Podhoretz's Razor

John Podhoretz writes that when it comes explaining the Oscars’ woes, sometimes the simplest answer is best:

This year’s excruciatingly boring Oscars stumbled to a conclusion with the victory of a movie that (a) nobody has seen and (b) nobody who has seen it is all that crazy about. The 80th annual Academy Awards ceremony was no country for ordinary men, or women, who go to the movies because they want to have a good time. The show’s ratings have been declining for a decade, and usually the decline is attributed to the proliferation of other awards shows, the excessive political-style campaigning for the prizes, and the general withdrawal of affect from once-starry-eyed consumers of show business.

These may all have contributed to the ratings woes. But what if the cause is far simpler? What if the Oscars, in a display of perverse artistic integrity, are simply determined to garland movies in which (and performers in whom) no one but a critic or a film-industry professional has the slightest interest?

Thus taking the original intentions of the founding fathers of the movie industry and why they created their “Academy” and completing perverting their goals. But then, that’s modern Hollywood in a nutshell.