When I look back on the best horror movies, I do so with sadness and a sense of mourning for what once was and may never be again. Just take the year 1982 when so many great movies hit theaters, like E.T., The Year of Living Dangerously, and Blade Runner. But one movie that didn’t do so well at the time has now become one of the greatest horror movies ever made: John Carpenter’s The Thing.

The Thing holds its place in cinema history because it is heavy on mood and suspense, driven by the ominous music, some composed by John Carpenter and the rest by Ennio Morricone. It’s also the suffocating atmosphere of men trapped in a compound surrounded by nothing but snow.

And then, a dog shows up.

It isn’t really a dog, of course, it’s one of those things. But who could resist a dog? Not these men. And so they let it in and, in so doing, write their own death sentences. Yes, every single one of them will die by the end of the movie. But it is how paranoid they become, how tricky the monster is in hiding inside of them, that makes this movie still so watchable.

And of course, there’s the star of the show, Kurt Russell as MacReady, who must outwit, outlast, and outplay the thing. Russell is surrounded by a talented ensemble, with no weak links in the bunch. David Clennon as Palmer, Wilford Brimley as Blair, Keith David as Childs, Richard Masur as Clark, and one of my personal favorites, Donald Moffat as Garry.

I remember when it came out and how everyone was comparing it to 1979’s Alien, which was also about letting a monster into an enclosed space as it becomes something that can’t be killed, peeling them off one by one until only Ripley and Jonesy remain.

But The Thing doesn’t offer any such salvation for its characters; they all have to die because one of them might be The Thing, even when there are only two remaining characters left. We never find out if either of them is The Thing. But killing them all off was a daring choice back then, when audiences wanted uplifting conclusions.

The Thing made just $19 million, which was nothing compared to E.T.'s $350 million. On such a low budget, the visual effects are still legendary, crafted by Rob Bottin, then just 22 years old.

Carpenter builds suspense in The Thing by making us uncertain where anyone is at any given time. Like Alien, the computer is also a big warning sign for these doomed men. It tells them the bad news that this Thing could wipe out the entire human race. They know they can’t save themselves because they have to sacrifice their lives to save humanity.

Like all movies and horror movies especially, they had to be for everyone. They had to depict a time and place we all knew. They didn’t take a side politically most of the time. You didn’t have to belong to a certain group of people to get the movie. You were immersed in the story because they actually wanted people to come see their movies. They weren’t made for critics or for awards. They were made for audiences.

Every time I watch The Thing, it feels like the first time I’ve ever seen it. Since I already know how it will end, I enjoy the getting there, how Carpenter sets up the story and makes us get involved with the characters - even if we don’t always know who the good guys are and who might be one of those things.

The Thing is top-tier Carpenter, though he’s made some great ones, like They Live, Christine, Escape from New York, and The Fog - but around Halloween, there is only one movie one that everyone has to watch. And it is THE movie.

Halloween is not a complicated story. It’s guided by the mood of the place, of the spooky nature of Halloween itself, and the masked villain who can’t be killed. So immortal is he that he would be the subject of 12 more movies, though none coming anywhere near as good as the original.

What is Halloween about? It’s about cinematic horror and the power of the image, but Carpenter also clearly sees it as a film about fate that brings together Michel Myers and Laurie because she, as played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is the embodiment of innocence. She’s a good girl. She does her homework. She babysits and isn't a frivolous, easy, good-time gal like her friends.

Michael Myers is pure evil. He was born bad. How great is the film’s opening, when we see Michael stalking his sister and witness his first kill? Who is this killer, we wonder, and when the mask is ripped off, we’re shocked to see the face of a confused little boy.

From then on, we’re to fear this supernatural, evil entity that has returned to Haddonfield, which is supposed to be in New Jersey but is also rumored to have been filmed in South Pasadena.

All the characters in Halloween are pretty great, but what stands out to me most is John Carpenter’s score and Dean Cundey’s hand-held Panaglide cinematography, which makes us feel like we are right there in the town. We can almost smell the coming of fall and feel the leaves crunching under our feet, the cool night breeze of late October.

It’s this Carpenter movie that best captures the mystery of Halloween. There is a guy roaming around in a mask on a day when lots of people are wearing them. He is the ultimate evil, but how could they know that in this sleepy town? All Jamie Lee Curtis can do is survive.

As with The Thing, there is no need to belong to a specific class, gender, or ethnic group. It is a story set in a town somewhere in Illinois. The only thing that matters is that we believe it. We don’t watch the characters wondering about power dynamics or representation. We watch the characters because we are invested in the story.

Halloween proves that great movies can be made as long as everyone on board is committed to the story. The budget was around $1 million, with Carpenter earning just $10,000. It went on to make roughly $50 million, which was a lot back in 1978.

The film is extremely violent as Michael Myers goes on a killing rampage, and for many in today’s fragile America, it might not have even gotten made, especially since serial killers were on the rise in the 1970s. Sooner or later, someone would complain about violence in the movies, but audiences couldn’t get enough.

