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Casablanca. On the Waterfront. The Godfather. The Silence of the Lambs. Forest Gump. Gladiator. Slumdog Millionaire. Oppenheimer. All great films that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards stretching more than 80 years of filmmaking.
But outside of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023), can you name even one film that’s won Best Picture in the past 10 years? Let’s even take it one step further: can you name the film that won Best Picture just a few nights ago?
Let’s go through the list since 2016:
2016 – Moonlight
2017 – The Shape of Water
2018 – Green Book
2019 – Parasite
2020 – Nomadland
2021 – Coda
2022 – Everything, Everywhere All at Once
2023 – Oppenheimer
2024 – Anora
2025 – One Battle After Another
Let’s be honest: How many of these films, outside of Oppenheimer, have you seen?
The answer regarding the general public is likely “not many” after seeing the box office receipts. 2021’s Coda made approximately $2.2 million at the box office, or about half that of 1929 winner The Broadway Melody (without adjusting for inflation). 2024’s Anora made just $20 million domestically. 2020’s Nomadland took in less than $4 million here in the U.S., while this year’s winner, One Battle After Another, did take in $200 million worldwide, but needs to make $300 million just to break even.
There are a few exceptions, such as The Shape of Water, which took in $195 million on a relatively small budget. But the question is: Are these films remotely memorable? Are they the type of films anyone would stop and watch after coming across them at home?
One reason for the mediocrity is the criterion the academy mandates in order to be nominated for Best Picture. And yes, these rules are real, per Oscars.org (emphasis mine): “The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has established a standard for the Best Picture category that requires films to have at least one lead or significant supporting actor from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group. This standard is part of the broader inclusion standards aimed at promoting equitable representation in the film industry. The Academy’s initiative is part of its Academy Aperture 2025 initiative, which seeks to reflect the diversity of the global population in both the creation of motion pictures and the audiences who connect with them.”
Under these criteria, classics that previously won Best Picture would be barred from even being nominated. Those films include The Godfather, All the President’s Men, Braveheart, Gladiator, and The Departed.
“Everyone thinks the Academy went too far. It’s ridiculous to tell us we have to regulate our work,” Oscar-winning actor Richard Dreyfuss said of the new rules.
Another standard for a movie to be considered is that it must “have a main storyline focused on an underrepresented group in some way.”
So-called underrepresented groups include Asian people, Hispanic people, Black people, Indigenous/Native American people, Middle Eastern people, women, LGBTQ+ people, or people with disabilities.
One Battle After Another certainly fits the woke bill. It glorifies immigration centers being attacked by antifa-like mobs with guns and explosions to free illegal immigrants. They also bomb the offices of anti-abortion lawmakers. Even a botched bank robbery (to get the cash needed to save democracy) results in a security guard being shot dead.”I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to,” remarked American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis on his podcast. “Why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made [is] because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.”
Conservative Ben Shapiro, who often reviews movies on his show, calls the movie “trash.”
“I hate One Battle After Another with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns. I think that it is horrifyingly bad,” he said after the film scored multiple nominations. “I think the script is just trash, and the whole thing is just about how America is a white supremacist nation that’s secretly being run by a cadre of polo shirt-wearing white people trying to harm illegal immigrants and Black people in a sort of 1973 era rip off.”
No wonder it won six Oscars on Sunday night. And could anyone imagine if a film was made honoring right-wing, MAGA-hat-wearing mobs blowing up offices of abortion-rights lawmakers and rounding up illegal immigrants for deportation vigilante-style? Would that be nominated, or simply banned by the Motion Picture Academy altogether?
As for the award show itself on Sunday night, it drew 16.8 million viewers, down 15% from the year before and among one of the least-watched Oscars of all time. For context, the 1983 Oscars were watched by more than 50 million viewers. Fifteen years after that, in 1998, the ceremony drew 57 million. And fifteen years after that (2013), the program drew more than 40 million viewers.
No Oscars have broken the 20 million-viewer mark in the past several years. The movies that are heavily nominated and winning are almost all being swept into the dustbin of history.
The award hosts also again embraced this incredibly tone-deaf strategy of mocking half the country. In this year’s case, we got Conan O’Brien making jokes about the late Charlie Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, which hosted an alternate halftime show against the Super Bowl and drew an impressive 5 million viewers.
“I warn you, this could get political,” O’Brien said. “If that makes you uncomfortable, Kid Rock is hosting an alternate Oscars at a Dave and Busters down the street.”
And since the ceremony was on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel also offered up some “comedy” by mocking first lady Melania Trump and the president while presenting the award for Best Documentary.
“Oh man, [Trump’s] gonna be mad his wife wasn’t nominated for this,” he said to laughter from the audience.
One problem: Melania wasn’t eligible to be nominated for a 2025 award because it was released this year. The White House responded by correctly by calling Kimmel “a classless hack.”
An actual comedian, Ricky Gervais, put it best during his last Golden Globes hosting gig in 2020.
“If ISIS started a streaming service you’d call your agent, wouldn’t you?” he asked rhetorically. “So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.”
So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f*** off, OK?”
THE QUIET RADICALIZATION OF THE AMERICAN LIBRARY
Shame we can’t get that guy back.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That appears to be the mantra of the increasingly unmemorable Oscars as it continues its descent into irrelevancy.
