You were not alone – I was not watching the Oscars either the other night. I didn’t even know they were happening until they happened, and I bet you didn’t either. There was this vague notion out there in the ether that it was Oscar season, but that was sort of the manifestation of an archetypal collective memory from back in the day when the Oscars used to mean something, when the movies in Hollywood used to mean something, when they were part of our lives instead of this weird alien thing full of commies and transsexuals and weirdness.
Now? When’s the last time you went to the movies? I need to think about it. It doesn’t come to mind right away, which is so weird, because just 20-some years ago, every single weekend there would be three or four new movies, and you would go out and see one or two. They weren’t always great, but at least they were designed for normal people. Hollywood was at the vanguard, on the front line, the epitome of pop culture. And now what is it? It’s nearly irrelevant. Can you name a recent mass-release movie that has changed the cultural conversation? Can you name a recent mass-release movie you were interested in seeing? I can’t. Let’s see: there’s “The Bride,” a feminist retelling of The Bride of Frankenstein, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nobody’s going to see that bomb, which cost $90 million. What was the thought process for greenlighting that bomb anyway?
"You know what America is waiting for? A remake of 'Bride of Frankenstein,' except she's a chick who is mad about dudes instead of about being stitched together from corpses!"
"Brilliant! Here's some money!"
"Oh, I've got another idea. How about a brave American who's fighting our jihadi enemies! It's ripped right out of the headlines!"
"Is the hero cisgender? Differently abled? A person of heft? And can we make the villains Christians who like Trump?"
"Wait, what?"
"Pass."
Instead of gathering around the TV with about half of all Americans and watching the Oscars on Oscar night, the Oscars experience now consists of skimming a few tweets mentioning the winners or describing the political posturing du jour. Sometimes, they’re the same thing. The Best Picture winner was some commie pean to leftist terrorists that could've been titled "Take That, America!" Its poster featured an angry, pregnant black chick hip-shooting a Russian machine gun; believe it or not, I have not seen this film, nor have you. I am guessing it is actually not a good movie, based on the number of people who commented that they dropped out after watching about 15 minutes on Netflix – which is where we see movies now, apparently – but I don’t have to guess why it won. It won because it's a big middle finger to the kind of Americans who used to be Hollywood’s customer base.
Hollywood's new purpose seems not to draw audiences in to entertain them, but to inform them that they suck and should die. The most nominated movie was a vampire flick called "Sinners," which was OK but undistinguished as a vampire flick until the gratuitous ending, which could pretty much be summed up as a kill whitey fantasy. I assume all the white people who run Hollywood are fine with it because they think that the dead white people are a different kind of white person than them, so it's cool. In any case, that'll teach me and you to give such films a chance. Call me crazy, but I'm not really interested in watching a movie that seems to want me dead.
It's a chicken in the egg thing. Did we stop seeing their movies because they hate us, or do they hate us because we stopped seeing their movies?
Look, it's not all Hollywood wokeness that's driving this structural change. Technology and economics have evolved, making the old models obsolete – which my good friend @GMFWashington, a Hollywood insider, disagrees with here. Moreover, the march of time is cruel and relentless. In just the last year, we lost a lot more of the artists – of all political stripes – who made a lot of the stuff that we grew up watching. Robert Redford, Rob Reiner, Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall… All gone. And they've been replaced with… I really have no idea. I don't know who the guy who won Best Actor is, and I have no idea who the woman who won Best Actress is. Tinseltown was once the star factory, but now, instead of hand-making bespoke out Ferraris, it's mass-producing Ford Tauruses. Who wants to spend $22 for a ticket to test drive one of those? The only real movie star left is Tom Cruise – tell me I'm wrong.
And I don't have much hope that conservative voices will have a significant say in Hollywood in the future. As the appeal of film has become more selective, the wokeness of the people who make them has become more pronounced. I used to be an economic determinist, and I thought that someone would eventually make a play for all the conservative money that's being left on the table by failing to serve that tiny 50 percent of Americans who Hollywood ignores when it's not trashing them. I was wrong. It's not all about the money. It's all about the social cachet, and you don’t get social cachet from appealing to people like us. You get it from dumping on people like us, whether on the screen or at the Oscar podium.
But we cons are still seeking to break through. I would love to see my own Kelly Turnbull/"People's Republic" novels turned into films. Perhaps a billionaire will eventually stop writing checks to useless D.C. think tanks and support some conservative culture instead, but that's like wishing for a unicorn pony on Christmas morning. My current project is a graphic novel version of the "People's Republic" books called "Blue Flame," and, as you can see from the animated trailer, it's really cool. The drawings of conservative artist Sean Salter – who does all my covers – are absolutely amazing and demonstrate that conservatives have the technical chops to make great art. We are crowdfunding its production, and we'd love your help.
But some of the reactions we've got have been a bit troubling. There's often a reluctance on the part of conservatives to support conservative projects. We hear a lot of complaints about how there is no conservative culture, but then we hear a lot of complaints when we try to produce conservative culture. "Well, I don't do comic books." OK, but I'll bet your grandkid does. If you're not going to support conservative culture and conservative projects, I don't want to hear a damn thing from you when you're flipping through Hulu, and all you see are cop shows about a fat, lesbian, Hindu of color detective hunting down the mass shooter in the MAGA hat.
Andrew Breitbart had it right. Politics is downstream from culture. The disintegration of Hollywood is an opportunity for us, because the cultural vanguard is now a cultural rearguard, defending a dying medium by withdrawing within itself and making films about its own navel. For all their bluster and bravado and shows of solidarity with Hamas, drag queens, illegal aliens, and every other bunch of degenerate losers, they are failing and flailing. This is the time to strike. But we need to strike. We need to support conservative culture, and if you're not going to support conservative culture, you need to shut the hell up when there isn't any.
Check out Kurt’s Kelly Turnbull GRAPHIC NOVEL campaign (with Sean Salter) – "BLUE FLAME"! The amazing animated trailer is out now!
Read Kurt’s new bestseller in the Kelly Turnbull "People's Republic" conservative action novel series, "Panama Red," and follow Kurt on X, @KurtSchlichter!