Moreover, everything was worse and more depressing than usual in 2020. I certainly liked them less than usual (no Palm Springs or Sylvie’s Love?), but that tends to happen at least as often as we get a legitimately great winner like Parasite (partly because, as I’ve written, critical consensus is a myth, and awards are only ever just the lowest-common denominator with a smaller sample size). The 2020 movies were probably worse and more depressing than usual. Now, Are they more out of touch than ever? That’s harder to say, but I doubt it. So wait, do you want movies to reflect the common man or don’t you? But even the critics in Dowd’s own article argue that being a “dream factory” is half the point. Are New York Times opinion writers ever publishing anything but lazy clickbait these days? It’s easy to say that Hollywood is out of touch, because they are.

The cycles simply reverse and repeat every few years, like the cycle of flood and drought in California (full disclosure, I will still defend The Artist to the death).īut after one of the dullest Oscars in recent memory, in which The Frances McDormand Diarrhea Movie won Best Picture, and the touching send-off to posthumous best actor winner Chadwick Boseman was spoiled with an upset victory for Anthony Hopkins, who didn’t even show up to collect his award, we were left to ponder an even more horrifying possibility: had Maureen Dowd actually been right? For every lame, too-broad grandpa pleaser like Green Book, there’s an overly conceptual, extended navel-gaze destined to be hated by “middle America” like The Artist. Writing that the Oscars are hopelessly insular and out of touch with the common man because all the movies are critic-bait downers is an evergreen take you can recycle every few years. That was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van.'”ĭowd went on to quote New York Times Hollywood reporter Brook Barnes, who told Dowd, “The Oscars forgot about its primary job - to sell Hollywood to the world, to be a big, fat commercial for the dream factory, the kind that makes financiers open their wallets and wannabe actresses get pinwheels in their eyes about the day they might be able to stand on that stage and give their acceptance speech.” As a Hollywood writer friend of mine said after she watched Nomadland: ‘That was not entertainment.

“Hollywood is now focused on worthy, relevant, socially conscious and lugubrious. “Sex, glamour, excitement and mystery are relics of a bygone era,” Dowd wrote. Over the weekend, New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a piece entitled “ Crushed Dream Factory,” arguing that people generally weren’t planning to watch the Oscars this year, and it was because the Oscars are out of touch.

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