Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen talk about Mark Ruffalo and the lies Hollywood tells itself about censorship and freedom of speech. We also talk Telluride! Scott is leaving on a jet plane and will be covering the festival every day. We go through the lineup and talk the Oscars from here.

If only all of the people now rising up to defend Mark Ruffalo had said one word in the past ten years as cancel culture and mass hysteria consumed Hollywood. I am living proof. As long as I run my site and the majority of studios refuse to advertise and continue to unperson people like me for the crime of disagreeing with them, the state of Hollywood’s paralysis will be clear to everyone outside the bubble.

Inside the bubble—the high castle in the sky—Mark Ruffalo or Jimmy Kimmel or any of the high-status aristocrats are protected. Any tiny bit of pushback they get, like accusing Ruffalo of antisemitism (which I disagreed with in my post):

I didn’t think his hysteria and idiocy meant he was antisemitic. But boy, the slightest bit of criticism brought out all the people who have been, for ten years, too cowardly to stand up for people like me or anyone else falsely accused of being a “racist.” Just imagine if they’d done that years ago. Just imagine how different things would be. As it is, the scolds and the puritans have Hollywood by the balls. And when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. I am embarrassed for all of them who only speak out when it’s convenient and only defend people who are acceptable inside utopia.

Here is their open letter (which is not brave, my friends, because they are preaching to the choir):

We are Jewish artists, writers, creative professionals, faith leaders and thinkers who have, in response to the outrageous smear campaign against our respected colleague Mark Ruffalo, a simple message to share with the world: Enough! Enough with the false and dangerous weaponization of charges of antisemitism against those who are brave enough to point out the obvious: that the assault on the Palestinian people and the assault on our liberties at home are deeply interconnected, and there is nothing antisemitic about recognizing that fact.

The proposed merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery is no mere combination of two huge multinational companies. Yes, it will destroy thousands upon thousands of livelihoods. Yes, it will further consolidate the oligarchic control of our media (witness the gutting of CBS News). Yes, it will strangle competition and creativity in film and television production and distribution.

But it will do all this and more as part of a larger project of tech-driven domination, a project Larry Ellison and his partners have never been shy about trumpeting — and one they themselves have explicitly linked to their support for the ongoing depredations being visited on the people of Palestine and their silencing of critics of those horrors. We all saw this after their Trump-brokered takeover of TikTok — a takeover they openly proclaimed was in large part motivated by their desire to boost pro-Israel propaganda. Larry Ellison personally, with his astonishing $350 million in funding and pledges to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, has been Blair’s major backer as Blair assumes an influential role in the Trump-concocted “Board of Peace” takeover of Gaza, a territory which has become an open-air laboratory for AI-driven killing and control technologies like the ones celebrated by former Oracle CEO (and current Oracle and Paramount board member) Safra Catz.

The AI road to WarnerMount runs through Gaza, and Ellison has often let us know the Orwellian world he has in store for us as he consolidates control over what we watch and how we watch it, knowing that as we watch he and his corrupt cohort will always be watching us: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.”

Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty. According to a recent Washington Post poll, 61% of American Jews now agree that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza; and four in ten even agree that these crimes amount to genocide. Do those attacking Mark Ruffalo as an antisemite seriously believe that all these American Jews are antisemites too? Or that we don’t see the connection between, on the one hand, the criminal impunities that have led the US and Israel into unending disaster and, on the other, the oligarchic powerplays of the Musks, Ellisons, Thiels and others who are working to dismantle our democracy?

But the virulence and falseness of the slanders they direct towards their critics is evidence of the increasing weakness of their position, based as it is on innuendos. Today, more and more people of conscience are joining together, to loudly and univocally proclaim: The time is over for spurious charges of antisemitism to be trotted out, this time in the defense of war, oligarchy, and AI domination. That tired playbook has run its course.

We stand proudly with Mark Ruffalo, and with all decent people who are bravely rising and speaking truth to power.

Signatories: you can read the list at Deadline.

They throw around the word genocide, which is itself antisemitic, in my opinion. You can criticize the war but don’t get it twisted. Genocide was what happened to theJews and what will happen to them if the Arab world had its way. They’re fighting back now because Hamas started a war with them. That’s what happens when you start a war. You either win or lose. This is Berlin after World War II:

But regardless, this letter and everything we’ve seen in the last ten years show where the power lies. It shows how afraid they still are to tell any kind of truth and how easy it is for them to stand up for free speech when it’s safe to do so.

No, none of them are brave. None of them are holding the powerful to account. None of them are standing up for those who have been punished for thought crimes. That is Orwellian. Who they are is what 1984 is about. They are the enclosed bubble that keeps out the Proles. They are the side with the thought police who tittle-tattle on the thought criminals. They are now and have always been Big Brother.

With Trump, they have their Two Minutes Hate—their imaginary villain dragged out every so often (every second of every day) to keep the people in line. People like me, who have been severely punished for thought crimes, are shut out and used as an example: don’t speak out or this is what will happen to you.

If it’s one of theirs—Jimmy Kimmel, Mark Ruffalo—then you have the full protection of the side with all the cultural power, the side that chooses who gets to stay and who has to go. Being anti-Israel and anti-Jewish is all the fashion now. The other side are the people demonized as Zionists and ostracized.

That they’ve now married Trump and the war in Gaza with Paramount closes the loop at long last. There is no way out, because on their side you are told what to think, what to want, what to care about, what you should like, and what you can and cannot say. That’s not the right.

So no, I’m not impressed with any of them for doing what cowards do best: protecting themselves while pretending to be brave.

Some of my favorite artists are on this list.

Not one of them would stand beside me, even though I have praised their work for years, now that I’ve become a marked person no longer welcome inside their castle in the sky.I just want them to know they get no pats on the back from me or from most Americans they’ve shit on and thrown away like human garbage, to their own detriment.

Mark Ruffalo will be fine. For once in his life he suffered the tiniest bit of criticism. And Hollywood has now shown everyone who really has the power and who doesn’t. If they kill this merger, there will be no saving the ship. It is made of iron and it will sink.

They’re the side standing up for blacklists. They’re the people who have gone along with a culture of silence and a climate of fear. They’re the people who have shut out half the country and somehow still think they are our moral betters. America is sick and tired of all of them.

Antisemitism in America is at an all-time high—on the Left and on the Right. It is unpopular and dangerous to support Israel, or even to say they have a right to exist, or to support the war in Iran. That is the simple fact. Why? Because the people with all the power are on the other side, and now we can see it laid bare. Fingers crossed the merger goes through, because these folks have all but ruined culture by making it one-sided and totalitarian, and someone has to do something.

Sasha Stone, Jeremy Jentzen, and Scott Kernen discuss the death and impact of the great Dolly Parton. We talk about the “big twist” in Digger (but we don’t give it away). We also answer questions from readers.

Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen discuss whether or not The Invite will land in the major categories. We also talk about ideal Oscar pairings for presenting awards, wading into the JK Rowling debate, and what happened at the most recent Oscar meeting.

Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen talk about the Best Picture race and whether this is Tom Cruise's year or Matt Damon's. Does Tom Cruise getting an Honorary Oscar hurt his chances? How do the new voters vote? Also talking Bucking Fastard and the Fall film festivals.

Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen discuss the Oscars and whether Obsession can crack not just Best Picture but the other categories. The Odyssey seems like the film to beat, but do people really like the movie? Will Cancel Culture ever end?

Universal is having a hell of a year. They will likely have the most profitable Best Picture contender come Oscar time, as well as one of the most profitable films of all time when factoring in budget. And those two movies are The Odyssey and Obsession(which is Focus Features, but that’s under Universal). They have become the first studio to cross the $4 billion mark for 2026, which means this is one of their best years ever.

The Odyssey is likely to sweep the Oscars and become one of the defining films of this year, but the other movie people should be thinking about is Obsession. It isn’t just that it has made an absurd amount of money simply because it was a good idea. It isn’t that the lead performance by Inde Navarrette is one of the best of the year, if not the best so far. It’s also that the film reflects what’s happening in American culture right now in an honest way.

Obsession has ignited a culture war debate every bit as big as The Odyssey has; it’s just that the conversation has been mostly confined to TikTok and in some corners of Feminist Film YouTube. It didn’t make the same kind of news because it was never about sticking it to the Right, or calling out the villains in Hollywood’s ongoing narrative. It has, however, deepened the conversation around sexual politics in our modern day.

Allow me to explain.

Obsession has become a litmus test. How you see the film will reveal who you are. It has two different camps of viewers—people who think it’s about controlling men or incels needing to possess women, and people who see it as the opposite: that women are powerful destroyers who are never satisfied and will ruin your life if given the chance. Both of these ideas pushing up against each other are what make Obsession such a great film and not just your average horror flick.

But now, Voice Memo Guy and Obsession have become linked, at least in the world of TikTok discourse.

It was the voice memo that launched a thousand TikToks, and everyone had to chime in. But what I found interesting was how it was then blended in with Obsession to further expand the discourse about women, consent, and men.

All it makes me think about is how afraid everyone is all of the time. And to me that is what makes Obsession such a brilliant movie. It is moments like these that I wish I were smarter and a better film writer so I could put into words how I see it, but I’ll give it my best shot.

Curry Barker plays with this idea on his YouTube channel, always hilariously, the anxiety of men when it comes to women, like this:

So why is it funny? Because it is the truth. It acknowledges that there is a baseline reality: men like cute girls. But then, it has the layer of safety by making fun of those guys, not the girl. As long as they’re the joke, they are in the safe zone. But of course, if you macro out from that and look at the bigger picture of what’s happened to men in movies of late, you’ll see why the perspective of the male viewer is so essential in Obsession.

Even if the Great Feminization and the Great Awokening [tm] have meant that the alpha hero has become diminished (One Battle After Another, The Odyssey, Obsession), that doesn’t mean that, at least in Obsession, there isn’t another way to view the film. Sure, you can see it as the ultimate MeToo screed, but you can also see it more as how difficult it is now just to ask a woman out.

Obsession is a wink and a nod to how absolutely crazy it has become not just to try to date, but to navigate your way through a relationship without being seen as abusive, oppressive, or any number of complaints women routinely have about men.

On the other side, young women, especially Gen Z, are raised to see men (heterosexual men) as predatory, whereas in the queer world anything and everything goes and there are no limits on sex and almost no one is dragged out into the public square and shamed for any of it. Heterosexual men, however, have been mostly muted or dampened in pop culture, and it does seem like women are simply afraid because every man is a predator and every woman is a victim.

Here is how TikTok users have tied Obsession to Voice Memo Guy to paint a picture of men as predatory.

So to me, that is what Obsession reflects as black comedy and satire. I expect some men and some women will see the film completely differently. How did you read the movie? Did you see it as these women do, as a kind of “rapey” movie about how men want to control women, how they always want to rape or assault you, and never want a “normal” relationship?

Obsession is what I think of as stealth storytelling. Horror has become a great way to explore truthful things while staying under the radar of the hive mind that demands all films send the “correct” message and that all people be “correct.” It’s a killer for art and film. The same thing happened in the 1950s with the Hays Code. Filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock flirted with the boundaries, especially Hitchcock, of what you could get away with.

The “Woke Code,” you could call it, isn’t as strict as the Hays Code was. It’s mostly voluntary, which makes it almost scarier. If you are caught out, you are not admired the way, say, Hitchcock might have been. Your career and reputation are destroyed. But the end result is the same. I found deeper themes in films like Weapons and now Obsession that explore truths buried deep beneath the surface.

Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen discuss the HFPA’s $150 million lawsuit against Penske Corp. in an attempt to take back the Golden Globes. Can they break up the unethical Penske monopoly on the trades and the Globes? Also Behemoth! Starring Pedro Pascal. We talk Best Actor and Best Actress. We talk The Odyssey. We talk Ryan Gosling and his chances for Project Hail Mary.

And we read from Joseph Kahn’s brilliant piece in the Hollywood Reporter: Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole.

Don’t let the mirage of The Odyssey’s wild success fool you. The industry is as unhealthy this year as it was the last time a Christopher Nolan movie was heralded as saving Hollywood. That was 2023 with the Barbenheimer phenom. We were all so excited to see everyone excited to line up and see both movies because they kind of had to. Even my nieces and my daughter wanted to buckle in for a movie about the guy who helped win WWII by inventing the A-Bomb.

The same sort of cultural phenom has been birthed with The Odyssey, with the Right’s unfortunate flail that it would be a “go woke, go broke” bomb. Instead, it became a must-see movie that has now surpassed Oppenheimer at the domestic box office as it heads towards perhaps becoming Christopher Nolan’s highest-grossing film ever.

Hats off to Nolan for making two blockbusters about relatively nerdy subjects and bringing them to a broader culture of young people who might never have thought much about Oppenheimer, the war, the bomb or Homer. In tapping into the cultural zeitgeist as he has here with his casting choices - Elliot Page, for example - and bringing in Travis Scott, Nolan has invited generations of social media users to participate in high culture without them even realizing it.

So that’s cool. But the whole industry can’t rest on the mighty shoulders of Christopher Nolan. The foundation remains weak, and the fact that Hollywood voters and critics will turn The Odyssey’s success into yet another battle won against the Trump Right is the tragedy of it all. Despite many loud voices hating on The Odyssey online, quite a few Conservatives love the movie. It is a movie with broad appeal, as it turns out, as is Project Hail Mary. And, it should be said, Steven Spielberg’s underrated film, Disclosure Day.

We’re living through a major transformational period; there is no doubt about it. AI is about to wipe out 3/4 of the entertainment industry, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it. While actors might be spared because AI can’t do actors well yet, everything else will, at some point in the near future, be replaced by cheaper, faster, and more compliant artificial intelligence. It’s only a matter of time. Not if, but when.

We lost our shared culture right around 2009, when the Obama administration merged with Hollywood and gradually, Hollywood split in two - with massive superhero IPs making the studios richer than their wildest dreams, and the niche market of the Oscars for the sophisticates where politics and ideology began shaping films and streaming.

Maybe things would have worked out if these two Hollywoods had remained separate, but right around 2020, the Great Awokening, these two Hollywoods had no choice but to merge because the mob was banging on the door and everyone had to “go woke” fast or else.

The attempts to “block the merger” in an attempt to stop Paramount Skydance from buying Warner Bros. Discovery show that the “resistance” is alive and well and still believes that all culture, all government, all society belongs only to them. Nothing has hurt Hollywood more than taking a side against the other half of the country, the working-class half. Whatever lies they want to tell themselves that this is not the case - and in many ways the content churn has something for everybody - there is no doubt that Hollywood still believes itself to be at war with Trump ten years later.

The war on Trump has to do with power, of course. No one gives it up willingly and everyone wants it. It has to do with Barack Obama and the utopia we all built way back when in 2008 with the rise of the iPhone and social media. We didn’t realize it back then but that’s when everything changed.

If the Americana utopia in post-World War II America was a way to put things back together again after one of the most violent periods in all of history, but especially American history. 70-80 million people died during World War II. The horrors that would emerge from that era, our last “Fourth Turning,” were the kind of thing that can send an entire country into a numb fugue state where all they wanted to do was “get back to normal.”

The threat was Communism as one war ended and another began. But really, what threatened society in the 1950s was the counter culture simmering beneath the surface. As America attempted to become stable after the war, marginalized groups would rise up and fight for their rights to be included - Civil RIghts, Women’s Rights, Gay and Lesbian Rights (as it was called then) all would mobilize and take to the streets, and eventually, the anti-war movement would create a revolution in the streets.

Think of the difference between the 1950s and the 1960s. I think we’re living through something similar now. I think it was 9/11 just at the turn of the millennium, and as civilization was beginning to migrate online, we experienced, for the first time as a society, what it was like to feel collective fear. Eventually, after two failed wars in the Middle East, Barack Obama would rise up and begin to reshape America as Eisenhower had done after World War II.

We built a new kind of American utopia, this time rooted in identity - to purge the Islamaphobes, transphobes, homophobes, racists, sexists, misogynists. We were trying to “fix” the country as we’d all “fixed” ourselves back in the 1990s amid the self-help revolution.

Throughout the Obama era, almost no institution, corporation, or industry could survive without being online. And that meant the Left had complete control of almost everything. Almost. Donald Trump led the counterculture revolution with his “basket of deplorables” in 2016, and the rest is history. Agonizing, painful, soul-crushing history, and now, because of this pointless ten-year war, there is almost nothing left of the once-mighty Left.

This has hurt the Democratic Party hard, as they now have to battle with actual Communists, not just Socialists, ready to tear it all down and remove even the presidency as they seek to build something that should terrify every American. But Hollywood was hit hard, too. The red line they drew that said you’re with us or you’re against us has all but killed the business. It has pushed the Oscars into being even more niche than they were before.

I understand that it comes down to basic beliefs, and two sides of the country are at odds with those beliefs. Now, however, we have major figures in public life so consumed by Donald Trump - the guy who used to host Celebrity Apprentice -- that it has come to define their entire personalities and careers, like Bruce Springsteen, Javier Bardem, John Cusack, Mark Ruffalo, Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda. I guess they think that’s the right move, but where does all of it end?

What do they hope happens if they somehow manage to “destroy” or even assassinate Trump? What about the millions of people who voted for him, their fellow Americans? Throw them in gulags? Shoot them? Shun them? Exile them? Then who will watch the shows and buy tickets to the movies? Yes, Christopher Nolan is just special enough to bridge the gap, but how many others can?

The reason the ten-year war on Trump has been a failure is that it’s never really been about Trump but rather preserving utopia, or “Woketopia.” In real life, majority rules. That would ordinarily mean box office and ratings matter. But they don’t, not really, unless it’s to make a point as so many now have with The Odyssey to say “see, we can go woke and not go broke.” In general, most who cover Hollywood don’t care about success or failure in terms of the numbers. Those people out there just don’t count.

Trump, believe or not, represents the “real world” more so than any Democrat now, even the new leader, Zohran Mamdani. He might lead the utopian version of America, and if he doesn’t now, he soon will, but Donald Trump, by default, has taken up the cause of the ordinary man and woman in the country who no longer have any representation in culture, certainly not in any of the award shows.

Ending the war doesn’t mean seeing Trump as a good guy or likable, but it is to understand that America is one country and we have to find a way to tolerate each other. Voting for Trump should not mean the end to anyone’s career. There should not be one side that sees itself as better or morally superior to the other. This is especially true in an industry like Hollywood that is supposed to serve the people. Yes, all the people. Even those you detest, sneer at, and would like to see dead.

I don’t know for sure that the Paramount Skydance purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery will lead to a big bang of better movies and TV shows. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that what has happened to Hollywood in the last ten years, as they shut out those who refused to go along with their totalitarian impulses to force everyone into compliance and believe what they believe, has been a disaster for an industry that still relies on ticket sales and eyeballs.

In other words, it can’t possibly get any worse.

Keep in mind that most objecting to the merger are doing so only to protest Donald Trump because what else is new? They are happy to see their entire industry collapse if it means sticking it to the Right. This is not sustainable for Hollywood and the sooner they abandon this pointless war, the better. Let it be fought at the ballot box, in politics where it belongs, not in the arts.

The #BlockTheMerger campaign has brought together an unprecedented number of power players to stop David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance from buying Warner Bros. They don’t care about a monopoly--they are the monopoly. This merger would break it up and maybe, just maybe, give the rest of us a chance to see Hollywood come back. Maybe they can do it, maybe they can’t, but there is no question that what has happened to Hollywood has been a tragedy.

All you need to know about Hollywood’s ideological monopoly is that two of the most popular shows on television, Landman and The Madison, not to mention Kathy Bates in Matlock, were blanked by the Emmy voters.

Dig further, and you’ll see that the nominations went to ideologically compliant shows, including all the late-night talk shows: Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Jon Stewart. Do you think they’re getting nominations and wins because they’re good at what they do and entertain most Americans every night?

No, friend. It’s because they are part of the ideological monopoly that has overtaken all of Hollywood and nearly every corner of American culture. There is no breathing room. If the Emmys were honest, and not part of this monopoly, they would have nominated Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison, because these are the best performances of the year.

None of this should be a secret to any thinking person. It’s just that everyone is afraid, so no one says anything. Well, I’ve never been afraid. I’ll admit it was a terrifying freefall to watch friends I’d had for 15 years end their friendship, and to experience all the ways I was punished in 2024 for the crime of having a different opinion than the monopolistic power that controls our culture.

It wasn’t even a question. If you do not go along with the status quo, you’re out. They say it’s about morality. But it is not. It is about power, and it is about control.

