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March 27, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
12:57
Oscar News & Some Disney Employees Hate WOKE Agenda

Megan Basham discusses the Oscars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm very pleased to be joined now by my friend Megan Basham, a reporter for The Daily Wire, a Rotten Tomatoes critic, the author of Beside Every Successful Man.
Megan, thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So you are here to educate me because I am reliably informed that the Oscars are coming up.
I have not watched the Oscars in years at this point.
I'm not sure that I've seen any of the Oscar-nominated movies, nor do I really know what they are.
And so I've got two questions.
One, what is going to happen at the Oscars?
What should we look for?
And two, are Americans going to care or have they completely tuned out Hollywood?
Absolutely.
Well, I think that's one of the things that you need to watch for because I think ratings-wise, this is probably just going to be a dumpster fire.
I mean, the reality is that Oscar ratings have been trending down for years, but last year they reached an all-time low, really bad.
Now, some of that you can ascribe to COVID, but the fact is they were already on a downward trend and the Academy has been losing money and ABC has been losing money on this deal.
I mean, they still make some revenue, but to give you an idea...
Oscars brought in $15 million less in advertising revenue last year.
So that's a really big deal.
So what you can expect to see, you would think, would be let's reverse course.
Maybe the Americans at home do not like the political speeches.
Maybe they don't like having their values derided and insulted and mocked.
Well, that's not what the Academy ultimately decided.
They looked at the declining ratings And they said, we think the problem is that people just really don't like that sound editor.
They don't like that film editing category.
They want to get rid of the poor little guys who, to be honest with you, that is my favorite moments.
Those are my favorite moments in the Oscars is when you see these guys who are not celebrities.
They're not well known.
They get their big moment.
They're never political.
They always thank their wives and seem really sincere.
So what they've decided to do is cut those guys out of the show.
Wow.
Because I agree with you.
I used to watch the Oscars as a kid all the time.
And I thought those were some of the most enjoyable categories.
You know, the celebrities, they always get the attention and the accolades.
So it's fun.
Or, you know, the short film category.
Some random person who you've never heard of gets up and is just very sincere and thanks the Academy.
We used to joke that, you know, the way to give a proper speech is you go up and say, I just want to thank the Academy.
And now you basically don't even see that.
You see someone go up and say Donald Trump is really bad and men are really women and abortion is really good.
And OK, now maybe we'll be played off because my my personal political speech has gone on for so long that, you know, we're going to run out of air time.
So they've doubled down on this.
Well, yeah.
And you have seen them showing some gratitude in recent years.
It's been female actresses thanking their abortions for their performance.
I mean, we have seen that.
Michelle Williams did that.
I am grateful that I had an abortion so that I could be here tonight.
So they don't consider that maybe that is what's driving viewers away.
Instead, they think, nah, it's just these categories.
Some fairly important categories.
Like, I don't know, film editing seems like it's fairly important to making a film.
Yeah.
But so they're doing away with that.
So part of the reason is they're saying this is going to streamline it.
They think that more time with the stars that people find off-putting is what is really going to bring viewers in.
And then, this is the real kicker.
They went, who could we get to host this show to bring in viewers?
And what they settled on was primarily Amy Schumer.
The most political, off-putting comedian in the comedy landscape.
Oh, I have to correct you.
I have to correct you, Megan.
You called her a comedian.
Right, okay, you're right.
That seems generous.
It does seem generous.
And Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall.
Look, I think Wanda Sykes can be funny, but she is not a big draw for middle America.
And Regina Hall, most people don't know at all.
I don't know who she is.
I'm just hearing the name for the first time.
She's been in some small movies.
She had a recurring role on the TV show Black-ish.
And I think to a lot of people, it seems like after the Me Too movement, after Black Lives Matter, they went...
We will have a black lesbian comedian.
We will have a black comedian.
We will have a white comedian, but they'll all three be females.
No men on that stage hosting.
And, you know, I look at it and I go, I don't see how this is in any way going to draw anybody into watching this show.
So I think those are the two main things to look for.
As far as the movies, you know, there were some that I liked, but I'm going to tell you, these are very...
Other than Dune, these are not films that most people have seen.
There's movies like Power of the Dog, which is another gay cowboy movie.
Coda was a good movie, but it's about a child of deaf parents.
It was actually a sweet movie, but it's not very well known.
So you just have a lot of films that people haven't heard of, they haven't watched, and they're not going to care.
How many gay cowboys are there?
They've been making these movies for decades now.
I mean, more than 20 years at this point.
I guess you saw this really begin...
30, 40 years ago, this split between movies people see and movies that nobody sees.
Maybe you and I, I used to occasionally go see some kind of indie movies.
The gay cowboy thing never did much for me.
And now, even for me, it's too much.
And I like the artsy kinds of movies.
So, you've got this split now.
Is there ever any turn back that we can hope for, that you're going to see a popular movie be nominated again?
Well, you know, and actually, it sort of affected the entire film landscape in a way that's really negative because they used to try to make really good popular movies, movies that were popular that could also qualify as a best picture.
And now you've seen such a split that the arthouse movies are getting more and more esoteric, less appealing to the general audience, whereas the popular films, they're all superhero movies, which, you know, I like a superhero movie, but I would also like some other popular movies as well.
