Fox News Says Awards Should Be Based on Popularity, Not Quality

From a column with an “Open Letter to Hollywood” by Jonathan Morris on Fox News:

These were your favorite films this year, along with their ranking in box-office ticket sales, and number of Oscar nominations:

• Brokeback Mountain: 27th place, 8 nominations
• Crash: 49th place, 6 nominations
• Good Night, and Good Luck: 90th place, 6 nominations
• Memoirs of a Geisha: 45th place, 6 nominations

I didn’t want to see any of them, and I haven’t seen any of them. And judging by the numbers, neither did anybody else. These “masterpieces” were playing to mostly empty theaters for most of their theater run.

[snip]

That’s why I’m announcing today the first annual We the People awards. There’s only one criterion: whether audiences actually wanted to go see the movies. Revolutionary! Drum roll, please… the We the People (WTP) award winners for this year are:

• Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith: $380 million gross (1st place for the year), 1 nomination
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: $288 million (2nd place for the year), 1 nomination
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: $288 million (3rd place for the year), 3 nominations
• War of the Worlds: $234 million (4th place for the year), 3 nominations

Oh, look, I think I see a pattern. None of these movies glorifies homosexuality (”Brokeback,” “Capote”), squeezes in 182 expletives (”Crash”), bashes McCarthyism (”Good Night”) and America in general (”Syriana” — 2 nominations) or features subject matter unmentionable in this column (”Geisha,” “Transamerica” — 2 nominations). In a word, none of them is propaganda. Maybe that’s why we wanted to go see them.

Wow, that’s an impressive position, even for an article at Fox News. It’s hard to believe that it’s a real article, but it certainly appears to be. So let me make sure I got this straight: Americans don’t want to watch propaganda like those crazy liberals bashing McCarthyism, they want safe, conservative, boring pictures. We don’t want propaganda that tries to tell us racism is bad, we want explosions and action and loud stuff that goes boom.

Even if you ignore that surreal complaint about anti-McCarthyism, it’s still a very weird article. He’s quite clearly saying that awards for the best movies should be based on how popular they are, rather than trying to assess the quality in any way. I guess everyone knows that the most popular things are always the best, and therefore deserving of special recognition far beyond the mere millions of dollars that they already got. After all, trying to give out awards based on quality will just lead to those wacky Hollywood types trying to reinstate Communism by prophylactically attacking any future McCarthyesque Senators that would try to defend the homeland from the Communist menace. Or maybe they’re just trying to get slavery outlawed for good by encouraging a dialogue about race. Jerks. It’s going to totally be Hollywood’s fault when we can’t find any obedient Negroes to work the fields in a few years.

Anyway, I feel like I’m being trolled by linking to such an out-there article and responding to it as if it was written by a human being capable of rational thought, but here I go anywhere. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Fox News follows up with a “YHBT. YHL. HAND.” You know Fox News has to be run by Kibologists. Ok, so it wouldn’t really explain anything, but we can pretend it would, right?