The Decline and Fall of Hollywoke

The dirty secret of Hollywood’s subservience to wokeness is that even the minorities it depicts are sick of it. Any group would rather be entertained like they once were — regardless of the racial representation on screen — than preached about by warped reflection. New proof of this came from one of my few remaining film-industry friends, Randy. “I was walking down the street in Hollywood yesterday, and overheard two black guys talking,” Randy said. “One said, ‘Man, we need to make a film.’ The other said, ‘Yeah, but no oppression movie. I’m tired of seeing movies about being oppressed because I’m black, and all this pandering sh_t.’”

For Hollywoke lemmings, virtue signaling is not just their raison d’etre, it’s all they know how to do and have been hired to do over the last decade. If they can’t keep doing it, then everyone will see how utterly untalented they are. They’re already finding out. Saturday Night Live, Colbert, Kimmel, and the rest may play to their liberal audiences, but they won’t get a genuine laugh out of them. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: The Woke of Zorro)

Because comedy requires skill and guts, both of which modern screen writers lack, and a Trump mock is easier than a funny joke. Though the latter would attract more viewers from both ideological camps, as SNL, Carson, Leno, and Conan once did, the writers simply can’t rise to that level even if they wanted to, which they certainly do not. And the good writing deficiency extends to every aspect of the screen trade.

The headline of a Red State article last week identifies the trouble: Hollywood Doesn’t Have a ‘Toxic Fan’ Problem, It Has a Bad Writing Problem. Columnist Brandon Morse jabs Marvel Comics Eternals actor Kumail Nanjiani, who said he had to go to counseling after his lousy movie bombed. (What a contrast to 1941 Hollywood, when practically every combat-age male star enlisted in the military following Pearl Harbor.) Nanjiani blamed “a weird soup in the atmosphere” for the picture’s failure, but Morse correctly faults the writers and the politics that spawned them.

“Today, many studios hire writers based on two really bad criteria,” Morse wrote. “First, do their ideological beliefs fit with the ‘modern’ direction the company is trying to go with? … Secondly, does the person fit the right identity for being at the head of the project?”

Just imagine if the classic studios had subscribed to this insane philosophy. There would be no Wilder, Mankiewicz, Brooks, Chayefsky, Serling, Rodenberry, Chase, and a hundred other geniuses, consequently no Double Indemnity, All About Eve, The Producers, Network, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Sopranos and a thousand other screen treasures. What film or series in the past 10 years has come close to any of them? Perhaps one of the Best Picture Oscar winners of the past decade? (READ MORE: Look What They’ve Done to My Song)

Take your pick: Twelve Years a Slave (2014), Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2015), Spotlight (2016), Moonlight (2017), The Shape of Water (2018), Green Book (2019), Parasite (2020), Nomadland (2021), CODA (2022), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023). Few of these films will even be remembered, let alone ever watched again, unlike every Best Picture loser of 1940: Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, not to mention the winner, Gone with the Wind. But they sure had diversity and liberal messaging.

Hollywood went woke and is going broke, despite deceptive exceptions like Barbie. According to The Hollywood Reporter, domestic box-office revenue is running 43 percent behind the 2016-19 average, when movie ticket sales topped one billion dollars in January. Last month’s ticket sales totaled just $513.6 million, the lowest other than during the COVID period. And the rest of the year looks even bleaker. But that hasn’t stopped the masterminds at Disney.

Undeterred by a continuous slew of woke-driven disasters, including three from its Marvel Comics leaden goose (The Marvels, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the forementioned Eternals), the Mouse House is all in on more diversity behind and in front of the camera. The studio is considering a female-led (read, feminist) new installment in The Pirates of the Caribbean series to star black starlet Ayo Edebiri, supposedly inspired by Irish pirate girl Anne Bonny. The suicidal idiocy was not lost on powerful new Disney nemesis Elon Musk. “Disney sucks,” Musk said about the idea.

But Musk did more than lambast Disney. He posted the corporation’s lunatic Inclusion Standards with the comment, “An anonymous source just sent me this from Disney. It is mandatory, institutionalized racism and sexism.” The document makes unbelievable demands on casting, producing, crewing, and training, such as, “Characters: 50 percent or more of regular and recurring written characters come from Underrepresented Groups.” “Actors: 50 percent or more of regular and recurring actors come from Underrepresented Groups.” “Series Premise: Meaningful integration of Underrepresented Groups in overall themes and narratives.” I‘d hate to be a writer bound by that last stipulation. But whoever complies with it, the movie will suck, and bomb. (READ MORE: Beauty Survives the Left)

Musk also put his money where his mouth is. He’s backing actress Gina Carano’s lawsuit against Disney for her unwarranted firing from The Mandalorian over her non-racist conservative views. Disney sure knows how to pick its enemies. Last month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis totally thrashed it in court. Now it’s Elon Musk’s turn. Maybe someday it will make a movie that two creative black guys in Hollywood will enjoy, and not feel victimized.

The post The Decline and Fall of Hollywoke appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.