The Oscars join the stage of shame

Here's the latest "great television" to praise killers and abandon those in need

I thought last Friday’s spectacle in the Oval Office was meant to be prescient in a different way. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have one thing in common: before their current job they were television stars. “This is going to be great television,” Trump kibitzed to himself. “I will say that.” I’m sure Zelensky appreciated the moment. Getting booted from the White House was probably the best thing that could have happened to supercharge the Ukrainian leader’s cause. Don’t look now, but “Europe” (as if they all act in complete unity) is racing to Ukraine’s side to counter the U.S. swing toward Russia.

Sometimes I think, though there are very real horrors going on in Ukraine, that these events are engineered for the stage. In the case of Friday’s White House performance, it was a stage of shame. Whether you think Zelensky is a great guy or a snake, he publicly argued with the U.S. president in POTUS’s own office. And Trump was being Trump; in many ways he was technically correct, but in the most important way, he was as wrong as he can possibly be. A nation’s freedom isn’t to be bandied about and haggled like baubles in a Jerusalem bazaar.

But I didn’t expect “great television” as a foreshadow of the Oscar broadcast. At least not in the sense it happened.

Image source: X, Hilel Fuld. This might be an AI-generated image, by the looks of it. But it goes along with his post.

Let me begin by praising Conan O’Brien, whose portrait¹ hangs in the lower floor of the Georgia Governor’s Mansion in Atlanta. O’Brien was funny, and his skits were on-point, if not a bit hokey. Ben Stiller was also hilarious, as usual.

It’s AMPAS I have a problem with. These Bubble-Boy Boomers are so socially insulated and lack even the pretense of self-awareness that movies like “Emilia Perez,” made specifically for them as the sole audience, known as “Oscar Bait,” do not fail to win high profile awards. Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Zoe Saldaña. She’s tops in my book, as an actress, a class act, and—well, yeah—we all know she’s hot. But a French-made movie about Mexico, that doesn’t portray Mexico in the best light, regarding drug cartels and a transgender drug lord—a musical no less—is not made to titillate crowds. It’s made to garner fawning votes from the slobbering fools at AMPAS.

So, from the viewpoint of “art,” shame on AMPAS for considering a movie’s popularity as a deficit. I never saw “The Brutalist,” but I grew up within an hour of Boston, so I’m familiar with the topic. Have you seen Boston’s City Hall? Making a film about the guy who designed such Soviet paeans to dystopian efficiency, and doing it so beautifully, is, to my uncivilized mind, a waste of celluloid, or bytes, or paper folding money, which really is the only thing that matters in Hollywood.

I saw more than the usual (which is zero) Oscar nominated films this cycle, just so you don’t think I’m a total troglodyte (fooled you). “Dune Part Two” in IMAX was bone-shattering. That movie wholly deserved both the special effects and the sound Oscar. A masterpiece of ear-splitting, gut-moving, eye-popping cinematic perfection, with sandworms and Timothée Chalamet plus Zendaya thrown in as plot devices, I rather enjoyed it. “Lead them to Paradise.”

The worst shame was picking a fake documentary, “No Other Land,” as best documentary feature. This film may as well have been made by Hamas, for starters. During the broadcast (which we watched using an old-fashioned antenna on digital broadcast TV, because Hulu crashed—what’s new?), I switched off while the winners made their anti-Israel rant on the same stage, that within 15 minutes, Israeli actress Gal Godot would walk as a presenter.

I won’t gild lilies here. Israel and the West Bank Israeli settlers are trigger happy. The slightest provocation brings the bulldozers out, and the slightest threat usually ends in tragedy for the teenagers throwing rocks or attempting to knife innocent Jews because they’re Jews. The solution proposed by those who believe documentaries like “No Other Land” is to remove the Jews from the places they live alongside Palestinians, and the land would be “free” (“judenfrei” is the appropriate word).

Of course, Israel tried that when the IDF forcibly removed all Jewish settlers from north Gaza. All the land, and the buildings and factories and farms were given to the Palestinians. The Palestinians promptly burned them all to the ground and dug up the farms, because they refused to live anywhere that was once occupied by Jews. Then they voted in Hamas. We know what happened after that.

Why would anyone think it would be different in the West Bank?

And a few weeks ago, as Hamas celebrated around the coffins of murdered babies and their mother (the body wasn’t even the mother’s body), and hundreds of vicious terrorists were being released from Israeli prisons to obtain the remains of dead hostages, the very people celebrated on the stage at the Dolby Theater were planning—and nearly succeeding—in another 10/7.

Hilel Fuld is a pretty extremist Zionist Jew in Israel. But he does play it straight. Fuld posted what was really going on when four buses exploded around Tel Aviv the night after the Bibas babies were returned to their family as corpses. Here’s an excerpt.

According to my source, and this was news to me, a whopping 15 busses were supposed to explode this morning. According to reports, the terrorist set the timer for 9 PM instead of 9 AM.

So is that the worst of it? Not even close.

In addition to the 15 busses, 5 suicide bombers were set to detonate bombs on the lightrail at the same time, all in the center of Israel. So is that the worst? Nope. That’s the good part.

Where did this attack originate? Gaza? Nope. Judea and Samaria. In other words, these terrorists came from within Israel.

And here’s the kicker, and again, I am not telling you where I heard this, all of the above was intended to be nothing more than the distraction, much like the incoming rockets on 10/7. Just a distraction for the real invasion.

My source says that as those busses and terrorists blew up, massive security and emergency forces were supposed to rush to the scene at which point, there would be a massive breach of the security fence and many terrorists from Judea and Samaria would invade Israel and carry out a 10/7 2.0. Only this time it wouldn’t be from Gaza so it would be an invasion into basically every major city in Israel.

For the third time, this is not information that is publicly available. I can’t share a link and I won’t share a source. Believe me or don’t. Up to you.

Add to that my personal thoughts. I previously defended Egypt for moving tanks to the Israeli border on the Sinai peninsula at the Negev frontier. But think about it: if another 10/7 was planned, more massive than Gaza, who would be in a better position to move into Israel from the south and take out military targets? In the enormous chaos of terror, murder, and explosions all over the heart of Israel, an exhausted IDF would need to defend against a military attack.

Not to defend violence, but who wouldn’t be trigger happy if those who are supposed to be the saner ones as “negotiating partners” for a two-state “solution” are the ones planning to top Hamas in its bloodthirsty pursuit of dead Israelis? There was another instance of a stabbing in Haifa just last night. Bombs, knives, and all manner of death is stored up by those who were being celebrated at the Oscars last night, to be unleashed on the most innocent of shoppers, children, and even infants, because they are Jews living in land that the killers want “from the river to the sea,” to be judenfrei.

Hamas and its parent organization, Islamic Jihad, still use the Nazi salute, borrowed from the Germans during WWII by the Mufti of Jerusalem. And people say AMPAS is controlled by Jews. If it is, they’re the most self-hating, insulated, freakish neurotics ever to walk this planet.

If it’s possible to add more shame to “great television” than the White House did last Friday, I believe the Oscars topped it soundly.

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1. It’s not really Conan, it’s Stephen Heard, of whom Heard County is named. Heard was acting governor of Georgia for a year (the state was overrun by the British at the time) during the Revolutionary War. But wow, what a likeness.