The Academy Awards were last night, and the awards show was less of a failure than usual; it was more entertaining than usual.
Sure, it was still roughly nine hours long, but it had its moments.
First, “Oppenheimer” did really well. The film walked away with Best Picture, Christopher Nolan properly won best director, Cillian Murphy came away with Best Actor, and Robert Downey Jr. walked away with Best Supporting Actor.
My second main concern was seeing the film “Barbie” fail. I got my wish. It did not do well. It won one award, Best Original Song, which is the only Oscar that “Barbie” should have been up for in the first place.
The highlight of the Oscars award evening was John Mulaney, who was genuinely funny. He should definitely host the Oscars next year.
With all that said, the Oscars show is still a trash fire filled with trash human beings.
That is the message for today. Hollywood is a place filled with people who do not share your values. They do not like your values. They are very beautiful and very glamorous people — and they have very, very small moral brains. Their small moral brains are not capable of understanding the world around them.
They live in this little artistic bubble, the Bohemian grove of Los Angeles, in which everyone is tolerant of everyone else’s excesses and in which everyone thinks exactly the way they do.
WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show
Here’s the way Hollywood thinks of itself: If everyone would think like Hollywood does, they, too, would have massively dysfunctional marriages, drug problems, and screwed-up children. Then everything would be better.
They are the expositor of higher morality to you, the tiny little peons, the humdrum little people. There was a lot of that last night.
Jimmy Kimmel should never host the Oscars again. He is not good at hosting the Oscars because he’s an unpleasant human being.
But the real lack of morality at the Oscars arose because Hollywood has decided to root for Hamas.
Granted, that is not a great shock.
Since October 7, I have been repeatedly making the point that for the West, it really is not about what’s happening between Israel and Hamas. The real conflict happening in the West is a conflict over our own moral value system. If we cannot see the distinction between Israel and Hamas, if hundreds of thousands of young people are marching in the streets in support of an actual, honest to God, genocidal terror group — who rapes women, murders babies, and throws gay people off of buildings on the routine and wants to maintain control of the Gaza Strip — and those young people and other people in the West are rooting for them, that says something about the vacuum at the heart of the West.
If a moral conflict exists over that particular conflict, then that demonstrates a lackluster moral center in the West, which will lead to the dissolution of the West as a whole. Any civilization that cannot tell the difference between Israel and Hamas is a civilization that is doomed to decline and disrepair.
Naturally, Hollywood is on the side of Hamas, with a bunch of moral idiots who were wearing Gaza cease-fire pins. It’s important to understand that when they call for a cease-fire, what they really mean is that they want to leave Hamas in place in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas is currently holding 134 hostages; we don’t know how many are alive and how many are dead. They are holding women, elderly, and babies in captivity. They have raped an enormous number of these women.
When these people want a cease-fire and they try to put pressure on Israel, they’re neglecting the point that Hamas has rejected every cease-fire proposal that takes them out of power.
There were a bunch of dolts wearing cease-fire pins at the Oscars, Billie Eilish and Mark Ruffalo among them. Of course, Ruffalo is just a full-on anti-Semite at this point. He has been anti-Israel and anti-Semitic for years and years.
But the greatest exemplar of a person with no moral character and no moral spine at the Oscars, a simply anti-moral person, was Jonathan Glazer, the director of a movie called “Zone of Interest.”
“Zone of Interest” is an excellent film about the Hess family. Rudolf Hess was the head of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The movie is about the Hess family living at Auschwitz in a house; the entire movie is just the family at the house. In the movie, the Holocaust doesn’t exist — except we know the Holocaust exists in the background. There is a smokestack and people randomly screaming in the background; shots are heard far away. The movie is quite good because it demonstrates how easy it is for people to ignore a Holocaust that’s happening — as long as they benefit from it and get to enjoy their lives.
The entire movie is about the banality of evil. But then Glazer won an Oscar and got a chance to speak.
And here’s the thing: Jonathan Glazer is the villain in his own movie, and he doesn’t even know it.
Here’s what Glazer said in his Oscars speech:
Thank you to the Academy for this honor and to our partners A24, Film4, Access, and Polish Film Institute; to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for their trust and guidance; to my producers, actors, and collaborators. All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present — not to say, “Look what they did then,” rather, “Look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads, at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation, which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist? Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk, the girl who glows in the film, as she did in life, chose to. I dedicate this to her memory and her resistance. Thank you.
Glazer is moral trash. He is so because when he says he wants to refute his own Jewishness and the Jewishness of the people who are standing with him and the use of the Holocaust in order to defend what Israel is doing right now, he’s the villain in his own film.
This is what happens on the Left. Dara Horn wrote a book called “People Love Dead Jews.” Excellent book, uncomfortable title. She begins the book by telling the story of the house occupied by Anne Frank while the Nazis were looking for Jews in Amsterdam.
There’s a museum there now. A few years ago there was a major controversy at the Anne Frank house. The major controversy was that there was a young Orthodox Jewish child who was at the front door as a greeter wearing his kippah — and people were uncomfortable with him wearing his kippah. So, the Anne Frank house told the Jewish boy to cover up his kippah. They told him to wear a baseball cap.
Dara Horn’s point is that people love dead Jews, meaning the best Jews are the ones who are silent and dead, while the ones who are living and actually standing up for their own capacity to live, the ones who actually defend themselves, those are the Jews who make people like Jonathan Glazer very uncomfortable.
The entirety of “Zone of Interest” is about the absence of Jews. Not a Jew appears in the movie. The Jews are silent. Apparently, the best Jews, according to Glazer, are the ones who are nameless, faceless, and dead. Those are the ones who are really good because they’re victims.
Those are the ones whose bodies he can rifle through for an Oscar while simultaneously ignoring the Jews who are getting slaughtered in the Gaza envelope, or the Jewish men who are being wounded or killed in the Gaza Strip. He gets to sit there and morally preen; he gets to live in his house amidst the chaos, ignoring the live Jews, the ones who are actually screaming right now.
He can ignore those ones in favor of the dead Jews. That’s what he’s doing.
When people use their Jewishness as a cover to rip on Israel’s capacity to defend itself, they are virtually always people who don’t know anything about Judaism. They are born Jewish but have very little Jewish practice. They spend zero time in the Jewish community, but then pull out their “as a Jew” card in order for them to demonstrate their fealty to Left-wing principles or anti-Israel principles.
Whenever people say, “As a Jew,” you should ask them, “How often do you go to synagogue? How much do you care about your Judaism? How much does any of that mean to you?”
People like Glazer are part of this broad moral trash pantheon in Hollywood, the system that believes the West itself is bad, the West itself is the problem.
You don’t see Glazer talking about the evils of Hamas or the evils of the Assad government in Syria. You see Glazer talking about Israel. Why? Because he gets to rifle through the bodies, and he gets to look good while being the villain in his own film.
Hollywood is completely disconnected from reality, but they do have an impact on how people view morality.
And that is why Hollywood remains a dangerous place for the creation of culture.