We Have the Great Stories: Let the Cinematic Renaissance Begin – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Contrary to popular belief, the Dark Ages weren’t so dark. As much as secular historians hate to admit it, Christianity held Western Civilization together from the fall of the Roman Empire around 500 AD to the start of the Renaissance around 1300. And the surge of humanistic art and philosophy that made the Renaissance was no radical new idea. Quite the opposite, it marked the influence of ancient brilliance on Petrarch, Giotto di Bondone, and Dante. Petrarch rediscovered Cicero and Virgil. Giotto revisualized the Faith in works like Life of Christ. And Dante revolutionized narrative literature with one of the greatest epic poems of all time, La Commedia Divina (The Divine Comedy).

It’s a similarly lazy thought to proclaim the movie industry dead, even as the radiation from what could be the biggest bomb in Disney history continues to empty theaters. Not that audiences needed the disaster of Snow White to stay away. Hollywoke had been repelling them for more than a decade, when it completely replaced storytelling with messaging. It institutionalized this contempt by constantly bestowing its top prize, the Academy Award, on pictures few people had ever heard of let alone seen.

Forget the Best Picture Oscar nominations. A list of the actual winners from this year back to 2015 reads like the Dead Sea Scrolls to most folks: Anora, CODA, The Shape of Water, Nomadland, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Parasite, Moonlight, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave. Of the last ten Best Pictures, only Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) was a box-office hit. Because Nolan is talented enough to have chosen and told a riveting historical story, whose repercussions still haunt the world today. While The Shape of Water, Moonlight, Green Book, and 12 Years a Slave all offered the same tiresome obvious Message: Racism is bad (throw in homophobia for Moonlight).

We didn’t have to suffer through 12 years of slavery to know that. We know the last century was artistically far superior. Only view the Best Picture nominations at the start of each decade beginning with 1940.

1940 – Gone with the Wind (winner), The Wizard of Oz, Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach.

1950 — All About Eve (winner), Born Yesterday, Father of the Bride, King Solomon’s Mines, Sunset Boulevard.

1960 — Ben-Hur (winner), Anatomy of a Murder, The Diary of Ann Frank, The Nun’s Story, Room at the Top. Okay, so the last three weren’t so great in a year (1959) that included The 400 Blows, Some Like It Hot, North by Northwest, Rio Bravo, and Pillow Talk, but that’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts’ fault not Hollywood’s.

1970 — Midnight Cowboy (winner), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Z, Hello Dolly, Ann of the Thousand Days. Again, the last three should have been replaced by the classic Westerns The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, and True Grit. Though John Wayne deservedly won Best Actor for True Grit.

1980 — Kramer VS. Kramer (winner), All That Jazz, Apocalypse Now, Breaking Away, Norma Rae. Equally Oscar-worthy choices from 1979 were Alien, Escape from Alcatraz, Manhattan, The Onion Field, The In-Laws, and Being There.

1990 — Driving Miss Daisy (winner), Born on the Fourth of July, Dead Poets Society, Field of Dreams, and My Left Foot.

Driving Miss Daisy had as strong an antiracism message as the slew in last year’s batch but was a much better movie. Because playwright Alfred Uhry and director Bruce Beresford are masters of narrative art. As are Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, and Clint Eastwood. As were John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder, who chose to go heavy on social criticism, like with The Grapes of Wrath, Meet John Doe, and Ace in the Hole. They mixed riveting stories with the moral.

And their work will outlast that of Steve McQueen (the 12 Years a Slave director not the movie star), Guillermo del Toro, Greta Gerwig, and almost every vaunted auteur today. For the current breed not only can’t come up with original stories like Stagecoach, North by Northwest, Manhattan, and so many others, they can’t even recreate old fairy tales, comic-book adventures, sci-fi fantasies, and popular IPs. Witness the collapse of Disney, despite owning Snow White, the Marvel Universe, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones.

They’ve learned that the Message won’t replace the story. But here’s the ultimate irony. Their Message itself is dying. The belief they crammed into their whole existence — by banishing good writers of the wrong skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and ideology — is being widely rejected in favor of what they most hate — traditionalism. Like the wild notion that girls may want their Prince to come someday, and not dream about the leader they could be.

It’s too late for Hollywoke, which is collapsing as permanently as Imperial Rome, corrupted from the inside. The good news is contemporary film artists won’t have to delve through ancient parchments in Latin like Petrarch did The Aeneid, or wait a thousand years for their cinematic Renaissance. The riches of the past are at hand, at the touch of a laptop key or TV remote button. All they need to turn it into great art are rich patrons who wish to leave a mark. Calling the new Medicis.

READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:

After ‘Snow White,’ a Chance to Replace Hollywoke

The War on White Male Fiction Writers