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Comment by TedShiller | Hacker News Reader

Oscars have become too political. This further erodes interest in it.

In 2021 it’s too easy being political. Not being political would be interesting.

Political in what sense? In the mid-90's the Best Picture was won, successively, by Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, and Braveheart.

Each of those had a pretty solid political viewpoint, and I'd imagine the ratings were pretty high for those Oscar ceremonies.

More likely, as the article says, we're living in a multi-channel world now where people have the choice to tune in, or not, to these monolithic cultural touchstones.

Here's Richard Gere in 1993 directly addressing Deng Xiaoping from the podium: https://youtu.be/mh8cAlNGQxI

Here's Marlon Brando sending a (fake) Native American to accept his award for Godfather in 1973: https://youtu.be/2QUacU0I4yU?t=38s

Looking at Wikipedia, it appears that Ms Sacheen Littlefeather's father was Apache and Yaqui. That doesn't seem fake.

Can you elaborate what you mean by political? I've seen this term used as a criticism in media when the focus is put on a non-white, non-male or somehow "othered" person.

To me, I read this as people seeing the accomplishments of white men as legitimate and anything else purely as optics.

I do think there is probably an element of pandering to an audience that goes on, but I'd love to see some evidence or just hear some more of your thoughts on this one.

If you have a sizable populace willing to garrote you if your award nominations do not include a large enough representation of minority populaces, regardless of how movies, actors, directors, screenwriters, and anyone else actually performs in any given category (which, I believe, is the main point of an award), the incentive for including an equalized representation across all award categories far outweighs the benefit of awarding based on merit.

That is the evidence you asked for, you're welcome. It's not a white / non-white question at all, as you can see.

Many awards since last year, Oscars included, actually require this kind of representation now to be nominated.

Then the equation is even more simple.

I wouldn't call that evidence, but I can see how the pressure of political activism could challenge the idea that awards are merit based.

But I don't think I've ever seen any actual evidence that the merits of non-white, non-male people are any less than their counterparts. Most responses I see are talking more broadly about "PC culture".

I think this could also be a case of

a) More non-white, non-male, "othered" people working in media b) More of an audience for that content than ever, enabling people that fit different profiles to make movies

Tthe opposite of not wanting selection via cowardice isn't "select more white people", as many seem to misunderstand. It's simply wanting selection based on the criteria at hand.

As long as a mob force exists that alters that equation, you'll have at least minor distortion.

It could well be that without the mob the award candidates would've been exactly the same, but we won't know.

It sort of sucks how opaque awards/speaker nominations/prize selection can be at times. It does create an environment where things can not be 100% "fair" and there's no way of knowing. It would be interesting to see what a truly fair process would look like!

I think with something like The Oscars, the fact that the film/TV industry take it seriously is merit enough to pay attention to who wins awards.

Interest in the Oscars is at an all-time low. The statistics are inconvenient, but there they are. This is probably a good thing.

Does that mean lack of interest because of politics, or the same problem the Oscars have had since perhaps back when Jaws/Star Wars invented blockbuster movies: the Academy Awards aren't going to award the big budget crowd-pleasers (like superhero films), so most audiences are uninterested. That's a high art vs. low art issue, not a political one.

All culture has always been political, the only thing that's changed is people taking offense at it.

People taking offense at politics hasn't changed either. George Carlin was doing bits on cancel culture (what used to be called "political correctness") forty years ago.

Fair enough, everything old is new.

Cancel culture is political correctness, but applied to a person's entire history, always.

Being angry at something someone just did is not cancel culture. But when you look at something someone did 20 years ago and they've already apologized and learned from it, but then still insist they not have a job because of it, that's cancel culture.

Cancel Culture is the opposite of "the right to be forgotten".

But you're correct that people have always taken offense at politics. I can't imagine that ever wasn't the case.

I generally agree with you, but I would say that something like "donglegate" also fits in the cancel culture spectrum. Would you agree? Should there be a different term for it? (maybe just twitter shaming, followed by the modern rule that if you get too much attention on twitter you will be fired?)

I think there's definitely something there worth talking about, but trying to broaden a term to mean more will actually just make the term less useful, and it'll be harder to talk about both things instead.

I'm not sure what I'd call "donglegate" other than "internet justice", but it wouldn't be "cancel culture".

