The ‘vibe shift’ hasn’t reached the Oscars

If there’s been a ‘vibe shift’ in America, then no one has informed Hollywood. Despite Donald Trump’s second presidency supposedly heralding the ‘end of woke’, our cultural overlords took to the Oscars on Sunday night to flaunt just how perfectly PC they still are.

Immediately, ABC’s coverage of this year’s Academy Awards kicked things off with a land acknowledgement. ABC co-host Julianne Hough ‘paid respects’ on the red carpet to the Tongva, Tataviam and the Chumash indigenous peoples, ‘the traditional caretakers of this water and land’ where Oscars venue the Dolby Theatre now sits.

The gathered celebs then took several more opportunities to rehearse the same political talking points that they do every year. Ceremony host Conan O’Brien wasted no time in taking some obligatory swipes at Trump. When congratulating the cast and crew of Best Picture winner Anora, a film about a stripper who marries the son of a Russian oligarch, O’Brien quipped that ‘I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian’ – clearly, a lame line referring to Trump’s apparent fondness for Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Ironically, outside of the Dolby Theatre, Americans weren’t actually that excited for this movie at all. Anora made history last night for having the lowest ticket sales of any Best Picture winner, outside of the Covid pandemic.

Americans weren’t so keen to tune in to the awards, either. While it’s too soon to know exact viewing figures, the predictions don’t look good. Ratings have been declining over the past decade, and most Americans confessed ahead of the ceremony that they were ‘not at all interested’ in the Oscars.

Of course, this didn’t stop the great and good from lecturing the ever-dwindling audience on various fashionable causes. The directors of No Other Land, a documentary about the West Bank, used their Best Documentary acceptance speech to rail against the supposed ‘ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people’. Zoe Saldaña, who won Best Supporting Actress for Emilia Pérez, a musical about a transgender Mexican cartel boss, made sure to remind everyone that she was ‘the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award’. Anora director Sean Baker dedicated his Best Picture win to the ‘sex-worker community’, parrotting that hideous phrase promoted by the woke to try to legitimise the act of sexually exploiting women for money.

The one saving grace of this year’s Oscars was that the dreadful Emilia Pérez came away with just two awards, after being nominated for an almost unprecedented 13. One of these included the nomination of a man, Karla Sofía Gascón, for Best Actress. But even Emilia Pérez’s well-deserved thrashing wasn’t so much a sign of a vibe shift or of woke themes falling out of favour. If anything, it highlighted the endurance of cancel culture in Hollywood. After Gascón’s old tweets were unearthed, in which he criticised the Black Lives Matter movement and even the Oscars themselves for being too woke, he was largely hidden away by publicists for most of the awards season.

So no, Hollywood has not yet woken up to the changing mood sweeping America. The Oscars remain a self-congratulatory, smug and painfully PC echo chamber. But did anyone really think that would change?

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.