Sleeper are about the dominant media and culture that controls society. That hasn’t been the Right since the 1950s. It’s the Left that has been in control of it ever since. When the box office mattered, when ratings mattered, the people had to matter, but the new model for streaming is to forget about them and double down on utopia via streaming sites like Netflix, which will eliminate box-office pressure and allow utopia to flourish.
I don’t think Hollywood wants to fix the problem. What they want is utopia back. Guys like Adam McKay don’t want to make art for everyone. They only want the right people to consume their films. Same with Jimmy Kimmel and anyone else on the Left. That is why there is so much outsider media on podcasts, YouTube, and TikTok. Culture is being reinvented by necessity.
Fixing it won’t mean appealing to MAGA. Hollywood would not know how to do that even if they wanted to. The idea is to stop demonizing, dehumanizing, and shunning half the country, making them the named evil that if only they would treat Trump like the Devil incarnate, all would be forgiven. That’s why it’s an impossible goal because it not only means giving up on the mass delusion of Trump as a named evil, but it also means giving up on Obama as the named God. Can the Left do that? I do not think so, personally. I think culture will have to be built outside of them, and that with enough competition, they will be forced out of their insulated bubble.
The Academy, however, can fix the problem pretty quickly with the Oscar race, and that is to do the following:
- Shrink Best Picture down to five. Expand International Feature and give the Oscar to the director, not the country. That will improve the Oscars tremendously and make people excited about the movies — it’s a first step. We’ll also get big Oscar sweeps again, which we never do anymore, thanks to the expanded ballot.
- Many will pressure the Academy to shorten the season. They like the “wham bam thank you ma’am” of it because bloggers and critics now control the Oscars. Why were they so predictable? That’s why.
- Abandon the DEI mandate now that Sinners didn’t win Best Picture. The mandate failed, and the ruling class will have to live with the consequences.
- Movies should be shown in movie theaters to be considered. There should be a separate category for streaming-only. I realize Netflix has a huge investment in the Academy and is as much of an insider now as anyone ever has been. But Netflix and all streaming, along with AI and online content, should be a separate thing from movies in movie theaters. There is no reason for these industries to overlap.
- Get a host who is not afraid of insulting the ruling class of Hollywood. Ricky Gervais is a start. When the complaints come in, tell them to pound sand.
Those will fix some of the problems. But they won’t fix all of the problems. People like me invented this game of Oscar watching. It was supposed to predict the Oscars, but now it’s to shape and define them, and it’s been this way for a long time. No one wants to rock the boat because they’re all getting paid. Erik Anderson of AwardsWatch, Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture, little sites, and the biggest sites like Penske Media are making insane amounts of money to shape the race.
But they are PR for the publicists. That is what they are, and it is what I used to be. I still am happy to push Focus Features because they had the balls to advertise on this site when every other studio ran screaming. So I get it. And there is no way to put the toothpaste back in the tube. There is nothing the Academy can do about this except for one thing. They can start inviting in and including the other half of the country for commentary. Meaning, invite the Daily Wire or other conservatives to cover and attend the Oscars. Don’t just invite those who are obedient to the Left’s dictates.
Finally, it’s time to give up the Woketopian ideal after this year’s Oscars. Sinners was the film that should have won, even if lots of people don’t agree. They say “these aren’t Oscar-worthy movies,” but they don’t know what “Oscar-worthy” means. All it should mean is high achievement in film, with specific measures of success. Those measures should not just be made by bloggers but also by the public. That is why Sinners should have won. As long as movies have to make money, movies will have to be better. If movies are better, people will be more interested in the Oscars.
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