Hollywood’s Richest Stars Spent Oscars Night Claiming They’re Oppressed

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At the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday, some of America’s richest and most beautiful people decided to inform their shrinking audience that they are exceedingly oppressed. They’re oppressed because the United States never recognizes Korean cinema, they’re oppressed because no one can ever speak their mind in this fascistic Trump regime, and they’re oppressed because every day, we draw closer to a dictatorship like that of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Right.

Kicking off the delusional evening, the co-director for the award-winning short film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” thanked the Academy “for supporting a film that is weird and that is queer and that is made by a majority of women!” This makes sense because Hollywood famously hates things that are weird and “queer” and involve women.

When “KPop Demon Hunters” rightly won multiple awards, including one for best animated feature — yes, I said rightly, go check it out on Netflix! — creator Maggie Kang used her acceptance speech to apologize “to Koreans everywhere.” Never mind that the Korean film “Parasite” won best picture in 2020 and that K-pop artists such as BTS and BLACKPINK have rabid followings here in America.

Kang must be stuck in 2015, when the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was trending. Now, we have Academy-mandated diversity quotas. But that didn’t stop Kang from shooting her shot at the oppression Olympics. “I am so sorry that it took so long to see us in a movie like this, but it is here. And that means that the next generations don’t have to go longing,” she said.

For her role in “Hamnet,” Jessie Buckley just became the first Irish woman to win Best Actress, and she didn’t say a thing.

Not to be outdone, Jimmy Kimmel, who was only at the Oscars to present awards for documentaries, decided to make the night about him. This can be hard to do as a straight white male in the current climate, but he found a way. 

“We hear a lot about courage at shows like this, but telling a story that could get you killed for telling it is real courage,” he said. “As you know, there are some countries whose leaders don’t support free speech. I’m not at liberty to say which. Let’s just leave it at North Korea and CBS.”

Kimmel is still upset that he claimed on air that Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a deranged right-winger, and the world noticed his lie. His jab at CBS appears to be a shot at the Left’s new favorite punching bag, Bari Weiss. CBS wasn’t biased before, of course, but now that it’s run by a conservative-adjacent figure, it is rife with scandal! In North Korea, “antistate” agitators face imprisonment and extrajudicial killings. In the U.S., they face the praise of liberal media. See if you can spot the difference. 

None of this can top the grandstanding by some guy named David Borenstein, a documentary filmmaker who apparently has spent a lot of time in China and recently set his sights on the Russian regime with “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which won best documentary feature. During his acceptance speech, Borenstein said the film is about “how you lose your country.” This happens “when we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities, when we don’t say anything when oligarchs take over the media and control how we produce it and consume it,” he said.

Not exactly a subtle reference to current left-leaning talking points about the United States. Incredibly, as Kyle Smith pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, Borenstein’s talking points got even worse after the show.

“One interesting thing about working with a team of Russians throughout this process has been my desire, as an American, to constantly compare the situation in America to Russia … a lot of my Russian colleagues and friends always said, ‘No, it’s not the same situation. It’s actually happening quicker in America than it’s been happening in Russia. Trump was moving a lot quicker than Putin in his early years,’” he said. “So that’s kind of all I have to say to that.”

In the oppressive landscape of 21st-century America — that is, the part of the century that does not include the Clinton, Obama, or Biden years — our entertainment industry wants us to know how brave it is. While sporting glittering designer gowns, barely-there ceasefire pins, and more botox than a human face should be able to hold, celebrities would have us believe that their resistance is akin to those fighting against dictatorships in North Korea and Russia. They’re stuck in a world where non-white actors are discriminated against rather than given job opportunities through heavy-handed quotas.

In reality, the rest of us just like to watch their movies — and even that often isn’t true anymore. Perhaps worse than the lectures about ending wars and resisting the president is the implication that the celebrities who were celebrated on Hollywood’s biggest night have somehow been discriminated against. Spare us your sob story, please, and invest that energy into making better movies.

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