2027 Oscar Predictions: One-Sided Political Movies are Oscar Bait but Box Office Bores

That awful moment has arrived at long last. Hollywood will start to roll out its “right-wing” movies, wherein they examine the other half of the country like insects in a jar and attempt to tell stories about them. They are always laughably bad, at least if you aren’t inside the bubble of the Left. They are most likely to bomb at the box office but will always have the Oscar race as a soft place to land.

At the top of that list is the truly groan-worthy Sean Penn January 6th movie starring Bradley Cooper as a cop who gets swept up in it and then, supposedly, becomes a national hero. We need another word to describe what only half of the country thinks. I doubt it would ever occur to Sean Penn that he is preaching to just one side of America. The other side will mock the film ruthlessly on social media.

When One Battle After Another swept, even after costing way too much and not even cracking $100 million here, that was mostly the beginning of the end for the Oscars being a way to prop up the film industry. The disconnect was never so dramatic as it was last year because COVID has been left behind, and Sinners was sitting right there.

Had I never escaped the bubble, ventured over to the other side of the aisle, and gotten to know that world as it actually is, rather than through the unreliable narrators who cover film, culture, and politics, I would probably be very excited about Sean Penn’s January 6th movie. As it is, I feel like I’ve already seen it. We know the story. We’ve been hearing it for ten years, even before January 6th.

What we won’t hear is any kind of truth about what really happened that day. If the film were about, say, Capitol Police Chief Stephen Sund, I might be interested, but Sean Penn would never dare tell that story; like everyone else on the Left, he is, at heart, a totalitarian who plays only for one team, and that team insists Trump is a dictator, fascist, “King,” etc. It is so dull by now, and there are literally no words left for them to use. But their campaign to dehumanize, demonize, and marginalize the other half of the country continues apace.

It won’t, for instance, tell the whole story of 2020. They certainly won’t tell of the damage caused to ordinary citizens and their small businesses because none of that matters when it comes to the game of politics and propaganda.

Can you imagine anyone in Hollywood telling THAT story? There are hundreds more like that Hollywood is too afraid to touch. The river can only flow in one direction, and what a shame that is.

But yes, I expect Sean Penn’s January 6th movie will do very well at the Oscars. He just won his third so he’s a high priest inside utopia.

One person who dipped a toe into offering a somewhat more truthful depiction of this crazy moment we’re living through was Ari Aster with Eddington, among last year’s best films. And yet, Aster is now back with what appears to be a Charlie Kirk movie called Scapegoat. Since so many on the Left were happy it was coming, I can only conclude it reflects their bizarre and twisted viewpoint of who Charlie Kirk was, which does not reflect reality.

I would hope that Aster shows what really happened after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, wherein both the Left and a large portion of the Right lost their minds and exhibited some of the worst behavior I’ve ever seen. Here are a collection of the tweets I gathered after his death of those on the Left mocking him and his wife.

To the Left, because he is a traditional Christian who has said things that have been taken out of context, cherry-picked, then dropped into the churn (we’re all guilty of falling for this), he is worthy of this level of dehumanization and abuse, and in fact, worthy of being shot.

Amanda Seyfried said as much on social media, saying his hateful words meant he got what he deserved (in so many words), and now she’s saying she had to hire a bodyguard. Well, Charlie Kirk got thousands of more death threats than Seyfried will ever get in her life and had an entire security team and was still shot dead.

Charlie Kirk had a right, too, but someone shot him to shut him up. He deserved, at the very least, common decency.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the Right took it to an even more insane place. I know, the mind reels that there could be anything worse than thousands of people displaying their inhumanity on social media but there is. Sociopathic grifter Candace Owens has spent months dragging Charlie’s widow, Erika, through the mud with one conspiracy after another, claiming that it was secretly Israel that killed Charlie because he was not willing to disinvite Tucker Carlson to a Turning Point event, angering some of the donors.

The “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” started immediately after his death, according to a reformed antisemite named Lucas Gage who gave a lengthy interview explaining how it started long before Candace Owens ever got her hands on it.

And it gets weirder. Tucker Carlson is out there insisting it’s the same because inside the Groyper movement, it has to be the Jews because the Jews are responsible for all the world’s evil.

Tyler Robinson is on trial now for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. His lover, who was either transgender or on the way, is set to testify against him. Yet, somehow, it’s become DA JOOOOOS!

