They don't seem to understand that most human beings can automatically detect when they are being sold a sermon. Have they seen church attendance? It has shrunk greatly. People don't really enjoy lecturing. Everything they've done in this order has come off as weird, uncomfortable, unrealistic, and fake. I never understand why they want to redo old stories that people feel emotionally attached to when they could easily find or write actual new stories for diverse groups. Different cultures have their own wonderful stories to tell. Rewriting history just insults the audience.
When will somebody with a voice/following comment on the incredible (futile/performative) saturation of black actors on every ad, TV show, films (set in 1900 England!) and billboards.
We all want an end to racism. But how is this helping that end? And how is it diversity?? Ask all my Arab, Latino and Asian colleagues in fury....
It's utterly ridiculous. It's as if companies hire the same 4 marketing companies to do their ads and shows. When in doubt, put a black man in. It's fake and desperate at the same time.
Yes! This is another example of 'token blacks.' It carries the same danger that 'token blacks' pose in every other field: it tarnishes the blacks who have earned that position. This is unfair to the many great black actors out there.
This also goes for great latino, asian, middle eastern, pacific islander, etc, actors. When they have racial quotas in movies the audience is never sure that they are getting the best product that they could have made...
Agreed. Outside of CRT and other insane whitness theories, in reality, I've never met a black person in my life who said they needed help or reparations or payback or liftups, and I've lived in the most woke cities on earth.
CRT, yet another product of academia. I am in academia - let me explain that stuff coming out of academia must be interpreted in the context of "Publish or Perish."
It is more than simply churning out paper after paper... no one gets tenure by publishing articles that reaffirm what has already been written: new scholarship must innovate, create and push boundaries.
Not everyone with a Ph.D. & a teaching position can come up with good, new ideas to obtain coveted tenure, so they take old and/or bad ideas and apply academese to camouflage them as good, new ideas. No one calls out the fact that the empire has no clothes because everyone who can read those articles is playing the same game.
Sadly this has crept into STEM fields.
Many up and coming Biologists, in lieu of producing good research, are jumping on the 'Spectrum of Sex' bandwagon. Instead of labelling the condition of XXY chromosomes as Klinefelter Syndrome - they proclaim that it is another sex besides male & female. (The same goes for XYY - Jacobs Syndrome). These young scholars make the leap to Sex is a spectrum of infinite variety because you have to push the boundaries to get tenure - and you get bonus points for pissing off The Right. Side note: I am betting that by 2030, someone will publish a paper claiming that 'male' is *not* one of the many, many sexes along the spectrum of human sexes.
Plus, Tom Hanks has been churning out some good domestic films that have *appropriate diversity* that doesn't shock you out of the film. Consider Greyhound and News of the World.
I cancelled my Disney+ sub after seeing the pedo content in Acolyte. I already canceled Netflix for other DEI nonsense. I'm running out of streaming services that I want to give money to.
Instead I'm watching Pluto: free, no log-in or registration required. Or turning back to physical media. Or playing video games. Reading, lots of reading. And I'm not the only one.
I have cancelled streaming services for those reason, too. I now spend more time *doing things* than watching things. It is amazing how much of a mental health boost I get by being creative and/or productive.
Good question. Pushback is happening, but on a small scale so far. And you're right: there's an army of woke zombies. A dangerous and difficult war. But it must be fought and won.
This is more about greed and laziness than anything. Why aren’t production companies mining the rich tradition of stories that come from places other than Europe and North America? Instead of six versions of Cinderella with actors of various ethnicities, tell tales from other cultures. They’d have to pay a bit more for research, translation, and script writing, but it would be better to tell an African or Asian tale to give more roles to people of color than to just plug in people of color in traditionally white stories. Audiences are so ignorant of history these days and shows like Bridgerton are not helping.
I can imagine the essay’s history teachers have to read about how tough it was for black Anne Boleyn. It was tough for her because she was French. That’s important. It’s important to understand that hatred and bigotry isn’t restricted to skin color. In many parts of the US, you can still attend 16 years of public education and not have either a non-white student or teacher in your class. I grew up in New York and had only a handful of non-white kids in my town. Diversity should serve the stories being told and the stories should be about people from all walks of life, but casting someone simply to check a box is ridiculous as is a story about Regency England where race and gender are flexible, no matter the role. Black soldiers weren’t even part of the general U.S. Army population until 1951.
The classics are an exception. You should not have to be white to perform Shakespeare. To bar actors of color would be wrong. (In Shakespeare’s day, women’s roles were played by men.) To theatre’s credit, actors of color were welcomed into a greater range of roles for a long time and well before film and television even considered it.
For 30 years we have had non-western traditions and stories.
We have had a decade of almost nonstop African American tales.
Yes, we could produce stories based on the Igbo, Japan or China, or Jordan, or El Salvador. But you know what? They do that and presumably their product is not worth importing.
Also, no other part of the planet outside the West offers any interest in non-nationalist product/stories.
