The State of Movies and Why They Suck

From The New Jerusalem: Why Movies Suck - by Andrew Klavan

Well, the Oscars have come and gone, and I really can’t say how much I enjoyed not watching them. Not watching the Oscars has become one of the high points of my entertainment year. Conversely, one of my entertainment low points is listening to conservatives whine about what some lefty said when he accepted the statuette for his lousy leftist movie. I mean, really. It’s like going to a Communist cell meeting and complaining that everyone there is some kind of Communist.

I share that joy of not watching the Oscars. They have been meaningless for a very long time.

Klavan then goes to describe how Americans used to go to movies regularly, but now don't, because movies are mostly not interesting to people.

He has video (see below) about Oscar winners from 1980 through 2010, and how things became a bit strange as time went on.

Dances with Wolves, which, like Pocahontas and Avatar, partakes of the Rousseauian fallacy that there is something innocent and benevolent about the lives of primitives. Schindler’s List, which presents itself as the authoritative movie about the Holocaust, and yet centers on acts of decency that were so rare an exception as to be nearly non-existent. The English Patient, a dishonorable and subtly antisemitic picture, in which the primary act of love involves giving traitorous aid to the Nazis because who wins the war doesn’t matter so much as getting the girl. (The opposite theme of Casablanca, a far, far better film.) And American Beauty, a picture that pretends to be about a straight man but isn’t, and hasn’t got a single honest frame in it from start to finish.

This is the video Andrew Klavan Ranks Best Picture Oscar Winners: Part 2

Part one can be found at Klavan Reviews Best Picture Oscar Winners Over the Decades. That video covers 1940 to 1980.