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Another week, another wave of revelations about big tech’s war on civilization. This week: the latest chapter in the slow-motion derailment of Facebook.
An apt moment to draw together a few threads on how Silicon Valley’s incursion into entertainment keeps giving birth to progressive waves of disasters, even as it gives us the wonders of the Great Streaming War.
As ever, The Ankler raises an eyebrow to note the entertainment industry’s complete lack of a response to the demolishment of its way of life, or a seat at the table of the Versailles Conference to divide up its remains. The leadership vacuum yawns before us still.
Exhibit A: AMPAS’s Tedornation
If you’re looking for a living allegory worthy of Dante, you couldn’t do much better than the AMPAS museum – on so many levels.
As film – the living medium and industry – teeters towards its almost inevitable conclusion, the institution created to promote and defend it, opens a museum, encasing movies and their history forever in amber, preserving its artifacts for future generations to wander among like that Viking ship dredged up from the Stockholm harbor. Except in this case with many more apologies and warnings. Only the Academy could turn a “North by Northwest” exhibit into a joyless mea culpa for the crimes committed against indigieneous people.
As for film’s relevance to the years ahead and the coming generations, the museum sticks that in a hallway at the very end, with an introduction that all but dares visitors to summon the interest to keep looking:
Telling perhaps that the “Future of Cinema” wing looks like the entrance to a holocaust memorial? The upbeat ambience is only missing a reminder to remove your hat and please keep voices down in respect for the fallen and those come to mourn them.
For those hearty souls who venture onward, the Academy presents… its vision of the future! Which is: a wall of floating homilies by the industry’s usual suspects spitballing warmed-over platitudes about how we’ll solider on…somehow.
Given that in the time this museum was being constructed, the Academy has managed to chase away something like 80 percent of the audience from the Oscars broadcast, its appropriate they turn their attention to the past, pivoting from preserving and defending film to helping it die with, if not dignity, then, grandeur perhaps.
And presiding over this event – using the opening as his coronation – is the man whose company has taken a wrecking ball to the entire industry, not to mention, to the meaning of film with his ersatz filmwerks. In the novel of the death of film, it would be almost too on the nose to have this executive of all people presiding over the industry’s entombment. But Hollywood has never been known for its metaphoric subtlety, and so there he was, making his lengthy remarks while he effectively gave the film world its gold watch and wished it a very happy life in Boca Raton. Hope canasta night is good! Later in the week, he also would wrest possession of Chadwick Boseman’s legacy away from Disney by announcing a $5.4 million scholarship fund in his name at Howard University. “My deepest thanks to Ted Sarandos, Scott Stuber and our family at Netflix,” said Boseman’s widow in a statement.
Of course, as we get deeper into the allegory, it would be way way too on the nose if Stuber, the man who presides over Netflix’s film division, didn’t bother to come to the great event, missing not only the opening of the shrine to film – which we’re to assume is a cause very close to his heart – but his own boss’ ascension as King of Hollywood.
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