It's A Furious Day in the Neighborhood!

THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2020

Pseudo-lib anger and dumbness: Anger and dumbness were on wide display in the wake of this week's Oscar noms.

Increasingly, these are the fuels on which LiberalThink runs. Again, we'll recommend the angry screed run by the Washington Post under this self-assured headline:

Pop Culture : Analysis
This year’s biggest Oscar snubs, from Adam Sandler and Jennifer Lopez to women directing movies

The Post dragged out four different "pop culture" reporters to catalog all the snubs.

They told us who was "totally snubbed." They told us who is "consistently snubbed."

They told us which were the biggest snubs. They told us which of the (thousands of) omissions were "more glaring."

They told us whose fans were "angered," or were even "totally angry." These are the only metrics these "pop culture" scribes seem to know.

Increasingly, our liberal tribe is adopting the culture of Rush Limbaugh and Fox. Within this brain-dead culture, no complaint is too dumb to advance if it supports tribal scripts.

Today, we'll offer just one example. In the passage shown below, the four "pop culture" reporters complained about the lack of Best Director nominations for a female director:

IZADI, RAO, BUTLER AND YAHR (1/14/20): Many had hoped Greta Gerwig, who earned a directing nomination two years ago for her solo debut, “Lady Bird,” would again appear for her critically acclaimed adaptation of “Little Women.” But the fifth slot went to Todd Phillips, whose box-office juggernaut “Joker” landed the most nominations of any project despite being one of the year’s most divisive films.

There weren’t too many other women who stood a chance in this arena, though it’s worth noting that Marielle Heller, who has delivered two Oscar-caliber films with this season’s “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and last year’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” is consistently snubbed. Tom Hanks, who was nominated for his supporting role as Mister Rogers in the former film, told the New York Times he wanted to work with Heller after reading a story that inspired him to work with more female directors and, then, seeing her debut film, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.”

Should Heller have been nominated for Best Director?

We have no idea. Beyond that, we doubt that the four pop culture reporters have anything which dimly resembles expertise in this area.

That said, we can tell you this. “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” wasn't especially well reviewed. Not even with Tommy in it!

The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday was an outlier in this area. She picked A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood as the second best film of the year.

Almost no one else reviewed the film that way. Very few mainstream critics had it on their "ten best" lists. Were all those critics, male and female, "snubbing" Heller too?

In her own screed about the Oscars, Dana Stevens linked Slate readers to this Metacritics page. That page seems to say that A Beautiful Day didn't even rank among the year's thirty best-reviewed films.

That same page lets you review a very long list of critics' "top ten" lists. Heller's film appears on very few of those lists.

The critics aren't necessarily right. Oscar voters aren't necessarily right. But given the way the film was reviewed, why would anyone have thought that Heller would get a Best Director nod? And what makes those reporters so eager to say that she somehow got "snubbed?"

Increasingly, our tribe behaves like Fox. We're angry and persistently stupid. We're full of complaints and we're dumb.

Increasingly, our punditry and our journalism seem like versions of Children at Play. This doesn't work well for our liberal tribe, or for the values we claim to support.