In the 1990s, there was a failed experiment in the Arizona desert called Biosphere 2. The idea was to create a self-sustaining orb where pretend astronauts of the future could live without contact with the real world for at least a year. They would grow their food, slaughter their own animals, and breathe their own air. If they were successful, they might be able to plop the orb on Mars to ensure the future of humanity after climate change destroyed the planet.

It turned out to be a disaster. They ran out of food. They ran out of oxygen and almost suffocated. They starved. There was tribal warfare, and eventually, Steve Bannon (yes, the same one) was brought in to fire the scientists and salvage the project for investors.

I often think of Biosphere 2 when I think of what happened to the Oscars. They, we, built a self-sustaining bubble cut off from real life. At first, we celebrated the artificiality of this construct with names like “Hollywood” or “Tinseltown.” But as the Oscars approach their 97th year, with the threat of ending their long reign on network television for the luxury of streaming, it seems clear that our artificial dream factory is now suffering the same fate as Biosphere 2, minus the intervention of Steve Bannon.

A massive creative bottleneck has choked the life out of Hollywood, but I don’t have to tell you that. You already know. Movies simply aren’t as good as they used to be. The spark of urgency and originality that galvanized movies as a must-see activity from city theaters to rural drive-ins is gone. For every well-marketed sequel in a decades-old franchise like Top Gun: Maverick, there are hundreds of films no one wants to see—and almost nothing in-between.

What becomes of this vast production of dreck is hardly inspiring. Sometimes, they hit theaters and play to empty houses for a week or two. Otherwise, they are dumped into the giant Sahara Desert of the streaming services. There, maybe someone clicks on it; maybe they scroll on by. Every so often—which, to be honest, means not very often—a movie surprises, and actually connects with an audience.

The economics of the movie business are equally discouraging. It used to be that a film had to be a hit to even be considered for the Oscars. Then, the model changed to films earning back their money after they were nominated for the Oscars. Now, the box office isn’t a factor, as streaming services simply buy more and more content in pursuit of an illusionary monopoly status, according to the same money-losing, audience-alienating, quality-lowering model that brought us Uber Eats. So why should anyone care?

The Oscars are at best ignored by most of the public now, except for the small community of native Biospherians who like it the way it is—a highly controlled environment ruled by corporate oligarchs, publicists, sycophantic bloggers, and self-important film critics who see their roles in the system as structurally necessary and therefore assured. For these natives, their jobs on the industry merry-go-round are something like a public trust—the far more glamorous and urbane equivalents of lifetime tenure in a big city public school system under the protective umbrella of the United Federation of Teachers. Meanwhile, the public has been turned off by the overt politics and the predictably niche films they nominate every year.

While last year’s Oppenheimer and Barbie phenomenon, aka “Barbenheimer,” seemed like a promising sign that the Oscars were back on track, this year, after the writers and actors strike, it’s back to the usual pattern of niche movies no one saw dominating the Oscars, as a testimony to the progressive virtues of the Hollywood insiders who greenlit this content to begin with, and who—in the absence of profits—hope to use award statues to justify their continued employment.

They’re not all bad movies. Some of them are good. A few may be great. But it’s like Fashion Week in Milan. A lot of money and time is spent on something that only serves an insulated microculture of sophisticates who all share the same values and dine out in the same five restaurants. The resulting ratings are expected to be so bad that, for the first time, the Oscars will be simulcast on Hulu.

It makes sense that the final resting place for Hollywood’s new incarnation of the Oscars is to be put out to pasture on streaming services which in the absence of meaningful audiences or advertising dollars can blissfully conceal their abysmal ratings. Think of it: no more pressure for ratings or box office. Filmmakers have a blank check to indulge their creativity, as long as they stay within the political lines and are content with no one actually seeing their movies. Those of us who grew up loving movies in movie theaters will have to live with the pain of time passing us by. Like record stores and bookstores, maybe movie theaters can’t and won’t survive.

Still, it’s worth asking: How did it ever get to this place where Hollywood can’t make good movies, and the Oscars are fading into the obscurity of streaming on Hulu?

Most people say that competition from streaming, a checked-out Gen Z, the great exodus from network television, and social media’s own ecosystem of low-wattage, tiny-screen celebrities have all led to actual celebrities—the kinds who carry blockbuster movies—going extinct. All of that might be true. Yet the other thing I know after 25 years of covering film is something that I learned from watching movies: If you build it, they will come.

Top Gun: Maverick, for instance, defied every rule used to justify the emptied-out movie theaters and the lackluster box office. For once, Hollywood made a movie people actually wanted to see. It gave them what they wanted instead of what they should want. Similarly, there’s a reason that Taylor Sheridan has not one, not two, but three hit series running simultaneously on network television—namely, that people are clearly hungry for the types of storylines and characters that he reliably cranks out.

