RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-coming-backlash-to-the-oscars-diversity-mandate/

Far from appeasing the hashtag activists, the Oscars have merely announced that the quota wars have begun.

I t’s easy to make fun of the Oscars’ new set of diversity requirements: Are we going to have to watch Lieutenant Colonel Anne Hathaway tossing grenades at Jerry in the next WWI movie? In the media, the initial response has been to gush praise for this “landmark,” “watershed” moment in which the Academy Awards have mandated hiring quotas for any film that wishes to be eligible for Best Picture (but not any of the other awards).

In about ten seconds, I predict, the Left is going to be furious. “We’ve been had,” they’ll surely scream. Let’s look at the details.

In order to qualify for Best Picture consideration, films will have to meet two out of four specified criteria. The first is the showiest but also the silliest, calling for diversity in casting and themes; it’s unworkable if you’re starting, as do a great many Oscar contenders, with an established historical record. You can’t pretend that Ford v. Ferrari or The Irishman was about minorities or women or gay liberation or handicapped people. Most producers of top-quality films will simply laugh off that top-line requirement and try to hit two of the other three. Which won’t be that hard.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/it_didnt_seem_possible_but_the_oscars_are_going_to_be_even_woker_than_ever.html

The 92nd Academy Awards show was one of the last big events in 2020 before life stopped for the Wuhan Virus. If people had known about a future of masks and isolation, maybe more Americans would have watched than the record low of 23.6 million viewers. But then again, perhaps not, given that winners cannot seem to stop lecturing Americans for being hate-filled, racist, misogynistic yutzes.

The smart thing for the Academy to do in the face of a seemingly unstoppable ratings hemorrhage would be to make the Oscar show more friendly to the viewers. The Academy could nominate movies people like to watch and then limit the speeches to conform to the old rule that, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Instead, as part of its “Academy Aperture 2025” initiative, the Academy has opted to make the nominations even more politically correct, promising Americans that future films will showcase stifling politically-correct orthodoxy.

On Tuesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put out a press release announcing all of its impossibly woke requirements for movies beginning in 2022 (meaning films produced in 2021).

The press release has created four “standards”:

“On-screen representation, themes and narratives”
“Creative leadership and project team”
“Industry access and opportunities”
“Audience development (i.e., marketing”)

Under each standard, the Academy lists a variety of mix-and-match quotas that must be met for a specific standard to qualify for Oscar consideration. For example, lead actors must include one of every victim-identity race or ethnicity group. Ensembles must include gay people and handicapped people. Storylines have to touch upon intersectionality, victim-identity issues. Apprenticeships and internships must have all the underrepresented people represented. Thirty percent of a film’s crew has to meet victim-centric intersectionality metrics. Here, for example, is the buffet menu for movie-makers listing the choice of possible requirements for what the audience sees:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/larry_elders_uncle_tom_the_little_movie_that_could.html

Did you know that there’s a documentary called Uncle Tom that IMDB ranks as one of America’s top documentaries? Released only six weeks ago, it’s currently the sixth-highest rated documentary on IMDB, with over 2,000 viewers giving it an extraordinary 9.5-star rating. The movie also doubled Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine opening box office revenue. Nevertheless, not a single mainstream news or entertainment media film critic has acknowledged it. I spoke with Mr. Elder to learn more about the movie and the media’s passive-aggressive efforts to ignore it into extinction.

One would think that, when a nationally-known radio and TV personality, who is also a best-selling author and columnist, writes and produces a documentary about blacks in America, the media would be all over it. That doesn’t happen, though, if he challenges the mainstream narrative that the Democrat party is American blacks’ only friend.

Uncle Tom’s use of historical footage, contemporary political events, and interviews with black conservatives both well known and unknown exposes viewers to the reality that’s unacceptable to the monolithic Democrat media: Since 1856, Republican Party policies allowed American blacks to thrive, while Democrat party policies consistently harmed them.

https://clarionproject.org/amazon-pushes-white-slaves-in-new-show/?utm_source=

The history of black slavery is a horrendous part of the American narrative, but does it help to heal the wounds by normalizing the concept of whites being enslaved by blacks? That’s what director Dale Resteghini envisions with his series Cracka.

