February 14, 2023

Andrea Riseborough

Andrea Riseborough

Source: Bigstock

]It’s Oscar season! Which of course means only one thing: White people are evil.

Of course, to be fair, that also applies to rainy season, holiday season, baseball season, football season, blueberry season, duck season, and wabbit season.

In “de facto apartheid” America, it’s a given that every season somehow means whites are bad.

“A Riseborough win would be another sign that people can be pushed just so far by this crap.”

But with Oscar season, that’s especially true. Increasingly, the period between the announcement of the nominees and the show itself (which now ranks, in terms of viewership numbers, slightly below Brooklyn community access cable) has become a time of outrage regarding how racist whites won’t allow blacks to receive the kudos they deserve.

It matters not how many blacks actually do receive nominations, because the number is never enough.

Ten? Why wasn’t it twenty?

Twenty? Shoulda been thirty.

Fifty? That it’s not sixty is stochastic terrorism.

But even during a season in which pummeling whites has become the norm, “magical black” whiners have really gone the extra (green) mile this year, and it’s gotten kinda ugly (well, uglier).

First, a brief explanation of Oscar campaigning rules.

When movies are vying for nominations, the Academy allows campaigning up to a point. You can’t directly contact Academy members to pressure them to vote for this film or that guy. No bribes, no exchange of favors. But you can lobby the voting membership as a whole. You can mass-mail fliers or screeners (DVDs). You can invite members to a showing of your film, but they can’t receive any items of value beyond “reasonable food and drink.”

No swag bags! That’s considered a bribe.

You can pay to take out full-page ads in the trade publications, you can pay for billboards, and you can literally paint the side of a skyscraper “VOTE FOR MOUTHBREATHER MCGEE FOR BEST ACTOR!” so the entire town sees it. Because such an appeal is general, not targeted to any one Academy voter.

As is obvious, these rules favor production companies with money. Low-budget producers can’t afford full-page ads, billboards, or skyscraper-painting. Most big-studio Oscar campaigns cost around $15 million. Small indie producers can’t cough up that kinda dough.

But the big guys certainly can.

In between raping women and ejaculating into potted plants, Harvey Weinstein was infamous as someone who knew how to effectively campaign for his films to get nominations. Sure, he could afford billboards and skyscrapers, but he could also be way less obvious. Unlike his rapes, his Oscar campaigns involved subtlety. Like the time in 2005 when he tried to boost the Oscar chances of his Scorsese-directed, DiCaprio-starring The Aviator by running a sub-rosa campaign against the film’s main competitor, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (ironically, a term applied to every DiCaprio girlfriend).

Weinstein secretly manipulated conservative groups and disabled activists so they’d slam the Eastwood film as “ableist,” “pro-euthanasia,” and “anti-disabled,” in the hope that cripples and veggies would shame Academy voters into rejecting the movie.

In the end, the campaign failed. Baby beat Aviator, leaving Weinstein to morosely jizz on a fern as DiCaprio went home brokenhearted to get blown by a teen cheerleader on a mattress of diamonds.

This year, there was an ultra-low-budget film titled To Leslie. The movie had no money behind it, but it did have one thing the other contenders didn’t: a performance of some magnitude by 41-year-old British actress Andrea Riseborough, a reliable, seasoned, yet largely unknown thespian with decades of experience who finally got the role of a lifetime.

The movie had such a low budget, nobody imagined it could be an Oscar contender. Literally, it would be like finding out that a Best Picture nod was given to a home movie of a dog being startled by its own fart (and that film still would’ve been better than Glass Onion).

But Riseborough’s performance is apparently so impressive (I say “apparently” because I don’t watch new movies), a word-of-mouth chain reaction quickly ignited: “Forget the budget; see this film!”

Bypassing expensive Variety ads, billboards, and fancy parties, the makers of To Leslie spread the word among their friends: “This is a great performance.” Soon enough, as often happens when Hollywood catches wind of whispers about “the next big thing,” A-listers hurriedly began seeing the movie and tweeting about Riseborough’s impressive performance. Edward Norton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Amy Adams, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Jennifer Aniston, Charlize Theron, Courteney Cox, Susan Sarandon, Mira Sorvino, Christina Ricci, and Rosie O’Donnell all praised Riseborough’s work (O’Donnell even volunteered to have a pro-Riseborough billboard painted on her ass, but there was not enough paint in L.A. for the job).

A feel-good story, right? Hardworking longtime actress with no big-money backing gives a stellar performance and her peers boost her career.

Ah, but there’s a catch: Riseborough is white. And “black Hollywood” had been banking on Oscar nods for last year’s top “blacks rule whites drool” performances: Viola Davis as Queen Ooogieboogie in The Woman King, and Danielle Deadwyler in Till, a comprehensive history of soil plowing (correction: It was just more media masturbation about that 1950s murdered black kid). And when neither performance was nominated, “black Hollywood” decided (based on zero evidence) that Riseborough “stole” the place of a black woman because she had so many industry well-wishers who lauded her work (funny enough, none of these activists criticized the absolutely ridiculous nomination of Ana de Armas for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe with a Cuban accent, something so farcical it was a done-seriously version of a 1983 SCTV sketch in which Andrea Martin played Liz Torres playing Jackie Kennedy as a Latina).