Of course, it’s common knowledge by now that scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis made her cinematic debut as a nod to Carpenter’s idol, Alfred Hitchcock, who depicted Curtis’ mother, Janet Leigh, being likewise hacked with a big knife in Psycho. Carpenter shows more, of course, than Hitchcock did, but nowhere near as much as filmmakers show in film and television today. But the best horror movies don’t rely on graphic violence but on mood, suspense, and time and place.

Time and place are what Hollywood is missing now. Everything looks like this mythic land they built inside utopia, where everyone is equal and everyone is represented. They depict the America they wanted to exist, and do so out of fear. It is pure dogma made for the religious and the devout.

Maybe Hollywood always depicted an America that wasn’t real, but it should at least be one we recognize —one that feels rooted in some kind of truth, even if that means it doesn’t reflect an ideal utopian vision of society. All that matters is that we believe what we’re seeing on screen.

And this time and place are ones I remember from growing up in the 1970s, before all Halloween costumes were known brands, and when people still handed out homemade treats. You don’t want to be always looking back at the past and remembering the good old days, but that gets harder and harder to do now, because movies don’t seem to be getting better, and it’s doubtful there will ever be any as good as Halloween.

It’s October, and it’s time to celebrate the best horror movies, at least in my opinion. I’m not the expert when it comes to horror. I have a few dozen I really love, but at the top of that list is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

In 1980, just the trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining scared us. Everyone was talking about it. I was just 15. What did I know about movies? I didn’t know the name Stanley Kubrick, let alone Jack Nicholson. I don’t remember when I first saw The Shining, but it was probably not that year.

By the time I did see it, I was already fully immersed in the lore as everyone was going around bending their finger and pretending to talk like Danny talking to Tony. They were repeating Redrum, Redrum, Redrum. And of course, “Here’s Johnny.” What stood out to me when watching the movie finally was how smart Danny was to backtrack in a snowy maze to throw his father off track.

All these decades later, The Shining remains one of my favorite movies, and I watch it at least once a year, usually in October. The film has not lost a step in 45 years. Those who love it, obsess on it. Every detail is picked apart and dissected. How did he do that? How has it held its shape and magnetic force decade after decade?

What is it about this movie set in this particular place in this hotel that so fascinates us? It isn’t the book so much. It isn’t Stephen King’s imagination that we love. It’s how Stanley Kubrick brought it to life and the unusual, hammy, unforgettable performance of its star.

Do we see ourselves in Wendy? Do we imagine what if? Do we secretly desire to be trapped in that hotel all winter with all of that food in the freezer, the giant can of fruit cocktail, and no one around for miles? Does it sound like a dream or a nightmare? Would an only child want a whole hotel to himself to roam the hallways and dig into the mysteries?

Or is it that other layer, with the “shining” itself, the magical power the boy has, the one that Hallorann has?

I always knew the author of the book, Stephen King, wasn’t a fan of the movie. He said he liked some of it, but he felt Kubrick turned it into something else. He’s right. None of what most people remember about the movie, from Redrum to Here’s Johnny to the twins, “Come play with us, Danny…” is in the book.

The book is good in its own way and probably scarier and less funny than the movie. Stephen King has always been what we now call “woke.” He has always been aware of social justice and injustice, and he has woven it through his stories. His wife, Tabitha, was famously a feminist who has been schooling him ever since. That’s why the lead in his book, The Shining, is such a strong — albeit slightly annoying — female protagonist.

There is more to the story of the hotel itself in the book, including why it’s haunted and why it wants Danny due to his special powers. It’s also, I think, a scarier book because at the end, Hallorann (who isn’t murdered by Jack, as in the movie) is almost seduced by the evil of the hotel to kill Wendy and Danny, but he fights it off. I think that’s how it ends, though it’s been a while since I’ve read it.

Rewatching movies from the past is a reminder that movies didn’t use to judge or categorize characters in terms of their identity. Scatman Crothers is Halloran, and he is just Halloran.

Wendy is just a mom. Danny is just her son (with a supernatural ability). Jack, a stand-in for Stephen King in the book, is played by Jack Nicholson almost for laughs. That was Kubrick’s gift as a director - he could introduce absurd humor even if none existed in the source material.

The film isn’t a feminist screed, as there are evil forces in the hotel that take the shape of women, like the old lady in the bathtub and the twins. They don’t have to say anything about women or society. They can just exist as characters in a story.

Watching frail and scrawny Shelley Duvall crack her husband over the head with a bat is spectacular. Had they cast her with a stronger, more formidable actress to match the character in the book, they would have lost the character’s seemingly helpless quality. She is so small and the hotel is so big. That alone tells the story of this movie. We don’t think she can defeat her husband, and yet she does.

Everything about the movie is about showing the audience what it would be like to be stuck there, with all of the great things and the terrible things about it: you go stir crazy and try to murder your wife and child. Could you escape? If so, how?

Once you decide that everyone in the movie must make a grand statement about an entire population or gender, everything else the movie offers vanishes. When they tell you how to think and what to think, you don’t wonder. You stop asking questions. You don’t go deeper into the film.