Slated for a fall 2020 release, the series asks, “What if the roles were reversed?”

‘You took our breath away, what if we took yours? You raped our daughters, what if we raped yours? You stole our freedom, now we steal yours.’ — Title Card for the upcoming TV show Cracka

But it’s more than just reversing the roles. While the series “boasts” of reliving all the horrors of slavery, including the rapes, beatings and lynchings, it also takes a very disoriented approach toward history, as All Hip Hop describes,

The movie offers a present-day so-called white supremacist who is magically thrust back in time to an alternate past where Africans enslave whites and rule the land known as America. … the protagonist – tatted with racist Nazi symbols – begins to harass an African American motorist. It is at that point that the violence starts. After the lead character rains down blows on the motorist, the pseudo-Nazi returns to his home. He then finds himself staring at the barrel of a shotgun and enslaved.
In Cracka, it’s not “enough” that whites are the slaves in this alternative world, rather all whites must be depicted as Nazis (which, intentional or not, gives off a message that, unlike the blacks who were enslaved in the American South, the whites in this alternative universe are racists and deserve such punishment).

A show like Cracka might look like it’s aligned with pro-black, anti-racist narratives, i.e., by allowing whites to really feel what blacks went through. In actuality, it promotes a distorted vision of that reality, similar to what is being advanced by the woke movement of today, where perverse new strains of reverse racism are being embraced as social justice:

By reversing slave roles and making whites look like beasts and savages, the show plays into exactly the same racist narratives that advocates of slavery used to justify the torture and bondage of African Americans.
The show essentially functions as a free marketing campaign for the real (and violent) neo-Nazis of today — a kind of “call to action” in the war of extremes, giving them good visuals for the propaganda they use to increase their ranks.
The show ensures race tensions will be emboldened by pushing into the public consciousness more crude imagery and rhetoric similar to that of snuff films. It is a scientific fact that the human subconscious (with child-like innocence) completely accepts as reality whatever it sees, even if it rationally disagrees with it or rejects it. To have this type of content normalized by a major distributor is genuinely worrisome for the mental and spiritual health of the human race.
Let’s be crystal clear on one thing: Cracka is not just “entertainment.” It is extremist propaganda, whether or not it is intended to be.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/hollywood_is_falling_victim_to_its_relentless_virtue_signaling.html

During the 1930s and 1940s, there were many genuine communists, as well as fellow travelers, working in Hollywood. Once the Cold War began, Hollywood turned against those people and instituted its blacklist, which made it impossible for anyone with communist sympathies to work openly in Hollywood.

Of late, the further left you lean in Hollywood, the more you are to be applauded. That’s why it’s incredibly ironic to realize that Hollywood is once again blacklisting people – only this time, blacklisting means that the only people listed for employment have to be black.

That at least is the story that Caroline Graham tells in the Daily Mail. According to Graham, the message has gone out in Hollywood that, if you want to work, you had better not be white:

A revolution is under way. White actors are being fired. Edicts from studio bosses make it clear that only minorities – racial and sexual – can be given jobs.

A new wave of what has been termed by some as anti-white prejudice is causing writers, directors and producers to fear they will never work again. One described the current atmosphere as ‘more toxic than Chernobyl’, with leading actors afraid to speak out amid concern they will be labelled racist.

The first sign came with one of the most powerful black directors in Hollywood, Oscar-winning Jordan Peele – the man behind box office hits such as Get Out and Us – stated in public that he did not want to hire a leading man who was white. 

‘I don’t see myself casting a white dude as the lead in my movie,’ Peele said. ‘Not that I don’t like white dudes. But I’ve seen that movie before.’

