Why, I wondered, do I dislike this person on sight? “Who is that boy?” I asked my wife.
“That is not a boy,” she explained. “it’s a girl. Billie Eilish, and she’s a well-known singer. If you like the type.”
Some people, like this Eilish, strike you as nasty. There is a darkness, a dark aura about them that instantly repels. Some people are born with an attitude.
Some people keep a grudge that lasts a lifetime.
Then came the rest of them on the Red Carpet, smirking for the cameras, and moving swiftly to avoid being recognized…but I recognized Mark Ruffalo.
Ruffalo, Billie Eilish and about a dozen of them were wearing tiny red pins to signify their support for the people. Hamas, who slaughtered and raped 1,200 Israelis that day, Oct. 7.
They were proud to take that side, and also, ashamed. They knew history was recording this…and why bring this up in Hollywood, at the Oscars?
Why is Israel the story, and not in a good way? Do you remember Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint in the movie, Exodus? Never today would they make a movie so pro-Israel.
Later, on stage, to accept an Oscar, came someone named Jonathan Glazer, a Director, saying that he refutes his Jewishness because of IDF deployment in Gaza.
Jews who fight back and defend themselves are not his type of Jews. Imagine a Muslim renouncing Islam.
Only Jews do this. Why? Glazer is British. Just what we need, a Brit coming to America to denounce Israel.
The snots have no borders and they have taken over the world.
After all the hoopla, next year you will not know most of these people. This includes the Best Actor for the movie Oppenheimer. You know…what’s his name?
We call them Morning Glories.
Or, as Norma Desmond has it in Sunset Boulevard, “I am big. It’s the Pictures that got small.”
This is not your father’s Hollywood. Where, you ask, was Paddy Chayefsky. There, in 1978, he unloaded on Vanessa Redgrave for her “Zionist hooligans,” remark
She still hasn’t recovered.
The audience cheered Chayefsky for taking Israel’s side…1978. Today, 2024, Hollywood cheers Jonathan Glazer for refuting his Jewishness.
Times change, people change…for the better. So you would think. So you would hope. But no such luck. Instead, futility.
The host, Jimmy Kimmel, got in a few licks on MAGA. The audience cackled. Kimmel needs 21 writers to prepare his monologue and write his jokes.
With all that…not funny.
When he mentions Trump, derisively of course, this crowd of sophisticates starts hootin’ and hollerin’ barnyard style and Robert de Niro becomes frightfully ecstatic.
He needs to be taken to a home where they all share Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Where, you ask, are the movie stars of yore? Once Upon A Time In Hollywood there was Kirk Douglas, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe…
Nothing like that today. Yes, the Pictures got small, and mean-spirted, and political, and Norma Desmond went on to say, “Back then, people had Faces.”
People also knew their job was to entertain, not to scold, preach and lecture. Leave it to us, the little people, the ordinary people, to figure things out for ourselves, namely at the Box Office.
There we will cut the winners from the losers.
Writing a book, making a movie, is always a gamble. Blood, sweat and tears, sometimes for nothing.
Life rests on a. roll of the dice.
As it says here in this book on gambling, faith and fate…and take it from someone who knows…
Some people are born to win, some people are born to lose. Some people are destined to succeed, some people are destined to fail. Some people are marked for wealth, some people are marked for poverty. For some people life is hard, for some people life is easy. Some people win Oscars, deservedly or not, and most people win nothing. Some people are dealt the right cards. Luck is everything.
King David is puzzled. He asks why the undeserving so often flourish.
G-d only knows.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact here.
NOW AVAILABLE: The collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, Writings, here
Plus, a free sample chapter of his noir gambling thriller, Compulsive, is available from his website, here.