Bill Maher Hilariously DESTROYS The Oscars For Their New Woke Categories
The Slow, Agonizing Suicide of Hollywood’s Self-Congratulatory Class
The modern award show is no longer a celebration of artistic excellence; it is a desperate, flailing attempt to remain relevant in a culture that has largely tuned out. We are witnessing the real-time decay of an industry that has become so intoxicated by its own moral righteousness that it has forgotten how to perform its primary function: entertainment. The Golden Globes recently introduced a category specifically for “Cinematic and Box Office Achievement,” a pathetic concession that translates roughly to “Please, for the love of God, watch our broadcast; we finally nominated a movie you have actually seen.” It is the ultimate participation trophy, a category born not from artistic evolution, but from the terrifying realization that the general public no longer cares about the curated, high-priced seminars on morality that these ceremonies have become.
When you strip away the red carpets and the designer gowns, what remains is a tuxedo-clad factory of virtue signaling. The Oscars and their ilk used to reflect the culture, serving as a snapshot of the year in entertainment where artistic merit was the currency. Today, they are gated communities where taste is measured in ideology points rather than storytelling prowess. The industry has convinced itself that the audience is the problem, that the viewers are simply too unsophisticated to appreciate the heavy-handed sermons masquerading as cinema. But the numbers tell a different, far more brutal story. Viewership for the Academy Awards has collapsed, plummeting from over 40 million viewers in 2014 to barely scraping by with less than half that in recent years. This isn’t a slump; it is a rejection. The audience hasn’t abandoned movies; they have abandoned the lecture.
The disconnect is palpable. We have reached a point where the industry feels the need to invent categories just to validate the existence of films that people actually enjoyed, while the “real” awards are reserved for projects that check the correct sociopolitical boxes. It is a strange, baffling dichotomy where enjoying a film is treated as a shameful act, a sign that the viewer wasn’t sufficiently humbled or educated by the experience. The message from the podium is clear: if you aren’t watching a three-hour deconstruction of societal trauma, you aren’t watching art. This sanctimony is precisely why ratings are in freefall. People are out there grinding, paying bills, and looking for an escape, only to be told by a room full of millionaires that their taste is problematic.
This rot extends far beyond the award season; it has infected the creative process itself. We are living through an era of creative cowardice, where the primary driver of decision-making is fear. Writers, directors, and comedians are paralyzed by the prospect of the “mob,” that ephemeral, screaming void on social media that demands blood for the slightest infraction. It is a culture of pre-apology, where artists castrate their own work before it even reaches the public, terrified that a joke will be misread or a character arc will be deemed offensive by a twenty-year-old with a Twitter account. The industry acts as if these online outrage storms are permanent judgments, ignoring the reality that the internet has the attention span of a caffeine-addicted goldfish.
We see this cowardice most starkly in the realm of comedy. The industry treats comedians like ticking time bombs, desperate to sanitize humor until it resembles an HR memo. The hypocrisy is staggering. Will Smith can physically assault a presenter on the Oscar stage and remain in his seat, yet Kevin Hart was forced to step down from hosting duties because of decade-old jokes that didn’t align with modern sensibilities. The standard is upside down: actual violence is tolerated, but “offensive” humor is treated as a hate crime. This creates a sterile environment where comedy goes to die, because you cannot have laughter in a culture that refuses to consider context, intent, or the simple fact that a joke is not a manifesto.
There are rare moments of backbone, and they highlight just how spineless the rest of the establishment has become. When Netflix employees staged a walkout over Dave Chappelle’s comedy special, demanding it be pulled for violating their sensitivities, the leadership did the unthinkable: they said no. They drew a line in the sand, effectively telling their staff that if they could not handle content that pushed boundaries, perhaps they were in the wrong line of work. It was a shocking display of sanity in an asylum run by the inmates. Similarly, Ben Stiller has refused to apologize for Tropic Thunder, a film that the scolds insist “could not be made today.” His career survived. The sky did not fall. It turns out that if you stand your ground for forty-eight hours, the mob gets bored and moves on to the next nothing-burger.
Yet, these examples are the exception, not the rule. The prevailing wind is one of terrified conformity. This fear of excellence and obsession with optics has even bled into academia, the supposed bastion of intellectual rigor. We see institutions like Dartmouth reinstating standardized testing after realizing that removing objective metrics didn’t solve inequality; it just hid it. The notion that measuring knowledge is inherently oppressive is the same logic that leads to participation trophies in Hollywood. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations, a refusal to acknowledge that standards exist for a reason. When you remove the bar for entry—whether in college admissions or in “Best Picture” nominations—you do not create equity. You create mediocrity.
The tragedy of the modern entertainment industry is that the fix is incredibly simple, yet seemingly impossible for the current gatekeepers to grasp. The audience is desperate for greatness. They are starving for stories that take risks, for comedy that is sharp and messy, for performances that prioritize raw humanity over political sanitization. They want movies that don’t feel like they were written by a committee of lawyers and diversity consultants. But instead of correcting course, the industry doubles down, insulating itself further in a bubble of self-affirmation. They award each other for bravery while being too terrified to write a villain who isn’t a caricature or a joke that might upset a blogger.
If Hollywood continues to chase social approval instead of storytelling excellence, these award shows will cease to be cultural events and will become what they are fast approaching: private corporate retreats filmed for an audience that doesn’t exist. The viewers have already voted with their remote controls. They are tired of the hypocrisy, they are tired of the lectures, and they are tired of being told that what they love is wrong. Culture does not belong to committees, and it certainly does not belong to the terrified executives trying to appease a Twitter mob that will never be satisfied. Until the industry rediscovers its spine and stops performing morality to start performing greatness, the decline will continue, and frankly, it will be entirely deserved.
