Let us go back to a simpler time. The late summer of 2016. People were still enraged about white male domination, but it hadn’t become as parroted on a daily basis as when the Orange One took hold of the Oval Office. So it was that when Damien Chazelle’s sixth movie, La La Land, came out, critics and audiences were as quick to revel in it as they were to immediately tar and feather it once Moonlight was released a couple months later in October and suddenly shot to the top of people’s list because it checked off far more politically correct boxes, in addition to serving as just the sort of victim porn that audiences have come to love and expect in order to feel not only better about themselves, but as though they’re getting some sort of “cinematic experience” worth leaving their own couch for (though, to be fair, Joker also endlessly feeds off just that kind of victim porn).
La La Land was suddenly a chief representation of the #OscarsSoWhite phenomenon. An emblem of the Hollywood sickness called white privilege and the lack of diversity that comes with it. Never mind that it was initially hailed as a “magical love letter” and “audacious, retro, funny and heartfelt,” now that Moonlight had come along to iterate to viewers how “unwoke” they had been for falling prey to such white people fodder, it was game over. How could they have been so blind to such faux profundity? When, in fact, Moonlight was the very pinnacle of such a phenomenon.
In an introduction to Eli Roth’s conversation with Bret Easton Ellis for Interview in spring of 2019, it was written that the topics addressed would be: “Hollywood’s ‘fake-woke corporate culture,’ the psychosis of self-victimization, the asexualizing of gay men to fit mainstream tastes, the death of art in the name of pluralism, the ‘warped authoritarian moral superiority movement’ that passes for progressive liberalism in the era of Trump and why King Cobra is a more interesting film than Moonlight (Ellis does shrewdly speculate that Moonlight never would have won an Oscar if the main character got a blow job on the beach instead of a prudish hand job).” For one of the many films addressed in Easton Ellis’ latest book, White, a collection of essays on Generation Wuss and the love of victimizing that has taken hold in America, is Moonlight. A movie that was even further given to that love of the exploited victim when Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway came together to falsely announce the winner of Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars as La La Land before correcting themselves to read the envelope as originally intended: Moonlight. Again, the white man had somehow swooped in to fuck up the entire demographic of non-whites’ (because when any “ethnic group” gets a nod, they all do, right?) opportunity for glory.
With La La Land having racked up fourteen nominations in comparison to Joker’s eleven, it seems that Joker still has a slight leg-up on being even more scandalous for there’s not even really a requisite “ethnic movie” that it can be as easily pitted against. It’s merely that it embodies so much of the woe is me white male privilege that people have come to despise on cue at the very sight of a bianco. Least of all one putting on clown makeup for added insult, as though to iterate to the masses that the people who run the show are complete harlequins.
Joaquin Phoenix’s now signature dance seems merely to come across only as the continued triumph of the bianco traipsing over the advancement of others at every turn. In La La Land, too, there’s a lot of white people dancing. As though to mock those ignored and forced into the margins while these lilies appear only to be doing a jig on the grave of potential progress. But sometimes a movie is just a movie, and the Academy, if anything, has proven themselves to be, believe it or not, staunchly color blind in the face of a film community that seems not to care for the content of anything but that it checks off all the right marks in an affirmative action application, so obsessively focused on color and genitalia as opposed to story.
The obsession with racial and gender quotas in film has, at this point, been the main catalyst for having no Oscars host. Everything and everyone is too controversial, doomed to somehow offend (yet no one got that upset about white male Ricky Gervais hosting the Golden Globes, instead titillated by his brutal honesty, so brutal they’re already calling in Tina Fey and Amy Poehler again for next year). Did anyone really think J. Lo deserved an Oscar for Hustlers, or that her performance was just particularly good after years of being presented with schlock on her part like The Back-Up Plan? Those clamoring about how Lupita Nyong’o also should have been considered for Us have quickly forgotten the backlash against her performance for declaring that her “creepy” voice was inspired by those with the disability of spasmodic dysphonia.
At the outset of its release, while met with concern about and criticism toward incels and stoking white male rage, Joker was instantly hailed. But now the time has come for its reckoning. The same reaction against it that befell La La Land (still, mind you, a great movie) when audiences all at once realized that white people problems are not chic, and so often contribute to the worse problems of “the other.” Little does this other know, it’s only further making itself as such by constantly ranting about it every time the Oscar media blitzkrieg rolls around. And, honestly, why does anyone who hates white institutions and all they stand for so badly crave their approval? At the rate of this offense, one envisions all awards shows being banned in the future.
