The 96th Academy Awards will take place March 10th 2024. Now I haven’t watched any part of the Oscars in coming on twenty years. Even back in the early 2000’s they had become unwatchable both for the virtue signaling that made up most of the spectacle and for the unbelievably low entertainment value of the movies selected as nominees.
In the spirit of open mindedness I decided to take a look at the publicly available information on the movies that are up for the Best Picture award. Below are links to each of the nominees.
- American Fiction
- Anatomy of a Fall
- Barbie
- The Holdovers
- Killers of the Flower Moon
- Maestro
- Oppenheimer
- Past Lives
- Poor Things
- The Zone of Interest
You can check for yourself if your tastes may differ from mine. Most of them sound unwatchable. A multi-decade exploration of Leonard Bernstein’s bisexuality or a courtroom trial to determine whether a wife killed her husband or he committed suicide or whether he just fell off a balcony with their blind son as the chief witness or several other even less interesting plots.
I suppose a lot of older women might want to see Barbie. And I’m sort of interested to see whether Oppenheimer is any good. But after those two movies there isn’t much else. Interestingly, those two movies appear to be the only ones that made any money. The rest of them didn’t even break even. And since the Marvel movies lost money last year does that mean Oppenheimer and Barbie are the only source of income for Hollywood in 2023?
So my experiment in open-mindedness crashed and burned. Hollywood is no longer a thing. Other than maybe a source for genre movies (action/adventure, sci-fi and comic book heroes) they’ve basically moved away from a pretty large chunk of what used to be their audience.
And it shows. This list of best picture nominees is made up of either vanity projects by arthouse directors or Hollywood virtue signaling vehicles. There’s even that time honored chestnut, the Nazi Holocaust period piece (The Zone of Interest).
So, I still haven’t gotten around to watching Oppenheimer. I’ve heard it’s a mixed bag. It has some interesting things but it’s more than bit too long. Eventually I’ll watch it. But as for either watching the Oscars or any of these movies that ain’t happening. In fact, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever have a reason for watching the Academy Awards ceremony again. Maybe if they were brave enough to make Ricky Gervais the emcee I might watch the compilation of his insults of the nominees. That I could see as being worthwhile. What he did to the Golden Globes as the host was epic and well deserving of my time to rewatch it.
In fact that’s what I’m going to do on March 10th. I’ll rewatch the clip showing all of his best zingers at the Golden globes.
Now that’s entertainment!