There is no denying that it was a story conceived in the 1970s and released during a time when the country was changing and the pendulum was swinging. That might also be why so many of us ‘70s kids had the nightmare dad image stuck in our heads, since so many of our families had broken apart, marriages split up, and mothers were left to fend for the kids without them.

Whatever the dynamic at play, it has never alienated any generation over time because it wasn’t trapped in time. Kubrick was not trying to convey any message beyond the story of these three people trapped in a haunted hotel and how the mother and child barely escaped.

The Shining is pure cinema, from the saturated color of red, to the way the camera glides across the soundstage, to the hotel being surrounded by acres of white snow, to the fact that no one can get to them, and no one can get out. It is the imagery of Kubrick’s masterpiece that stays with us. He created an atmosphere that never feels artificial and yet, in its own way, feels entirely artificial.

He wasn’t the easiest director to work with, according to Shelley Duvall. But he was the kind of director that Hollywood no longer produces. They’ve become too fragile to function. Everything must go down easily. Their horror is increasingly grotesque and graphic, but their messaging must always be on point.

Much of what makes The Shining effective is how sound and music merge, allowing the dialogue to be minimal and much of the story to be absorbed through the senses. He wanted the viewer to feel the movie, to sense it, to taste it, to hear it — wheels on carpet, the distant sound of long-dead party goers, the hard hammer on the typewriter, and Jack pounds out All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy, also not in the book.

So, when we rewatch The Shining, we aren’t so much watching to relive the story as to experience the movie with all our senses fully engaged. In that way. We feel like we’re a part of it, too. We are Wendy and Jack. We are Danny. We are Hallorann. And maybe we are the hotel. Maybe we are taking human behavior and turning it into our own entertainment for our own purposes.

The Shining is a great movie because Stanley Kubrick was a genius. He was fearless in what he sought to show us about human nature, as all great directors are. We don’t have films like this because we don’t have audiences like this. The Shining is a great way to remember some of the best Hollywood has ever produced, and a great way to kick off the month of October and the Halloween season.

The Good

Warner Bros. has almost single-handedly rescued the movie business this year by making original films that people turned out to see, and they made money. F1, Sinners, and Weapons are all in the top 20 highest-grossing films of the year. Now, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, with a hefty price tag of $140 million, just hit theaters. Can it make back its money? Probably not.

Even if it does fail at the box office, it won’t be allowed to fail. It will be lauded with film awards, maybe even Oscars. Is it a good movie? It’s well-made. Is it funny? At times, yes. Some of the action sequences are great. The cinematography, the acting, and the directing are all top-notch. But as one of the audience reviewers put it on Rotten Tomatoes:

One Battle After Another is a film for a very specific type of person, and that type of person just happens to be our elite ruling class, who somehow see themselves as oppressed because they borrow oppression of marginalized groups that they speak for in their films, their TV shows, their books, their late-night comedy, and their media.

PTA is a great director, but he’s never been my cup of tea. I don’t think I’ve seen any of his movies more than once. He has a cult-like following of film fans who adore everything he does, and this movie is no exception.

Shot in large format Vistavision, the film looks great. It mostly keeps things rolling, so that the lengthy runtime, over two hours, speeds by. That’s if you like the movie. If you don’t, you’ll be bored by the one-hour mark.

The best thing about it is Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as Bob, the ne’er-do-well ex-revolutionary raising his daughter Willa (Chase Infinity).

The plot is more or less about a group of radicals (think: ANTIFA) who shoot up an ICE detention facility before going on the run after shooting a cop. The main radical is Perfidia Beverly Hills (an excellent Teyana Taylor), who is sleeping with both the racist ICE agent, Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, and Bob. She gets pregnant and assumes Bob is the father.

But when the revolution calls to Perfidia, she abandons her baby, leaving Bob to raise Willa. All of this would have made for a much better movie had they stuck to it, but instead, we have to follow Lockjaw, who now wants to join an elitist group of white supremacists, and because he once slept with a Black woman, he has to find out if Willa is his biological daughter and, if so, wipe her off the map.

Meanwhile, loser Bob is in a race against time to find his daughter and save her now that the underground has taken her off to a hiding place. Yes, that’s the plot, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

The Bad

It may be that what we call “woke” storytelling is now here to stay, and that there will never be a return to the way things were before. Those rules mean only white people are allowed to be evil or bad guys. All people of color and LGBT individuals must be portrayed in a positive light, for instance.

Teyana Taylor in this film seems to be headed in a complex or negative direction, or at least someone who is not admirable. But if you know the rules of Woketopia in movies, you know how her character will turn out in the end. There is no way they will allow her to be seen as bad.

That means, at least for me, I already know what the story will be about and how the movie will end just based on the casting alone. One Battle After Another checks every box, up to and including Leonard DiCaprio de-centering himself from the narrative, as all white men must. They’re not allowed to save women anymore.

In the Left’s America, and in the film and television shows they produce, each of us is judged by our identity group - skin color, gender, or how well the film panders to the marginalized groups. That is what seems to decide good and bad now. And I don’t know if that will ever change.

It must be present in every movie. It’s in F1 and in Weapons. Every time you see a sampling of intersectional characters, you know they are only there because they are mandated to be there, not necessarily because it fits with the story.