A lot of people since then have said to me, “All you had to do was not support Donald Trump. All you had to do was not confront the ‘gender-affirming care’ madness of the left. All you had to do was say nothing.” But to me, that was like confessing as a witch in order to live. Not only wouldn’t I ever do that, but the Hollywood I used to know—the people like those who signed their names, the 5,000-plus objecting to the merger—wouldn’t have done it long ago either.

Donald Trump’s win in 2016 changed everything. They drew a line: you’re with us, or you’re against us. In so doing, they wiped out half of their audience. How did they think it would go after that? A business that used to care about box office and ratings now has no need for either, because streaming allows them to have their utopia and say fuck you.

That, more than anything, has led to the collapse of the system. As Hollywood took its lead from the Democratic Party -- not to listen to its voters, but to decide top-down who should be the candidates --Hollywood doesn’t listen to its ticket buyers or its viewers because it doesn’t have to, not with a media that functions like a magic mirror.

The Odyssey is their Hail Mary because it pushes their ideology while also being a hit. You see, there’s no problem here. There’s no such thing as “go woke, go broke.” We’re not going to listen to you anymore, ticket buyers, because now we have a hit, and this proves that nothing is collapsing. The industry is thriving!

Except that it isn’t, regardless of The Odyssey’s success. I always knew it would make $1 billion, and I’m happy for all involved that it has. They should throw Oscars at this movie and allow a Christopher Nolan film to once again be the gold standard for the kinds of films that should win Oscars.

The tragedy is that it will probably win not because of its excellence so much as because it projects the utopian ideal of the Left’s monopoly--just as One Battle After Another did, just as late-night comedy does, just as all of the documentary nominees do. Art is politics and politics is art. There is no dividing line.

If nothing had ever happened to me or anyone else who voted for Trump, or if white men hadn’t been so systematically shut out of Hollywood to elevate women and minorities, or if there weren’t a climate of fear and a culture of silence that prevents anyone from thinking freely or writing freely or making great movies regardless of The Message, then you could say there wasn’t a monopoly. But I am living proof that there is, and they will punish you for thought crimes that will destroy your career.

HFPA Sues Penske

Today brought the news that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was suing Jay Penske for having pushed a smear campaign against the Golden Globes to weaken them in order for Penske to then buy them and add to its considerable share of the industry, which also includes The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, IndieWire, Gold Derby, and Rolling Stone.

“This case arises from a clandestine scheme to fraudulently acquire the prestigious and valuable 80-year-old Golden Globe Awards, destroy their founder and former owner, the HFPA, and exert monopolistic control over the Hollywood trades, awards, and advertising markets,” states the complaint.

Penske Media didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, Dick Clark Productions, a large producer of televised live-event entertainment programming, which shares the same ownership as THR, and Eldridge bought the Golden Globes from the HFPA, the organization of non-American journalists that founded the awards show in 1943. [HR]

So they can lie to themselves and fool themselves into thinking all this is about keeping things free and open. They can’t fool me. I’ve been working in this industry for 26 years. Half my life I’ve been online, and I know what free looks like. I know what happens when you listen to the majority, when you listen to the ticket holders, when you listen to audiences and give them what they want.

I also now know up close and personally how monopolies work. I know how the Left’s ideological monopoly works and I know how the Penske monopoly impacted me personally, not to mention the entire awards industry since all of them are under the same oppressive control that has wrecked Hollywood.

Let’s not forget what happened when Rebecca Keegan wrote an investigative piece in The Hollywood Reporter about my political shift. That meant my career went up in flames overnight, and Jay Penske was able to indirectly take out a competitor. I can’t say for sure that’s what happened or if he even cares or knew about it, but the song remains the same - a competitor was taken out and, more importantly, one of his loudest critics was now rendered moot.

Beyond that, Gold Derby, also owned by Penske, “benched” me, which further helped to marginalize me and my site amid cancellation. There is something sinister about having the same ownership of the trades and the Golden Globes, as I have been saying ever since the sale.

Monopolies are bad for Hollywood, but especially so when one as big as the Left’s chokehold on Hollywood has now become. It gets into everything and has weakened Hollywood’s voice at a time when there are more exciting stories swirling around us than at any time in my lifetime—only those stories can’t be told.

Variety announced that the merger is delayed in a tweet below:

This merger is like Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. These are not creating monopolies; they are breaking them up, and only billionaires like them have that kind of power.

If we’re fighting a virtual civil war, our battles are not fought at Antietam but on social media. The left lost one significant battle when they lost Twitter. But it’s not over yet for them. They’re still fighting. They want their utopia back, and how that translates into practicality is to retain total control over the message—whether it’s the Democrats pushing it, or Hollywood pushing it, or schools, or museums, or cultural institutions. That influence, that hold, has meant half the country is no longer welcome because they do not comply.

Think about the Kennedy Center or America 250. Think about how easy it was for all of them to pressure and intimidate artists. Don’t you dare participate, or else. And they think they’re the good guys. They think they’re the heroes of this story for suppressing art and preventing the public--at least half the country--from participating in it.

I can only hope that David Ellison, Paramount, and Skydance are up for the fight. Not everyone is. Most people buckle when they see this kind of public pressure--the Writers Guild suing them, SAG-AFTRA going after them, Benedict Cumberbatch demanding that this is unethical. Benedict Cumberbatch said, in effect, “You better comply, David Ellison.” It is their delusional fever dream that Bari Weiss overtaking CBS has turned it into a mouthpiece for Trump.

What threatens Hollywood now is less about the monopoly of the trades and more about the culture of silence, the climate of fear, and the one-party ideology that has become soft totalitarianism. I am living proof of that, as are all of those who were canceled, including the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Sasha Stone talks with Scott Kernen and Jeremy Jentzen about The Odyssey, how they liked it, and how many Oscars it will win. We also talk about the new Little House and whether it’s “woke” or not. We also talk about the Venice and Toronto announcements of upcoming films.

Sasha Stone, Jeremy Jentzen, and Scott Kernen talk about the “woke” casting choices in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and how that has turned it into yet another battle in our ongoing culture war. The film is on track to make close a billion worldwide but it is also becoming a target by the Right and a virtue signal by the Left. How will it do in the Oscars? Also, we go through Armie Hammer’s walk-back of his performance in Citizen Vigilante, and the various categories, and where they stand now.

Taylor Sheridan’s Landman and The Madison proved too successful with Emmy voters--both were completely shut out of this year’s nominations. We probably don’t have to think too hard to figure out why. The “Stop the Merger” crowd decided to cancel Paramount+, and that was that. If nothing else, they are the most predictable people on the planet.

The problem is that Landman’s success should not be ignored by an industry that supposedly cares about success. But if you no longer care about the people--or at least the “wrong” kind of people--then you won’t care much about actual success either. The awards industry, the Oscars, and the Emmys exist primarily to validate their own ideology. There is no real incentive toward broad success. The incentive is to tell the people inside the bubble what they want to hear about themselves.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? You are.

