OPINION | BRADLEY GITZ: Goodbye to Oscar

With the possible exception of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Tom Landry's Cowboys, there was nothing that mattered more to me growing up than movies.

Which meant that the Oscars mattered too.

I memorized all the winners dating back through time and tried to see as many as I could (no easy task before the VCR, but one of my go-to sources was the WGN Late Night Movie, which I remember having Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" as its theme song).

I made a special effort to see all of the best picture nominees every year at our two downtown theaters, although this sometimes proved difficult for a different reason: having to sneak into movies that had an "R" rating (or even an "X," the original rating for "A Clockwork Orange" and "Midnight Cowboy") when I was only 13 or 14 and looked every bit of it. I usually pulled it off, but still remember slinking away in defeated embarrassment when the lady in the booth laughed when I tried to buy a ticket to "Straw Dogs."

My favorites didn't always win best picture--I probably had about the same expression on my face as William Peter Blatty when they announced that "The Exorcist" had lost out to "The Sting"--but it still seemed that just about everything that had Oscar associated with it was worth seeing.

Things began to change a bit when the incomprehensible ("Kramer vs. Kramer" winning over "Apocalypse Now" in 1980) was followed by the downright bizarre (the Hallmark execrable "Ordinary People" winning over "Raging Bull" in 1981).

As is often the way of such things, disillusionment gradually turned into indifference that eventually turned into contempt.

By the time the present century rolled around (only old people can say things like that), I had generally stopped watching and caring much about who and what won.

Although I once tried with great difficulty to see best picture winners from way before I was born, I now make little effort to see the latest, even though all it takes is streaming from Netflix or putting the DVD on our mailing queue. And I don't feel at all intellectually deprived by that.

Politics undoubtedly had something to do with this shift, both the Oscars' and mine. As the years passed the Oscars became more overtly political and I found myself becoming more irritated by the unnecessary intrusion of the political into more and more things.

These days the kinds of movies celebrated by the Academy seem to be mostly cinematic exercises in left-wing agitprop and virtue-signaling. Kyle Smith notes in National Review, regarding this year's show, that "the first awards, in order, went to movies about these subjects: toxic masculinity, Alzheimer's, alcohol abuse, racism, racism, racism."

Once the Academy was accused of that most despicable of all things, being "too white" (which makes about as much sense as accusing the NBA of being "too Black"), it was only a matter of time before identity politics and diversity quotas (now in place for best picture nomination consideration) would dictate winners and losers and thus fatally impair the meritocratic principle that undergirds the award concept.

Politics obviously has its place, but it also invariably destroys that which it infects when the infected is not formally and intentionally political, all the more so when, as with the politics of Hollywood, it is so boring and obnoxious.

If one believes that films can be an art form (a belief reinforced for me every time I watch "Rear Window" or "Dr. Strangelove"), then it is hard to imagine anything more poisonous than the idea of politically correct woke art, that the making of films would be expected to follow a party line and be praised according to the nature of their ideological content and degree of ideological conformity.

When I was young it seemed like every family in our neighborhood watched the Oscars together in their living rooms on the big, glamorous night. The Academy Awards were a national cultural institution and event.

In stark contrast, just one in every 33 Americans watched this year's Oscars (under 10 million in a country of 331 million). The pandemic influenced this but doesn't explain why last year's show also set a record low in viewership.

Anyone familiar with its history knows that Tinseltown politics has generally tilted leftward, but usually not in a way that insulted movie-goers and Oscar viewers and the country they inhabit.

I've discovered that once something reaches a certain degree of politicization I abruptly drop it from my life, never to return. And that it is easier to do that when it comes to matters of popular culture because so much of it is bad anyway and there are so many other options.

It was, along these lines, surprisingly easy to find other things to do on Sunday afternoons last fall as the NFL took its deep dive into woke politics.

You can, for instance, always pick up a good book and count the time well spent.

Since, once you go woke, it's hard not to try to always be more so, the hunch is that the woke Oscars are here to stay.

And that ever more people will join me in finding other things to do than watch them.


Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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