That is why the critics are so over the moon.

To them, it is everything they are and everything they believe, a validation of their mass delusion that Trump didn’t win a fair election in 2024 but rather he and his Nazi army stormed DC, and they’re all trying to survive in a racist/fascist nation. They really do believe this because they have locked themselves away from the rest of America, and no one in the media will ever tell them the truth.

What would be funny is if someone made a movie about that, their collective delusion about being oppressed as the side with still so much wealth and power. They just don’t like sharing this country with people who do not agree with them. Coming the closest is Ari Aster, who made the film Eddington that satirizes the awful year that was 2020, and does so by pointing out how different real life was from virtual life, where a Civil War rages on.

One Battle After Another aims to be satire, but it mocks the Left with the lightest of touches. There is one scene where one of the progressive activists is mocked by saying he doesn’t feel “safe,” and we sympathize with Bob’s frustration as he screams at him. He just wants to save his daughter. He doesn’t care about the rest of it. But the movie cares.

The Ugly

One Battle After Another reminds me of the agitprop B-movie Billy Jack, which was released in 1971, the same year as Dirty Harry.

One Battle is better made, for sure, but it’s the same idea.

We don’t have a Hollywood that would catch the wave of the way America was changing in 1971. Dirty Harry was popular because America was tired of the hippies. They were tired of crime. They were ready to move in a different direction.

There’s a reason Dirty Harry has stayed with us all of these years, and Billy Jack has faded. That’s probably because Clint Eastwood became a formidable force in American film. But there might be something to the idea that Dirty Harry was a Trump-like figure back then, someone who didn’t exactly fit in the progressive Left culture but who somehow found a way to resonate, though people today would call it “racist.”

Either way, I wish we had a Hollywood now that would make movies for audiences rather than movies for critics. The critics don’t seem like they assess movies so much as they use film and writing about film to push their social justice agenda outward. There aren’t many areas on the Left anymore that don’t.

It’s one thing to abandon half the country and make culture and art only for themselves. It’s another thing to turn normie America into The Enemy, which One Battle After Another does in its one-sided view of the border crisis, in its obedience to portraying the white people as bad (except Stoner Bob) and the marginalized people as good.

For ten long years, the Left has been demonizing and dehumanizing not only the Right but the silent majority as “racists,” which has distorted their worldview and wrecked their ability to tell good stories for everyone. But it’s even worse than that. If half of America is their enemy, how can they possibly expect them to buy tickets to see their movies?

If you are a working-class American who is worried about the border and so you voted for Trump, this movie will tell you that you are a “racist” going along with crimes against humanity with mass deportations. If you are an ICE agent, a cop, or a soldier, you are the Gestapo in this movie.

Here is a good rundown by Chris Gore and Alan Ng for Film Threat.

This isn’t a movie that will incite more violence against ICE officers, but it is a movie that celebrates those who do as heroes, and it affirms the mass delusions of the Left better than probably any movie ever made. No wonder they are euphoric. This is their Ben-Hur.

Ultimately, I have to wonder about the collective sanity of the Left. Is it that they will only feel safe if they somehow cancel half the country? Do what with all of those people they see as their biggest threat? You know, their fellow Americans? Throw them into gulags?

Perhaps worst of all, the way critics and the media responded to the film made me realize that movies, like everything else, are weapons in our ongoing Civil War. This one would count as a “win” for the Left because they know it will hurt and anger the Right. If the movie bombs, which it might, it counts as a win for the Right, and the cycle continues.

Just as Billy Jack reflected a part of America in 1971 that America would ultimately leave behind, while Dirty Harry became a part of its future, with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, One Battle After Another could end up being the definitive portrait of the Hollywood Woketopia that so many have already left behind.

That makes it an odd legacy for Paul Thomas Anderson, who will forever be seen less as the auteur he once was, and more as someone who spoke for a generation trapped inside a Doomsday Cult.

//

This is another terrible weekend for Hollywood at the box office. They have shrunk their audience dramatically. They can’t fix the problem because they can’t even name it. As I look around at the trades, I still see the same thing:

On X, they think Hollywood is to blame for sending movies to streaming too quickly and for ticket prices being too high.

Nope. That’s not the reason. People will crawl across cut glass to see something they want to see. If you build it, they will come. Look at how expensive Disneyland is. Do you think their amusement parks aren’t selling tickets? No, people pay because they know the experience will be worth it. The problem is that Hollywood doesn’t want to build it. They want to build utopia, or woketopia, just like the Democrats, and therein lies their problem.

If the Democrats are less popular now than ever, that goes double for Hollywood. They are one and the same.

Hollywood, like our government, is no longer working for the people. At the very least, they should respond to the market. But that hasn’t been true for a very long time. No one really talks about the elephant in the room - how Hollywood lost its audience and why no one goes to the movies anymore, or at least not enough to keep the industry thriving. But every weekend, it’s more bad news.

Says Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro:

If Snow White pulls off a $50 million-plus opening, that’s a respectable bump for what is a barren desert of a business right now. Current estimates show that this weekend is in fact the lowest grossing at the domestic box office year-to-date with around $54.7M for all films, lower than Super Bowl Weekend ($55.8M). How is that possible during a spring break with kids off?

