March 9, 2024
I don’t go to movies and I seldom watch them at home. Maybe this was a result of my growing up in the segregated south. The first run movies were in segregated theatres and my parents refused to go sit in the balcony. I can’t remember what our theatres showed but I do remember going to them every now and then with friends. It was a social outing. But I felt imprisoned in the theatre being held captive for 3 hours. I never could get pass the fact that the actors were acting with all the fake imagery – cue the rubber shark! Now the imagery is lifelike but it is still fake and the actors are still acting. I would occasionally watch a movie at home where I could pause the movie and go do productive stuff. Sometimes it would take me days just to get through a single movie. Nevertheless, I actually liked some film noir like the Bogart movies, Pulp Fiction and Choose Me. On a recent flight to Los Angeles, the entertainment video screen in the plane had dozens of movies. None of them appealed to me so I listened to my music instead. On the flight back, I tried to watch Star Trek Discovery and found it simply awful. I did watch the first season of Halo which at least was not boring.
The last movie I saw in the theatre was Saving Private Ryan only because my other half’s father was a Bedford Boy and in the first wave at D-Day. Before that I went with my son and his family to see one of the Star Wars movies when he was in UTs MBA program. Aside from my aversion to the movies, I do not like what the movie makers are peddling. They are among the leading leftists in the country despite gaining their riches through capitalism. Much like their fellow leftists, Hollywood makes all the appropriate clucking noises to appease themselves and their fellow “progressives”. Yet Hollywood remains a predominately white male good old boys club. Few blacks are members of the academy and remember it is the academy that nominates itself and votes itself Oscars. You would think in these “woke” days that the Oscar nominees would be black, women, Hispanic and transgender demonstrating Hollywood’s commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity. So you would expect “Till” to receive a best picture nomination and nominations for Warrior King which starred black women, produced by a black woman and directed by a black woman. But no. There were no blacks nominated in any major category. The white good old boys once again nominated themselves and will vote themselves the Oscars. Not surprising the hash tag “Oscars so white” has resurfaced.
Thomas Sowell once remarked that when some white person professor starts spouting off about diversity and inclusion to ask “How many republicans are in your sociology department?” In Hollywood, one can ask how many black directors do you have? How many black producers? How many blacks actors in meaningful roles? The left pays lip service to DEI and the latest academy award nominations are further evidence of their hypocrisy.
haroldblackphd.com 