Over the past ten years--maybe longer--Hollywood has cut itself off from much of its audience. This has been true at the box office and true on streaming and television. Netflix is currently trying to figure out why there’s such a massive drop-off in viewership for its shows from Season 1 to Season 2. The answer isn’t that complicated: most of what Hollywood puts out is boring.

Keep in mind that Hollywood, and the industry that covers it, is largely unable to tell the truth about anything. It’s too dangerous. Doing so could mean career ruination. But if you can’t tell the truth, you can’t fix the problem. And that problem remains Hollywood’s deepening disconnection from the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.

We are living through extraordinary events. Every day feels like touching a live wire, and yet you’d never know it from the stories Hollywood chooses to tell. The only real freedom they seem to have left is in the horror genre--which is why Widow’s Bay was such a great show and did well at the Emmys, and why Obsession has made $300 million.

But in general, Hollywood--and the Oscars and Emmys--is about “us vs. them.” We’re the good guys, they insist, and those people over there are the bad guys. Inside this utopia, the rules are strident and thus boring. Most people already know the story they’ll tell, no matter the plot, because it’s almost always the same story. And it only appeals to a small portion of America.

The old monoculture that existed before the rise of the internet meant most Americans watched the same shows. In the Golden Age of television, for instance, Gunsmoke held the #1 spot for four consecutive seasons, from fall 1957 through spring 1961, typically drawing 42 to 45 million viewers per week.

That monoculture shifted after Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, as we began building our tribes on social media. Hollywood then constructed a new monoculture on the Left, isolating itself from the other half of the country. This only grew worse after 2016, when the industry openly took a side against half the nation.

The subsequent ratings and box office collapse tracks along these lines. The disconnect became even more extreme in 2020, when the entire industry imploded amid COVID and the Great Awokening. Hollywood has never fully recovered — and it’s possible it never will.

Unfortunately, the awards shows - the Oscars, Emmys, etc. - now function as an ideologically validated machine at best and a political weapon at worst. Rather than reward success (success? what’s that?), they reward compliance. They celebrate what’s doing well inside their insulated bubble.

Why was Paramount+ shut out? Because of the Left’s ongoing (and largely fantastical) war with Trump. They view Paramount, CBS, and similar outlets as a battle lost, so they refuse to touch any of their shows--no matter how popular, no matter how strong the performances. That’s reason number one.

The second reason is far more insidious: class snobbery. Hollywood has been given permission to sneer at the working class by swapping out class for race and gender. Thus, Oprah Winfrey can still be “oppressed,” while a poor white guy strung out on fentanyl in Wisconsin is labeled an “oppressor.”

Never in my life did the Left and Hollywood sneer at middle- and working-class Americans the way they do now. Even when they didn’t reach them with their sophisticated fare, they didn’t mock them. They remembered the great writers like John Steinbeck and filmmakers like Frank Capra. They remembered 1980s high school movies where the snotty rich kids were the villains. Not anymore.

This is exactly what makes Taylor Sheridan--or the Sheridan-Verse--such a remarkable one-man counterculture revolution. His shows play out on Paramount+ to roaring success. But say it with me: Success--what’s that? If you no longer care about box office or ratings, then why would anyone care about success?

Two of the most embarrassing snubs were Billy Bob Thornton in Landman and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Madison. (Full disclosure: Paramount bought ads on this site, which led me to watch their shows. I immediately understood what they were--and why they’d be rejected by Hollywood. They’re not woke. They’re made for the majority of viewers, not the minority of high-status coastal elites.)

It’s especially embarrassing because The Landman clears the room in terms of viewership. Here is a chart made by AI:

Only two other shows can even compete with Landman and The Madison. The fact that this doesn’t matter reveals everything. The kind of audience matters more than the numbers. Landman draws a white, older, male demographic. While many other nominees also draw mostly white audiences, theirs tend to be coastal elites. The wrong kind of audience simply can’t gain traction with Emmy voters.

We now live in a dramatically two-tiered culture, with the awards world--shockingly--siding with the upper class for the first time in my lifetime. It didn’t used to be this blatant. But once the monoculture broke apart around 2008, with streaming and social media hive minds taking over, ordinary people no longer mattered as much as the “right kind of people.”

That explains why Hollywood is in the mess it’s in. Even when it does connect with everyday Americans — as with Landman and The Madison--it doesn’t matter to the awards voters. They do not reward success.

Their variety show lineup features the usual suspects with some of the worst ratings in recent memory, yet it doesn’t matter. They serve a higher purpose: pushing Democratic Party politics. That is the only thing they truly care about.

I hope that, with these snubs, people in Hollywood can clearly see what has become of a once-mighty empire. When you no longer reward success, when your audience no longer matters, there is no incentive to do the best work. It isn’t that every great show has to be popular. It is that you can’t ignore shows that are popular because of politics.

The Hollywood bubble is shrinking, not expanding. Their elitism is alienating viewers across the board. If they actually rewarded success, the industry would be moving in a very different direction.

Supergirl is on track to lose Warner Bros. $100 million. That’s the bad news. The good news—for some—is that social justice activists are happy with it because it “speaks to them.” And isn’t that the biggest problem? Hollywood started speaking primarily to them.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and no one can fault Hollywood for having them. I was part of the movement that pushed Hollywood in this direction. Even my little Netflix movie, The Summer of the Shark, was about that very thing.

As a kid, I was a movie nerd surrounded not by girls but by boys. My sister and I were unusual in that we stood in line for Star Wars, Jaws, Alien, and so on. We were in that club, but Hollywood didn’t cater to girls to make its billions—and eventually it would have to pay the piper.

Girls weren’t reliable ticket buyers then, and they still aren’t. They’ll turn out for certain movies (horror has historically been fairly reliable), but what Hollywood took away from the blockbuster era was that boys don’t just show up—they build their entire culture around the fanboy experience. For nearly the entire time my daughter (born in 1998) was growing up, Hollywood catered to boys. It was “one special boy” on repeat.

Coming out of that era, the lesson was clear: brand entire generations of millennials to respond to specific IPs and franchises, and the money will follow. Look at the fortunes made during Hollywood’s heyday, with its built-in audience that showed up reliably for every release. Why wouldn’t they? This was a whole world made just for them.

Between 2012 and 2019, the number of films produced and their domestic profits reached all-time highs. Then came the one-two punch of COVID and the Great Awokening in 2020. Hollywood has never fully recovered.

That built-in (mostly male) audience was blamed by Hollywood for the angry, righteous mobs who were furious that it had been “all boys all the time.” Trust me, I know. I wrote about it for years. I just never thought it would get quite this bad.

One thing Hollywood always understood was that people like to watch the hottest, most beautiful actors and actresses on screen. For female stars, the formula was simple: men want to sleep with them, and women want to be them. I don’t think anyone in Hollywood believes that anymore.

Megan Fox in the Transformers films remains the perfect example of eye candy designed to pull audiences in—especially boys. If they’re your biggest money-makers, why not give them what they want?

