Tirades by Twits. By Bruce Bawer.

It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of the worst features of contemporary American society and culture. At the 1974 Oscar ceremony, Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann stepped onstage to present the Best Actor award. The winner: Marlon Brando for The Godfather.

But the person who walked down the aisle to accept the award wasn’t Brando. It was a young woman in an American Indian getup straight out of Central Casting. When Moore held the statuette out to her, she held up her palm to refuse it. And then she spoke.

“Hello. My name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I’m Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I’m representing Marlon Brando this evening.”

Brando, she explained, was turning down his Oscar in protest against “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry…and on television in movie re-runs.” He was, she added, also displeased by the government’s aggressive response to the recent occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by members of the Oglala Lakota tribe. …

Let it be remembered that in 1974 a statement like Sacheen Littlefeather’s (real name: Marie Louise Cruz) was unheard of. It was a time when people actually looked forward to this now-moribund annual celebration of the movies. But Brando’s stratagem would mark the beginning of the end of all that.

To be sure, Littlefeather’s brief turn didn’t take place in a vacuum: during the half dozen or so years leading up to The Godfather’s big night, Hollywood had been churning out product with considerably more aggressive social and political content than had been common in earlier decades. And the Motion Picture Academy had recognized some of these movies, with Best Picture nominations or victories to In the Heat of the Night and Bonnie and Clyde (both 1967), Z and Midnight Cowboy (both 1969), Patton and M*A*S*H (both 1970), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

But the social and political commentary had stayed in the movies themselves. Now, that was about to change. Politics had begun to seep into every corner of American culture. And that included the Oscars. …

The present era:

But in later years such moves would become routine. Leonardo di Caprio (a high-school dropout) would warn of climate change; Patricia Arquette (who left school at fourteen) would champion wage equality for women.

Eventually the awards themselves would become politicized. After all forty acting nominations for 2014 and 2015 went to white performers, the #OscarsSoWhite movement was formed … Four years later, the Academy unveiled a complex new set of rules dictating just how diverse the casts and crews of movies have to be in order to merit an Oscar nod. …

Sometimes these days it can seem as if the search for a fresh cause to front at the Oscars has driven an actor around the bend. Accepting his trophy for Joker (2019), high-school dropout Joaquin Phoenix held forth about the fact that “[w]e artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal.” …

As an obvious result of all this politics — as well as of the increasing woke-ness of the Academy-anointed movies themselves — the ratings for ABC’s Oscar telecast have dropped from 43.7 million in 2014 — the last year before everything in American pop culture was about Trump — to 10.4 million in 2021. …

Last night:

Meanwhile, this year’s orgy of Tinseltown self-congratulation will be co-hosted by the black actress Regina Hall (who, appearing on The View in 2020, described Trump as causing a “crisis” in America and said she’d vote for anybody with a “D” after his or her name), black lesbian comedienne Wanda Sykes (a fanatical partisan who even defended Biden’s “you ain’t black” stump line), and the once-funny standup Amy Schumer (cousin of Chuck), whose political radicalization has utterly vaporized her funny bone. …

And these are the people whom the geniuses at ABC and the Motion Picture Academy are putting front and center this year in hopes of re-engaging the interest of American viewers in their now utterly discredited golden booty.

Actually, Hollywood did inject some (real?) drama into it last night, which can only improve ratings: