[My career] was a success story by any measure. But it depended on one thing: my willingness to continue to conform and to suppress and stay silent about everything I knew to be true…. If you want to know what happened to Hollywood, just look at what happened to me.
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For those thinking the “woke” thing is over in Hollywood, know this: It is more profound than a trend. It is, by now, a deeply held collective belief system. Oscar voters live in their own universe. Almost nothing gets in or out unless the publicists want it to. They are protected and insulated, like the French aristocracy before the Revolution.

I didn’t watch this year’s Oscars and that’s not a surprise because I have not done so since LOTR swept them almost a quarter century ago. The last movies I went to were Dune, Part Two in 2024, the thirty year celebration of Jurassic Park (courtesy of my daughter, who loves her classic movies) and before that probably Dune, Part One in 2021 IIRC.

Tthat’s it for the last five years. Even up to 2020 I was probably only going to one a year, like Ford v Ferrari, and the Dune thing was more at my kids urgings; I’d already been burnt by the 1980’s shocker from David Lynch. There’s just very little out there that I want to see, though I expect I’ll be attending the 50th anniversary of Jaws if the theatre is nice enough.

Judging from this article, Who Killed The Oscars, I’m not alone in staying away, and it’s a sad story:

It makes sense that the final resting place for Hollywood’s new incarnation of the Oscars is to be put out to pasture on streaming services which in the absence of meaningful audiences or advertising dollars can blissfully conceal their abysmal ratings. Think of it: no more pressure for ratings or box office. Filmmakers have a blank check to indulge their creativity, as long as they stay within the political lines and are content with no one actually seeing their movies. Those of us who grew up loving movies in movie theaters will have to live with the pain of time passing us by. Like record stores and bookstores, maybe movie theaters can’t and won’t survive.

It’s written by one Sasha Stone and her very personal experience in Hollywood is a microcosm of what’s happening to a little world increasingly sealed off from the people that used to be its audience:

Luckily, my 25-year career as an Oscar blogger went up in flames this past summer after a journalist named Rebecca Keegan wrote an investigative report on my decision to vote for Donald Trump—a decision that it turned out was shared, for whatever large combination of reasons, by a majority of citizens of this country, including Hispanic voters, married voters, male voters, and other demographic categories that included all races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences.

That, and a joke mocking “White Dudes for Harris” saying “white power” was back in style that was clearly meant as sarcasm but was quickly taken as “evidence” that I was now a “white supremacist” (I’m a middle-aged Jewish woman in the business of reviewing movies, specifically for the Oscars). What seems more relevant is that I’d been standing against “cancel culture” for almost 10 years, and now it was my turn to be canceled. Everything I’d built was gone the minute the story landed in The Hollywood Reporter.

I could have groveled and apologized, as one does, but I didn’t think I did anything wrong. I didn’t want to confess to being a witch in order to live. So down came the consequences. I lost almost everything: my income, staff, and some good friends. But it was also a gift because now I can talk about what no one else can.

Read the whole thing and marvel at Leftists who can burn down an entire world as long as they continue to thrive in the ashes themselves – with wealth of course. Hollywood, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco, Britain, Germany, Western Europe,…. The list is endless and telling.

Read the whole thing on this pleasant summer afternoon and marvel at our changing world.