HuffPo: It’s Time for the Smug Celebs-Meet-the-Normies Oscars Skit to Die

The left-wing Huffington Post says it’s time “to burn the dumb-ass skits to the ground,” referencing the four-minute stunt during Sunday’s Academy Awards show that saw host Jimmy Kimmel lead a horde of actors into a theatre to throw candy and hotdogs at moviegoers who were in the middle of watching A Wrinkle in Time, all done as a show of gratitude.

Let HuffPo writer Claire Fallon tell it, Kimmel’s “backhanded comedy” at the Oscars amounts to “smug condescension”:

Every year, the Academy Awards run long. They run so long each year that the presenters’ banter starts to feel like a series of taunts and watch parties begin to resemble hostage situations. The awards run so long that the Academy is forced, annually, to get into a defensive crouch about how this could be allowed to happen again.

…

For the terrible, unfunny, smug skits, there is no such excuse ― and yet each year, the Oscars dedicates precious time to them. Take Sunday night’s ceremony, which managed to include one of the most dull and needlessly patronizing Oscars stunts in recent memory.

The jaunt was framed as a thank you to moviegoers, we heroic consumers without whose ticket-purchasing prowess Gadot and Elgort would be naught but normies themselves. But I don’t watch movies to make Gadot and Elgort happy, or to make them rich, or to enable them to spend four hours feting their craft and perfect cheekbones on national television each year.

Much like celebrities and other humans, I do things out of self-interest, without any thought as to how I’m serving the rich and famous. A skit that suggests celebrities view us as saintly but pathetic serfs isn’t an act of gratitude ― it’s an act of smug condescension.