* Don’t forget possible candidate Michael Bloomberg who will be 74 in another 8 days. Of the group, Trump is the only one who appears to be much younger than his actual age of 69. And, as far as I know, he has had pretty good health, unlike, for example, Hillary Clinton who had serious health issues a few years ago. If you recall, Mitt Romney was 65 when he ran in 2012, and he looked 20 years younger. So, it’s not just a matter of chronological age. But it is ironic when we have private corporations with a mandatory retirement age of 65 for their top officers to have a crop of presidential candidates a number of years above that age. On the other hand, we have Rubio at 44 (45 on May 28) or Cruz at 45 to choose from if you want relative youth. Knowing what we know now about JFK and having lived through 7 years of Obama, I would generally opt for age and experience over youth and inexperience.
* The issue isn’t really the composition of the Academy it is the need for blacks to be ‘validated’ by white institutions. Since black institutions, to the extent they even exist, are seen as second rate or copies of the white organizations, only white recognition matters to blacks. Thus we see these peculiar news stories where some black student ( African usually) wins admission to every Ivy League school. The reality is few, if any, white or Asian student is going to apply to every Ivy League school so the real news story is not that the black student was admitted to every Ivy League school but why? Here the answer is that the number of black students actually eligible for admission is so small that these schools fall all over each other to recruit those that do.
This formula applies throughout modern America. Blacks want white recognition, indeed, they now insist upon it, but heap scorn and accusations of racism upon those institutions who knuckle under and give it to them. The dilemma is the larger the role and more recognition blacks achieve from these institutions the less valuable it becomes. Does anyone consider the Nobel Prize in Literature to really matter anymore when 2nd rate Guatemalan or Nigerian writers are awarded it on the basis of ‘diversity’.
* Yeah, the problem here is that 84 year old Angie Dickinson was born and raised in an era where acting and such were judged on performance. She’s not hip to the new trend of social justice uber alles.
* The Oscars are boring and cater mostly to gays and women. The inclusion of more black candidates will still keep the old viewership and may get the academy more NAM viewers. It will then be the ultimate ceremony of smug moral righteousness that crowns its new emperor of the church of universal humanism.
* When I moved to Ohio for a year to look after my dying father I cleaned out a lot of his old books.
Pops had been a member of the NYT book club for many years so there were a fair number of best sellers from 30-40 years ago. I picked one up titled “Indecent Exposure” and started reading. Tossed it in the car and would read whenever I waited for my wife at the market. It was about a financial scandal at Columbia pictures in the 1970s where a high power executive producer named David Begelman forged a check with Cliff Robertson’s name on it. When Cliff got a tax notice on the check from the IRS the fraud began to unravel.
Most of the book centers around the Columbia power struggle between factions aligned with Alan Hirschfield and Herbert Allen, Wall Street players who helped Columbia recover from near bankruptcy to become very profitable. The Allen faction wanted Begelman reinstated and eventually drive out Hirschfield.
It was a good read and a fascinating glimpse into boardroom politics. Was a best seller around 1982. What struck me was not just the dominance of Jews in Hollywood but in American industry in general, as players in the drama assembled to fight from across a spectrum of well-known companies. Another tidbit was when the scandal broke in the media and Rolling Stone penned a hit piece on the affair and was sued by the Allen faction.
Anyway it was an interesting background to this recent Hollywood diversity crisis and the constant complaints about too there being many “white men” in the industry. Cynics might claim that wily Jews are orchestrating this entire controversy.
* I have a hard time sitting through more than about 10 minutes of the Academy Awards straight, but, yeah, Best Director, Best Actor, the Best Cinematographer, the Screenwriting awards, those are all big time male achievement categories, while the technical categories are of interest, too.
A fellow I used to know from the Boy Scouts, one of the other scout fathers, was at the last Academy Awards in his tuxedo as one of the three people who’d get to go on stage at the end of the show to accept the Best Picture trophy just in case their longshot low budget nominee happened to win. (It didn’t, of course, but J.K. Simmons from their movie got his Best Supporting Actor Oscar earlier that night.)
* FDR’s court-packing plan was pretty much of a victory for him even if it’s commonly assumed to be a black eye.
* The barely-disguised envy of so many of the aggrieved parties reminds me of a movie scene.
Doctor Zhivago, with the brilliant Omar Sharif (and the radiant Julie Christie), shows envy in a historical context. That Russian ‘public’ decided that a small family really didn’t need to live in such a big house, so they appropriated it.
Now, the modern ‘public’ wants to appropriate other selected assets, like awards. They’ll never stop to ask how people earned or accomplished, or acknowledge normative standards.
* “We never know how Tessio betrayed the family, and what could have been so big? It’s not like he assassinated the Godfather or Michael.
Similarly, we never learn what Freddo told Johnny Ola or did for Hyman Roth that was so earth-shattering that would require execution.
It’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking that for 40+ years no one has really questioned wtf were the betrayals all about.”
The fact of the betrayal is what matters. It IS big. It’s huge. He broke the circle of absolute trust, obedience and loyalty without which the family cannot function. Only an absolute punishment fits that crime.
I’m going to take a wild guess here that your ethnic background is not Mediterranean or Southern European. I’m Slavic not Sicilian and I understand this concept so well you could say it’s in my blood.
* Most of the ‘WHITES’ in the article are Jews. But that can’t be acknowledged. If the people who overwhelmingly control ‘HOLLYWOOD’ had Italian last names instead of jewish ones, there’d be howls of ‘MAFIA CONTROL’, senate sub-committee hearings and of couse RICO indictments.
But again none of that can be mentioned anymore than can be the singular world view expressed by
‘HOLLYWOOD’. But then of course, nobody ever accused that town of honesty.
* The appeal of the Oscars it that it is a live show. There are always one or more telling moments when celebrities are caught off guard.
Not to mention over the years the Oscars have had more than a few notable “wardrobe” malfunctions. Most memorable was Ashley Judd strutting across the stage as a presenter while not wearing underwear beneath her leg split dress and the annual event of Jennifer Lopez’s almost always too sheer top not holding up under the too intense lighting.
It’s always fun watching the obvious panic on the part of the director & cameramen as they struggle to reframe the live shot.
One has to suspect that such goings on are at least sometimes calculated so as encourage folks, even hetero males, to watch or at least DVR the show.
* At least in my experience, blacks aren’t particularly fond of the talents of any other races. I see of lease cars by the 1000′s and the ones we receive from black customers ONLY have black artists ( always pirated on cd) and ONLY have ‘black’ music stations on the radio presets. Come to think of it, millions of white kids wore Michael Jackson style clothing, millions white kids bought Michael Jordan endorsed products and Hundreds of millions of whites have always bought Motown and now mainstream rap music. It seems every added black member of the Academy Awards will only be a vote for black entertainers.