Transformers (2007) opened to $70 million and ultimately grossed over $300 million domestically. The same principle held in the 1980s. Julia Roberts built her career on two blockbusters in one year—Pretty Woman and Sleeping with the Enemy—and it was considered a big deal that a woman could do it. Why? She was hot. Men wanted her, and women wanted to be her.

ots of people, especially Gen-Z woke women, find Milly Alcock attractive. But she is not someone you could credibly say “men want to fuck her,” even if some women want to be her. The whole point of that classic appeal is that women want to be wanted. Just read any romance novel: the heroine is desired. I wasn’t pretty or hot enough to be an actress. At best, I might have had a career as a character actress. Beauty is rare, which is precisely why audiences—especially women—flock to see extremely beautiful people on screen. How else do you explain Angelina Jolie’s career?

None of this should need saying. No one should be forced into the awkward position of explaining that Alcock isn’t conventionally hot enough to draw a massive worldwide crowd, nor should anyone have to engage in a struggle session about Lupita Nyong’o only to be accused of racism. Nyong’o is beautiful, but “the most beautiful woman in the world who launched a thousand ships”? Hollywood used to simply know these things without debate.

The Odyssey will make a lot of money, probably a billion worldwide, so the casting isn't an issue but Supergirl's entire movie rests on the shoulders of one actress. She's the center so it seems like if you really wanted to bring people in you might find someone that appeals to men too. I'm sure she does to some men, just not all.

Hollywood built an empire by attracting a core audience and catering to its tastes. For women, that has historically meant romance novels and psychological thrillers. Superhero movies, by contrast, have long targeted a different demographic—one that is decidedly not Gen-Z Women’s Studies majors from Oberlin.

I’ve seen videos of girls thrilled with Supergirl, saying they finally “feel seen.” To them, it’s the greatest movie ever. The film does have an audience, just a tiny sliver of its potential one.

Captain Marvel was criticized for being too “woke,” but it still did pretty well because, well, not to put too fine a point on it -- Brie Larson is a little more universally appealing. Are we in Julia Roberts ‘ Pretty Woman territory? No, but it’s closer.

It isn’t fair to put it all on Alcock’s looks. The movie got not-so-great reviews on top of that and is struggling with the audience score. But the baseline has always been -- at least put a really hot girl in the movie to have a fighting chance.

You know, like Gal Gadot?

It isn’t that the film doesn’t have an audience. It does. It’s just a tiny sliver of its potential audience. Hollywood now always seems to be in the mode of defending itself against its social justice critics. They seem to always be in a defensive crouch. Maybe that has made it easier for them to feel like heroes, but it’s made audiences resentful and confused. It’s like switching up the Big Mac for a veggie burger with vegan cheese.

A hot girl doesn’t guarantee a movie will be a box office success, but it is a good baseline. The weirdest thing about right now is that Hollywood either has forgotten or is deliberately breaking that fundamental rule. Does anyone think Jennifer Lawrence would have a career if she didn’t look like she does in Winter’s Bone?

True, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, without a doubt. But there is also such a thing as universal beauty. Some people might not think Lawrence is beautiful, but most people would.

The problem is that no one in Hollywood can tell the truth anymore because they are terrified of losing everything. It’s a valid fear. The cultural Left, including Hollywood, has become a totalitarian hellhole where AI and YouTube are the only escape. Taylor Sheridan dropped some truth bombs lately, and it made news. No doubt, it ruffled a few feathers, but he’s 100% right.

From the piece:

It’s a dynamic Sheridan said he refused when he signed his deal with Paramount. “This is not a democracy. There’s no committee. You’re going to pay me and you’re going to give me a bunch of money and I’m going to deliver you these shows. I’m pretty common and I’m going to tell stories that common people are going to understand. That’s most of America,” he said.

“You’re not going to win no Emmys with me, but I’m not trying to win Emmys. That’s not my goal. My goal is to sit somebody on their couch and move them, make them think, make them laugh, scare the shit out of them, excite them. That’s what I want to do, because that’s what I want from a show.”

That’s the truth. The Oscars and the Emmys are for one kind of industry, when they should be about honoring the shows and movies that reach audiences and make waves. Already, the Oscar race is being curated by pundits well paid by the studios. All of them shape what the Oscars and Emmys will be, regardless of their success. That makes the awards themselves simply a stamp of approval, but not a measure of achievement.

What they seem to want more than anything is to appear to be good people rather than to entertain audiences. That is why Supergirl bombed. Until people feel free to tell the truth, the cycle will continue.

Sasha Stone, Jeremy Jentzen, and Scott Kernen talk movies and culture, starting with Tom Cruise’s Oscar campaign getting started with a Digger teaser, plus the wonders of AI and a true crime story in Michigan that Jeremy lived through.

Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen talk about the state of the film industry and the Oscar race. Sean Penn’s January 6th movie, the first AI movie, Disclosure Day’s box office, Uwe Boll’s new movie, and whether Obsession has any Oscar prospects. We also talk about how Hollywood has become so alienating because of its politics, and whether there is any hope that they will stop being so completely partisan in the future.

Have a listen.

After a bit of a break, Sasha, Scott, and Jeremy are back to talk about Obsession and why the horror genre allows people to be more creative. We talk about the current Oscar race and whether Cannes will be a factor this year. We talk about AI and why it is not going away anytime soon. We also go through Scott’s most recent predictions and try to find the “Woke Movie” we know will win Best Picture.

Scott Pelley is a pompous, self-important bloviator if there ever was one. His worldview is exactly what is wrong with the modern-day Left and the legacy media that props up the empire. I know you’re not used to hearing this, or reading it, because you get what you expect from the press: confirmation of your own worldview.

The assessment of Bari Weiss runs the gamut between erratic incompetence at best to being a Trump toady, silencing free speech at worst. That Hollywood and the ruling class have cast themselves as living through another “blacklist” era, where Trump is trying to censor them, is hilarious. If only they put this much imaginative thinking into writing better screenplays...

To the Left, to Hollywood, to the trades, they believe they are the brave people standing up to tyranny. They genuinely believe “free speech is under threat.” This Scott Pelley speech says it all -- and it’s this false reality that I escaped. None of this is true or was ever true.

Scott Pelley fired.

This commencement address last year was peak Pelley:

The drama. The theatrics. The self-important preening and performative outrage. The sermonizing. The propaganda.

Scott can now bring this kind of energy to Substack and hits on the Jim Acosta podcast. pic.twitter.com/1VZZhxGkuz

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) June 3, 2026

Hollywood and the trades, of course, back up this mass delusion that this is somehow an affront to free speech. Yeah, the 3 million who watch Kimmel at night (at best) and the 9 million who watch 60 Minutes are meant to represent all of America.

Brother, you can shout your opinions from the rooftops anywhere in America, and nothing will happen to you. If Trump had the power to censor anyone, he would go after the people who get hundreds of millions of views that people actually watch on YouTube and TikTok. He never had the power to do that.

Trump isn’t threatening Hollywood. Trump isn’t killing Hollywood. Hollywood did that to itself by becoming an insulated, isolated bubble and then, at best, passing judgment on its audience and, at worst, demonizing them. They want all of America to worship the same gods they do -- to elevate the marginalized based on identity, where you have no way up the ladder except to become more of a victim and find your place in one of the protected groups.

