From Variety (with some pictures I added):
Why Kevin Hart Was the Wrong Choice to Host the Oscars (Column)
Owen Gleiberman, December 6, 2018 10:07PM PST
I’m not a person who tends to have a censorious attitude toward stand-up comedians. …
But …
Yet Kevin Hart’s comic tweets about the LGBTQ community … can leave you with a slightly queasy feeling. … Those tweets marked him as the wrong person — the wrong host — at the wrong time.
The Oscars are an awards show, but as much as that they’re a celebration of movies. And what, exactly, are movies about? …
That a few individuals’ faces are worthy of being projected 40 feet high while millions of people with less glamorous faces sit in the dark, eat popcorn, and admire them?
No! That’s totally wrong. You see, Owen Gleiberman knows exactly what movies are about:
But what all great movies are about, on some level, is empathy. They have been, and still are, the supreme vehicle for putting ourselves in the shoes of people who aren’t us.
The shoes of beautiful, fabulous people who aren’t us.
To watch a great movie is to reduce that difference — between the people on screen, whoever they might be, and the people in the audience — to nothing.
I like the phrase “whoever they might be:” as if the people on screen are randomly selected. They are there because they look better on a movie screen than the people in the audience.
That, in a nutshell, is the miracle of movies. … But the glory of cinema is that no movie is for any one person at the expense of anyone else.
They are all for everyone. They’re not just about crossing boundaries — they’re about melting them down.
The trouble with Kevin Hart’s words— the reason that, by and large, they’re terrible jokes — is that they express a spirit of extreme anti-empathy. …
Going forward, that message could conceivably be the taking-off point for a hipper, better, more grown-up — and funnier — Kevin Hart. …
Some might argue that the high council of identity politics now demands too much. In this case, however, the real question was whether a comedian whose mocking reactionary spirit led him to write off a segment of our citizens in the most demeaning way possible was the person we wanted in 2019 to symbolize, on global television, the spirit of Hollywood. The main job of the Oscar host is to tweak a great many of the people in the audience — the royalty of the industry. They are not, and shouldn’t be, above satire, especially on Oscar night. But the essence of the satire is that it shouldn’t leave a sour aftertaste.
… And that couldn’t be further from the defiantly inclusive spirit of Hollywood today.
Hart’s spirit is, in fact, a bit Trumpian: superior and divisive, based on the falsity of exclusion. …
The last thing that anyone needed on Oscar night was to be laughing at the host and wondering, in the back of one’s mind, whether the cutting edge of his jokes was really the sharp blade of intolerance.
As Inkoo Kang asked in Slate about Borat, are comedies “politically useful” in the Current Year?
But drama, too, can come under suspicion of not being politically useful enough. As I wrote in “Exhortation and Megalomania” in Taki’s Magazine in 2015:
It’s widely assumed, both by liberals and conservatives, that the fields of arts and entertainment innately induce egalitarian political leanings. Much of the prestige of the left, in fact, derives from the notion that it’s only natural for creative people to favor equality above all else. …
A more subversive theory is that art is inherently anti-egalitarian, that the entertainment industry thrives by elevating individuals to levels of mass adoration that Belshazzar of Babylon would have found excessive. In turn, the entertainment industry adopts a bogus ideology of promoting equality to cover up its essential tendency toward Caesarism.