Ordinarily, I would be thrilled that Ari Aster was tackling this, but so far it does not sound very promising:

The last person who should be depicted as at fault here is Erika Kirk, his widow, and yet that is what it appears the film will be about. I’m not sure what else this woman is expected to take. She is the subject of ongoing bullying, harassment, and death threats now. They go after her looks, her past, her eyes, her hair, her clothes. And much of this is from the right, with truly psychotic women piling on, like Carrie Prejean Boller:

I bring it all up because I know most of you reading this will never know any of this because you do not follow these people or news from his side, but unfortunately for me, I follow both sides, and the death of Charlie Kirk has brought out the absolute worst, Left and Right.

But Ari Aster, like everyone else in Hollywood, is required to adhere to one point of view, even if he gently prods the Left. He can never step too far outside of the rules, or else his career will be ruined. That is what people live with in Hollywood now. They are one risky choice away from total career ruination, and I’m here to tell you that all of the best stories come from their side, only no one has the courage to tell those stories.

So, I’m not expecting this Ari Aster movie to be as good as Eddington if it’s about the widow generating conspiracy theories. If so, he got it wrong. The Left will love it, and the Oscars will flood in as they did last year because the river only moves in one direction.

Eddington was too critical of the Left to get anywhere near the Oscars, though it absolutely deserved a Screenplay nomination if nothing else. Perhaps now, if he hits the Right harder, they will deign to honor his work.

Speaking of which, Luca Guadagnino has become the Left’s latest martyr after his film was yanked from MGM Amazon and is now seeking a new distributor. Of course, this means to them that Jeff Bezos lost his shit because of a recent deal with Open AI. And fair enough:

This likely means the film will do much better with the Oscars because now it has the kind of Oscar story voters like: it goes up against the big bad Amazon machine. What we don’t know is whether there is any truth to that. Why would these two billionaire companies care about a little indie movie? But who knows? Maybe there is something to it.

It does seem like a heck of a coincidence. Perhaps they wanted to avoid any controversy or comments about what’s in the film, or maybe they saw it as a conflict of interest. Most of the reactions on X seem to indicate that it is a take-down of AI in general, which is the current vibe, or at least a brewing conflict in Hollywood as AI is set to replace thousands of jobs done by humans.

And indeed, that’s a real fear. I think Hollywood screwed itself by becoming a utopian cult that ruled with cancel culture and fear, and thus, rendered storytelling propaganda at best. Also, I’m not as fearful of AI as others are. I see it as a creative tool that can facilitate movie-making, and if the writing is good enough, the movie will be good.

This short film was made by a guy who could not get his scripts sold, no matter what he did, so he just made a movie himself. How could anyone object to that level of creative freedom?

I watched Robert Gaudette’s short film that Joe Russo is squawking about, and honestly, it’s pretty good. I love the idea that anyone can make a movie, and may the best writing win. Sorry, Hollywood. You had a chance to make great movies, but you instead chose to obey the strident rules and make movies you could almost not pay people to watch.

And the problem is that the Oscar voters, and the awards hive mind in particular, have been far too forgiving of not-so-great movies for far too long, and all of that combined killed the business.

The bottom line is that they love controversial films as long as they hit the “right” targets and not so much if they feel the heat on their own lawn. So that means these three films, at least as far as I can tell from here, seem to be strong Oscar gets (though will likely bomb at the box office because Americans are sick up to here of it, all of it).

Fjord is one of the few films coming out this year that attempts to tackle what has been happening on the progressive Left. I can only hope it does well and that they don’t shun it out of spite.

And that, my friends, is why we all have such a hard time curating the Oscars every year. Best Picture should be a no-brainer. It shouldn’t be the movie the critics anoint as the “resistance” anthem. It should be the best movie, and right now, that movie is Project Hail Mary, which is why it is the frontrunner.

Here are my pointless predictions:

Best Picture
Project Hail Mary
The Odyssey
Fjord
Wild Horse Nine
The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Dune Part III
The Black Ball
Digger
Obsession
Behemoth!

Director
Lord & Miller, Project Hail Mary
David Fincher, The Adventures of Cliff Booth
Martin McDonagh, Wild Horse 9
Christian Mungiu, Fjord
The Javiers, The Black Ball

Actor
Ryan Gosling, Project Hail Mary
Tom Cruise, Digger
Sebastian Stan, Fjord
John Malkovich, Wild Horse Nine
Jafar Jackson, Michael

Actress
Julianne Moore, No One Cares
Renate Reinsve, Fjord
Michelle Williams, A Place in Hell
Sandra Huller, Fatherland
Cynthia Erivo, Prima Facie

That’s all for now. Have a nice weekend.