Bong Joon-ho鈥檚 Parasite shook the Academy Awards to its core. How did it happen? Why is it the Zohran Mamdani of the movies? Before ranked-choice voting became the fashion for blue-state liberals seeking to control election outcomes, liberal Hollywood had already popularized the scheme. In 2011, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences introduced new voting rules for the Best Picture Oscar. This politburo policy change was irresistible to the Academy鈥檚 far-left comrades. The tendency would soon after install race and gender diversity requirements for Academy membership and award eligibility.
The idea of ranked-choice voting appeals to the simple-minded vanity of political do-gooders; it allows them to overlook their actual inclination toward favoritism, authoritarian dictates, and absolute control.
鈥淭he organization realized that a polarizing film could, in a year in which votes were really spread around, conceivably win with the support of only a small percentage of members,鈥 wrote the Hollywood Reporter鈥檚 Scott Feinberg, 鈥渁nd that seemed wrong.鈥
It鈥檚 necessary to understand such twaddle as 鈥渢hat seemed wrong鈥 and realize that the urge to change traditional democratic voting rises from a sense of panic 鈥 the devastating loss of control left-wingers felt after their defeats in the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections.
As the Oscars in the new millennium continued to lose popularity and TV viewership, the Academy became distressed. Undoubtedly pressured by the need to appease ABC-Disney鈥檚 broadcast agreement, it desired high ratings. But the program that the Academy supplied could not account for the industry鈥檚 radical shift away from quality and prestige films. Voters who were manipulated by more than a decade of Harvey Weinstein鈥檚 high-pressure 鈥渢aste鈥 campaigns had reflexively ignored such adolescent trash as Christopher Nolan鈥檚 Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight.
So ranked-choice voting was implemented as a stop-loss remedy 鈥 a move to camouflage the practices of an industry devoted to meretricious, often nihilistic entertainments. It was a top-down decision, mirroring how party officials and consultants propose gerrymandering rather than focusing on social needs.
On November 5, 2019, New York City voters approved the ballot measure that amended the city charter to establish ranked-choice voting to be used for primary and special elections beginning in 2021, leading to the current Mamdani consternation. Failed mayoral candidate Andrew Yang had championed it as a key policy initiative, claiming that it would 鈥減revent ever more polarized election campaigns鈥 and 鈥渋ncrease the number of women and minority candidates,鈥 as Time magazine characterized his view. It鈥檚 the same scam that persuaded Academy members to move past their own best 鈥渓iberal, democratic鈥 interests.
Larry Diamond, the former director of Stanford鈥檚 Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, sounded exactly like a Hollywood publicist when he told Time, 鈥淲e are really settling on ranked-choice voting as the most promising reform to democratize and depolarize our politics.鈥
The hoax of further democratizing what was always implicitly democratic relies on sham logic. The preoccupation with polarization is one of those fairness cons derived from media virtue-signaling. It鈥檚 an obsession apparent in such Oscar choices as 12 Years a Slave, Green Book, The Shape of Water, Coda, Oppenheimer, and Anora. Since adopting ranked-choice voting, the Oscars have merely awarded more junk. Now it鈥檚 nearly impossible to get an informed or artistically sound Oscar choice.
The Academy鈥檚 website features a cartoon to explain 鈥渁 voting system that employs the fairest possible outcome for nominations and for who wins the Oscar for Best Picture.鈥 It鈥檚 a distortion of the already misunderstood sentiment: 鈥渄emocracy.鈥 It essentially violates the majority-rules concept in favor of pretending to satisfy the whole. In fact, it ignores the majority. It degrades what is supposedly an aesthetics-based competition. From my decades of experience in critics鈥 awards groups, I know how winners result from strategic voting and weighted, preferential ballots that never actually reflect critical discernment, just improvised jockeying toward a public statement. But ranked-choice voting is far from fair; it鈥檚 a deceptive power grab and pretense that reflect Hollywood鈥檚 lingering communist legacy.
The site鈥檚 cartoon features a sample film titled An Unverifiable Veracity, apparently some joke by an Al Gore supporter riffing on the sham climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Even when the Academy explains its own newly 鈥渄emocratized鈥 voting plan, the fix is already in.