How is it possible? Hollywood doesn’t know how to tell stories for a country it no longer knows or understands. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that Hollywood, like the Democrats, despises the majority of the American people. How can they tell stories for people they can’t stand? And why would they expect those Americans even to want to see their movies?

They tell stories for themselves. They use Hollywood as yet another propaganda arm for their singular ideology. And to absolve themselves of their sins of wealth and privilege. The same people in power now have always been in power, and those are mostly white men. The only people who have paid a price for what Hollywood has become are all of us, the ticket buyers.

[This is my first try at a video of my podcasts - let me know what you think. The text is below]

What did Robert De Niro think when he heard the news that a loser on the fringe shot President Trump? Did he think, “Good. I’m glad someone finally did.” Did he pause and contemplate the near-death of a former president? Did he, like so many others on the Left, wish the shooter had better aim?

It didn’t matter to Thomas Matthew Crooks whether the target was Joe Biden or Donald Trump. He probably never watched Taxi Driver, and the only thing he knows about Robert De Niro is the anti-Trump memes that flood the MAGA zone, making fun of the aging actor. Everybody sees those. No, all that mattered to him was that people remembered his name.

But still, you have to wonder, in the moments immediately following the shooting, what De Niro must have thought, considering he once played Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, a guy a lot like Crooks— a lonely invisible man who would be written off as an incel today—the very definition. Not many people go to the trouble of assassination attempts of political figures. Thomas Matthew Crooks now joins that very short list.

What made the Trump assassination attempt so jarring was that we all watched it on live television. We saw something that should have shocked us all out of our partisan stupor. It should have meant the end of our Cold Civil War, fought mostly on Twitter for control of the media narrative.

I came of age in Ronald Reagan’s America. The Hays Code had loosened its grip on movies throughout the 60s and 70s. Hollywood felt threatened enough by television to give audiences what they couldn’t get anywhere else, graphic violence and explicit sex.

But by the 1980s, a new Conservativism had taken hold and with it, a “greed is good” mentality that helped Hollywood abandon quality for blockbuster entertainment.

Hollywood couldn’t afford to alienate a large swath of the American public and still be a thriving business. So movies had to be for everyone, or at least the mostly white, mostly heterosexual, mostly Christian majority. It was always a fine line studios had to walk to ensure the big numbers.

This was much easier when branding came into play after movies like Jaws, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and the Lord of the Rings franchises built Hollywood’s empire, the one that is now collapsing.

//

Tomorrow, the Oscar nominations will be announced bright and early for the 96th Academy Awards. It’s also the date of the primary in New Hampshire. It’s hard not to connect these two things. The Oscars are now fully merged with the Democratic Party as one organism. The same reason Trump is making them sweat the polls is why people are tuning out the Oscars.

The movie that won’t be announced tomorrow is Sound of Freedom, which landed in the top ten box office of the year, beating both Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. To Hollywood and the Oscars, however, it is like it never happened. Here’s David Mamet, one of the great writers Hollywood ever employed, on this film:

The success of Sound of Freedom is a cautionary tale that the Counterculture revolution is nearly upon us. It signals the same thing as a potential win by Trump. A shift in the public consciousness as the people who have been abandoned rise up and demand equal representation - at the box office and at the White House.

Both the downfall of the Democratic Party and Hollywood are hard to watch, as they have shaped most of my adult life. Movies used to be so good. Even the bad ones seem like masterpieces now. Great movies winning awards are a thing of the past as dogma and propaganda have overtaken free expression.

The hope is that Barbenheimer can save the Oscars as it briefly saved the box office before the actors and writers went on strike, bringing the whole thing to its knees again.

Maybe, they hope, the ratings won’t be terrible, thanks to two very popular movies. Maybe they’ll be right. Hiring Jimmy Kimmel as the host is not a great sign. Why would anyone tune in if they won’t even tune in to his late-night “comedy”?

As this chart indicates, they did better with Kimmel than with no host (at least they made that decision, which was smart). It’s easy to see how Trump’s win led to their inevitable collapse. When you treat half the country like terrorists, this is the end result. It wasn’t just Trump supporters who tuned out, though. It was anyone who didn’t want to listen to the agonizing therapy sessions awards shows have become.

The bigger problem is that the Oscars are now used as yet another propaganda arm for the Democratic Party. They believe that if someone can win an award on national television, they can get on their soapbox and give a rousing speech as Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez cheer them on.

The short film categories are particularly dire this year. Most people don’t pay attention to these, but usually, they are some of the best offerings worldwide. Now, many of them reflect the ideology and religion of the New Left because, of course, they do. They have to. Everything is politics.

Take, for example, the terrible propaganda “documentary” short called the ABCs of Book Banning. If it somehow misses tomorrow, that would mean the voters thought it was as phony as I did, dragging out these poor kids to spout the gobbledegook of the woke.

But I fear it will not only be nominated but probably win, and someone will get on stage and make a truly terrible speech and move the needle for the Democrats heading into an election year.

