Cannes Film Festival stars slam the right, oblivious to their own ideological straitjacket

Cannes Film Festival stars slam the right, oblivious to their own ideological straitjacket

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — It’ s bad enough that the contrast between the “haves” and “have- nots” seems to be increasingly evident in Western society. Enter tone-deaf Hollywood to make things even worse.

Stars have recently taken to the red carpet at events like the Met Gala in New York and the Cannes Film Festival here in France, which are inherently decadent to begin with. Part of their job is to self-promote. Fair enough. If they were cranking out some half-decent bread and circuses to distract the masses from the fact that they’re struggling to make ends meet, with the top issue cited in recent polls around the Western world being the dire state of the economy, then it would be easier to choke down the usual self-indulgence from Hollywood in the current climate.

Instead, stars mostly just sat on their hands while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented diversity quotas for productions to qualify for Oscar consideration. This means that one of the leads or significant supporting actors in the movie has to be an ethnic minority, or least 30 percent of other actors have to be “from at least two underrepresented groups,” or the main storyline, theme or narrative of the film has to be centered on an underrepresented group, according to the organization’s website.

Announced back in 2020, new rules would serve to explain headlines like this one from NBC News last year: “Cleopatra was not Black, Egypt tells Netflix in growing feud ahead of new series.”

And therein lies the big problem that average folks have with Hollywood these days. All they want is to be entertained. Instead, they find that they’re constantly being bombarded with grotesque propaganda under the guise of “art”.

For instance, moviegoers can now look forward to gems like “Emilia Perez,” a musical film debuting at Cannes about a drug lord who has a sex change to dip out of the narco business.

Sounds like it ticks just about every diversity and inclusion box, and has been touted as an early favorite at the festival. So has “Kinds and Kindness,” described by industry magazine Variety as “an anthology of stories about sex cults, cannibalism and general debauchery.”

Yeah, those totally sound like the kind of entertainment that the average person would sit down to enjoy with a drink after an honest day’s work.

If it’s really all about the art, as filmmakers would have us believe, then where have they been to defend their right to make art that isn’t forced to conform to propagandistic rules?

Pulitzer Prize- winning screenwriter David Mamet, a rare critical voice, called Hollywood’s requirements “ fascist totalitarianism” earlier this month.

“I can’t give you a stupid f****** statue unless you have 7% of this, 8% of that … it’s intrusive,” Mamet told the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Instead of speaking up like Mamet has about the extremism imposed on their profession and on their audiences, most Hollywood stars have been actively defending the kind of increasingly extreme establishment status quo that has straitjacketed their industry. Director Francis Ford Coppola, currently at Cannes to debut his new film, " Megalopolis ", described in The Guardian as “megabloated and megaboring,” instead reserved his criticism for the American trend “towards the more neo-right, even fascist tradition.”

What about the criticism leveled at his own director daughter, Sofia Coppola, when accused back in 2017 of dropping the only Black character from her film,“ The Beguiled,” based on a novel about the U.S. Civil War?

Sofia Coppola was subjected to the same kind of fascism that Mamet was getting at — and on which Coppola is silent, choosing to focus on the right-wing in America that’s pushing back on the authoritarian lunacy that’s been integrated into the establishment status quo and normalized. It’s no secret that it’s the Democrats w ho have fully embraced an equity agenda and quotas through the Biden administration’s equity action plans.

Actress Jane Fonda also chimed in at Cannes in an exchange with a reporter, calling on Americans to vote for Biden over Trump — or “the orange man,” as she called him. Not exactly a surprise when she’d previously called Covid “God’s gift to the left” in that it revealed Trump’s approach to the crisis — which can ultimately be described as laissez-faire, or the opposite of authoritarianism — as having shown “what he stands for.”

She also has a climate change- oriented political action committee with the objective of electing “climate change champions at all levels of government,” according to its social media.

Nothing quite says anti-fascism like advocating against the guy who pushed back on freedom-limiting Covid mandates implemented at the state level, or openly admitting to wanting to blanket the country with activists interested in dictating how people live their lives under the ridiculous and narcissistic pretext of attempting to control the Earth’s climate.

Perhaps if stars wanted to fight fascism, they could turn their sights on something they can actually control — their own industry’s ideological straitjacket. Maybe then they could stop scratching their heads and wondering why audiences would much rather watch their own neighbors clown around on internet apps like TikTok for entertainment than sit through another Hollywood flop.