No one is being censored. It’s called being fired for being boring, predictable, and one-sided. Scott Pelley, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel are not being silenced. My god, you can’t shut them up. All we hear is their blather. Get back to me when they’re thrown in jail or simply shot, as Hitler would have done. They won’t be. The shooting, the silencing, and the censorship are going in the other direction and have been for ten years. Anyone who says otherwise is either stupid, lying, or both.

I loved freedom of thought and speech back when it existed in our culture. It doesn’t anymore because the people who rule over it demand obedience or else. You are told what to think and forced to believe it, even if it isn’t true. What we all created on the Left, going back to the very beginning of 2008, was a 1984-like “Inside” and thus, we could also banish anything or anyone we didn’t like to the outside.

Social media made that possible, as we all formed a massive tribe ruled by an angry mob that swarmed the non-compliant whenever they stepped out of line. I’ve been writing about this for many years now, almost ten years, probably because cancel culture - the black lists, the silencing of speech, and the suppression of free thought has collapsed Hollywood’s empire, even if very few of them will admit it.

Why do you think Nepo Babies are so popular now? It’s this idea that they’ve closed themselves off like an aristocracy would have, you know, like the Romanovs before the Russian Revolution, or the Court of King Louis XVI. It’s easier to keep recycling the same bloodlines rather than open it up to new people. There is a pipeline now, and no one says anything about it. If you are a member of this class, you are invited to participate.

America was not built to be a class system, though that runs counter to our nature, doesn’t it? We are status-oriented, and we always want to position ourselves against everyone else. I’ve just never seen the Left do it in my lifetime. I’ve never seen them sneer at the working class the way they do or decide it’s perfectly fine to shut out or disregard millions of Americans just because they voted for Trump. It remains hard for me to fathom that this is what became of American culture at the hands of the ruling class.

I know why it happened. I lived it. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I don’t like living that way. I don’t like demanding that other people follow the rules or else. I don’t like accusing people of things they aren’t guilty of just because you imagined soemthing they said or did was racist or homophobic. And so here I am, an exile in my own country and the Hollywood I used to know.

None of this means that either side is better than the other. People are people. They will essentially do the same things in varying circumstances. I am listening to a brilliant Noiser podcast about Adolf Hitler.

What is remarkable is how many people went along with Hitler’s way before it even got to war. He was able to invade countries, and they barely even bothered fighting back. Why? I don’t know exactly, except to say that people go along with things. They just do. Unless, of course, you aren’t built that way, and I am not built that way. I would not have survived Hitler’s Germany, and not just because I am half-Jewish. I would not have survived Salem in 1692 either. I would not have been able to hold my tongue.

The Left would tell this as a cautionary tale against Trump because they’ve been selling that lie for ten years, that Trump is Hitler and his supporters (half the country) are Nazis, but really, the opposite is true. The side that dehumanizes and demonizes whole groups of people, shuns them, and prevents them from participating in culture until they comply is the fascist side.

It’s true that the Right dehumanizes illegal immigrants, black and brown people, trans people, etc. But you don’t see violent mobs attacking them.

You just don’t see the opposite playing out. We never saw illegal immigrants chased and beaten and swarmed. It was all imaginary, a lie sold to the public that it was the Right that was violent because you saw the January 6th footage on a loop. Well, it doesn’t matter because dehumanizing whole groups of people is always wrong. For Hollywood and culture writ large, it has been catastrophic.

I’m still shocked that the dominant ruling class -- people like Steven Spielberg, Rosie O’Donnell, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Kimmel and Robert De Niro believe they are in the right in participating with this madness, shutting out half the country, pointing fingers at them constantly, mocking them. What a mess.

Well, one person who bravely stood apart this past week was none other than Gwyneth Paltrow, who said the following (link to full podcast):

Only parts of it were clipped, where she says she’s a Centrist and wouldn’t you know it, the puritanical fascist scolds erupted on Twitter as they always do.

Speaking of bravery, Natalie Portman, Justine Triet, and others have signed a letter protesting a boycott of an Israeli filmmaker. People, what are we even doing here? Why are so many going along with it?

The censorship, the blacklists, the public pressure, and cancel culture have been coming from the Right for a decade. It’s time Hollywood reckoned with this and started doing the work to repair the damage.

The 60 Minutes, Jimmy Kimmel, and Stephen Colbert freakout over David Ellison and Paramount, along with the merger with WB, is such gaslighting by people who literally control everything. They have all the power, and they abuse it casually, without even thinking. Yes, Paramount, like Focus, still advertises on this site because someone in those companies is not a fascist scold. It’s shocking that they still exist, but apparently they do.

Learn from history. You can’t shun or ignore or demonize the working class majority and expect it to go well for you. The internet has blasted through what used to be a shared culture. We all knew the same songs, the same TV shows, the same movies. We shared in these cultural experiences. It changed when Obama became the leader of the Left’s massive power alignment. That meant if he was beaten by Trump, then Trump had to be a racist, and that meant war.

So, the entire power alignment turned on half the country. And yet, even after they threw one hissy fit after another, after their violent outbursts, their protests, their impeachments and indictments, Rachel Maddow’s nightly monologue (as she collects, what is it, $30 million a year?), assassination attempts, Trump won again. That should have been the wake-up call, but it wasn’t.

So what’s the plan here? To take back power and then do what with the other half of the country? Throw them in concentration camps? Put them in jail? Either way, Hollywood will not be able to tell really great stories until they get over themselves.

Maybe none of it matters anyway because AI will just zoom right past all of it. Why, because it’s there and because it can. Who wants to wait around while everyone re-arranges the deck chairs on the Titanic? Human beings have always had the urge to create art, not art that tells people what to think and what to believe, but art that expresses some kind of fundamental truth.

This AI film will screen at Telluride, and it was made for just $2,000. You think the gatekeepers are going to slow this thing down?

No one should be surprised when the real revolution obliterates the ruling class that now rules Hollywood. That’s what history tells us, anyway. To quote the great Cormac McCarthy: You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.

I don’t know how all of you survive on the inside. I could never live like that. I’ll take my chances on the outside, with the Proles.

When the rumor swirled that Lupita Nyong’o had been cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s epic, The Odyssey, my first thought was oh boy, here we go again. It’s the same old ritual about to play out. Piss off the target demographic, then watch the virtue signals fly. Turn what should just be a movie for everyone into a political battleground.

We’ve gone through this so many times by now that imagining yet another major wave of controversy feels exhausting. We know the routine well. We know who will say what and how they will say it. The film will probably do fine, but every single time there is a major virtue signal of this magnitude, it’s everyone to their battle stations.

We’re hitting the Peak Woke phase of Hollywood movies right now, I figure. For many of the major directors, they have only one place left to go, and that’s to carve out a place for themselves in the pantheon. You don’t do that now by just making a great movie. PTAs, like Spielberg’s West Side Story and Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, are films with deeper social-justice resonance.