But the poor kids are being used as pawns in this sick little game. They sound like kidnapped hostages or children of cult members.

Here is the link to the Paramount-Plus short documentary by MTV Films called the ABCs of Book Banning.

And a clip:

Pedro Almodovar and Wes Anderson have directed Live Action shorts that might get in, with stars like Ethan Hawke, Ralph Fiennes, and David Oyelowo crowding out what is usually a category for up-and-comers. This is another sign that the film industry is in trouble if actors and directors are going back to making shorts.

Just like the Democratic Party will have to learn its lessons the hard way, so too will Hollywood have to go nearly bankrupt before it remembers why it built an industry in the first place - to serve the people.

It was the best way to escape the misery of everyday life, to disappear into the movie theater and slip into another world. It was my salvation as a kid. Well, that’s gone now. Movies are no longer a relief. They’re an exhausting drag much of the time. We can see the strings. We know what they’re doing and don’t care about us anymore.

Either they serve up badly written franchise junk, or they’re trying to fix us and turn us into them. They don’t seem capable anymore of caring about the box office enough to care about the people who really do crave a good story, like the many who turned out to see Sound of Freedom.

Thankfully, there are some movies up for the Oscar that will be nominated tomorrow that are actually good. One is Oppenheiemr, the frontrunner. The other is The Holdovers, the underdog. Another is American Fiction, which calls out the Woketopians in the best way. There’s also Barbie, which has become a cultural phenomenon.

Otherwise, though, much of what is on offer is about reflecting the ideology of the New Left. This is especially true with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which sacrifices the plot of the great book about the first case that formed the FBI into a long apology for our barbaric and genocidal past.

Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t entirely a bad movie, but it is almost four hours long and feels like it would have been a great miniseries on, say, Apple TV.

Oppenheimer Predicted to Land 10-12, But Won’t Sweep

Most people don’t know that the Academy expanded their Best Picture ballot in 2008 from five to ten because why would they? Most have long since tuned out what happens in the Oscar race, except for obsessives like me. It all goes back to Christopher Nolan, whose film, The Dark Knight, missed out on a nomination, generating so much controversy that they felt they had no choice but to expand to ten nominees.

In so doing, however, they now must use a ranked-choice ballot to find the winner. We haven’t had Oscar sweeps since then. Last year’s winner broke the record with 8. If Oppenheimer can match that total, it will be considered a sweep, even if it probably would have won 10-12 back in the day.

Oppenheimer might not even win Best Picture at all. The pattern lately is that the sweeping epics don’t win, but the smaller character dramas do. Gravity lost to 12 Years a Slave, La La Land lost to Moonlight, Roma lost to Green Book.

If Oppenheimer is to lose, it looks like the movie that could do it is The Holdovers, easily one of the year's best films. What makes this movie great is that it is a “holdover” from the days when Hollywood made movies to give something back to audiences.

I won’t complain if The Holdovers wins. Everyone should see this movie and remember what storytelling used to be like. But for Hollywood and the Oscars, Oppenheimer is the better bet. A win for a three-hour, R-rated movie about a scientist that made $300 mil here and nearly a billion internationally would show audiences that Hollywood still cares about them and that the Oscars are back.

Here are my Oscar predictions if you’d like to play along.

Best PictureOppenheimerThe HoldoversKillers of the Flower MoonBarbieAmerican FictionPoor ThingsMaestroPast LivesAnatomy of a FallThe Zone of Interest

Alt: The Color Purple, All of Us Strangers

Best DirectorChristopher Nolan, OppenheimerGreta Gerwig, BarbieMartin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower MoonYorgos Lanthimos, Poor ThingsAlexander Payne, The Holdovers

Alt: Jonathan Glazer, The Zone of Interest; Justine Triet, Anatomy of a Fall

Best ActorPaul Giamatti, The HoldoversCillian Murphy, OppenheimerBradley Cooper, MaestroColman Domingo, RustinJeffrey Wright, American Fiction

Alt: Leonardo DiCaprio, Killers of the Flower Moon; Andrew Scott, All of Us Strangers

Best ActressLily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower MoonEmma Stone, Poor ThingsCarey Mulligan, MaestroMargot Robbie, BarbieSandra Huller, Anatomy of a Fall

Alt: Annette Bening, Nyad; Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Origin

Supporting ActorRobert Downey Jr., OppenheimerRyan Gosling, BarbieDominic Sessa, The HoldoversRobert De Niro, Killers of the Flower MoonSterling K. Brown, American Fiction

Alt: Mark Ruffalo, Poor Things ; Paul Mescal, All of Us Strangers; Willem Dafoe, Poor Things; Matt Damon, Oppenheimer

Supporting ActressDa’Vine Joy Randolph, The HoldoversDanielle Brooks, The Color PurpleEmily Blunt, OppenheimerPenelope Cruz, FerrariSandra Huller, The Zone of Interest

Alt: Jodie Foster, Nyad; America Ferrara, Barbie; Julianne Moore, May December

Adapted ScreenplayOppenheimerAmerican FictionKillers of the Flower MoonPoor ThingsBarbie

