The Oscars No Longer Matter…that’s a Good Thing

This year, the Academy Awards used Instagram influencers to try to boost the Oscars’ show ratings. It helped a little. The ratings for this year’s Academy Awards were higher than last year’s train wreck, but the show still had the second-lowest ratings in Oscars history with 15.4 million viewers.

Oscars ratings have collapsed 70% in the last ten years alone. To give you a sense of how far the Oscars have fallen, 43.7 million people tuned in to watch the Oscars in 2014, less than a decade ago.

More importantly, few care about what movies are nominated anymore. Can you even name last year’s “Best Picture” winner? Do you know what pictures were nominated this year? The answer is irrelevant to the public.

Part of this is just technological change. Young people can see themselves on their phone screens all day. The new teenaged “dream” is having a TikTok video go viral, not winning an Academy Award and giving a speech, mostly because so few people would watch the speech anyway.

That’s a good thing. The Oscars have a decades-long history of pushing left-wing political activism and cultural degradation. We should welcome its decline.

The use of Oscar awards speeches to engage in political activism took off in 1973 after Marlon Brando’s win for his role as “Vito Corleone” in “The Godfather.” To receive his award, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to protest U.S. treatment of native Americans. The Oscar ceremonies have had moments of mostly left-wing activism ever since.

But it was in the 1990s that the role of Oscar clout in promoting cultural degeneracy really accelerated. It was during this decade that convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein manipulated Hollywood to honor films his company produced. Many of his films, which will be forgotten in the decades to come, were rabidly pro-abortion, viciously anti-Catholic, and generally hedonistic. Had the Oscars not constantly honored Weinstein films as somehow “sophisticated” instead of vile, he would not have attained the power he gained over actors. He destroyed many women’s careers and lives in the process.

By the early aughts, Oscar ceremony attendees were giving a standing ovation to creepy rapist Roman Polanski, who sodomized a 13-year-old girl. That the Academy Awards had large audiences for as long as it did after that is baffling in many ways.

Even before Weinstein reached his pinnacle, the Academy was using the awards to push far-left cultural fetishes, particularly in service of an increasingly radical gay agenda. The Academy Awards played a role in moving American culture from boundary-appropriate tolerance of gay men and women to obsessive “celebration” of all things LGBTQUIA.

For example, in 1993 the transvestite film “The Crying Game” was showered with nominations. Its Oscar recognition enabled the movie to triple its earnings gross. Nobody has wanted to watch “The Crying Game” since and, had it not been nominated by the Academy, few would have bothered to see it that year either. 

But highlighting an LGBTQUIA thriller about a chic who is really a dude feels tame and innocent now compared to later years.

By 2018, the Oscars were celebrating a pederasty film called “Call Me By Your Name.” The film romanticized a sexual relationship between an adult male and the teenaged boy he grooms. Abuse victim Cheyenne Montgomery rightly called it a “dishonest, dangerous film” in a Boston Globe editorial. The film won best adapted screenplay that year.

In earlier decades the Academy at least had the common sense to balance out nominations for unwatchable “art” with popular successes that would draw an Oscar night audience. No longer. 

In 1994, director Jane Campion could get an Oscar boost for her film “The Piano” because it received a best picture nomination in a year when other nominees included commercial successes like “The Fugitive,” “Schindler’s List” and “In the Name of the Father.” 

In 2022, is Campion’s “Power of the Dog going to receive any such boost? Doubtful. And with the Academy instituting a radical racial and sexual quota system for nominations in the future, interest in the awards will dwindle even further.

But do not mourn. Be glad that rapists, pedophiles, and radical leftists are at least losing the power of this one-night opportunity to manipulate a worldwide audience with their garbage.

Reporting by Media Research Center.

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