Tarnished Oscar Gold

“It's a political time, so I imagine the Oscars will look exactly like your Twitter of Facebook feed. Why should we ignore for three hours what we're talking about 24 hours a day?” – Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Hamilton” creator, in a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter on February 20, 2017

At the nexus of art and commerce, the movie business has always been about escapist entertainment. Today, that dynamic is severely undermined by actors making polarizing statements during awards shows. Naturally, everyone is certainly entitled to an opinion. Yet, sometimes it's wiser to keep a controversial view private if it's likely to alienate the public. After all, ticket buyers keep the whole industry afloat. Isn't this lack of civility equivalent to biting the hands that feed them?

Recall, the purpose of the Academy Awards is to celebrate the practitioners of the dream factory. Perhaps the best representation of this was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers gliding across the dance floor in their “Top Hat” (1935) finery! Watching them, the audience could briefly forget about their Great Depression troubles. This Sunday, the glitterati dressed in designer duds for a three-hour spectacle should behave accordingly. Why then does Lin-Manuel Miranda encourage real-life banality to intrude?

Would someone read Lin-Manuel his Miranda rights: swear him—and his fellow travelers in La-La Land—to blissful silence just this once? Honestly, does anyone go to the theater to be lectured to? Historically, as today, people go to movies for many reasons: for vicarious experience, to learn something new, to have an emotional outlet or simply to be distracted from our social ills. None of the above include to feel irritated. Therefore, the Silent Majority speak loudly—with their feet—by avoiding the cinema. Likewise, the TV ratings for the Oscars has also fallen to the lowest point since 2008. Who isn't weary of the vitriol—the perpetual airing of grievances and political causes—by the rich and famous? And why should these truly fortunate complain, or target fellow Americans for holding a different perspective?

The statistics of erosion tell the tale. Only 9.7 percent of the population or 27.3 million people (read: 3 percent of adults in 2017) still go to the movies weekly. Compare that to 80 million or 65 percent of the population who went to the movies at the same rate during the Astaire-Rogers era. Of course, high cost and a plethora of modern options are contributing factors to the titanic decline. And exactly how does A-list divisiveness help?

In skilled hands, any successful movie message is accomplished with subtlety and persuasion. Even though the medium is fictional, the heart and the intellect are authentically moved. Actors function as living props in the enterprise of telling a story. Their talents are based on conveying other people's words. Without the safety net of a script to parrot, these professionals at make believe are lost. Ironically, they come off as hollow when they ad-lib. Thus, it's clear why their turned off viewership has dwindled—and their do-gooder intentions fall on their cradled Oscar's deaf ears.

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Michelle's Chastising, Honest Mirror

If ever there are two peas in a political pod they are Barack and Michelle Obama. Even before Mr. Obama's first election Michelle Obama said of her fascist hubby, “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” That sounds like something that would come easily out of the mouth of a Castro spouse rather than a supposedly liberty-loving first lady. Indeed, Obama and wife are chock-full of these nebulous statements which when seen correctly lay plain their anti-Americanism (that the similarly biased MSM ignores.) Family vacationing from Cuba or passively watching her mindless husband tango in Buenos Aires, who besides brain-washed millennials (who waste their votes on Socialist Bernie Sanders) believe in the Obamas' fidelity to America?

While Courtland Milloy's biological age technically precludes him from the millennial generation, his role as The Washington Post's resident racial-scribbler—and his latest Michelle Obama puff piece—has the same probative value as millennial ideas about future political leadership. Of this lady, Mr. Milloy sycophantically sings the blues: “Michelle Obama, still standing tall, chin up, despite nearly eight years of enduring... racial contempt for the Obamas [and] an unprecedented barrage of ugliness toward her.” Fundamentally, this statement is patently false, and irrational. Precisely how can a voting citizenry who freely, proudly and publicly elevate the first Afro-American couple to the White House—not once, but twice—be secretly guilty of “racial contempt?”

In retrospect, although well-intentioned, a hope-filled American people foolishly gave the Obamas an eight-year key to the kingdom: stewardship of the greatest country in the world. In return, the Obamas—like the petulant low-rent tenants they are—have entirely squandered a golden opportunity to unify the nation as MLK dreamed. Worse, they have been MLK's antithesis, having wrecked the joint abroad (read: the Middle East) and at home. Domestically, they have constantly exploited “history-based racial grievances” (read: Democrats' victimization playbook) whenever a gracefully long-suffering public (not Michelle as Mr. Milloy wrongly claims) legitimately complains about her husband's job-killing, wealth redistribution policies. For example, almost 10 trillion added to the debt is just one of the Obama booby prizes left to yet unborn future American generations to pay for. Exactly who is being ugly here? Is it the Obamas who act with the carelessness of Roman emperors or the American people who have generously entrusted them with such never-ending faith?

It's a wonder to me that a beneficiary of more than seven years of tax-payer funded 24-hour Secret Service protection would ever have “ a lot of sleepless nights... fearing how my girls world feel if they found out what some people were saying about their mom.” So, 'Madam Political Correctness'—like all proponents of anti-First Amendment word-burning—worries about what other people say about her. That's a pretty high class problem to any Chicago mother whose child is gunned down by the ongoing, almost daily black-on-black homicide ignored by the Obamas since their 2008 departure. Mr. Milloy equates the act of one unhinged gunman that broke a White House window in September 2014 or the generations-removed vandalized Georgia monument (dedicated to her slavery-born great-great-great grandmother) as spurious evidence of how she has greatly suffered ugliness to rule us. Meanwhile, ensconced in perpetual 5-star accommodations (that would make pampered Marie Antoinette green with envy) with Air Force One at the ready and a cadre of personal assistants in tow, the Obamas' attitude of arrogant entitlement has disgraced MLK's memory in the same manner as their lack of care has betrayed the black community.

Under the guise of the yellowest journalism, Courtland Milloy repeatedly promotes the general fiction of hidden “American racism.” To reiterate today's “proof”: a toppled marker and a broken window. To any clearly thinking person, how do two isolated, indirect acts of criminality demonstrate anything of greater importance? Simple answer: they don't. Leftist ideologue Milloy has manipulated these unremarkable, unconnected occurrences to conjure a bogeyman out of whole cloth designed to silence warranted criticism of Ms. Pouty-Face 'hashtag bring home our girls.' (Incidentally, since her 2014 selfie, it seems the hundreds of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic Extremist group Boko Haram have fallen completely off the Obama radar—same as America's current prospects as the Obamas globe trot to tropical locales: Cuba, Buenos Aires and beyond.)

Mr. Milloy's fortuitous column artificially burnishes Michelle Obama's flagging reputation, much like that of her politically lame-duck husband. It's all rubbish, of course. A distraction from all of the above; a change of subject from the real 300-pound gorilla shrieking a reality that no one in the MSM will address. That truth: criticism of the Obamas has nothing whatsoever to do with skin color. It never has. In the 21^st century, the American people have graduated to the consistent use of MLK's content of character as a means of evaluation. (Proof of this is seen everywhere in the greater acceptance of gay rights and gay marriage.)

In the case of the Obamas, they have failed to honor American economic and geo-political interests or dearly-held cultural values. All the while, they are rightly blamed for living-large while the rank and file have suffered mightily under the inept, tone-deaf ministrations of Mr. Obama—and his no better, coddled wife.

Twitter: @DavidHunterblog

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