If everything is political, then politics is just background noise.

Not at all. Different things are political to different degrees and levels of importance.

> different degrees and levels of

But then the low level becomes baseline for apolitical.

I disagree, I wasn't stating it to be reductive, I was claiming that you can't find an IMDB top 250/Criterion collection/whatever fancy list of movies you prefer that doesn't have political statements. It makes them daring, the opposite of background noise.

That depends on how pedant you want to be about things being political. Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.

Also since you said culture, and not FILMS.

Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong.

> Movies like The Thing, Terminator, Alien, Aliens, etc. Don't really have a political message other than some vague politics as window dressing.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a34518538/john-...

https://gen.medium.com/the-scariest-thing-about-alien-is-how...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jerrybowyer/2012/06/13/the-poli...

https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/terminator-james-cameron

> Give me the politics of Tetris, Pong, Super Mario, Donkey Kong

You got me. Let me rephrase it as any culture with a message.

Well. What is the politics of Thing again? Paranoia can be worse than the virus? That's not what is in the movie. Most people if not all are killed by the Thing.

Also that's not political, that's common sense.

Terminator came to Cameron in a dream, and the rationalization was it is caused by possible nuclear crisis?

The obscured threat doesn't have to be worse than the overt one for a parable to be applicable.

In fact, almost any allegory deliberately uses fantastical imagery to illustrate a point, because it's easier to point to something when the contrasts are higher.

Are you suggesting that Godzilla can't be a stand-in for Hiroshima simply because a literal Godzilla would be worse?

The commentary on erosion of trust was political then and would be now, even if the backdrop has changed.

> The obscured threat doesn't have to be worse than the overt one for a parable to be applicable.

It has to be, if the message is that obscured threat is worse than the overt.

At some point, I wonder what is really in the work, and how much is this just the critics projecting their own thoughts onto it.

> It has to be, if the message is that obscured threat is worse than the overt.

The ranking doesn't matter. One is a fictional alien, the other is human interaction. If the alien virus is worse, does that negate any and all (lesser bad) commentary?

Likewise, I don't bother comparing which is worse of humans or zombies in Walking Dead. The zombies are an exciting (debatable now) fictional backdrop to the anthropological exploration.

The Terminator included a graphic 10 minutes of Arnold Schwarz terminating an entire police station full of LAPD.

I mean, I'm not sure what Cameron was thinking when he made it but I consider that a political statement no matter how anyone slices it.

Well, that and the political forces at work are boring. The cultural creators are excessively partisan, and excessive partisanship is the death of interesting nuance.

Interesting politics in a story is politics that challenges the orthodoxy and explores topics delicately. Partisans don't do that. They are the orthodoxy, and they can't handle nuance.

Yup, pretty much. I am a progressive. I am deeply committed to it. And yet, I have been watching the death of art at the hands of the partisans. The depictions must be purely on message, whichever side you're on. The art's only function is to mouthpiece the values of the faction it belongs to. There's nothing interesting to say in mainstream art anymore because there's no room to say it.

That's true in a sense, but there have been times when the popular culture was more relaxed, and was a closer fit to the median of the country.

Part of the problem of course is that there is not really a common, popular culture any longer. And so it's much easier for most people to feel estranged from Hollywood. Everyone's estranged, and no one has much in common.

But, it's also the case that the modern moralism that's permeating everything is particularly catastrophic and melodramatic. For sure, there have been times in history when things were worse, but that's hardly cause to celebrate.

Media can certainly become "less political" in a normal sense that anyone would recognize without making your comment untrue at all.

If people are suddenly taking offense to it that means the culture has shifted so far in one direction it's no longer relatable to the average person. The idea that people suddenly started being offended easier seems less likely than the industry falling off the political spectrum to the point people are sick of it.

> the only thing that's changed is people taking offense at it.

So what you're saying is the the oscars have always been offending people, they're just offending different people now? If you're right, then the article still has an interesting point and it's something they should pay attention to: they used to have a big audience, and now they don't, so they must be offending the people that they used to be relying on.

But that doesn't seem likely - the people most likely to actually be offended by the political tone of the oscars are the right-wing, traditional conservative types who ridiculed awards shows anyway. They've gone hard into the most extreme politics of the people who were tuning in to begin with and even they have gotten tired of the constant barrage of lecturing.

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