If you can’t even name the problem, you certainly can’t solve it. Luckily, my 25-year career as an Oscar blogger went up in flames this past summer after a journalist named Rebecca Keegan wrote an investigative report on my decision to vote for Donald Trump—a decision that it turned out was shared, for whatever large combination of reasons, by a majority of citizens of this country, including Hispanic voters, married voters, male voters, and other demographic categories that included all races, ethnicities, and sexual preferences. That, and a joke mocking “White Dudes for Harris” saying “white power” was back in style that was clearly meant as sarcasm but was quickly taken as “evidence” that I was now a “white supremacist” (I’m a middle-aged Jewish woman in the business of reviewing movies, specifically for the Oscars). What seems more relevant is that I’d been standing against “cancel culture” for almost 10 years, and now it was my turn to be canceled. Everything I’d built was gone the minute the story landed in The Hollywood Reporter.

I could have groveled and apologized, as one does, but I didn’t think I did anything wrong. I didn’t want to confess to being a witch in order to live. So down came the consequences. I lost almost everything: my income, staff, and some good friends. But it was also a gift because now I can talk about what no one else can.

The Oscars were my Roman Empire. I spent 25 years covering them, almost half of my life. Time for me was measured by what won Best Picture that year. I started out as a single mother living in a guest house in Van Nuys with a baby on my hip, a 1200 baud modem and a good idea. I would call my site OscarWatch, and I would spend the whole year watching the Oscars race from beginning to end. If I could crack the code, I could understand why some films win (How Green Was My Valley), and some films don’t (Citizen Kane). I could do it while staying home with my daughter.

About five years into starting my website, I began selling ads to the studios. And over time, it became my sole income. It was good money. I was doing what I loved—only now I could afford my rent, buy a car, and even take an occasional vacation. Best of all, I could support my kid.

In 2006 I was sued by the Academy for my use of the word “Oscars,” so I changed my site’s name to AwardsDaily. My staff covered the Emmys, too. I attended film festivals all over the world. I once sat a few feet away from Paul Thomas Anderson as he interviewed Martin Scorsese.

It was a success story by any measure. But it depended on one thing: my willingness to continue to conform and to suppress and stay silent about everything I knew to be true.

If you want to know what happened to Hollywood, just look at what happened to me. That is not a culture that can celebrate, much less create, art. Nothing can survive inside. It’s like Biosphere 2. The oxygen is depleted. The desperation is palpable. Everyone has that fake euphoria, so they aren’t wished away into the cornfield.

But there are other reasons, too. I might not be the right person to tell this story, but I’m the only person who can. So here goes.

On a cold night in January, as the Santa Ana winds howled through Los Angeles, a biblical fire rampaged through the mountains and reached all the way to the Pacific. It would destroy half of paradise in just a few hours. No one was thinking about the Oscars.

And yet, it was January, the thick of the annual frenzy that is Oscar season. Millions of dollars had been spent. There had been months of screenings, parties, interviews, and film festivals. The ballot deadline for phase one was just days away.

The fires were so catastrophic that, for a minute there, it looked like the Oscars might not happen at all. Stephen King announced he would not be voting at a time like this. The last thing anyone wanted to do was dig in to the always depressing screener pile foisted upon Oscar voters every year.

But this was Hollywood, and the show must go on. Instead of canceling the Oscars, they moved the dates around. Oscar voting was extended. The Critics Choice Awards were bumped to February. The annual tea party for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and the Oscar luncheon were canceled.

Three films had dominated since they played at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Sean Baker’s Anora, which would win the Palme d’Or, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez.

Emilia Pérez was a French movie about a Mexican drug lord who transitions to become female. And did I mention it was a musical? It was the living embodiment of what we call “wokeness.” It had it all, even a love scene with the transgender actress who would make history with nomination after nomination, up to and including the Oscars.

We all knew to prepare for the first transgender actress to make history. We have all been trained to go along with the ritual of cradling a nominee like a precious egg all for the sake of preserving the necessary messaging by the industry that they are all good people doing good things. It was an inevitability that the Cannes jury, led by Greta Gerwig, gave its Best Actress prize to all of the actresses in Emilia Pérez, including its star, Karla Sofia Gascon.

Netflix snapped up the film, sensing it would be a major Oscar player. A Best Picture win for Netflix was so close they could almost taste it. Their whiz kid Oscar strategist, Lisa Taback, had left the Weinstein Co. before the scandal hit: She’d been helping them land a Best Picture contender every year, bringing in wins like The King’s Speech and The Artist. Netflix hired her to work the same magic for them, and she did. She was bringing in one, sometimes two Best Picture contenders every year, but so far, a win had been just out of reach.

