With the 97th Academy Awards set for Sunday, expect the annual avalanche of anti-woke missives. This year’s batch is sure to be laced with glee in light of President Donald Trump’s decisive victory in November. Conservative commentators, many of whom made their names ridiculing woke absurdities, will do a Gene Kelly impersonation over Hollywood’s grave.
It’s an entertaining, if increasingly tedious tradition in its own right.
Of course, the movie industry has earned every ounce of derision it receives. Hollywood’s commitment to pumping left-wing cultural programming into the nation’s bloodstream has driven its decadeslong fade into irrelevance. The industry that once elevated America’s collective imagination, reinforced her shared humanity, and inspired her to embrace the very best of its aspirations morphed into a propaganda machine that alienates audiences with heavy-handed messaging rather than uniting them through timeless art.
Take Sunday’s hopefuls for Best Picture: Anora and Conclave. The former is about an Israeli sex worker and the latter is about an intersex pope. One doesn’t even need to see these movies to understand the messaging. It’s the same moral tale over and over: tradition bad, cultural acceptance of alternative sexuality good.
One wonders: Are not even the purveyors of wokeism bored to tears yet?
But Hollywood’s degradation is not the cultural win some would have you believe. It is indeed a happy development that malign anti-American and anti-Christian radicals have lost their grip on the nation’s consciousness. But the American film industry has, at its best, been a powerful force for good.
It is not a victory that Hollywood has fallen. It’s a tragedy.
In 1946, 90 million Americans, which was over half the population, went to the movies weekly. During World War II, films such as Casablanca galvanized a public wrestling with the uncertainty of war and promoted patriotism without being preachy — the New York Times called it a “picture which makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” Its cultural impact is beyond dispute. There’s a reason we can all quote from it 80 years removed.
A decade later, Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon reflected America’s inner conflict over how to best approach the Cold War. The paranoia of the early nuclear era, during which the United States faced down an enemy seemingly as mighty as itself, drove many Americans to consider appeasement and to even flee from the fight, just as the townspeople and deputy sheriffs abandoned Sheriff Will Kane, played by Gary Cooper, as a band of outlaws descended upon the town. Kane’s quiet courage and “stand your ground” mentality didn’t galvanize the public in the manner of Casablanca, but for Americans of all political persuasions, it deepened the moral understanding of the moment and the stakes involved.
And then, in the immediate wake of Watergate, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather offered an intricate and gritty meditation on the nature of power — and how far certain malefactors are willing to go to secure it. Drenched in post-1960s cynicism, the film, which the New York Times called “one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life,” captured the nation’s growing fascination with anti-heroes. Whereas the categories of “hero” and “villain” have been completely subverted by contemporary Hollywood (with the exception being white, male Christians, who are always villains), The Godfather and its equally gripping sequel did not glorify evil. Rather, it underscored the consequences of surrendering to temptation.
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Examples of movies stirring the American soul to great benefit are numerous, from the inception of the film industry up until its recent past. It is a history worth celebrating.
The fall of Hollywood has impoverished American culture. Celebrate the failures of the woke, sure, but not of the film industry itself.