You don’t win awards now by making great movies or great comedy or great documentaries. You win them by making movies that make you seem like a good person doing something good for society. It is an industry run by white guys like Leonardo DiCaprio played in One Battle After Another: the outdated patriarch who still holds the whole thing together.

Giving Team Bloviator major ammo was Elon Musk entering the fray and saying Nolan is only doing this for awards. Since Nolan has already won all the awards with Oppenheimer, that didn’t ring true. So now, the bloviating journalists had all the ammo they needed to write their angry, agonizing op-eds, one sanctimonious tweet after another.

And on the Right, calls to boycott are predictably forthcoming:

All we need now is a Truth Social post by Trump (and you know it’s coming), and the cycle will be complete. We’ll get Jimmy Kimmel and John Oliver. We’ll get Jon Stewart. We’ll get SNL. On and on and on and on it will go, with the self-righteous screaming from the rooftops because a small minority of loud voices dared to object. Sacrastic tweets that gaslight people who even thought twice about it. It’s the Ben Shapiro face tattoo theory: if you notice the face tattoo -- designed to get you to notice -- they’ll scream at you about noticing.

If the Right is hoping the movie will bomb, they’re in for a disappointment. It’s still an epic, a Christopher Nolan movie with big effects. It will, I predict, make roughly $300 mil domestically and roughly $1 billion worldwide. That’s my guess. The male heroes, like Matt Damon, will drive the film’s success in many international markets, along with the Nolan brand. The woke thing will give the virtue signalers a chance to write themselves into the story by performing online with their reaction to the movie, the endless scolding of those bad people on the Right, etc.

Then will come the second wave of bloviating, the high-fives by all of those who want the Right to eat shit. See, Nolan made a Peak Woke movie, and it was still a hit!

I don’t know enough about The Odyssey and won’t pretend I do. According to AI, Helen is supposedly the “face that launched a thousand ships” in The Iliad, not the Odyssey. Here, she is supposed to be older and more mature. Nyongo’s is over 40, which seems to be accurate. Helen of Troy was not Kenyan, however. But none of the actors in the film are historically accurate, from the hair to the accents, so why not a Kenyan?

Nyong’o is the one who must then bear the brunt and take the slings and arrows that come her way as people debate publicly whether she is pretty enough for the role. This happens quite frequently in casting choices. You can’t satisfy everyone. When race-swapping is involved, however, it picks the scab of the great divide in America right now, with the ruling class seeing the working class, the peasant class, as “racists.” Hollywood sees it as its job to right society’s wrongs, but in doing so, it robs audiences of the very reason people have always gone to the movies: to escape.

I’m sure Lupita Nyong’o will be perfectly fine in the role. She’s a lovely woman and not deserving of the kinds of mocking and scorn that have been aimed at her. It isn’t her fault she’s put in this position to somehow be right for such a high-pressure role (like, say, Scarlett O’Hara). I once took a picture of her in Telluride at the very beginning of her career, the year she would win the Supporting Actress Oscar for 12 Years a Slave:

She was gracious and warm, easily one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. That was in 2013. That was a very long time ago, way before the Great Awokening, before diversity mandates, before the rules put on Oscar movies, before the Golden Globes were canceled for being “racist,” and before Trump won either time. Now, a casting choice like this can’t help but seem political, like a FUCK YOU to the target demo at Lupita Nyong’o’s expense.

Critical Drinker is wary:

Will it make money? Well put it this way. The trailer already has 27 million views. Of course it will.

Hollywood has seemed to be constantly thinking about itself, about patting itself on the back, absolving itself of its sins, and punishing itself for always making films for the majority. The last thing they seem to care about is audiences. That’s not putting it on Lupita Nyong’o. It wouldn’t be fair to do that to her. It’s just the ideology in general, the practice of deliberately giving audiences something they have to accept - whether it’s much older women in what should be sexy roles, or barely any masculine men in movies, and almost no heterosexual sex. That is what we call Peak Woke.

Netflix is notorious for it. The joke online is always how Netflix would bring a story to life. Take, for instance, their adaptation of East of Eden. While it isn’t exactly a redemption arc for Cathy (Florence Pugh), it’s yet another remake of an evil female character, so people have more compassion for her. Like, why? It is not necessary except when you understand we’re living through the Peak Woke era.

Here is how AI explained it:

It kind of makes you want to rip your hair out, doesn’t it? I say this knowing I am old and that younger generations expect this as the baseline. I guess I wonder why they insist on plundering the classics the way they do. I guess because it fits with the Marxist-esque ideal of remaking and redefining the past.

It should go without saying that the hilarious Sword and Sandal epics in the past weren’t exactly historically accurate. They took great liberties in retelling stories that told the bigger story about the American culture they wanted to shape. That’s why I’ve always seen this modern Peak Woke era as so similar to the 1950s. We have the same conformist culture. We have the same code of conduct and ideology in movies, like the Hays Code.

We have the blacklists -- modern-day cancel culture that has made artists afraid to tell the truth about anything. There is no group more worthy of mockery than today’s Left, and yet, they never do. SNL would not dare mock Katie Porter screaming, “Get out of my shot,” or the sexual proclivities of Eric Swalwell. No, it has to be Justice Kavanaugh, Trump, etc.

These 1950s films reflected the beauty standards of the time, just as Nolan’s The Odyssey does. It reflects Peak Woke and thus, traps it in the time of 2026 Hollywood.

These films, then and now, reflect back to audiences versions of themselves, a world they recognize. And for Nolan’s The Odyssey, like almost every movie Hollywood puts out, the ruling class sees itself. It’s just the working/peasant class that does not. Think: Manhattan’s Lower East Side rather than, say, Columbus Ohio. It’s not the rich who need to escape into a fantasy world, by the way.

Since movies used to be the way ordinary people escaped from the troubles of the world, exhausting choices that seem to exist only to make the haters hate and the woke elated build resentment. For Lupita Nyong’o to be seen as the most beautiful woman in the world, a face that launched a thousand ships, is itself a utopian vision for the Left. It seems performative and unfair to her. But who knows. Maybe she will be great, and all of this will be sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Speaking of AI, one reason it is about to leave Hollywood in the dust is that it doesn’t have to adhere to activists’ dictates. And such a world, we’d see a much more white-centric version of The Odyssey and Helen of Troy.

In the 1950s, the white majority in America was around 90%. Now, however, it has dropped to just above 50%, right around 60%. Hollywood can’t only make movies that represent white people anymore. And they shouldn’t. But it’s the reworking of old Hollywood movies and tropes where white people are replaced that is perhaps why it always feels like Peak Woke.

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Sasha Stone, Jeremy Jentzen, and Scott Kernen talk about the very early Oscar race, Tom Cruise in Digger, and why we are getting ahead of ourselves and how that’s not great for the Oscars. Also, can Jafar Jackson get a nomination for Michael or is the film too controversial and the Best Actor race in general. Plus, 9/11 conspiracy theories.