When Emilia Pérez won Best Picture in musical/comedy at the Golden Globes, beating Anora was all the hype Netflix needed to take their campaign to the finish line. When the Oscar nominations were finally announced, Emilia Pérez led with 13, joining such historic Oscar juggernauts as From Here to Eternity, Gone with the Wind, Forrest Gump, and Oppenheimer. Netflix finally had a bona fide winner on its hands, even though most of us barely noticed that Netflix was about to cross the threshold and finally earn that coveted stamp of approval from the industry, clanging the bell that they were not just a streaming site that had killed movie theaters: They were a genuine movie studio.

As the front-runner, Emilia Pérez had the expected target on its back. Netflix was deflecting slings and arrows from every direction. Mexicans hated that it was a French movie that got Mexico wrong. The transgender community didn’t like its depiction of a trans person. Film fans thought it was terrible, one of the worst films ever made. How could it have gotten 13 nominations?

And then there were people like me who braved even more treacherous waters by calling out the system that pushed out veterans who had worked their entire careers to win a spot in the Best Actress lineup. It was an unfair advantage, yet again, because the only reason Karla Sofia Gascon was nominated was because she was transgender; the idea that her performance reached any high level of art equivalent to that of the world’s best actresses was plainly a joke.

But none of that would have brought down Emilia Pérez. For those thinking the “woke” thing is over in Hollywood, know this: It is more profound than a trend. It is, by now, a deeply held collective belief system. Oscar voters live in their own universe. Almost nothing gets in or out unless the publicists want it to. They are protected and insulated, like the French aristocracy before the Revolution.

What finally destroyed the Best Picture chances for Emilia Pérez was the titular star herself, Karla Sofia Gascon, whose thinking ran a little hot, shall we say. Some journalist found a trove of her old racist, bigoted tweets just sitting there in plain view on X, albeit in Spanish. It’s not that no one in studio offices speaks Spanish—although that might help. No one had bothered to do a pre-Oscars background check on Gascon, since she was by definition the incarnation of Hollywood’s collective virtue. After all, she was a darker-skinned transgender person—and thereby the embodiment of the left’s identity-politics ideology. Emilia Pérez, the trades announced it, was to be an ultimate “fuck you” to Donald Trump. Who would dare vote against that?

Well, let’s just say it didn’t go that way. In fact, the whole pot of cozy, inbred assumptions blew up in their face. Gascon’s tweets read more like MAGA trolling than the appropriately saintly thoughts of the first transgender person to be nominated in the Best Actress category. The tweets mocked the virtue signalers at the Oscars, saying they looked more like a “Black Lives Matter protest” or an “Afro-Korean film festival” than an awards show. She also complained about the rise of Islam in Spain.

The consequences for Gascon’s ancient thought-crimes were swift and immediate. Netflix refused to pay for her travel expenses. They told her to disappear. Instead, the actress went rogue and appeared on Spanish CNN, crying through the interview and comparing herself to Rosa Parks. It was a wildfire, all right, and it was burning through Netflix’s best chance to win Best Picture.

Netflix would strip her name and face from all of the advertising. She would be ordered not to attend any award shows. Now, after the smoke has cleared, Netflix has announced they will pay for Gascon to attend the Oscars after all.

The story of Emilia Pérez’s trip to the Oscars would make a better movie than almost every movie Hollywood has put out in 10 years, but there are no filmmakers brave enough to tell it. Had the film instead won Best Picture, however, it would have been a depressing indication of an industry that had given up on itself.

The rise and fall of Emilia Pérez exemplifies everything wrong with the Oscars now. The Weinstein/Taback model of curating hothouse flowers as Oscar contenders to the specific tastes of Oscar voters, who are now mired in the anti-aesthetic mud of woke group-think, means they do not reflect anything real. This was a problem when Weinstein movies were dominating, and it is now a worse problem when Netflix movies—produced entirely without reference to the lives or opinions of actual paying customers—have a guaranteed slot every year in the race.

What does it do for Hollywood and the Oscars if Netflix is a dominant studio? Nothing. It simply takes them that much closer to what might be their inevitable fate: life in the closed-off iron lung of the streaming system, as movie theaters continue going the way of bookstores and record stores.

The collapse of Hollywood and the Oscars was slow at first, and then it happened all at once. It wasn’t just the pressure of streaming, social media, and Gen Z’s on-demand entertainment consumption habits. It was also the COVID pandemic and the “great awokening,” and the Academy’s efforts to survive in a changing country and world. But there is no doubt that walling themselves from half the country has done enormous damage to the Oscar brand, as well as to the movie business as a whole. Even now, their movies seem only able to conjure up one enemy: Trump, a story they’ll tell again and again not just in movies but in late-night comedy and in literature, testifying to Hollywood’s own special, sacred virtue and the accompanying evil of the audience outside its walls.