Alt: The Zone of Interest, All of Us Strangers

Original ScreenplayThe HoldoversAnatomy of a FallPast LivesMaestroMay December

EditingOppenheimerKillers of the Flower MoonThe Zone of InterestPoor ThingsThe Holdovers

CinematographyOppenheimerPoor ThingsKillers of the Flower MoonMaestroThe Zone of Interest

CostumesPoor ThingsBarbieMaestroKillers of the Flower MoonOppenheimer

Production DesignBarbieOppenheimerPoor ThingsKillers of the Flower MoonThe Zone of Interest

International FeatureThe Zone of Interest20 Days in MariupolThe Taste of Things20 Days in MariupolThe Monk and the Gun

Documentary FeatureAmerican Symphony20 Days in MariupolStill: A Michael J. Fox MovieBeyond UtopiaFour Daughters

Animated FeatureSpider-Man: Across the Spider-VerseThe Boy and the HeronChicken Run: Dawn of the NuggetElementalWish

ScoreOppenheimerKillers of the Flower MoonSpider-Man: Across the Spider-VersePoor ThingsIndiana Jones: The Dial of Destiny

SongWhat Was I made For — BarbieI’m Just Ken — BarbieThe Fire Inside - Flamin' HotRoad to Freedom – RustinIt Never Went Away - American Symphony

Makeup and HairstylingMaestroPoor ThingsKillers of the Flower MoonOppenheimerGolda

SoundOppenheimerMaestroKillers of the Flower MoonFerrariThe Zone of Interest

Visual EffectsGuardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3The CreatorPoor ThingsMission Impossible: Dead ReckoningIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Animated Short (tentative)Once Upon a StudioWAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John and YokoHumoBoomI'm Hip

Documentary ShortThe ABCs of Book Banning (terrible film but it is a religion to them)Camp Courage Black Girls Play: The Story of Hand GamesThe Last Song from KabulNǎi Nai and Wài Pó

Live Action ShortThe AfterThe Wonderful Story of Henry SugarThe Anne Frank Gift ShopStrange Way of Life

All eyes are on Barbie to save the Golden Globes tonight when their beleaguered ceremony rolls out at long last on CBS. To get there, they would have to add 200 new members who were intersectional enough to satisfy the activists who had scolded them and shamed them out of business for being “racists” just a few years ago.

They would have to be bought by Jay Penske, who also owns the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, Indiewire, and Gold Derby. They would have to put out bylaws and rules to ensure they would be fair and equitable. And now, they can host their show and have some high-profile celebrities in attendance.

Gone are the days when Ricky Gervais laid waste to the ruling class with jokes that mocked them, exposed their hypocrisy, and were fearlessly funny. Remember funny?

Things might be “back to normal” at the Golden Globes and the Oscars, thanks to the Barbenheimer phenomenon. But is it just a new coat of paint covering an industry in decay? Or is Hollywood “back” from the brink?

How did it all go so wrong?

The leaders of Hollywood stopped listening to the free market and became Good Puritans in their new Woketopia. Once they took a side against the people, they sealed their fate and hastened their demise.

If that sounds familiar, it should. The same thing has happened to the Democratic Party and the Left writ large. In forming their #resistance, they became the most insulated ruling class since the Gilded Age. These things never end well.

I’ve been at this game since 1999, when I started an HTML site called Oscarwatch.com. When it made money, I was sued by the Academy and changed it to awardsdaily.com. I watched an entire industry rise around my little site, an industry of “Oscar blogging” that would eventually include the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and other outlets all earning money off the lucrative “For Your Consideration” ads.

I was also at the epicenter of the “Woke” religion that has strangled the life out of not just Hollywood but art, science, music, and comedy.

Back in 2001, I’d been calling out Hollywood and the Oscars because no black woman had won in the Best Actress category since they began.

I raged about this loud enough that eventually, people started to notice, and that year, Halle Berry won Best Actress along with Denzel Washington, making Oscar history. It felt like a victory won against an oppressive system that favored white people who got the best parts, won all of the awards, and shut out those who couldn’t open a movie.

That was years before Barack Obama would become the first black — or mixed-race — President. The high we received from that election is hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t a part of it. You have to think about the self-help revolution in the 1990s - therapy, Big Pharma allowed by the FDA to market directly to consumers — that led all of us on a path toward “self-improvement” and perfectionism that would eventually take us one step closer to collapse.

After the Clinton era ended, slowly, we would build a new utopia on the Left where character mattered. Bush would be the bad guy, along with the Koch brothers and other evil demons who supported fossil fuels and white people, or so we convinced ourselves. By the end of it, when Barack Obama rose to power, we were a new society — New Puritans, colonizing the New World online.

I followed Obama on Twitter, and he followed me back. Silicon Valley leaned Left, and as they became the richest people in the world, they shaped our New World in the image of Obama - now, we’d be hellbent on repeating the pattern of making history, or none of it mattered.

The problem? We didn’t notice that we’d abandoned half the country. We weren’t paying attention. Our bubble just felt so good. We were good. We were building a better world. Raising perfect children in our perfect Utopia.