We have been reading bell hooks for 25 years.
Most Eng Lit grads today don't read any white males! I mean cmon.
Last, perhaps the West has a far richer narrative of stories. Btw. It does.
None of your, mostly accurate, anecdotes are what we refer to by DEI/CRT, and the authoritarian race huckstering it constitutes.
Yes, and there were black soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War but they were in separate units, not part of the general population.
Didn't the MPA set DEI requirements for movies to be eligible for Academy Awards?
It sounds worthwhile for investors to challenge Disney as it alienates its market, but maybe not worth the effort to challenge the MPA while it engineers its own irrelevance. Not much money to win in fighting them, so it's their ball, their game. Let them make it even clearer that the awards have rarely been about the merit of the underlying work. Let them make room for awards in service of those paying for tickets and streams.
We are awash in misapprehensions. Hollywood is mistaking its mission of art for social programming. You can either have mandatory outcomes or a fair process, but not both. eg the racial mandates for the Oscars etc. have all but eliminated their interest or social significance - because it's explicit now that we are not rewarding the best art, but the best social agitprop. No thanks. I don't know how much longer all of this can persist - it's been proven not to be profitable in most cases - but seeing increased numbers of people willing to speak their minds is a refreshing change from 2021 etc.
re "In other words, erase actual Hollywood history and replace it with a fabrication"
An' if I may add, whomever is chosen to curate / run the Academy Museum in it's hopefully redeemed incarnation--needs to have a deep and intimate knowledge an' appreciation (nay love! adoration!) of Hollywood from it's humble early 20th C beginnings (startin' with the silent shorts) through the 20th Century. (I'll leave the current century to those of stronger stomach...) Anyone that cannot easily list the films of Michael Curtiz or George Cukor, or Billy Wilder or William Wyler or Preston Sturges or Frank Capra.... (and SO many more) should not be allowed to place their tuchis on that "chair!"
They don't seem to understand that most human beings can automatically detect when they are being sold a sermon. Have they seen church attendance? It has shrunk greatly. People don't really enjoy lecturing. Everything they've done in this order has come off as weird, uncomfortable, unrealistic, and fake. I never understand why they want to redo old stories that people feel emotionally attached to when they could easily find or write actual new stories for diverse groups. Different cultures have their own wonderful stories to tell. Rewriting history just insults the audience.
Seriously. A good story with believable characters sells itself. No “life lessons” or proselytizing necessary.
When will somebody with a voice/following comment on the incredible (futile/performative) saturation of black actors on every ad, TV show, films (set in 1900 England!) and billboards.
We all want an end to racism. But how is this helping that end? And how is it diversity?? Ask all my Arab, Latino and Asian colleagues in fury....
It's utterly ridiculous. It's as if companies hire the same 4 marketing companies to do their ads and shows. When in doubt, put a black man in. It's fake and desperate at the same time.
Yes! This is another example of 'token blacks.' It carries the same danger that 'token blacks' pose in every other field: it tarnishes the blacks who have earned that position. This is unfair to the many great black actors out there.
This also goes for great latino, asian, middle eastern, pacific islander, etc, actors. When they have racial quotas in movies the audience is never sure that they are getting the best product that they could have made...
Agreed. Outside of CRT and other insane whitness theories, in reality, I've never met a black person in my life who said they needed help or reparations or payback or liftups, and I've lived in the most woke cities on earth.
CRT, yet another product of academia. I am in academia - let me explain that stuff coming out of academia must be interpreted in the context of "Publish or Perish."
It is more than simply churning out paper after paper... no one gets tenure by publishing articles that reaffirm what has already been written: new scholarship must innovate, create and push boundaries.
Not everyone with a Ph.D. & a teaching position can come up with good, new ideas to obtain coveted tenure, so they take old and/or bad ideas and apply academese to camouflage them as good, new ideas. No one calls out the fact that the empire has no clothes because everyone who can read those articles is playing the same game.
Sadly this has crept into STEM fields.
Many up and coming Biologists, in lieu of producing good research, are jumping on the 'Spectrum of Sex' bandwagon. Instead of labelling the condition of XXY chromosomes as Klinefelter Syndrome - they proclaim that it is another sex besides male & female. (The same goes for XYY - Jacobs Syndrome). These young scholars make the leap to Sex is a spectrum of infinite variety because you have to push the boundaries to get tenure - and you get bonus points for pissing off The Right. Side note: I am betting that by 2030, someone will publish a paper claiming that 'male' is *not* one of the many, many sexes along the spectrum of human sexes.
When you all finally kill DEI. I mean, burn it like an evil Witch. I hope you will start making movies and TV shows worth watching again.
I want to see a good movie with great actors and scripts that entertain without preaching or placing actors in to check a box.
I have been to one movie, Maverick, in the past year or two. That should tell you something.
Watch foreign films. I saw Sisu and loved it.
