Forget trying to tell the most compelling story possible, that won’t win any awards. In fact, movies that sacrifice story for the hollow penance of identity politics box checking will stand to take home the Oscar for best picture. Behold the new woke rules for Best Picture consideration.
Gird thy loins for a lot of “women’s issues” movies featuring women dealing with women things and also these other groups dealing with stuff, my word, it’s like Derek Zoolander wrote this garbage. Good movies are good no matter who is in them because good writers can tell good stories and well-written stories don’t need crutches of identity politics to resonate with the viewer. I’ve been loving Jordan Peele’s “Lovecraft Country,” a show with a black cast set in the late 50s dealing with segregation (and also monsters) and I’m a white woman from southern Missouri. It’s a well-written show, identity politics be damned. It’s why “Gone with the Wind” was a compelling story, why “Boyz n the Hood” was a compelling story, why “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was a compelling story, and why “Mean Girls” was a compelling story because they were all wonderfully written. The well-written story transcends all of the silly barriers we construct for ourselves in this life. Good stories resonate with the soul, superficial wokery does not.
This story is impossible to not make fun of and I’m not at all sorry that I did make fun of it on today’s radio program; the simulcast of this excerpt is below:
