Affirmative Action Oscars

James Kirkpatrick
VDARE
February 23, 2015

The Birdman who should have won.
The Birdman who should have won.

The Obama Administration is openly flouting the law by importing yet more illegal immigrants despite a judicial order, jihadists proclaiming a restored Caliphate are gleefully genociding what’s left of the Middle Eastern Christian communities, the most civilized nations of Europe are transforming into Third World war zones, and there’s a shooting war in Eastern Europe, but the Great and the Good know what the real issue is lest all plunge into Chaos and Old Night.

African-American civil rights groups plan to protest outside Sunday’s Oscars show, where every single one of this year’s 20 acting nominees is white.

However small, the demonstration will revive debate about diversity at the Oscars-awarding Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose voting members are overwhelmingly white and with an average age in their 60s.

“The goal of the protest is to send a message to the Academy, send a message to Hollywood, send a message to the film industry,” said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, head of the LA Urban Policy Roundtable group.

“And the message is very simple: you don’t reflect America, your industry doesn’t reflect America. Women, Hispanics, African-Americans, people of color (are) invisible in Hollywood.”

[Oscar protest planned over all-white nominees, by Guillame Meyer, AFP, February 21, 2015]

A two day old whine from some rent seekers that the Oscars are too white is also the top “story” at the Huffington Post.  [Why It Should Bother Everyone That the Oscars Are So White, by Brennan Williams, Christopher Rosen, and Irina Dvalidze, February 20, 2015]

So you have a small protest receiving mass media coverage and one of the largest and best funded media outlets in the world telling us that the Oscars need to implement affirmative action.

As the political system of the West gradually depends on ratcheting up anti-White sentiment, we can expect culture to increasingly resemble the kind of crude agitprop you would see in an Eastern Bloc country or, for that matter, a typical American university.

A recent podcast at The Right Stuff noted that many theater companies or orchestras will reluctantly put on popular shows so they can raise the money to do the shows they really want, i.e. incomprehensible and ugly leftist nonsense that no one wants to see or hear.  Film will increasingly follow the same pattern.

We will get a greater number of affirmative action movies that no one wants to see but will serve as a set-aside for various minorities and prevent them from protesting.  Much like we subsidize the urban underclass in the hope that they will stop rioting, the thinking of Hollywood will be that all we need to do is give the protesters an award, tell them they are special, and hopefully they will go away and leave us alone.

Those movies which feature heroic white male protagonists and do well will be discouraged and only reluctantly indulged in order to bankroll the more politically valuable films.  The media’s worshipful coverage of the government-subsidized Selma and the frothing hatred towards American Sniper is an instructive contrast.

Of course, one of the many downsides is we will get far fewer good movies.  Next from Paramount Pictures, Worker and Parasite!