So, these “marginalized” Hollywood blacks launched a media blitz to get the trade papers to denounce Riseborough’s “racism” and to pressure the Academy to rescind her nomination. And these blacks are so very marginalized, the trade papers dutifully denounced Riseborough’s “racism” and the Academy considered rescinding her nomination.

Oy, such marginalization! We should all be so marginalized.

Although the Riseborough word-of-mouth nomination campaign broke no Academy rules (something the Academy itself was forced to admit after investigating the matter), the claim by bitter industry blacks is that the simple fact that white people spoke to other white people about a white actress constituted racial discrimination.

Whites speaking with whites about a white should be forbidden. The black bittermen admit that there was no payola, no dirty dealings. The simple fact that whites spoke to whites about a white was the problem. And it must be classified as an Academy violation going forward.

Till director Chinonye Chukwu (a female, for those of you who don’t speak Igbo) Bushman-clicked about how white-on-white conversations prove “we live in a world and work in industries that are aggressively committed to upholding whiteness.” Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood skibidi-bee-bopped that “black women in this industry, we don’t have that power.” Claiming that blacks never get industry support, Prince-Bythewood wailed, “There is no groundswell from privileged people with enormous social capital to get behind Black women. There never has been.”

For the record, Prince-Bythewood’s film had a budget of $50 million and Chukwu’s had a budget of $20 million.

While Riseborough’s film had a budget in the hundreds of thousands.

Yeah, nobody gets behind black women.

Only $20 million? It shoulda been $50 million.

Only $50 million? It shoulda been $100 million.

Only $100 million? Genocide!

For their part, the two “snubbed” actresses—Davis and Deadwyler—handled the matter with all the class of a fat Laqueda who got dem cold-ass fries at McDonald’s. Davis wrote that the “grassroots” campaign for Riseborough was rooted in racism, and that anyone who sees a Viola Davis movie but doesn’t “help” Viola Davis is therefore “hindering” Viola Davis (paying money to see her film—which lots of people did—isn’t enough; if you don’t subsequently live your life in service to her, you’re worse than a Klansman). And Deadwyler, whose film was seen by nobody, said that not seeing her movie was “a racist choice made by whites” (the film wasn’t seen by blacks, either, but she didn’t address that).

There are several basketballs in the air in this story. The makers of Till expected an Oscar sweep, but instead the film didn’t nab a single nomination. Not one. That was a shocker. The media’s spent the better part of the past decade force-feeding Emmett Till stories to the public. As my colleague Steve Sailer has painstakingly demonstrated, there’s been an unprecedented campaign to turn Till into a household name and an American Jesus. And the Till movie—complete with a standard-issue poster of a noble, proud black woman (there’s no other kind; don’t believe all those fast-food workers with black eyes)—was supposed to be a barometer of the success of the Chinese water torture “Till Till Till Till” indoctrination.

When Deadwyler and Chukabukawu attack Riseborough, what they’re really lashing out at is the fact that Hollywood, in completely snubbing the film, proved resistant to the brainwashing. Not Hollywood! Not the most leftist place on earth! If Hollywood can resist, what of ordinary whites?

And speaking of ordinary whites, that’s another point of interest here. Yes, eventually, whites speaking to whites about whites will become verboten, to whatever extent government and private companies can decree it.

You’re a white office manager, and you need to have a conference call with your boss, who’s also white, about an employee, who’s white as well? Company policy will dictate that a black must be in on the call too, lest any racisms happen.

“Accepting as a given that the only thing whites ever talk about is oppressing blacks, we simply cannot allow you to speak amongst yourselves.”

And indeed, the Academy has pledged to monitor all future nomination discussions “to help create a better framework for respectful, inclusive and unbiased campaigning.”

But perhaps the most fascinating wrinkle in the story is that there’s now a small but very real pro-Riseborough backlash among Hollywood insiders who think the anti-Riseborough not-so-sharptons overplayed their hand. Seeing a respected and largely powerless working actress have her dream moment ruined by a bunch of sour race-whores is not sitting well with some in the Academy. Legendary screenwriter (and legendarily gruff contrarian) Paul Schrader wrote on Facebook that Riseborough has his vote specifically because of the attacks against her.

“She’s got my vote,” Schrader defiantly declared. “Go ahead, investigate me.”

Other Academy members told the Daily Mail they feel the same way.

So at the very least, there’s one good reason to follow (if not watch) this year’s Oscars. A Riseborough win would be another sign (along with everyone on earth ignoring Till) that people can be pushed just so far by this crap.

To be fair, black politics aside, Cate Blanchett and Michelle Yeoh are the clear front-runners. It was that way before Laqueda Nation declared war on Riseborough, and it’s that way still.

But a Riseborough win is a fun thought.

Last year’s show saw only one black person slapped. Maybe this year, voters will smack down an entire demographic of entitled race-hustling children.


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