Plus, Tom Hanks has been churning out some good domestic films that have *appropriate diversity* that doesn't shock you out of the film. Consider Greyhound and News of the World.
I cancelled my Disney+ sub after seeing the pedo content in Acolyte. I already canceled Netflix for other DEI nonsense. I'm running out of streaming services that I want to give money to.
Instead I'm watching Pluto: free, no log-in or registration required. Or turning back to physical media. Or playing video games. Reading, lots of reading. And I'm not the only one.
I have cancelled streaming services for those reason, too. I now spend more time *doing things* than watching things. It is amazing how much of a mental health boost I get by being creative and/or productive.
You mean Libertas is afraid of the woke fallout. Understandable.
DEI is toxic. Hollywood, and other corporations, are learning this lesson.
Are they learning this lesson, though? The financial side maybe learning, but the ranks have been colonized by postmodernists.
Good question. Pushback is happening, but on a small scale so far. And you're right: there's an army of woke zombies. A dangerous and difficult war. But it must be fought and won.
This is more about greed and laziness than anything. Why aren’t production companies mining the rich tradition of stories that come from places other than Europe and North America? Instead of six versions of Cinderella with actors of various ethnicities, tell tales from other cultures. They’d have to pay a bit more for research, translation, and script writing, but it would be better to tell an African or Asian tale to give more roles to people of color than to just plug in people of color in traditionally white stories. Audiences are so ignorant of history these days and shows like Bridgerton are not helping.
I can imagine the essay’s history teachers have to read about how tough it was for black Anne Boleyn. It was tough for her because she was French. That’s important. It’s important to understand that hatred and bigotry isn’t restricted to skin color. In many parts of the US, you can still attend 16 years of public education and not have either a non-white student or teacher in your class. I grew up in New York and had only a handful of non-white kids in my town. Diversity should serve the stories being told and the stories should be about people from all walks of life, but casting someone simply to check a box is ridiculous as is a story about Regency England where race and gender are flexible, no matter the role. Black soldiers weren’t even part of the general U.S. Army population until 1951.
The classics are an exception. You should not have to be white to perform Shakespeare. To bar actors of color would be wrong. (In Shakespeare’s day, women’s roles were played by men.) To theatre’s credit, actors of color were welcomed into a greater range of roles for a long time and well before film and television even considered it.
For 30 years we have had non-western traditions and stories.
We have had a decade of almost nonstop African American tales.
Yes, we could produce stories based on the Igbo, Japan or China, or Jordan, or El Salvador. But you know what? They do that and presumably their product is not worth importing.
Also, no other part of the planet outside the West offers any interest in non-nationalist product/stories.
We have been reading bell hooks for 25 years.
Most Eng Lit grads today don't read any white males! I mean cmon.
Last, perhaps the West has a far richer narrative of stories. Btw. It does.
None of your, mostly accurate, anecdotes are what we refer to by DEI/CRT, and the authoritarian race huckstering it constitutes.
There were Black soldiers in the Continental Army during the Revoutionary War.
Yes, and there were black soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War but they were in separate units, not part of the general population.
Excellent piece. Thank you for all you do!
"Go woke, go broke" in action
Didn't the MPA set DEI requirements for movies to be eligible for Academy Awards?
It sounds worthwhile for investors to challenge Disney as it alienates its market, but maybe not worth the effort to challenge the MPA while it engineers its own irrelevance. Not much money to win in fighting them, so it's their ball, their game. Let them make it even clearer that the awards have rarely been about the merit of the underlying work. Let them make room for awards in service of those paying for tickets and streams.
This comedy of errors is one self-inflicted wound after another.
We are awash in misapprehensions. Hollywood is mistaking its mission of art for social programming. You can either have mandatory outcomes or a fair process, but not both. eg the racial mandates for the Oscars etc. have all but eliminated their interest or social significance - because it's explicit now that we are not rewarding the best art, but the best social agitprop. No thanks. I don't know how much longer all of this can persist - it's been proven not to be profitable in most cases - but seeing increased numbers of people willing to speak their minds is a refreshing change from 2021 etc.
I think Hollywood believed the accusations that violence in TV & Movies fostered in in society so now they are trying to foster their value system.
re "In other words, erase actual Hollywood history and replace it with a fabrication"
An' if I may add, whomever is chosen to curate / run the Academy Museum in it's hopefully redeemed incarnation--needs to have a deep and intimate knowledge an' appreciation (nay love! adoration!) of Hollywood from it's humble early 20th C beginnings (startin' with the silent shorts) through the 20th Century. (I'll leave the current century to those of stronger stomach...) Anyone that cannot easily list the films of Michael Curtiz or George Cukor, or Billy Wilder or William Wyler or Preston Sturges or Frank Capra.... (and SO many more) should not be allowed to place their tuchis on that "chair!"
My nominee: Jeanine Basinger
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/wesleyan-jeanine-basinger-tcm-festival-honor-1235869905/