The Oscars Nobody Watched: Hollywood Congratulates Itself Again

The Oscars were televised last night.

I’d bet you didn’t watch the awards ceremony. Nobody watched it.

The Oscars have been in a state of precipitous decline for decades. In part, that’s because nobody has seen the movies that are competing for the Academy Awards. But it’s also because the ceremony has become a left-wing agitprop fest.

Last night was no exception. The big winner was “One Battle After Another,” a truly egregious and terrible film about the virtues of domestic terrorism against a white supremacist infrastructure.

The other big winner was “Sinners,” a Critical Race Theory remake of “From Dusk Till Dawn,” the Quentin Tarantino vampire movie.

Conan O’Brien, formerly a funny human, told a bunch of stale jokes about how much Republicans suck, saying, “I should warn you, tonight could get political. Okay. And if that makes you uncomfortable, there’s an alternate Oscars being hosted by Kid Rock. It’s at the Dave & Busters down the street. A lot of tickets for that.”

Hollywood loves Hollywood: All those people who don’t agree with their politics? The only thing they’ve got is Kid Rock and Dave & Busters and all the rest.

There’s a reason their ratings are in precipitous decline.

All in all, it was a totally forgettable evening, but at least most of the Oscar winners stayed out of politics, to the disappointment of at least one author in the New York Times, Daniel Kehlmann. Kehlmann is the author of a book called “The Director,” a really, really good book, but also the author of a pretty terrible column on the necessity for actors to say things.

Kehlmann wrote before the ceremony, “Hollywood’s great actors and directors are not merely well known; they are famous figures everywhere, even in dictatorships now closed to the world, such as Russia and North Korea. On Oscar night not only will the eyes of the American public be fixed on them; so will the ears of the entire planet, listening for the answer to the question: Your country is being turned into a dictatorship, people are being arrested and shot in the streets, your mad king is trampling your venerable Constitution underfoot — what do you have to say about it?”

Yes, according to Daniel Kehlmann, we need to hear from our greatest artists (actors!) about their geopolitical analysis. His book is about a director named G.W. Pabst, who was a little-known director from the 1920s and 30s who returned to Nazi Germany from the United States in order to be allowed artistic resources by the regime. The book is about art’s surrender to tyranny. In the book, Pabst is fully complicit with a genocidal Nazi regime. He even takes advantage of concentration camp victims as extras.

To equate America in 2026 with Nazi Germany is, of course, an act of extreme moral blindness. Unfortunately, that seems par for the course in much of the artistic community.

That’s why actress Charithra Chandran, whom I’d never heard of, wore a pin for the anti-Israel ceasefire in Gaza, where Hamas is currently murdering opponents in the streets, but not a single actor or actress anywhere on the Oscar red carpet said anything about the slaughter of 32,000 Iranians by the regime.

The only truly overtly political moment from any winner came from Paul Thomas Anderson, who said, “I wrote this movie for my kids to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left in this world we’re handing off to them, but also with the encouragement that they will be the generation that hopefully brings us some common sense and decency.”

Paul Thomas Anderson was not saying sorry to his kids. He was saying, “Look at my virtue signaling while I earn millions of dollars for films that lose $100 million at the box office.”

But at least he’ll sleep better at night with his gold statuette and $10,000 swag bag from the Academy.