And thank you for your layered and lucid responses. As I said I haven't seen Emilia Perez and may or may not until later so the quality of the film isn't the issue so much as everything surrounded Gascon and the way Hollywood has reacted is.

As an addendum, everything played out pretty much as I expected. Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez haven't offered any support to Gascon: Saldana has denied and Gomez is saying this has 'cast a shadow on the entire film' Gascon hasn't attended any awards show since the Golden Globes and everyone in Hollywood - which wanted to raise Gascon and Perez to the rafters in January - now seem to just want to pretend they never met her.

I left out that there now seems to be a trend among celebrities of scrubbing their social media profiles around awards season. Just consider the implications of that for a moment. All the arguing the left does about the right censoring free expression and its clear that Hollywood will gladly do the same thing to protect itself. Kind of makes you wonder how much everyone cares about free speech to begin with.

There have been, so you know, other 'controversies' surrounding other Best Picture nominees. Brady Corbet went under a grilling because he used AI for The Brutalist and because that was a major talking point during the strike in Hollywood in 2023, he's being branded a traitor. Mikey Madison said she didn't use an intimacy coordinator for Anora, and because that was a cause for women's rights a few years ago, she's being accused as ...a porn star I guess? Some ar e trulu absurd, Adrian Brody is being raked over the coals for an SNL performance he did in blackface in 2004 and Demi Moore is being roasted for kissing a fifteen year old...when she was 19. I could keep going but I juat don't have the heart and if you keep reading my articles you will find out my problmes.

What maddens me is that I'm FOR everything the left wants. Everything they ask for is completely legitimate and they deserve it. I just want to know how they plan to get it within the boundaries of what is possible in a democracy and a free society. And every time I ask the question, I either get no response to that or I am called names because apparently asking the question is viewed as being on the side of the enemy. I'm a liberal but I'm also a pragmatist. So many on the left - certainly on this site - no what's wrong with the world but they won't tell you what they would do to fix it. But it doesn't take a genius to see the problems in the world today.

There's a saying by a Democratic congressman named Sam Rayburn. He was Speaker of the House for 20 years and was in the House for half a century. He did more as a congressman to build the liberal order than any CONGRESSIONAL leader from the New Deal to the national infrastructure to the first civil rights bills and getting Alaska and Hawaii as a state. He was also very good at coining phrases and one of them I've always loved:

Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one. I don't think i need to explain to you what that means nor the fact that I spend so much time on this site looking for carpenters - and I have found nothing but jackasses.

That's the problem I have with so much of the left today. They argue about burning everything down, calling everything that America and the world is flawed and broken and that we need to something better. I agree and sympathize with their despair. The problem is, their despair and rage really seems to be all they have. The right is far worse, obviously, but in a sick twisted way they at least have sense that the far left doesn't. It's taken them decades to accomplish what they've done and the left had the same amount of time to do everything the right did. But while the right was forming the Federalist society and the Heritage foundation, creates cable news networks to message their bigoted horrible message, gerrymandering democracy, rigging votes in rural states, doing everything they could to bring the rise of Trump the left has done...nothing, really. They didn't build any of the organizations that the right did, they don't have any networks nearly as big and they sure as hell haven't been voting Democratic or voting at all. If evil occurs when good people do nothing, then i think the left has to at least partially acknowledge their role in the last half century by the fact that they basically argued there was no difference between the Democrats and Republicans for fifty years.

Some of them, for the record, were holding to that after Trump 1 and all through the leadup to 2024 by the way. I can understand in a sick way the loyalty of the GOP to Trump. tO THOSE WHO spent the last four years saying that there was no difference between the two parties and voted for Jill Stein this past election, I can't comprehend them.

I've gone on a rant, for which I apologize but you see what I mean.

Thanks for reading again