I used to love the Oscars. The Oscars and election night were my “Super Bowls” growing up. I would print out the list of nominations, see all the movies with my cousin, and then vote for my favorites and which movies I thought would win. In sixth grade, I wrote that I wanted to be an executive producer — that’s how much I adored movies. I saw the medium of film not just as an end to be loved for its own sake but also as a means to change culture and direct people’s attention to the true, the good, and the beautiful. They say politics is downstream from culture. What moves culture better than movies?
And if Joker is this year’s most Oscar-nominated film, what does that then say about our culture?
Globally, Joker is now the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, but the highest-grossing domestic R-rated film is still The Passion of the Christ, which was not even nominated for best picture, best director, or best actor back in 2004. But did anyone make a fuss when Hollywood disenfranchised people of faith? Nope.
Did anyone even mention the snub of Martin Scorsese’s 2016 long-awaited Silence? No — because that was also a film that dealt with a serious question of faith.
Righteous outrage only seems to occur when people of color are statistically less represented in nominations and when women are left out of the best director category.
As a woman, I wouldn’t want to be nominated unless I made a movie believing it could “save the world,” as Greta Gerwig claims Quentin Tarantino movies do. “[To make a movie] like movies themselves matter — like they are both high art, which they are, and that they are populist art, which they are. A movie that speaks the most profound truth to the biggest crowds … and with the confidence that everybody will be changed for the better by the experience.” Not because I’m a woman — hear me roar — but because I made a movie that mattered.
While I’ve already stressed how little I cared for Greta Gerwig’s version of Little Women, the film still has six Oscar nominations. Yet the film’s producer, Amy Pascal, has complained that men are not as interested in seeing the movie, which makes sense seeing that it is a film “by women, for women, about women.” But it’s not that all men don’t enjoy the story of Little Women. (Former President Theodore Roosevelt liked it, as did America’s youth.) In fact, in 1927, the New York Times published a poll that said Little Women beat out the Bible as the book that high school students found most interesting. Perhaps it was the movie version men didn’t want to see, a realization that might be too hard to bear for the film’s backers and falls on deaf ears.
What really should be talked about is the ideological diversity that is consistently missing in Hollywood. This year’s missed opportunity for that was Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life, a thoroughly Catholic movie. While not particularly entertaining to watch due to Malick’s slow style and the film’s excessive length, as Brad Minor noted, the film dealt with heavy themes often ignored in mainstream cinema. The protagonist resists Adolf Hitler (you would think Hollywood would take the bait) and, similarly to St. Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons, will not swear an oath that goes against his conscience. It’s also an extraordinary story about a marriage centered on faith and enduring until death, which glorifies God.
In pale comparison, Marriage Story, nominated for best picture, is about a marriage centered on self-gratification and identity, love enduring until infatuation flees, and the glorification of divorce.
But in addition to a lack of ideological diversity, there’s also no comedic self-deprecation. The Oscars will not have a host. It’s amazing to me why anyone would still tune in to watch an industry awards show that promises to be missing what makes it relevant to pop culture. Let’s not forget that Ricky Gervais was the best part of the Golden Globes.
It was St. Pope John Paul II, a former playwright, who in his Letter to Artists offered an “initiation [for artists] to rediscover the depth of the spiritual and religious dimension which has been typical of art in its noblest forms in every age.”
Until that renaissance, I’ll be rooting for 1917.
Jessica Kramer (@JessKramer1776) is a writer in the Washington area. She is founder and president of Ladies for Liberty.
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