I think that that is part of the divide that's going forward.
I don't know.
I think probably not because of the streaming revolution.
Our content has become all the more fractured.
Quite honestly, I see no sign that they're going to pull back from irrelevance here.
I guess it's a step in the right direction for the Academy that they were able to get a host this year.
Because after the Kevin Hart debacle, no one wanted to host anymore.
It's sort of like giving the Republican response to the State of the Union.
It's the worst job, it's the end of your career, and nobody wants it.
They would have a hostless Oscars.
Not entirely true.
Ricky Gervais said, I'll do it.
And I don't know why.
They said, no, thank you to him.
Which, that would have really brought some viewers.
It was really too bad.
If they really wanted people to watch the Oscars this year, they would have taken Ricky Gervais up on his offer.
It does.
I'm looking now at what the Democrats are doing.
Forget Hollywood for a second.
What the Democrats are doing politically is, in an election year, in a midterm election year, they are doubling down on letting men go into the girls' locker room and take girls' trophies, doubling down on abortion as some kind of sacred right up until the moment of birth.
They're doubling down on mass migration.
They're doubling down on all the same sorts of radical policies that the vast majority of Americans do not like.
And you've seen them be rebuked for it at that Virginia governor's race.
They're getting absolutely crushed in the polls right now.
And yet it seems that the worse their numbers are, the more they double down.
And that's kind of what you're seeing in Hollywood.
I mean, the people who run Hollywood, they don't have a low IQ, all right?
We're not talking about really stupid people.
So they must know that the majority of Americans don't like this stuff anymore.
And what's their answer?
Amy Schumer, one of the least funny, most nauseating, shrill, politically annoying.
She's the niece of Chuck Schumer, for goodness sakes.
That's the answer that they've got to their problem?
Well, and I think part of it is, you know, they're just listening too much to the Hollywood press and the activist employees in their own houses.
You've seen parents who are sort of driven by their obnoxious children.
In a really true way, that is what we're seeing at studios.
You look at the Disney debacle this last week, and you go, you have actually some conservative leadership there who had a correct instinct when they said, we're not actually going to talk about the Florida bill or We're just going to focus on doing good work, putting out movies that people like.
And their employees went insane.
The Hollywood Press then, of course, amplified all of that insanity.
And you're talking about a very small sliver of people who were able to drive Disney's agenda in a way that is against its better business instincts.
And they know it.
That's what's weird.
weird is I talked to some very high level executives this week at Disney who told me, we know, we know about the Daily Wire polling.
We know that parents don't like it.
But at this point, there's such fear of the negative press.
There's such fear of getting blasted on MSNBC that they are reacting.
They're not thinking this through.
This reminds me of a line in politics.
They say personnel is policy.
What they mean by that is the people that you put in charge are much more than any little document or memo or frankly, constitution even.
The people you put in charge of running your company, your organization, your government, they are going to set the policy.
It's It's them.
If you've got a lot of crazy hair and weird tattoos and crazy left-wing t-shirts, that is going to be the policy that you're going to get.
get.
I noticed this even with Republicans, even Republicans in left-wing institutions, left-wing universities, left-wing corporations.
They will get much squishier because their view of the country is so distorted.
They're only around liberals.
They read the New York Times.
They think that this represents the majority of Americans when it represents a very small portion of them.
Antonin Scalia gave an interview with New York Magazine years ago now, And the interviewer was mocking him for believing in the devil.
For believing in God.
And he took a pause and he looked at her.
She was laughing at him.
And he said, do you realize how out of touch you are with the majority of people?
The majority of people throughout history have believed in God, have believed in the devil.
Do you realize what a crazy bubble you're living in that you think that this is not just wrong but uncommon?
And that was the strangest thing to me, you know, to talk to some of these guys and hear that they know and yet they're under the perception that they are going to be more damaged by this negative press than they are by, let's say, stories that reflect what Ron DeSantis has done and said, we're going to stand strong or, I don't know, fire some of these crybabies and these crybullies, I've heard it called, and that really is what they are, crybullies.
Within these organizations, they're in the mailroom trying to tell the board what to do, and the board is letting them.
So the insanity of the lack of leadership, it just kind of blows your mind.
Though it did blow my mind to hear that some of these guys high up in Disney listen to Daily Wire and watch Daily Wire broadcasts.
Well, I do love that.
I hope they check out my docu-series, Fauci Unmask.
Maybe then we'll get some good policy coming out of the administrative state.
Because, you know, what you're describing is the inmates running the asylum.
But it actually is just striking me now when we say these Hollywood execs, they're not dummies, okay?
They're well-educated, they've got high IQs.
Maybe they just feel that the political power in this country, the power that can really threaten them, It's not the people.
It's not even really the customer base.
It's the liberal press.
It's the woke employees.
It's the blob.
It's just that kind of big liberal blob.
There actually might be something to it.
Megan, in just the few seconds we have left, where can people find you?
Oh, well, you can find me at The Daily Wire, of course.
And you can find me once a month now on Andrew Klavan's show, which is probably my favorite part of my month.
We get to chat about culture and entertainment and all of these Great things that make life more entertaining and more worth living.
And you can always find me fighting with people on Twitter, at Meg Basham.
That's great.
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