Hollywood was founded by, and for generations run by, pure showmen who were fanatically devoted to giving the audience what it wanted. Today Hollywood’s message is, “Let us entertain you! But first, a brief lecture on what’s wrong with you, the audience . . .”
Artists and entertainment corporations have always been desperate to be taken seriously, hence their need to manufacture respectability via awards given out by high-falutin’, august-sounding institutions such as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Sciences? You guys are creating pretty pictures, not curing cancer).
The Oscars originally went to box-office giants — glossy romantic dramas and swaggering historical epics. Then the movie industry divided into “awards pictures” and “audience pictures.” In the past few years, even the audience pictures have started to fill up with reminders about racism, feminism, immigration, etc. These are important matters, but people go to the movies primarily for escape.
One reason “Top Gun: Maverick” is such a huge success — the biggest movie of Tom Cruise’s career and probably the biggest movie of this year — is that it simply ignores all quarrelsome real-world issues. “TG:M” seeks merely to entertain, not to persuade you that the people who made it are virtuous.
PIXAR
Paramount
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