The problem with this story, of course, is that it isn’t true. The Hollywood left and the Democratic Party as a whole were never the “resistance” to anything. We were always the empire. We had everything. We controlled all meaningful social institutions that granted prestige and profits. We colonized the internet, and as civilization migrated online we were in control of all of it. Hollywood used that control to impose our own code, which was as restrictive as anything that the movie business adopted in the 1930s and the 1940s.

The woke code is like the Hays Code. The rules weren’t written down, but everyone knew what they were. After Trump’s win, the fear of racism morphed into Salem-like episodes of mass hysteria that would find its way to the Oscars, too. Suddenly, it wasn’t just most people who were racists. Most movies were racist, too. La La Land was racist, so Moonlight had to win. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was racist so The Shape of Water had to win. By the time Green Book came along, everyone in Hollywood had lost their minds.

Part of Hollywood’s problem was its tight marriage to the Democratic Party, which dates back to the 1970s. As the Democratic Party changed from a party of the working-class masses to a party of the country’s elites, Hollywood changed, too. As a result, the Oscars lost half of their audience. But the more fashionable political hysterias ripped through the industry, the more alienating its products became, even to people who weren’t Trump voters, but were simply, you know, normal. That’s because “normal” was now code for the enemy—in the form of racism, transphobia, and “white privilege.”

In the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, everything in Hollywood dramatically and very visibly changed. In what seems in retrospect like a parody of elite progressive attitudes within society as a whole, the BAFTAs revoked voting privileges for their members and brought in a (now-abandoned) committee to handpick the “correct” choices. Voters were now decided to be too biased, too racist to be trusted. The Academy announced its new inclusivity mandate, which took effect in 2024—an imposed code of conduct that could be used by the powerful to ensure they remain protected while keeping out actual dissenters and wild cards who might question or differ from the party line.

Now, to be eligible for the Oscars, all productions had to feature people from marginalized groups. They could be in front of or behind the camera, but they would have to prove that they were not racists or sexists or homophobes. If films did not meet these requirements, they would not be eligible for the Oscars. Nothing has done more damage to the Oscar brand than this new arbitrary quota system, adherence to which was now openly proclaimed to be more important than the quality of a film’s writing, directing and acting.

After the outrage over Green Book, the Academy began adding new members and purging their older members, with the objective of adding more women and people of color. The only requirement would be that they were somehow involved in film and that they weren’t white and male. Women in Hollywood saw this new rule as a perk for going along with the new system, which targeted white men but not white women. Over a period of just a few years, the Academy added approximately 3,000 new members, bringing the total membership of the Academy to around 10,000. Of necessity, most of the new instant Academy members were from foreign countries—the same way most “students of color” at prestige American universities these days are the children of wealthy foreign elites, not the products of our collapsing inner cities.

The sea change in the Academy’s membership was first felt in 2019 when the South Korean art house film Parasite beat some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable films from American film studios, including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Joker and 1917. Parasite killed two birds with one stone. Had it not won, all of the winners that night from the major categories would have been white. Parasite ensured that the Oscars made history and had glowing headlines the next day.

But they also proved something else: that the Oscars were no longer as invested in their traditional job of fortifying the American studio system. Most of the members worked in the industry and cared about its continued success. International voters, whose own film industries are often heavily subsidized by their governments, have no such investment.

As Hollywood began to rebuild after COVID, there was a shift away from reporting on the domestic box office and more on the global box office, which paints a more optimistic picture of the industry. This is the second year in a row that there are two films double dipping in the Best Picture and International Feature categories.

That is why a win for Emilia Pérez would have been such a disaster. It wasn’t just that it was a streaming film that made zero dollars in the United States, but it was also a film made outside the American studio system. What benefit did its win have to anyone except Netflix? What jobs did it create?

It’s hard for me to see the Oscars surviving, especially if everyone is still too afraid to speak their minds and insists on seeing half the country as racists, and enough morally vacuous stars insist on festooning couture tuxes and gowns with bloody Hamas handprint pins. Worse, it’s getting harder for me to find a reason to care about whether they survive.

I care about movies, though. We need movie theaters in our country so that we can share space with each other. We need universal stories, so we can share dreams. The Oscars used to matter because we mattered as human beings to each other. And now? The Oscars look a lot like Biosphere 2: an artificial lifeworld somewhere out in the middle of the desert that people barely know is even there.