Woke Oscars Will Be Entirely Out Of Step With The Vibe Shift Right

Some things never change. Public opinion may change, new administrations may come into office, and popular media trends will always bubble and pop in the many streams of arts and entertainment. But the imperturbably woke standard the left imposes on everything under the sun will forever remain.

This is apparent in the recent Golden Globe winners and Academy Awards nominations. True to form, films with obviously woke values lay at the forefront: Emilia Pérez, a musical about a drug cartel kingpin “transitioning;” Conclave, in which a group of leftist bishops works against bigoted conservative bishops to elect the next pope; A Complete Unknown, a Bob Dylan biopic celebrating his leftist sensibilities and how he rocked out with people of color; and The Substance, an artsy horror film that examines the impossible beauty standards placed on women.

For good measure, there were more traditional (i.e., slightly less obviously woke) films like the three-and-a-half-hour The Brutalist, in which a Holocaust survivor architect makes his way in the antisemitic culture of New York City (a kind of woke version of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”), and Anora, a dark comedy set in Brooklyn about a prostitute who marries the son of a Russian oligarch (a kind of woke parody of Cinderella).

So yes, it’s another round of largely supposedly artistic films ostensibly pushing the boundaries of cinema and telling compelling stories for those with more refined tastes. With any luck, the people running the Oscars can ask Chris Rock to host again and have him take another slap from a popular celebrity to rouse the audience out of their induced comas.

All joking aside, it’s worth asking why tastemakers of film are so committed to pushing this agenda even now. When will they finally drop the left’s preachy garbage? And, knowing that that wokeness is mostly passé at this point, what do they hope to achieve by promoting ever more of it?

The first question is easier to answer than the second. In all likelihood, this may be the last year where wokeness receives such outsized attention and investment. Because producing movies often involves years of filming, editing, and marketing, there is always a multi-year lag between the conception and the final product. In most instances, what audiences watch today was originally thought up and written half a decade earlier.

This means that the movies and shows today will manifest the left’s values, which were very much in vogue a few years ago. No one at Netflix could have known that a TV series about black women in the U.S. military dealing with a backlog of unsent mail during WWII would be a punchline today. No one at Disney could foresee that their girl-boss iterations of popular franchises like The Acolyte or She-Hulk: Attorney at Law would effectively destroy their respective franchises. All these things just happened to be in the production pipeline at the wrong time, resulting in commercial failure.

The same goes for more artistic films. They embody the high culture of their day, which, once again, happened to be leftism’s woke culture. Even so, they have less of an excuse since such films should either be ahead of their time or timeless. They are supposed to set the trend and be the standard, not submit to the new cultural trends in order to signal the approved message to leftists in Hollywood.

The problem with the left’s woke storytelling is that it inevitably casts virtue and likability into a zero-sum game between characters and treats genuine human diversity in exclusively racial and sexual terms. It’s not enough that the female protagonist is strong; she must be perfect, and her antagonist must be a one-dimensional irredeemable monster. It doesn’t matter that different viewpoints, beliefs, and approaches are represented in a movie; there must be some black and queer characters along with a formidable squad of proud women who are all united against injustice.

Needless to say, this thinking results in movies and shows with incredibly thin characters, superficial dialogue, predictable storylines, and little to no credibility.

As such, it’s impossible to see the current list of Oscar nominees as anything more than different iterations of the same tired woke formula. Until filmmakers and their producers realize the incompatibility of this formula and competent storytelling, many of them will keep pushing it until they go bankrupt.

It’s important to understand that this isn’t just a matter of adapting to the country’s shifting culture, but rather a matter of returning to aesthetic fundamentals, specifically to being true to life and telling stories that actually mean something to people. Wokeness, with its emphasis on fake diversity and empty tales of empowerment of struggle, will always do the opposite.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He is the founding editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor to The Federalist, and has written essays for Newsweek, The American Mind, The American Conservative, Religion and Liberty, Crisis Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow him on X and Substack.