Oscar, Hollywood and Relevance

Peggy Noonan is at her most perceptive and eloquent today (and that's saying a bit for Ronald Reagan's former speechwriter) in her weekly OpinionJournal piece on the Oscars and Hollywood.

Noonan thinks that viewership of the Oscars is declining (off 9%) this year because it has become, like the Olympics, too common.

In the same way, the Oscars used to be the big awards show. Then another came by, and another: Golden Globes, People's Choice, Independent Spirit, Foreign Press.
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It's like what happened a few years ago, when network programmers found that "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" was an overnight sensation. So they put it on four nights a week. And it stopped being a sensation.

Hollywood should stop diminishing its own mystique. It should discourage the proliferation of awards shows.

The Swiss understand this very well. Take Rolex, for example, their blue face Submariner is an extremely popular watch and they could sell many more than they manufacture today. But they don't. The reason is it keeps the brand elite. [Another interesting fact: all the reputable merchants in Switzerland have the exact same price for the same watch - they do not undercut on the basis of price.]

Why does Hollywood make and celebrate a movie like Brokeback Mountain - which is about gay, adulterous cowboys?

...You don't have to be a genius to figure out that viewership of the Oscars is down because movie attendance itself is down, and that movie attendance is down because Hollywood isn't making the kind of movies that compel people to leave their homes and go to the multiplex.

There are those who think Hollywood hates America, and they have reason to think it. Hollywood does, as host Jon Stewart suggested, seem detached from the country it seeks to entertain. It is politically and culturally to the left of America, and it often seems disdainful of or oblivious to its assumptions and traditions.

I don't think it is true that studio executives and producers hate America. They are too confused, ambivalent and personally anxious to sit around hating their audience. I think they wish they understood America...

I also think that it's not true that they're motivated only by money. Would that they were! They'd be more market-oriented if they cared only about money. What they care about a great deal is status, and in their community status is bestowed by the cultural left. This is an old story. But it seems only to get worse, not better.

There's the money quote of the piece, its status and who bestows it. Because as a celebrity, being on the A-list is everything.

Noonan's dish on Clooney is potent and deadly.

But Mr. Clooney's remarks were also part of the tinniness of the age, and of modern Hollywood. I don't think he was being disingenuous in suggesting he was himself somewhat heroic. He doesn't even know he's not heroic. He thinks making a movie in 2005 that said McCarthyism was bad is heroic.
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The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they've experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven't experienced life; they've experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life.