Amanda Milius on the Oscars: Hollywood Now Culturally Irrelevant

Filmmaker Amanda Milius told Breitbart News on Monday that Hollywood undermined its own influence over America by abandoning conservatives.

Ambition within the entertainment industry blocks Hollywood insiders from publicly criticizing false orthodoxies espoused by their peers, Milius stated on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption. She noted Tinseltown’s decades of direct and indirect left-wing political advocacy.

“What Hollywood is — and what it’s always been — is a bunch of people who seek relevance and influence more than anything,” she remarked. “Nobody’s going to say the emperor has no clothes. Nobody is going to turn around and say, ‘This thing we’ve dedicated ourselves to — changing American culture and this sort of cultural Marxist point of view [has] snowballed out of control.'”

Milius pointed to the Oscars ceremony’s focus on COVID-19 as illustrative of Hollywood’s disconnection from most Americans.

She added, ‘They really are just culturally irrelevant, like this weird COVID ceremony performative thing that they did last night about. That was also part of it. It wasn’t just the usual wokeness. They also had to do this insane hypochondriac performance while they were awarding their wokeness, which was even weirder. … It was totally bizarre, totally out of touch.”

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The New York Times observed the emphasis of the Oscars ceremony on COVID-19, highlighting special procedures implemented by the event’s organizers that were said be done in the interest of health and safety. It wrote, “[The Oscars] had to do it in a Covid-19-safe manner (while continually pointing out that it was doing so).”

Hollywood diminishes its influence by alienating conservatives, Marlow determined.

He said, “They’re really struggling with this thing where they want to be these cultural trendsetters with the wokeness. But they’ve hemorrhaged so much of their audience. … How are they going to be this influential culturally if there isn’t any shared culture? And there’s not that much of a shared culture anymore, because of Hollywood. Hollywood was a closest thing we had to a shared culture other than sports, which is, I guess, next to try to destroy itself with wokeness.”

Milius described Hollywood’s abandonment of conservative audiences as an opportunity for filmmakers.

“The door is wide open, because Hollywood has abandoned every type of movie that could be appealing to people across all kinds of spectrums [in] the United States,” she said. “My friends and I like to say we really have a great future in front of us. It’s really an amazing thing, because I want to make movies for the other half of America, and so if Hollywood is going to abandon half the American audience … basically, they’re making an ideological business decision.”

Lowering costs of film production relative to previous decades further weakens the hold held by Hollywood over film and television production, Milius noted.

She continued, “What they’re doing is just leaving a giant pile of money and content on the table for somebody to come along and make. [This is enabled by] technological changes and things that have been going on for … quite a few years. You don’t have to make movies in Hollywood, anymore. There’s no need to be there, and there’s no need for their system of acceptance, because I don’t need their money. There’s no more gatekeeping to movies really in that way.”

Milius warned that left-wing institutions amplify their authoritarianism to coerce ideological compliance among the public as their politics become increasingly disconnected from reality.

“What [leftists] do when they’re wrong and they can’t admit it — and their wrongness bumps up against [the] empirical reality of whatever the situation is — [is] they become more authoritarian,” she remarked. “So when the wokeness doesn’t catch on … [and when] people didn’t adopt their little verbal modifications the way that they had hoped, they just became more authoritarian about it. They started cancelling people if they said the wrong thing. They started having punishments for people who didn’t go along with [this] culturally Marxist agenda that they had.”

She concluded, “What’s scary is whenever they’re confronted with wrongness, they just try to break reality into their perspective instead of adjusting their point of view.”

Los Angeles’s temporary removal of homeless people from Union Station in Los Angeles — vacating the area so the Oscars could be hosted there — epitomizes the contradictions of Hollywood, Milius shared.

She said, “The best thing I heard about the Oscars that wasn’t actually part of the ceremony was these stories about how they had to shoe all the homeless people away from Union Station so that they could film their Oscars thing. I mean, to me, that image just sums up Hollywood better than anything they could have actually written.”

Fox 11 in Los Angeles reported, “[Union Station is] an area that is plagued by homelessness. But come Oscar Sunday, the homeless will not be seen anywhere near Union Station. … Not exactly a surprise to Andy Bales of Union Rescue Mission. Bales says anytime there is a big national event, Los Angeles tries to sweep its homelessness problem under the rug.”

Millius directed The Plot Against The President, a documentary film based on Lee Smith’s book of the same name.