As one studio executive responded privately: ‘If a white director said that about hiring a black actor, their career would be over in a heartbeat.’ Few doubt it.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/ed-driscoll/2020/06/26/mr-jones-walter-duranty-n580824

Having linked at Instapundit to a couple of reviews of the new film about the journalist who first went on the record about the Soviet Union’s terror famine in Ukraine in 1933, titled Mr. Jones, I bit the bullet and purchased it from Amazon Prime Video. I wanted to like this film so, so much, given that it focuses on a subject that Hollywood moviemakers have avoided for decades. And while Mr. Jones has many excellent moments, it also has several scenes that ultimately work against it as a film.

But it’s a very noble failure. The man in the title is real-life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), played by James Norton. But he’s really not what makes Mr. Jones so important a film. That person is the now infamous Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow, Stalin’s stenographer, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Previously, Sarsgaard co-starred in another film about a leftwing fabulist run amok, Shattered Glass, playing the editor of the New Republic’s Stephen Glass.

In 1932, Duranty won a Pulitzer for his lies that, as Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1919, the Soviet Union and its capital-C-Communism was “the future, and it worked.”

It didn’t. And the Times, which apparently now sees the Soviet Union as some sort of extended experiment in free love under Premier Austin Powers, has yet to return the Pulitzer.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

This is a film based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell based on Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, two famous American writers who were married to each other. The key word here is ‘novel’ but the viewer doesn’t know that this is not biographical and this presents serious ethical questions with the liberties taken as various behaviors are ascribed to these individuals without our ability to distinguish between authorial fantasy from reality.

The film hits many current popular marks: male philandering, abusiveness, narcissism along with female insecurity, emotional distress, lesbianism and dependency on drugs and alcohol. The plot concerns a young couple coming to Bennington College for the husband to assist Professor Hyman. They agree to have his pregnant wife do the cooking and housework for the Hymans in exchange for their room and board. At first, this seems like a doubly good idea, allowing the husband to try for a job in the English department the following semester by impressing Hyman and for the couple to save their money for their expected child. They are both unaware of how psychologically damaged Shirley is, spending all her time indoors, drinking, sleeping and writing. Her mood swings are so wide that she seems tri-polar and as abusive as her husband. Of course this becomes apparent as soon as they move in yet the young wife is willing to put up with the situation and becomes infatuated by Shirley, eventually in a sexual manner.

An additional plot point is Shirley’s novel in progress about a young woman who disappeared from the town without being found. This offers more nuances concerning the perils of marriage, friendship and extra-curricular relationships. One of the pivotal scenes recalls Thelma and Louise as Shirley and Rose (the young wife and mother) stand at the edge of a precipice – a device too corny and contrived to be effective. The main reason to see this movie is the performance of Elizabeth Moss, an actress who is capable of making you read her most subtle thoughts without histrionics – a true artist or perhaps magician. The second reason is to remind you to re-read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, one of the great short stories of the 20th century

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/remembering_the_hillthomas_story.html

On Monday night, our local PBS station showed “Created Equal…..Clarence Thomas in his own words.”    

It was a great documentary and I learned a few things about his early days and marriage.  

Like some of you, I recall the day that President Bush nominated him.  I happened to be with my father that day and he seemed very happy with the choice.  He told me that Thomas would make a great justice because he faced a lot of adverisity coming up in life.  (On a personal note, “overcoming adversity” was a theme that my late father would always go back to. It made people tougher and better, he would say)

Then came Anita Hill and the documentary became very intense.  It was interesting to watch then Senator Joe Biden and the late Senator Ted Kennedy sitting next to him.  Am I the only person watching who thought that Biden made a fool of himself talking about “natural law”?  Clarence Thomas couldn’t understand what he was saying either.

Two things really struck me about the documentary:

First, Justice Thomas reminded his opponents that the “Tarring and feathering” would eventually come back to get them.  He must have been thinking about now candidate for president Joe Biden who faces a 1993 sexual misconduct allegation a lot more credible than Anita Hill’s.  I wonder if Mrs. Biden understands the pain that Mrs. Thomas went through?  

Second, the media and the Democrats had no trouble believing Hill.  You can see in the documentary how they all lined up to support a woman who had absolutely no proof of anything.  It all looked so eerily similar to the effort to get Judge Brett Kavanaugh.