I sent my daughter to a high school my more critical thinking nephew dubbed a “social justice military Academy.” I didn’t think twice about it. Around that same time, Black Lives Matter was taking root in our online Utopia, and before long, the hashtag #oscarssowhite appeared, sending the ruling class into a freaked-out tizzy.

I was way ahead of the curve back then because I’d already been on the bandwagon of pushing race and gender into the Oscars. It was “Critical Theory” in practice. I didn’t know the term for it. We all came to the same point at roughly the same time, around 2013, just after Obama’s second term.

Around this time, we began to notice the pushback against Obama himself. Any criticism against him was interpreted as “racism,” and from then on, that became the thing we feared the most. Gender and gender “identity” would come later.

When Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director and Best Picture (2009), I quietly patted myself on the back, knowing I’d had a part in screaming about gender and the Oscars. And it had worked.

Every year, there I’d be, counting heads. If they snubbed an actress like Viola Davis, choosing Meryl Streep instead (2011), I’d call them racists, suggesting they hadn’t changed since the days when Hattie McDaniel had to enter through the back of the auditorium when winning for Gone with the Wind.

I lost my core audience when I went “woke.” We didn’t call it that back then. We just felt the high of a collective sense of purpose, making our new utopia online more equitable, 1984 style. We were building a world “inside” that locked out the world “outside,” and we were taking all of American culture, including the Oscars, with us.

We were already too married to the Democrats so that all of Hollywood, a business that relies on the free market to survive, suddenly had to abandon it because half the country was now the enemy when Trump won in 2016.

We never expected to need people to buy movie tickets and watch our awards shows. We seemed to believe that all of our whining about Trump was something people cared about outside our bubble.

We didn’t notice we’d abandoned half the country until the Oscar ratings went into free fall. You can track them at the beginning of the Trump era. Hollywood took a side, and thus, half their audience vanished.

When COVID hit, the box office collapsed. We kept waiting, year after year, for the box office to come back to life. Top Gun Maverick brought people out to the theaters, but it seemed like a one-off. We all imagined this was finally the end of theatrical.

Then came Barbenheimer. As a meme phenom online, it represented signs of life in a dead industry as TikTok users delighted in taking pictures of themselves in Barbie and Oppenheimer costumes. Every Gen-Zer had to see both movies so as to brand themselves as part of this movement.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Barbenheimer looked a lot like Hollywood movies used to look, with traditional masculine and feminine heroes. There was something retro about it, an echo of the past that seemed to ignite a frenzy at the box office.

But it was too good to be true. Not long after that, the writers and actors went on strike, and the industry once again hit the skids.

When Sound of Freedom came along, the hysteria machine went into overdrive, here was a movie that had defied the odds and became a bonafide hit, but because it wasn’t part of the Woketopia, it had to be viciously attacked and destroyed. The machine went into overdrive, attempting to crucify the filmmakers and the film's subject.

Yet, there it is, in the year's top ten films, besting Indiana Jones and Mission Impossible. It also showed signs of life. People would turn out if someone gave them a movie they wanted to see.

And therein lies the problem for the Woketopians. They continue to give people what they should want rather than what they do want. They could right the ship if they listened to the free market. But to do that, they’d have to abandon their mission of equity over merit.

Film awards depend on merit. They depend on an industry that awards the best rather than an industry that tries to right the wrongs of society.

Since 2020, most film awards seem more motivated to give their awards only to people of color or other marginalized groups because giving out an award to a “white guy movie” feels counterproductive. But in so doing, they’ve destroyed their brand.

The Fix

Understanding the why of it takes you halfway there. The real problem for the Woketopians is their alliance with the #resistance, aka the Democratic Party. If Obama is producing movies, putting out top ten lists, and overseeing his flock in our New America online, then there is no escape. No one wants to offend The King.

Those of us who have been around a while remember what it used to be like in Hollywood and on the Left. Of course, the counterculture revolution in the 1960s broke free from religion’s grip on art, science, education, and culture. That was an easy side to take back when they made Field of Dreams.

But that Hollywood doesn’t exist anymore. We don’t have Arthur Miller to write The Crucible or Rod Serling to write The Twilight Zone. We have instead Good Puritans who value their status inside utopia. All of the great work will have to be built outside of Hollywood as a new counterculture takes shape.

What is destroying Hollywood and the Oscars is that they have forgotten why they exist at all. They’re not a church or a religious movement. They’re here for one reason. To entertain us. Do we care what Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DeNiro, Julia Roberts, or Mark Ruffalo think about politics? No.

They should be begging Ricky Gervais, Dave Chapelle, or Joe Rogan to host. These voices are popular and exist in “the real world.” But more than that, they have no problem speaking truth to power. Give people a reason to watch, and they just might.

They won’t do that because streaming has given Hollywood and awards shows a soft landing and a safe space to retire. The SAG Awards will be hosted on Netflix this year, and viewership numbers won’t matter.

Like fixing the Left, fixing Hollywood is likely a fool’s errand. They don’t want it to change. They’ve reached an unfortunate bottleneck that leaves them no option except to let what was once a thriving empire collapse. But out of the ashes, a new industry will grow - because we the people still need one.

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